Deep into that darkness peering: A critique of The Peculiar Romanticism of the English Situationists

A new article of mine, Deep Into That Darkness Peering: A Critique of The Peculiar Romanticism of the English Situationists, can be found here. It is a critique of an awful academic article about the English section of the Situationist International and King Mob by Sam Cooper of the University of Sussex.

Correspondence with Siddiq Khan

An (ongoing) exchange of correspondence between myself and Siddiq Khan about what we can do to hasten the end of this rotten world can be found on his Love Letters Journal.

The Palace of Exile: Fragments from the Notes of a Tourist in Prague

“From time to time I tried to realize my unhappiness. I barely succeeded.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 25 January, 1912)

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Work has once again become insufferable. Why? Where should I begin? Interfering managers and infuriating targets? Smiling contempt and “meaningless achievement” (Kafka)? Perhaps the staff cuts that remind me that I am nothing more than a disposable tool of management or the growing insistence that I engage enthusiastically in my alienation? Suffice it to say that being compelled to spend so much time, with so many other people, creating this absurd and unwanted society has left me sorely in need of a break. Not that it will really help. Everything will be the same when I return. All the same, I shall go. We have become used to making these false choices. “Anything is better than working,” we tell ourselves. We then take a week or two off in the very world that work has built.

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“Of course, to a certain extent this is a belief that I grasp at when I am already on the window sill.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 15 August, 1913)

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The alienation of work cannot be softened or escaped, it can only be abolished. Alas, the systematic revolutionary reconstruction of this society, the taking back and transformation of the social, economic and political powers that have escaped us, is not immediately at hand. What is worse, in many time and places, profound dissatisfaction with everyday life has been so deeply buried that it is, for the time being, entirely subterranean. How is one to live in these frozen lands? Amongst other things, we must surely take what pleasures we can, when we can. But the pleasures we are able to enjoy, the tastes they gratify, are so often small, unworthy and imposed. If we are not to shrivel into petty cogs of consumer capitalism, we must, I think, unsettle our pleasures: trip them up, force their shortcomings before our unwilling eyes, poison them even as we swallow them down. If this means that, sooner or later, the permitted pleasures come to be unbearable to us, then so be it.

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To the airport by rail. The usual ugly trains and tiresome changes. The usual frustrating crowds. The problem is not the number of people but the void between them: the lack of real social relations. The same ubiquitous dreams of happiness, the same obligations, may draw us to the same spaces. They may even prompt us to exchange money now and again. For practical purposes, however, we are nothing to each other but obstacles. We decide and do nothing together.

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In the same way, the repulsive quality of airports is not a matter of their admittedly stupendous ugliness alone. What is most bleak about them is that they are mechanisms for the mechanical transportation of separated bodies and other commodities. All the passengers have in common is that they are being moved for money.

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Airports have a habit of looking like warehouses for people because that is what they are.

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In this airport, the sole way to reach the waiting area is through the middle of a shop. The marketing of cynicism, brutality and despair has no place here. Everything is bright and supposedly elegant. If life sometimes seems a little drab (and who in an airport could deny this?), it can be remedied, the smiling surroundings imply, by a dash of stylishness. This antidote of style has no substance. In our world, there is no graceful use of life. There are only symbols of sophistication to display in its absence.

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The café in which we while away too much time drinking mediocre coffee is, inevitably, filled with background music. What would happen if the music was turned off? Would the profound absence of life, if once laid bare, drag everything and everyone into a singular and paralyzing desolation?

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The waitress has a cheerful and pleasant air. It is not hard to allow yourself to be charmed by this. But it is probably deceptive mimicry on her part. At least, I hope so. There is nothing cheerful or pleasant in her situation. She has no reason to be amiable to me. She is selling a commodity on behalf of her employers and I am buying it. That’s all. There is nothing between us as individuals. The quality of the transaction would be the same if I ordered from a vending machine.

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In an airport, one mainly waits. It would be tempting to say that life is suspended there, were it not that life is no less absent elsewhere. Outside the airport, our lives may be busy but they are equally passive, in the sense that they defined in every respect by our subservience to the economy and the state. The inertness of waiting makes our position clear. We do not like this. It chafes against our illusions.

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The illusion of freedom is paper-thin in an airport. One is rudely and nakedly pushed around by one imposed procedure, one authority, after another.

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Turning the old dream of human flight into reality is an impressive technological accomplishment. It has been squandered on shipping, petty games, aerial bombing and air pollution. Capitalism can make no better use of the sky than it can the ground.

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I exchange a single word with the person sitting to my right. He sleeps through the rest of the flight. This is a relief. We share no practical project. We have nothing to say to each other beyond trivia. An hour’s empty chatter would have been a misery.

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“I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 28 July, 1914)

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A tunnel, such as a passenger cabin, often intrigues. You are surrounded on all sides by surfaces in close proximity. The atmosphere is also, perhaps, a little charged by claustrophobia. What might we do with this? Within an aircraft, light, sound, temperature and air pressure could all be varied. So too could the characteristics of the surfaces that bear upon us. What could be brought to life in this way? The answer of the current designers of passenger aircraft, whose conclusions are imposed upon us, is nothing. Nothing is meant to happen on their jets. Isolated units of humanity are quietly and passively carried from one place to another. The décor reflects this drab function. It settles for a reassuring intimation of technological modernity and as much of textbook elegance as can be conveyed by white pre-moulded plastic.

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The cabin attendants have largely given up the appearance of cheerful care they are paid to project. They seem to prefer the reserved air of competence associated with the professional. Perhaps this keeps at bay the unhappy thought that they are, to a large extent, airborne waiters. Not that there is any especial shame in being a waiter. It merely appears so to those who are concerned about their status in this society.

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From time to time, one musters a little interest in the land and sea to be seen from the window. It is hard to sustain. It is not our world. We soon tire of what we only see.

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A carton of salad, mass-produced in a factory and chilled to the point of tastelessness. Its plastic wrapping enjoins me to “Be Invited.” Pseudo-language for pseudo-food.

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The stewardess gives me a half a cup of coffee. She promises to return with more but doesn’t. I don’t complain. There is no more terrible thing than expecting someone to do his or her job properly. As with other forms of murder, it should not be indulged in lightly.

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Air travel contains its share of the paltry privileges this society extends to those it values most. The pallid elite in business class board the plane just a little before everyone else. They sit behind a small curtain that separates their seats from the identical ones beyond. They are entitled to a different set of equally mediocre goods. On arrival, the demands of the economy drag them away first.

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“Security with a smile” a sign at the transfer airport promises. The grim-faced official who snarls at me at the X-ray machine does not feel the need to act out this insincerity. He is not yet required to disguise his irritation and contempt with upturned lips. He should not be consoled by this easement. The corners of his mouth may be his own. During working hours, however, everything else is his employer’s.

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“You will see that you are nothing but a rat’s nest of miserable dissimulations.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 7 January, 1915)

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At Frankfurt airport, as the plane taxies across the runways, we are briefly surrounded by a lattice of multi-coloured lights laid across the tarmac. This saturation in colour is as lovely and unusable as a firework display seen over prison walls.

