Europe in the Rain

Europe is over. The sages have met. A small, but self-important clique. They imagine themselves as Zimmerwald, though few can speak European languages. Nor have they ever operated in conditions of illegality, poverty or imprisonment. In the chutzpah stakes they win, at least in the assessment of their own self worth. Mighty heirs to the Bolsheviks of 1917.

Europe as a category is intensely political. What constitutes Europe? The northern, western and southern borders are defined by seas; the Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean sea.

The eastern edges are more blurred. Parts of Russia (west of the Urals) and Turkey may be considered Europe in a geographical sense. But politically they are in other realms. There are great divisions based on nationalism, military and ruling class interests. At the moment, and for a good part of the historical record, these divisions have triumphed over oppositions based on the unity of the workers against capital.

The working population of Europe, without the Russian workers, is around 277 million people. The working population of Europe, if Russia west of the Urals is included is around 333 – 352 million people. Consider how the history of the Cold War has served capital, and how it has divided up the workers.

Working populations are important statistics. Let’s look at this in the raw, without considering technical inputs, wages, standards of living or productivity.

Here are high level figures of working population for some of the major areas of the world:

China 725 million
India 643 million
Africa 529 million
Europe (including western Russia) 333 – 352 million
Europe (excluding western Russia) 277 million
South America 210 million
USA 163 million
Middle East 150 – 165 million

Now let’s add estimates of GDP. These are IMF or World Bank figures and again they are in a relatively raw state, but they tell us something:

USA $30.5 trillion
Europe (including western Russia) $27-28 trillion
Europe (excluding western Russia) $26.1 trillion
China $19.2 trillion
Middle East $5.5 trillion
South America $4.4 – $5.1 trillion
India $4.2 trillion
Africa $2.8 trillion

I found this all rather fascinating and wondered why I hadn’t thought to look at these figures before. They suggest that whatever the critical critics might be saying, there is an enormous amount of economic activity across Europe involving millions of people who collectively create trillions of dollars of value.

Perhaps Europe isn’t quite ‘over’?

And what ever anyone thinks of Europe it is not a stand alone entity, any more than the USA, India, China, South America, Africa and the Middle East are stand alone entities. The global system of production has made all types of commodity and service production integrated and collaborative as well as intensely competitive.

And at the production layer (and the communications layer which moves the data which makes it possible), there is an immense amount of standardisation. TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/ internet protocol) is used in every country in the world.

A whole range of commodities are produced through global manufacturing and supply chains. Even large lump buildings which are specific to exact places are constructed using pre-fabricated sections which are manufactured at a global level.

One great big tension (one of many) is that factories and buildings used for services are based in nation-states (they have to be, large ships are slightly different). But the capital that makes their construction possible is global, and the manufacturing network is global, and the consumer base is global. Nationalism is in ever greater opposition to internationalism.

The forces of capital which are both national and international, are creating an ever fiercer oscillation and it’s that oscillation which is beating upon the legacy of political systems of an earlier time.

I guess if you use a certain language and particular groups of categories, part of what Tony Cliff would call ‘the Swamp’, then these things might be difficult to see. Ideology gets in the way, a sort of bourgeois fog that we have been warned about so often and so well, and yet quite good comrades get completely lost in it. Fog has that effect.

Some grapple to get through this fog with the torch of crisis. This torch of crisis provides illumination on any subject that cannot be clearly seen. Economic activity? Crisis. Architecture? Crisis. Programmes on Radio 4? Crisis. The current fashions in hairstyles? Another crisis.

But then, I should have realised, the railway system is in crisis too.

The train was running 15 minutes late from London through to Brussels.

A young woman sits down next to me and within moments we are chatting away. She’s been working in London for the past two years in film production and is travelling to Amsterdam and the Hague to see family and friends.

I use this opportunity to provide a brief history of the Amsterdam School, Michel de Klerk, Piet Kramer, Floor Wibaut and Plan Zuid. She helps with the pronunciation of the Dutch words, a language which she grew up with. She is either extremely polite or is genuinely interested.

She tells me that her Godfather worked as an architect in Amsterdam and I reply that I would very much like to meet him. Before it seems possible we are at Brussels Midi and say good bye. It was a really great conversation and I enjoyed hearing her stories and ideas.

I walk around Brussels station looking for a plug adaptor. There are several at home, all of which are still at home. And then I find the train to Köln. It is old fashioned with wide seats that look as if they might be made of red velvet. It is like a cinema on wheels, and perhaps that’s what it really wants to be.

Europe feels different this time but really that’s just me seeing it differently. It’s as if I have never seen it before, but that sense of unfamiliarity appears to have developed because I’ve been studying it more closely. It’s like the whole physical problem of matter. The more Peter Higgs and his team studied matter the more they found nothing; which remains a puzzle to this day.