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The desolation of Ruzyně airport at Prague spreads into the surrounding area. Warehouses, light industrial estates, car parks, business parks, roads and other antitheses of human life cluster around the airstrip like secondary cancers. A merchandizer of masochism such as Will Self may find it profitable to walk through such wastelands, but for most of us the view from the 100 bus to Zličín metro station reveals all we need to know about the calamity that has descended.

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A five-star hotel (cheap during the off-season). A luxurious appearance, a calculated display of the emblems of the upmarket. There must, it seems, be expensive-looking fabrics and ostentatious padding behind the bed, even though they offer no practical benefits; and a very wide television, even though there is nothing to watch on it. Also, the bathroom must have marble-like surfaces, even though marble would serve no function in the room and the material actually used only looks like marble. It is a matter of pride that the entire building is so hot that one never feels the chills associated with poverty. No matter that this makes it all but impossible to sleep.

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The modern hotel breakfast buffet is an example of a consumer cornucopia. The guest is reduced to rummaging amongst a large array of rather poor goods indifferently prepared and presented by paid strangers. All you do is eat and perhaps exchange a little desultory conversation with the one or two people with whom you are sharing your isolated passivity. And as you are largely confined to eating, you typically eat too much. A true, wider satisfaction is impossible. You graze in vain until your stomach complains.

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“It has meaning but is weak; its blood flows thin, too far from the heart.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 27 May 1914)

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At the centre of the city, Prague becomes a parody of itself, a fantasy of historical fragments and national stereotypes projected for the benefit of tourists. Despite this, one can still, amongst the back streets and courtyards of Staré Město, come across a few resonant places of promise. In his 1844 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels excoriated “multitudes of courts, back lanes, and remote nooks,” “the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan” and “long narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and every alley exactly and separately.” Of course, Engels was rightly outraged by the poor sanitation and flimsy construction of the rookeries of his time, but his hostility to the unmethodical layout of these warrens was misguided, as we can see from the desolations subsequently created by the architectural partisans of imposed regularity. It is precisely to the irregular, the intricate, the labyrinthine, the enclosed, that I am drawn. It is there that a few intimations can be found of a potent and poetic architecture, an urbanism capable of sustaining adventure, liberation and free social relations. There that the desirable city and the city of desire tingle in the distance.

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One of Prague’s more attractive features is its old doorways, with their statues, decorated panels, carved arches, trellis ironwork and house emblems. The question these enticing portals pose is “what lies within?” The answer, under capitalism, is “nothing much.” There is only ever work, commodity consumption, domestic life, or parking.

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In general, Prague at eye level is insufferable. It has been despoiled by commercial relations and vulgarized by commercial publicity.

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“Happy of heart I climbed the hill
To contemplate the town in its enormity
Brothel and hospital, prison, purgatory, hell.”
(Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, 1869)

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The tower at Petřín. The cold and misty day has covered the 299 steps in ice, which adds just a little excitement to my ascent and descent. It also ensures that not much can be seen from the top. There is a better view across the city from the Žižkov television tower. From such points of vantage, the tourist passively consumes a panoramic image of a city from which he or she is separated. It is the quintessence of tourism, one could perhaps say. The views are also popular with residents. They too consume images of life in Prague. As workers and good citizens, they are also required to produce them.

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A number of large crawling babies have been attached to the television tower. This empty incongruity gives tourists something to photograph. It also helps to market both the tower and David Černý, the celebrity artist.

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"Made jottings on the trip in another notebook. Began things that went wrong. But I will not give up in spite of insomnia, headaches, a general incapacity.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 29 July, 1914)

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One of the pleasures of visiting another part of the world is eating new and different food, and reacquainting oneself with not-easily-found pleasures, such as goulash. Commodification corrodes this pleasure. It spreads the standardized mediocrity of chains, converts a subset of the local cuisine into a stereotyped ‘tradition’ that is petrified or adjusted to the tastes of tourists, and fosters the pseudo-innovations of fashionable restaurants. It also typically ensures that the diner has reified relations of exchange with the staff and proprietor and no relations at all, beyond simple physical proximity, with everyone else in the establishment. Even on the busiest and most raucous of nights, a restaurant is occupied by the solitary.

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In Prague, as elsewhere, takeaway pizza is ubiquitous. It frees us from cooking, promises intensity, and always disappoints. It is yet another false liberation.

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I see almost no rowdy drunks in the streets and bars, despite the fact that the Czech Republic has the beer consumption per capita in the world. The bellowing sub-adventures that many of the British associate with free and intense living do not appear to be a large part of the local alienation. The two quietly-unsteady men next to me in the Restaurant Zlatý klas have perhaps been drinking and smoking at their table, without a break, since around 1968.

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The dream of the tourist is to enter local culture. This is impossible, for the tourist is a pure consumer who is excluded from the other roles the culture contains. It is also the dream of the local to possess what this culture promises. This too is impossible, for the culture is a collection of false promises: the lies of the commodity and the state.

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Who can deny the charm of an evening stroll through the upper reaches of a quiet and misty Malá Strana, “a small town apart within another town and even more dead” (Georges Rodenbach)? For just an hour or two, the ordinary dreariness of space and time seems to be suspended. And yet, what does it say about this society, and about us, when the city appears at its best precisely in the absence of other people? What does it say when the receding enchantment of Radnicke schody, with its winding stairs, shimmering stone and occluded air, leads only to an absurd ‘Mystic Pizzeria’ and a gallery of unapologetic trash?

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"Bitter, bitter, that is the most important word. How do I intend to solder fragments together into a story that will sweep you along? (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 20 April, 1916)

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Gambra, on Černínská, is a museum of surrealism. It is supposed to be open at weekends during November. On the Saturday on which I visit, it is closed. This seems appropriate. Surrealism itself has long been reduced to rummaging through the vapid effusions of the unconscious, or the physical detritus scattered around the margins of cities, in search of the inconsequential incongruities it considers to be “marvellous.” Surviving Life, the English title of the latest film by Jan Švankmajer, seems to sum up the limits of the movement’s aspirations. A locked building is a fitting epitaph.

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Further down Černínská is the Hotel U Raka. The door was locked. A notice said that visitors must ring the bell. I did so. For some time, nothing happened. Just as I was beginning to suspect the entire street was unoccupied, the door was opened by what seemed to be the sole member of staff on duty. The narrow courtyard beyond was scattered with art works, including a number of wooden birds, and the walls of the café were lined with old items of household equipment. The employee explained, no doubt for the umpteenth time, that the house was perhaps the only surviving timber dwelling in Prague and was decorated with material created or inherited by the proprietor. This deliberately-contrived image of the “romantic” and the “unique” is sold to tourists in search of the uncommon and the sense of distinction that comes with its consumption. It is also an excuse for high prices. Still, its refreshments and open fire did not go amiss on a chilly and somewhat tiresome day.

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Prague is relatively free of surveillance cameras. Their absence makes little difference to the quality of everyday life. The problems lie elsewhere.

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In Prague, if you find yourself being observed from above, it is probably by one of the numerous statues that stand on the facades of the city’s buildings. Almost no-one now knows who these figures are or what they symbolize. They are relics. This society spreads its objects of admiration and desire through media other than stone.

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One place in which statues receive a certain fleeting attention is Charles Bridge. The tourists who cross the bridge know little or nothing about the 30 statues along its length. But they have been told that the bridge is special and somewhere they should visit, so they go. They have also been told that touching the statue of St. John of Nepomuk is part of the experience, so they do. While they are on the bridge, it may all be a bit of a blur, as they are too busy consulting their guides and capturing the experience on camera. Later, however, they and their acquaintances can watch the recordings of what was hardly seen and barely done.

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Stepping into the shopping centre next to Národní třída metro station in search of a toilet, I come across a bustle hardly found elsewhere. I almost said excitement, but that would not be the right word. Some of the shoppers are animatedly chasing the brightly-lit dreams of pleasure and modernity. Others, however, seem devoid of enthusiasm. Ecstasy is hardly on their minds. What propels their harassed and grim accumulation of commodities is, I suspect, an image of normal life and the consolation of ordinariness it promises.

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Glancing around an underground train, I am struck by how familiar everyone’s attire is. Compared to West Yorkshire, there may be more padded jackets and fewer mini-skirts but the differences are insignificant. As elsewhere in Europe and America, everyone converges on the same handful of current styles. It is the same in many other areas of life (architecture, work, etc.). For all its eddies of pseudo-individualism, the main currents in contemporary capitalism foster the crudest forms of uniformity and homogeneity.

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“Immediate contact with the workaday world deprives me – though inwardly I am as detached as I can be – of the possibility of taking a broad view of matters, just as if I were at the bottom of a ravine, with my head bowed down in addition.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 19 January, 1915)
 
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The old Jewish quarter of Josefov supplies the tourist with a consumable image of a vanished past. After the walls and gates of the old ghetto were removed in the early nineteenth century, wealthy and petit-bourgeois Jews gradually moved to other parts of the city. The remains of the old ghetto were then almost completely erased by a process of redevelopment that between 1896 and 1912 destroyed all but a dozen of the 260 or so stone structures that previously stood in the quarter. The Jewish population of Prague itself was decimated by the Holocaust (only 3274 of the 35,000 pre-war Jewish inhabitants of the city returned from the Nazi concentration camps) and post-war emigration. It now stands at around a thousand. In Josefov, all that remains of the former ghetto are a few physical fragments spared by the redevelopment: six of the nine synagogues that stood in 1895, the Jewish Town Hall and the old Jewish cemetery. These vestiges serve no function outside of tourism, and every glimpse inside must be paid for (even the view of the cemetery from the adjacent public toilets is blocked off). Around them throng streams of bewildered and bored tourists struggling to see what cannot be seen and feel what cannot be felt. The stallholders of U starého hřbitova, vendors of vulgar mementos, await them. Perhaps they know the tourists better than they do themselves.

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The buildings created by the redevelopment of Josefov, with their ornate profusions of cornices, columned windows, caryatides and sculptures, friezes, colours, entablatures, and other rich decorative elements, speak of the confidence of the bourgeoisie of the time. Yet their world was not to last. The sense of history that permeated their culture, their self-image as the refined developers of a civilization rooted in the classical era, has been swept away by the very economy they nurtured. Ironically, the whorehouses, disreputable bars, conmen and sellers of junk that congregated in Josefov after the ghetto dissolved seem somewhat closer to the spirit of our age than the high-minded pedants who later evicted them. The commodification of intoxication, pleasure and delusion for the masses is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. The classics are not. Even when it presents a return to tradition as an antidote to the ills that it has itself created, it is to the images of non-western or peasant practices that it turns. There is no market for togas, it seems.

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The inner ring of nineteenth and early twentieth century apartment houses that surrounds the historic centre is remarkably intact. It is possible to walk for hours within it. To someone from outside central Europe, the distinctive architecture makes a refreshing change. The handsome and ornate buildings also set me pondering about what a systematic modulation of space in the directions of play and liberation might achieve. It all soon wore thin. Merely walking and watching is enervating. And the buildings themselves, which in the end are nothing more than rather monotonously tasteful containers for the terrible poverty of family and commercial life, eventually pall.

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It is easy to see why inter-war functionalist apartment blocks have so few admirers. They reveal too starkly the ugly function they serve. They are too obviously hutches for confined people and diminished lives.

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The most recent buildings in the city provide further evidence of contemporary capitalism’s inability to build anything not deserving of immediate demolition. As the combined horrors of Nový Smíchov, Zlatý Anděl and Anděl City in Smíchov show, when the world of waged servitude, commodity exchange and policing builds for itself, when every aspect of the terrain is designed with those ends in mind, what results is a landscape of unparalleled barrenness: a perfunctorily gilded void.

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In Smíchov, an ugly flyover connecting two sections of the Strahovský traffic tunnel passes above a rotating advertising hoarding and an expanse of weed-infested ground. On nearby Grafická and Holečkova, trams and cars flow incessantly down the canyon formed by the tall apartments on either side. It is something often seen in cities today: the abolition of the street. That such abominations exist condemns this society. That we permit them to do so condemns us.

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There appear to be relatively few birds in Prague, so much so that in the centre of town one finds more jackdaws in the bookshops than in the sky. I saw only one cat in Prague, sitting on a window ledge in Palmovka. I doubt it is responsible.

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After walking down several descending streets in Žižkov to Koněvova, I come across the entrance to a long pedestrian tunnel that runs under Vitkov Hill to Pernerova in Karolin. Echoing footsteps, bands of light: it’s an intriguing place. By varying the sounds, colours, materials and light levels, one might make it something more. But first a life that is capable of properly using such an intensified space, a life that does not settle for the trivia of art and fun, has to be created.

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After leaving the tunnel, I could go left, right or straight ahead. Right is entirely unfamiliar, so I walk in that direction. It’s fairly dreary. A tram passes. I get on. It doesn’t help, and the stops don’t even appear on my map. I get off, take bearings, then, more or less at random, board another tram. This meanders through dark and uninteresting streets. It’s getting late. I get off in what seems the middle of nowhere. Nowhere turns out to Palmovka.

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Open, enthusiastic and candid encounters with strangers are far from common in our fearful and deceptive times. If I had one in Prague, it was perhaps with two delightful and frolicsome border collies I met in the Globe Bookshop. Even they, however, have their roles to play, as their dutiful performance of silly tricks later showed.