Here is Liège in the twilight with its tall narrow houses of two, three and four stories. Here and there is elaborate brick work; where white or lighter coloured bricks have been used to create patterns.

Occasionally the brick work has been covered with a render and painted with a colour that might be called burnt orange or iron foundry charcoal. It is supper time and through the electric lit windows people can be seen engaged in domestic chores. Humanity itself looks different when unintentionally on display like this.

It’s all just fragments that we see. Fragments of enormous social forces that are difficult to determine at the process of their actual movement. Even history does not stand still because what we really deal with is not so much history as it was actually experienced in the past, but with interpretations and critiques.

And such things shift and slide. It is as if the fragments themselves are inside a kaleidoscope. With such an instrument the picture changes as the tube is turned. When we travel we move through fragments in time and space and try to create a picture in our minds; aware that the picture constantly changes in terms of colour, intensity, luminosity and vibrance.

There is a sense of this in the art of Joachim Patinir. He lived in the Ardennes in the 15th century and painted in a way that suggested new ways of seeing.

The train is travelling through the Ardennes now and I wish there was no electric light and we might appreciate the dusking period and then the sense of the finality of the night; when it is truly dark and the imagination can come to life again.

The generation of fairy stories is harder in the digital age; we need a state of non-electrification. Perhaps once a day, apart from essential services, all power could be stopped. It would be good to feel the atmosphere of the earth again.

The train slows down deep within a dark and gothic wood of ancient trees. The journey is constantly being interrupted by dark matter and quarks and neutrons. It seems to be impossible to pass this space storm. A shower of meteors flashes through the sky.

The train guard checks my ticket. All in order. I can cross the border. He hesitates and looks at the empty seat next to me. He explains that the seat was booked from Paris. But there is nobody there.

Perhaps it was going to be Estelle; and she missed the train. I would have liked to seen her again. We once shared an evening journey through the Alps. She told me that her ancestors were from Persia. We talked a lot and then she curled up on the seat next to me and we read books, drifted through time and space and talked again.

And now the train slows down through Aachen where Charlemagne lies in his tomb.

He never rose to defend the city as some might have imagined. It was the scene of very heavy fighting in September 1944 as it marked the first point where the Allied armies entered the Germany of the Third Reich.

There is a sense of aerial bombardment in the air; and at ground level the topography all re-arranged. And yet throughout the obliteration of the city, the reign of capital continues. The harsh clash of metal on metal.

The air raid sirens are sounding through the streets again. In the forests of the Eifel region boy soldiers in combat fatigues hold panzerfaust. The strongest carry the MG machine guns. The railway wagons are full of dead people. The flat bed trucks carry tanks and boxes of ammunition. A rocket, no one is sure where it came from, hits a railway tanker of oil; a burst of orange flame, sparks into the night, thick, voluminous smoke, acrid, bitter, dripping to the ground in incandescent drops.

The ruins of some other time.

It is getting late by the time the train arrives in Köln. By chance I find exactly the sort of place to eat and drink that my imagination is using to push me through the streets. It is old fashioned without nostalgic kitsch. It is full of local people who look very much as if they have come here after work to enjoy themselves. Some of the earlier drinking shift have gone home, to read bed time books to children and catch up on the news of the family’s day.

The man in charge is genuinely friendly. He takes my suitcase and puts it in the staff area. It makes me feel like I’m now part of the place, rather than an outsider just passing through. He offers me a table in the corner and before I’ve sat down a cold glass of Kölsch beer is being placed upon a beer mat.

This corner is out of the main action of the place but I am tired and hungry and it’s nice to be in a public place and still have a little feeling of seclusion and privacy. There’s a couple in an alcove under the wooden stairs who are old and wrinkly and to all appearances very much in love. They laugh and constantly touch each other’s hands.

On the other side are two men, one about half as old as the other. The older man speaks loudly in Italian. The other listens patiently.

It might be said that this man never stops talking. But this would not be quite true. He was momentarily silenced by the arrival of a huge plate of food. This he ate with his companion. The older man shovelled, the younger man pecked.

I assumed this was the main course, something of a platter. The centre piece looked to be a giant baked potato cut in half and covered with liverwurst, salami, cheese, ham, chicken, duck, goat, beef, perch, trout, pike; who knows what else.There might have been a small tomato but perhaps it was just a piece of table decoration.

I was impressed at how much the older man ate. Why was I taken aback at the arrival of a further course? A huge knuckle of something that might once have been part of the leg of a frozen mammoth. It was quickly reduced to bone as if some scavengers from 10,000 years ago had found it lying in the glade of a primeval forest and devoured it as a pack.

The waiter was on first name terms with this man. How could he not be? He must contribute a substantial amount to the weekly profits.

I was still eating a huge plate of fried potatoes, an enormous bratwurst and a great mass of cabbage in a cream sauce. I wanted to offer my congratulations at his eating prowess.