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The Vyšehrad Fortress was recreated in the nineteenth century as a tool of Czech nationalist propaganda. As ever with nationalists, the Czech ideologues sought to portray the hierarchical national structure that they themselves proposed to create as an ancient and organic entity. To this end, the old local rulers who had used the hill for their own military purposes from around the 10th century onwards were redefined as Czechs, and the archaeological fragments they had left behind were reconstructed and represented as shrines to national piety. At the same time, the cemetery at Vyšehrad was established. The purpose of this Pantheon of the great and the good was to associate the achievements of the deceased with the nation and encourage a submissive reverence amongst pilgrims. It probably still has its intended effect on the pious nationalists who visit it. Whether it speaks in the same way to the many dog-walkers and weekend picnickers is more doubtful. Certainly its original mystifications go largely unheeded by the dogs and the tourists. The latter are content to consume the general appearance of history and romance, and enjoy the views over the city. For them, the rest is a half-read and soon-forgotten entry in a guide book.

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One of those incarcerated in Vyšehrad Cemetery is the surrealist, Vítĕzslav Nezval. In 1938 he applauded the Moscow show trials; later he wrote poems in praise of Stalin (other Czech surrealists, such as Karel Teige, were not so craven). He deserves to rot in such an ignominious place.

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The Cubist architecture by Josef Chochol in the streets below Vyšehradh Hill is a complete failure. It adds a few superficial prismatic touches to buildings whose basic form and function is unchanged. They remain very ordinary bourgeois homes. A similar poverty afflicts the House of the Black Madonna in Staré Město and the cubist lamp-post on Jungmannovo namesti. If the tourist guides did not point them out, they would not even be noticed.

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And a church […] I forlornly and reluctantly went into, only because of the slight compulsion of duty that a tourist feels, and the heavy compulsion of a man expiring of futility.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 4 November, 1915)

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The interior of the Church of St. Peter and Paul at Vyšehrad is decorated in a somewhat pallid Art Nouveau style that at least has the virtue of leaving no surface uncoloured. The indifference of the Czechs to religion has rendered most of Prague’s churches redundant. What should be done with these relics? In Proposals for Rationally Improving the City of Paris (Potlatch #23, 13 October 1955) Debord, Wolman, Bernstein and Fillon respectively recommended total destruction, stripping them of their religious content, partial demolition, and transformation into houses of horror. Undoubtedly it is a matter of determining whether, in any given case, these potent mechanisms for the mystification and mutilation of the human spirit can be reconstructed to serve better ends. Would the appropriate replacement of overt religious imagery, for example, create within some former churches a beneficial atmosphere of secular calm and meditation? Such questions cannot properly be posed outside of the liberation of society and the reconstruction of individual life by and for ourselves. When we have our lives and the resources of society in our hands, then we can experiment with the churches that remain. The redevelopment of churches (into art centres, homes, etc.) by the existing society merely reallocates them from an old form of alienation to a new one.

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One evening, a few wrong turns take me to a church on Ječná dedicted to Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order. After the defeat of Protestantism in the seventeenth century, 23 medieval houses were demolished to make way for this church and a Jesuit college. Today it testifies more to the decline than the ascendancy of the church. A handful of worshippers, huddled in the half-light, mumble their way through a call and response that appears to be led by a tape-recorded voice. An imaginary communication conducted through an unreal dialogue.

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The passages of Wenceslas Square: tunnels as concentrations of commerce and commercial publicity. An upside-down horse cannot save them.

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Where am I? What’s the name of that street? Which end of the street is this and how do I get to there? Where on earth does that diverted tram run? In the course of too much painstaking navigation, the city recedes behind the map.

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In advanced western countries, the consumption of art is an important part of the ever-expanding commodity economy and the dreams of sophisticated life that appear in its catalogue of the good life. The National Gallery’s collection of modern art is housed in Veletržní palác (Trade Fair Palace), a seven-story functionalist building from the 1920s that previously hosted trade fairs and the headquarters of various foreign trade companies. When I visited, it was almost empty. The short distance that separates it from the centre of the city discourages tourists.

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Art and artists have failed. Having conceded the creation of everyday life and the wider world that determines it to the economy and the state, too little is left to them: the narrow confinement of school and studio; scanty materials and soon-exhausted forms; long work on objects destined to be glanced at in the margins of life; and perhaps a little of this society’s disgusting prestige. Even the strongest effects of their most powerful works are, to be honest, slight and transient. They rarely survive the ordeal of crossing the busy road outside.

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Some of the works in this gallery might be rescued, and quite literally brought to life, by being construed as blueprints. Egon Schiele’s 1911 painting of Český Krumlov, Mrtvé městoi (Dead Town), was perhaps only intended to convey the rancid petit-bourgeois spirit that drove him from the town. Arguably, however, such an intensified vision of the human environment could usefully be built as a home for heightened life, once the economic tyranny that makes all construction vain has been excised. Similarly, Aleš Veselý’s Enigma sculptures could, perhaps, be approached as proposals for labyrinths, and Jiří Valenta’s Portrait of a Blind Young Man adopted as a design for a new room for a new life. Even Michael Bielicky’s somewhat silly spiral sculpture without a name, which by accident or design gives the impression of oscillating, might be expanded and redeployed in the construction of certain tunnels.

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The gallery contains a number of actual models of buildings. They reflect their times. As a result, they are, without exception, perfectly repellent.

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The organization of the gallery inadvertently illustrates the decomposition of art over the course of the twentieth century. With each succeeding floor, as the work becomes progressively more recent, the proportion of sheer vacuity and imposture increases. By the top, exhaustion, affectation and academicism are the only inhabitants of the ruins.

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One Prague figure who confronted the failure of art was Karel Tiege. In the Poetist Manifesto (1924) he called for an unsustainable “artistic professionalism” to be displaced by “the art of life, the art of being alive and living.” By the time of the Poetism Manifesto of 1928, this had become a programme for liberating all forms of art from utilitarian ends and combining them into a unitary “poetry for the five senses, poetry for all the senses” such as would produce “maximum emotionality.” The narrow scope of this “emotionality”, however, is revealed by Tiege’s examples of the “poetry of physical and spatial senses,” which include such petty pastimes as “sport of every possible kind: motoring, aviatics, tourism, gymnastics, acrobatics.” These and other comments suggest that the new emotions will continue to be confined and consumed within the limited domains of leisure and the aesthetic. Neither work nor the subordination of social production to an independent economy is disputed. On the contrary, Tiege takes the subjective and objective aspects of the existing socio-economic structure entirely for granted, blithely referring to “our mechanical civilization” and the need to adjust art to “the present day” and the “modern nerves and psychic make-up of contemporary people.” In effect, his programme does no more than realign art and recreation with early twentieth century capitalism and its burgeoning consumerism.

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Similar shortcomings can be seen in Tiege’s 1925 article, Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art.’ Tiege quite rightly proclaims “the total collapse of all varieties of so-called art” and calls for “the all-out liquidation of art.” But liquidation in favour of what? For Tiege, “our” civilization is a “civilization of the machine.” The machine is the driving force of progress. Moreover, “its law is minimum effort for maximum effect. This is the law of economy. The law of economy is the law of all work. And work is the only law of the world, its ordering force, which leads organized matter to an unknown destination” (his italics). In this world, “a product is beautiful when it has been created economically and precisely for maximum perfection and utility” and thus “powerful modern beauty exists in every object which is made for a precise and definite purpose and which fulfills exactly the end for which it is intended.” This not a matter for artists: “The machine is the work of specialists, of the engineer, never of the artist.” We also, says Tiege, need specialist “inventors” to “awaken new needs” and move development forward. All this is mystification. Inventors and engineers are servants, not masters. The particular needs that are awoken and satisfied are selected by capitalism and the state, and are confined to those that will sustain their profits and their power. The machinery and methods of production are developed with the same specific powers and ends in view, having being designed at every point so to allow the workforce to be directed, controlled and dispossessed from above. Tiege’s laws of economy and work are no more neutral. If work and the world at large come to be dominated by unknown and unchosen ends, if there is everywhere a relentless imperative to maximize productivity, this is not because of any universal laws. Rather, it arises from the perfectly contingent and reversible fact that an independent economy of commodity production dominates society. Stripped of its deceptive rhetoric, Tiege’s proposal is merely that we replace the artist’s production of small objects of contemplative beauty with the technocrat’s dazzled submission to industrialized alienation. There is nothing of progress or beauty in this. “Her face unmask’t, I saw her corps unclad” (John Harringdon).

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Graffiti is everywhere in Prague. It is no better than the other decorations with which the city is smeared. A stereotyped style is taken from an external youth culture. It is then regurgitated, with a few speciously individual touches, so as to win the approval of a pseudo-community of fellow adherents and make an assertive display to passersby. Nothing of substance is said, nothing of consequence is done. It is mere advertising for the alienated self. In somewhere like Vltavská metro station, its empty semblance of communication perfectly complements the vacant terrain of tatty bus shelters, concrete flyovers and a barely-alive grassy knoll.

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One of the entrances to the Smíchovské nádraží metro station in Smíchov has been made to look like a yellow cave. What were they thinking of?

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Further along Nádražní, at the junction with Na zlíchově, there is a closed factory, one of a number in the area. It has been reclaimed from alienated labour, and made a little interesting, by decay and weeds. Behind the fence, there are two beautiful guard dogs. What are they guarding? On a fence around the corner, there are pictures of animal skulls. Why? Are these memorials to the victims of the dogs? It is easy to create such mysteries from a lack of information. The solution would, no doubt, be perfectly banal.

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Across the footbridge that runs over the lines at Praha-Smíchov railway station to Radlická, amongst a cluster of workshops on Pod brentovou, two models of large birds (cranes or stalks, perhaps) stand on top of a tall chimney. I doubt that any real birds of this size ever visit Prague. There are only representations.

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Like so much else, the steep steps of Santoška promise much but often lead nowhere.

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In Santoška, the wealthier residents appear to have appropriated the heights and views of Malá Strana for themselves. The guard dogs suggest that they fear for their privileges. Do the words “fxxk you” (in English) painted on a wall imply that at least some of their offspring are not so sure that there is anything up here worth fighting for? Have they merely chosen the pseudo-rebellion of Anglo-American youth culture instead?

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At one end of underground line B, in the north-east of the city, is Černý Most, a collection of apartment block developments that is home to around 22,000 people. This is not the lumpen-proletarian nightmare that haunts the imagination of the middle classes in Britain, America and France. There appear to be neither gangs of feral young people in hooded tops nor gun-toting crack dealers on every corner. Gangsta rap does not thud from the windows. It is all very ordinary: working people coming and going; small dogs; cars and car parks; un-decayed blocks in well-maintained parkland; laundry and potted plants on the balconies; a functioning school in good repair; small shops on the estate and branches of Tesco and Ikea in an adjacent shopping centre; a concentric ring of roads. It is somewhere to which one returns, when one is not at work or out on trips, to watch the TV and be with one’s family (or perhaps the other way around); a place of tidy horror where the friends and relatives of suicides always say they do not know what drove them to it.

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“All is imaginary – family, office, friends, the streets, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 21 October, 1921)

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In an attempt to find out something about current events in the city, I buy a copy of the weekly English-language newspaper, The Prague Post. Perhaps it will be possible to find a few facts amongst the misinterpretations and outright lies. According to the lead story, on November 17, the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, 2,000 gathered on Wenceslas Square to protest. One protestor is quoted as wishing to “live normally and from time to time go to the mountains or the seaside or be able to afford some culture.” Another is reported as having said: “We are not against entrepreneurs; I earn my living with my hands, but I respect those able to make big money and employ people. But we want greater solidarity. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing.” If this account is accurate, are the sentiments it reports representative of the thoughts and feelings of the protestors? Are these really the limits of their desires and discontent?

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A news item on Prague Radio reports that a poll commissioned by Czech television at the time of the anniversary found that two-thirds of respondents were of the view that politicians today were more corrupt than their pre-1989 predecessors and only a third thought that life is better now than under communism. In response, the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, said: “our task was not to guarantee happiness and wealth for everybody; our task was to change the political, economic and social system from communism to something completely different.” The question for those who have found this imposed system not to be “something completely different” is how to renew, extend and deepen the failed revolution of 1989.

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“You find yourself painfully pushed against the wall, apprehensively lower your eyes to see whose hand it is that pushes you, and, with a new pain in which the old is forgotten, recognize your own contorted hand holding you with a strength it never had for good work.” (The Diaries of Frank Kafka, 3 August, 1914)

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An outdoor photographical exhibition on Namesti republiky called Almost Velvet Revolutions juxtaposes images from the events in Czechoslovakia with formally similar pictures from the Arab Spring. The visual parallels are useless. This is not to say that the two movements have nothing in common. Both, notably, were failures. The masses of ordinary people failed to carry out the process of social transformation themselves. As the old regime crumbled, they stood back and permitted specialists and new elites to take on the task of creating its replacement. From this alienation of their powers, this failure to bring every domain of economic and social life under their direct control, a new alienated society necessarily arose. If we are to understand how these two miscarriages occurred, and how they might be reversed in the present and avoided in the future, we need something more than vague and celebratory pictorial likenesses.

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In the course of a week, what evidence do I myself see of the consequences of the current economic crisis and a struggle against it? None. Is this entirely due to the peculiarly purblind perspective of the tourist?

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I see many forms of alienated labour in the city. The closed factories on Nádražní, and another that lies in ruins on Křesomyslova, suggest that manufacturing may be in decline in Prague; and yet I also come across various factories on Starý Hloubětín and a PVC factory and Pepsi plant on nearby Kolbenova. No doubt the rulers of the city are better pleased by the supposedly more modern alienation represented by the large telecommunications office on Nádraží vysočany, PriceWaterhouseCoopers on Kateřinská, GlaxoSmithKline on Na pankráci, and the various anonymous white collar penitentiaries that can be seen from the number 3 tram as it travels eastwards from Palmovka through parts of the city that have been stripped of all urbanity by lethal accumulations of business and traffic. Of course, there are also, amongst other things, tourism, retail, construction, government, public transport and the many attendants who collect the five-crown charge in public lavatories. What the city seems to lack are concentrated districts of hip production and consumption, such as Berlin’s Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg. Perhaps ordinary consumption has not yet reached the degree of saturation and disappointment that makes markets for avant-garde culture, artisanal goods and ever-receding ‘wellness’ both viable and necessary.