And then another course was delivered. Instead of a single slice of Apfel Strudel it appeared to be a whole tray. And covered with a huge saucepan’s worth of cream and custard. By the time that had been polished off I was on the final piece of fried potato which I was pushing round my plate to soak up the last dribble of the gravy.

I was tired and had to resist the barrel of beer that was calling my name. I wished the diners on the adjacent table a schönen Abend and left.

Somewhere in the cellar more courses were still being cooked. A couple of pig’s heads and a basket of apples. The man who talked loudly, except when he was eating, would still be working his way through endless dishes long after the final customers had rolled out into the dark streets of the Altstadt.

Early the next morning I walk along the Rhine to the Hauptbahnhof. The air is cool and fresh. The industrial barges still show their night lights. The movement of the river and its trade never stops. This is the train to Munich and the carriage I am in is nearly empty.

I have to change trains at Munich and while I’m waiting for the train to Wien I start talking to a couple from England who are on a cycling holiday. The woman tells me that she was born in the city and that I must go and see Karl Seitz Hof. She remembers the Russian occupation of the city. I would have liked to have heard more of her stories but then the train arrives and they have bicycles and I’m at the other end of the train and we say goodbye.

The afternoon drifts by as I drift in and out of sleep. Music through headphones gets mixed up with fragments of dreams; the real and the unreal, how hard sometimes to tell apart.

Agricultural land, orchards, huge concrete structures full of millions of chickens, force fed and doused in antibiotics, fields of cows, horses, well built farms in the Bavarian style, everything of high quality and solid. The fields look as if they are given a good sweep with broomsticks every morning. Factory production where trees and raw materials are processed.

Thousands of logs of standard sizes stacked up waiting to be turned into a thousand different types of chair and table, or pulped to make paper for books, notepads, newspapers, calendars, the cardboard packaging for breakfast cereals, tea bags, tin foil and a hundred thousand other uses. Coated with brightly coloured ink, brand identities and labels, list of ingredients, the daily headlines of massacres, genocides and war.

Further in the distance, alluring forests, a range of ice-top mountains where the ancient giants live, the edge of a lake that is a thousand metres deep.

Europe rolls away on either side of the railway lines and this train line connects up every European city and beyond. These great centres of human life and production.

Seen from space it would be impossible to determine that there are such animosities being created between the workers. Looked at without the dirty rags of the ideologies of capital the workers would seem to be completing the same processes using standard tools and measurements.

Miners digging, train, bus, lorry and van drivers, driving all day and night, machine operators all operating in the same way, surgeons operating in standard procedures, nurses tending the sick with agreed medical interventions, sales workers using the same psychologies to bring the shoppers to the counters, people on check outs move the goods along the conveyor belts in identical repetitive movements, office workers at a million workstations in a million office cubicles in Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Shanghai, New York, Sydney, Bangkok; typing away, filling in fields in databases, checking their reports with AI bots, adding the final touches to the presentation that outlines the irreconcilable character of class antagonisms.

And so many of those workers feel bored, annoyed they don’t have what they really want. Not even at times able to define what they really want because they can’t find the ideas and words that fit their emotions and ideas. And for too many the endless worry about security of employment and the management of finances which never, no matter how hard they work, are ever quite enough.

It’s exploitation that the workers suffer and yet that’s never in the headlines nor in the evening news. There are no television programmes that explore this theme and it rarely leaves its mark upon existing culture.

The train goes through a long deep tunnel and emerges at Meidlung Hauptbahnhof where I get off.

I go to the Bio Supermarkt to buy food. Muesli, yoghurt, pasta, butter, fresh pesto, chocolate pudding, plums in a jar, crackers, cheese, a bottle of wine, lettuce, tomatoes, artichokes in oil, apples, redcurrants.

The young woman on the check out wears a long headscarf and speaks to me in rapid Viennese. I understand about 30 percent of what she’s saying. The till is also using TCP/IP to connect locally to the internet, and then the Billa supermarket chain will have its own dedicated networks and databases and file storage and applications based in the cloud. As my purchases are scanned, packets of data are being sent almost at the speed of light to record the time, the place, the exact item bought; and that data is collated with all the other data points of people shopping at all the Billa supermarkets where ever they may be.

I hand over some notes and then produce a handful of change from my pocket. I am just about to start counting out one euro and seventy cents when she takes my hand, turns it over and collects up all those coins. Then she goes through it carefully so that the maximum number of coins can be used; five cent pieces, ten cent pieces. She quickly recalculates when she finds an even smaller coin.

A queue is forming which she addresses. I’m not sure what she says although no one is tutting or getting restless.

Perhaps she says, ‘sorry about this, he’s obviously new in town, he’ll learn’.

I wish I knew enough Viennese to have replied, ‘shop workers of the world unite’.