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Between 1908 and 1922 Franz Kafka worked as a lawyer at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. According to Gustav Janouch, Kafka said of his work at the institute: “That is not an occupation, it is a form of decomposition. [...] I sit in the office. It is a foul-smelling factory of pain, in which there is no sense of happiness.” (Conversations with Kafka, 1968, page 125). Office work remains fundamentally the same today. The ground floor of the Institute’s former offices at Na Poříčí 7, however, now houses a Turkish takeaway and a women’s clothes shop. There is no progress in this either.

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The final evening. An escalator abruptly projects from the bright mediocrity of the newer parts of the main railway station into the decayed gloom of the old entrance hall. Coffee and Becherovka at Fantova kavárna. Doors banging. A few passengers scurrying by in what seems to be mild alarm. The distant rumble of trains. The endless roar of traffic from the Wilsonova death strip. A policeman and a cleaner commendably skiving in the dark. No doubt it will all be erased by redevelopment sooner or later.

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The road to Ruzyně airport is no better in the daytime. Chilling abominations of steel and glass, of which a car park clad with sloping panes of blue-green glass is perhaps the most revolting. Dusty suburbs of asthmatics bathed in exhaust fumes. A stooped woman hauling herself through what may once have been a village but is now a neglected verge of a dual carriageway. What a way to end a life. Sucked dry and spat out.

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The usual collection of businessmen and executives waiting for the plane, the dejected marionettes of an international capitalism that leaves their minds, their bodies and their language as grey as the suits it forces them to wear.

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In the distance, cast by the setting sun on the tops of clouds, lie volcanic pools of deepest red. The woman to my right yawns and switches on her iPod.

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“Still unborn and already compelled to walk around the streets and talk to people.” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 17 March, 1922)

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February, 2012

No Copyright. You may use this text in any way you please.

The author can be contacted at aqrj35@dsl.pipex.com.

The Season of Kisses and Sighs: Cuts and Protests against Cuts in Britain

The stuttering course of the capitalist economy, accompanied as ever by the alternating tales of disaster and reassurance that make it distortedly visible to the spectator, has now, in Britain, reached the stage of cuts in government spending. What choices do we have in the face of this turn of events? We are told there are just two: submit to the cuts in order to restore the health of the economy or fight them so as to preserve existing public services. These are the choices held out to us in newspaper articles, politicians’ speeches, news programmes, management pep talks, advertisements and other pronouncements rained down on us by the dominant society. These are the choices we have taken up in our own thought and conversation. But like all the rest of the choices that are made public by the dominant society, they happen to be false.

The Coalition government and its allies tell us that the cuts are necessary. They promise us that things will eventually get better. They urge us to acquiesce. It has to be said that this is a course of inaction many of us are tempted to take. It is what we have done in previous economic crises and we have not done much to shake off the habit of resignation since. We have also found that submission has its rewards. If the past is any guide to the future, public services will not be completely decimated. Our earnings will not plunge relentlessly downwards. Only a small minority will be made unemployed, and most of those will eventually secure alternative employment, albeit at somewhat lower wages than they received before. Even those who fail to find another job will be kept alive, after a fashion, by the state. In any event, we are hardly suffering at the moment. Our real wages may have fallen back to where they were in 2005, but most of us were not poor in 2005. We may not have as much money as we would like, we may worry about our debts and the prospects of our children and parents, and we may have had to cut back a little here and there. True. Yet we are far removed from anything resembling profound material poverty. We do not need to take to the streets to secure bread, for we do not live on bread alone and such bread as we need we can still afford to buy at the supermarket. Besides, it is so very easy to go on plodding through one’s everyday life in the way one always has. Families, friends, homes, jobs, cars, holidays, nights out, shopping, sport, there is always something clamouring for our attention; always something to swallow up our time and draw us down those all-too-few (and all-too-deep) ruts that define our lives. Our sense that there is nothing we can do to change things only makes this slide into submissive resignation easier. So too does our penchant for easing our isolated bitterness by blaming the whole sorry mess on immigrants, benefit claimants, civil servants, greedy bankers or some other scapegoat we have found dangled in front of us.

Perhaps it is true that, if we give those in power a free hand, most of us will find ourselves in a few years’ time more or less back where we were when the recession started. After all, the doomsayers have always been wrong before. But is that enough? Doesn’t the recession tell us something rather terrible about our condition? Doesn’t it clearly and cruelly demonstrate how very little control we have over our lives? The economy within which we work is no more under our direction when it is growing than when it is contracting. During good times and bad, we are subordinated to its dictates. Of course, we would like to believe that we are not unfree in our work because we exercise some choice as to which jobs we apply for and we have some discretion over what we do while we are at work. But a forced choice between wretched options is not liberty; and trapped as we are between intrusive monitoring by managers, vexing performance targets, a wider organization of work over which we have no say, and a global economy that does our bidding to roughly the same extent as the weather does, our prized autonomy in the workplace seems the most threadbare of illusions. And what does the threat of redundancy tell us about our work? Our position has not suddenly changed. Despite all those friendly chats with management, and the team work and camaraderie, we have all along been disposable tools of our employers. All day and every day, we are nothing more than the means by which they realize their ends. When we can no longer perform that role, we are discarded as surplus to their requirements, which is what “redundant” means. The fact that our bosses may be reluctant to impose redundancies, preferring instead to retain surplus staff or introduce part-time working, takes nothing away from this analysis. We are merely being shown the same concern that a farmer displays for his prize livestock. He will put them down only when he has to.

The economic crisis also reveals unhappy truths about other aspects of our lives. Perhaps we have grown used to a pleasant chat with someone who works at a business or office we frequent. When bankruptcy, restructuring or redundancy strikes, our acquaintance vanishes. We never see or hear of her again. For all the pleasantries that may have passed between us, the only real relation we had was that between a supplier of goods or services and a buyer. When that was gone, precisely nothing was left. We shared no other activity and decided nothing else together. It is the same with the vast majority of our connections with people. They are relations of exchange, mediated by commodities. As we pass through the public world, who do we encounter but strangers hurrying by in separated indifference and the self-effaced, masquerading for wages? How often do we do anything more with those we meet than discuss and pay for commodities?

But perhaps you will say that all that may be true about the wider world, but the real meaning and richness of our lives lies in our private worlds? We know that work is shit. We know that politics, the economy and the environment are all going to the dogs. Nonetheless, you say, we can find some real happiness and fulfilment with our families, our friends and our leisure. Unfortunately, we cannot separate our private existences from the alienated world in this way. Our families, friendships and leisure are not refuges that somehow exist apart from the dispiriting processes of capitalism. On the contrary, they have been created by and for capitalism and share the same alienation that bleeds through every other aspect of the capitalist world. We are creatures of capitalism. Our domestic worlds, our intimate lives and our free time have all been adapted to the needs of capitalism. All have been shrivelled and shrunken down to the desperately narrow dimensions that the system permits. The family, for instance, is merely the domestic unit that happens best to serve a society that isolates individuals from each other, separates them from the management of the society, and requires them to submit to the world order it presents to them. In the soothing name of privacy, the family abandons history to its capitalist masters. In this jealously-defended isolation, we encourage children who have been reduced to dependence falsely to recognize themselves in the roles, the values, the pleasures, the activities and ultimately the jobs the society makes available. We mould them to accept and adhere to imposed and domineering collectives, starting with the family itself. For ourselves, we strive to find our greatest fulfilment within the small web of social relations and the tiny resources to which the family gives rise. None of it goes smoothly, for it is never easy to force the living into shallow graves. But we do our best. We temper our expectations of happiness. We create family occasions over and over again in which the unstated rule is that we profess our mutual love and contentment and convincingly play the happy family. We fiercely embrace a transcendental notion of love that hovers in disembodied abstraction above the resentment, division, abuse, punishment, incomprehension, blackmail, mediocrity and confinement that make up the actual lived experience of family life. In these and so many other ways, we would have ourselves believe that the image of familial contentment we have been given by our society is the defining reality of our lives.

Our friendships and leisure are hardly better. Of course, there are pleasures and adventures in our friendships, but they are much too small. We share so little with our friends. We have too little at our disposal. Through the work that we all do, we create the very world we live in. Everything around us is put there by us. But we do not create it for ourselves. We do not create it with our friends. When we come together, all we have are the paltry time and money left to us by work and the alien world our work has produced. We are reduced to chasing desultory diversions amongst the ruins. Our games are petty. We could build a very world with and for our desires. We end up going on vacation.

In public and private, we are colonized. We live by occupying the ideas of happiness, normality and the cool the commodity society brings to us, haunting its promises like ghosts roaming the corridors of a ruined mansion in search of a long dead love. We deny it, of course. We are our own men and women, we say. We pride ourselves on not believing the stupid claims of the adverts and the politicians, even as we spend each and every day living out the fundamental notion of consumable happiness that each advertisement and each politician conveys. We are sure that we each have our own individual styles, even as those styles uncannily coalesce around a bare handful of models in each era. We are mistaken. We can see this quite clearly when we look back at old photographs of ourselves. We insisted on our irreducible individuality then too. Yet the records show that we were entirely of the time. No matter how absurd the fashions and tastes may have been, our hairstyles, clothes, houses, cars, reading habits, musical tastes, and ideas in general duly reflected them. When this comes to our attention, we laugh, perhaps, and feel a little embarrassed. But we learn nothing and take no action. We blame it all on the follies and gullibility of youth. We waive away the staggering truth that everything about us has been dominated from afar without giving more than a moment’s thought as to how this state of abjection came to be. We retreat into that amnesia and indifference which seems to be necessary if we are to go on as we are. We sift nostalgically through the snapshots of carefully-staged displays of spontaneous contentment we have taken at the many occasions that seem to have no other purpose than to allow such photographs to be taken. We create the ground for the next disaster by forgetting what is essential about the ones that have gone before.

Is this really enough? Is this all that we desire? Are we content to sit tight under the insults of government and economy in the hope that we may one day return to the slightly-more-affluent alienations of yesteryear? Are we too scared, too timid, to take on the society whose very intimidating immobility testifies to how little it is ours and how little we are? If the answer is yes, well so be it. But do not be surprised if you struggle to remember what you have been doing during all these years, as you drift with scant attention behind the disappointing person and disagreeable habits you have become. Do not be surprised if you one day find yourself staring at the exhaust pipe you have fed through the passenger window, wondering where it all went wrong. It always goes wrong, my friends, when it is rotten from the start.

Merely enduring the cuts is not the only option we are given. We are also presented with clamorous calls to defend our jobs and public services against the cuts. We are given to understand that something valuable is being taken from us. We are even sometimes told that the victories of past generations of working people are under threat. All this, I would suggest, is quite preposterous.

The rulers of society and their supporters were once quite candid about the ends they hoped to obtain from good conditions and services. In 1837, Leonard Horner, a factory inspector, said:

“Independently of all higher considerations, and to put the necessity of educating the children of the working classes on its lowest footing, it is loudly called for as a matter of police, to prevent a multitude of immoral and vicious beings, the offspring of ignorance, from growing up and around us, to be a pest and a nuisance to society; it is necessary to render the great body of the working class governable by reason.”

When speaking in the House of Commons on 17 February 1870 in favour of the Elementary Education Bill 1870, W. E. Foster argued that “the speedy provision of elementary education” would allow the state to secure “our industrial prosperity” and remove “that ignorance which we are all aware is pregnant with crime and misery, with misfortune to individuals and danger to the community”. Moreover, “if we are to hold our position among men of our own race or among the nations of the world we must make up the smallness of our numbers by increasing the intellectual force of the individual.”

A more modern note was struck in Winston Churchill’s explanation of the idea behind the introduction of unemployment insurance (one of the forerunners of modern social security benefits), as reported by the Daily Mail in 1909. In Churchill’s view, the purpose aimed at by the reform was:

“to increase the stability of our institutions by giving the mass of industrial workers a direct interest in maintaining them. […] [This] scheme […] will help to remove the dangerous element of uncertainty from the existence of the industrial worker. It will give him an assurance that his home, got together through long years and with affectionate sacrifice, will not be broken up, sent bit by bit to the pawnshop, just because […] he falls out of work. It will make him a better citizen, a more efficient worker, [and] a happier man.”

The ends aimed at by modern public spending include similar objectives. But since these statements were made, the capitalist economy has grown in size and sophistication. The extension of a relentless consumer culture to the vast majority of the population has also become a key motor of its growth and its sole claim to legitimacy. The roles performed by public services have changed accordingly. New environments, new abilities, new attitudes, and new levels of public health are now created, not just directly to meet the new needs of business and government but also as new incentives and new rewards for our submission. For example, it is no longer enough to give the mass of the population an elementary education that merely instils “order, discipline, cleanliness, deference to authority, and the tolerance of boredom at work” (in the words of one historian). These remain important goals of the education system, but today’s education must go beyond them. It must now manufacture people who have the personalities, skills and willingness to do what is required of them without being told (deceptively referred to as “initiative” and “the ability to work by oneself”) that modern service industries and high value businesses demand. It must now, by means of its organs of “higher” education, produce the specialised workers and the specialist knowledge that allow the dominant society to produce its technological and cultural commodities, to shape its world and the individuals who serve it, and to mystify everything. And, to bring all this about, it must help foster the misunderstanding that the new education and the work to which it leads constitute desirable opportunities for individuals and welcome progress for the society. No more noble purposes are served by contemporary education. Indeed, no very different purpose is served by any of the public services. Without exception, they are mechanisms for reproducing an alienated society. They seek to integrate the majority into a life of alienated labour and abundant consumption and disarm the minority left to a more meagre survival on the margins of society. They are an unrelenting assault on the possibility of authentic and self-controlled life. They always and everywhere damage or destroy us as individuals. There is nothing victorious in this. In the very few instances where a public service or a legal right arose out of our struggles, it represented the defeat and not the victory of those struggles, the moment when the goal we pursued slipped out of our hands and became one more uncontrollable, external process pressing down on us.

This is not to say that public services do not provide us with facilities that are valuable within the context of the existing society. Without doubt, central government, local authorities and the bodies they fund can and do supply services that allow separated individuals who have surrendered their powers of world-creation to persist more easily in that separation and surrender. But I come back to the question of whether this is enough for us. Are we content with libraries that allow us to while away our free time with a novel about a missing swimsuit model or the autobiography of an entertainer (the most commonly borrowed fiction and non-fiction library books)? Do we want know more than an opportunity to grind our way through 16 years of submissive study of falsified knowledge and emerge with a degree and a job in property development, renting, business, research, education, health or social work (the most common graduate employments)? Can we think of nothing better than to have strangers to whom we are inevitably just another job of paid work dress and wash us so that we can spend the rest of the day staring at the television or gossiping about ever less? Would it be cause for jubilation to have a social security system that paid enough to allow its recipients to participate fully in the time-wasting futility of seeking a worthwhile life through commodity consumption? Need I go on?

The call to defend jobs, education and public services is, in effect, propaganda in favour of the existing way of life, one of many eulogies of the dominant society that take the guise of dissent. There is no qualitative difference between life as it was before the cuts and life as it will be afterwards, between public services and private services, or between employment and unemployment, even if one is a slightly more comfortable form of eviscerated life than the other. We are not obliged to confine ourselves to the false choices and tiny distinctions that the dominant society magnifies into fundamental conflicts and real progress. No matter how urgent and profound the crisis for which they claim to be the remedy, pseudo-critiques that take for granted the fundamental features of our alienated world (such as alienated labour, alienated consumption and the state) serve only to dissipate our discontents, refine this society’s depredations, and trap us just where we are. If we are ever to escape our already-insufficient lives, we must, I think, point-blank refuse them.

Those who sincerely participate in the anti-cuts movement out of a genuine disgust at what the government is doing may wish to consider the fate of one of its precursors, the anti-Poll Tax movement. The movement was successful. But what were the practical consequences? The movement itself, having obtained the only objective it had set itself and removed the only misery it had objected to, lost everything that held it together and disintegrated. Its participants returned to the isolation and alienation of a daily life that was very little changed. Everything they won drifted away from them. The Poll Tax was abolished and Margaret Thatcher deposed. But the Poll Tax was merely replaced by the Council Tax, another remote bureaucratic and legal procedure devised by central government, administered by local authorities, enforced by the courts and bailiffs, and completely out of the hands of ordinary people. Margaret Thatcher was also replaced, with John Major becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party. He proved more palatable to voters than the hopelessly unpopular Thatcher and led the party to victory in the General Election of 1992. The Conservatives remained in power until 1997. Capitalism has, alas, persisted for far longer. The fact that one of its governments was forced to develop a fairer and therefore more acceptable form of local taxation has probably only helped it to endure.

How often have we said of late (and how often have we heard others say) that what we need in this country is a revolution like those in Tunisia and Egypt? But they are only words. We avow in easy abstraction the need for revolution yet we do precisely nothing about it. We can barely conceive of an autonomous project on such a scale. Our capacity to think and act by and for ourselves, to step beyond this society’s cowering norms, is undernourished to the point of starvation. Well, we shall just have to create what we need. We might begin by bringing to the practical project of revolution at least as much time, effort and passion as we have been want to lavish on our jobs, families, pastimes and vacations. We might also develop the habit of viewing and treating our enemies as enemies. No part of this society is for our benefit, no part of it serves our best interests. Indeed, everything that this society allows might usefully be taken as a personal attack upon us. Its goods, its services, its visions of the good life, its models of deviance, its cities, its politics, its protests, its moralities, its high culture and cheap thrills, its gaudy fashions for young women and its drab uniforms for middle-aged men, its good jobs and shit work, everything that its media, its politicians, its domesticated critics, its teachers, its researches, its manuals, its managers, its celebrities extol to us, all of it, quite without exception, always and everywhere tends to confine and disfigure us, to make us into the kind of people that the separate economy and the separate power of that state needs in order to survive. So, a parent-teacher meeting, for example, is not an opportunity to help your child develop his or her knowledge, maturity and independence but an invitation to collaborate in the destructive process of implanting the falsified and tamed knowledge, the limited aspirations, and the acceptance of established authority and mores which contemporary capitalism expects of its producers and consumers. Equally, for the teacher, such a meeting is not part of an authentic vocation but is simply a facet of a process of alienation in which all of his or her time, thought and effort as a teacher is sucked into procedures and a curriculum imposed from above. Here and elsewhere across everyday life, the question is: what can we (parent, teacher, child) do to stop this expense of spirit in a waste of shame? Perhaps we can see nothing we can do today. If so, the question renews itself tomorrow and the day after as a fresh challenge to our cunning and ingenuity, our ability to publicize our discontent and seek out potential partners in the dance of revolution. Does this sound like a dreary life of unbroken militancy in the service of a political cause or party? If it does, think again. There is no cause. There is no party. There is only the creative, enriching and entirely practical task of defeating by ourselves our own unhappiness and our own subordination, of overthrowing a social arrangement that is unfit for us as individuals and creating a better one by and for ourselves. We must develop a theory and practice that precisely prevents the emergence of ideas, procedures and leaders that dominate us.

The Coalition’s cuts are shrouded in a lying ideology of liberation. According to David Cameron’s speech at the 2010 Conservative Party conference, his “big society” will bring about a shift “from state power to people power”. This is arrant nonsense. For the past forty years or so, the Right has secured its political power by offering us a mirage of personal transformation, a twisted reflection of our confused desire for freedom and change. In point of fact, the abridgement of the state the Right has brought about is minimal and its neglect of the power held over us by employers and the economy has been total. But even the suggestion of an attack on the state terrifies the Left. We need not be so concerned. The state is not a friend. The problem is not that the state is being attacked but that some part of it will be left standing. The problem is not that the Coalition is too bold but that its project of the emancipation of the individual is a pathetically timid and incomplete farce that fails to embrace the totality of alienated life and is conducted by the very state it purports to savage. Perhaps it is time to talk less about opposing the cuts and more about accelerating and extending them beyond any control but our own. Perhaps now is the moment to wrest the project of individual and social emancipation away from our masters and set it loose for real in our homes and places of work, our schools and universities, our minds and bodies, and all the rest of our public and private worlds. What do we really have to lose? The careering absurdity of our world is not worthy of us; and neither are the lives of loud satisfaction and quiet desperation we lead within it.

Wayne Spencer
March 2011
No copyright. Use as you please.
The author may be contacted at aqrj35@dsl.pipex.com.

Nothing Burns in Hell: On Delinquents and Respectable Citizens

In the bottom, sorrow dwells, in the heights anguish

1.

A society as disastrous as the one in which we unfortunately live can hardly avoid talking about its shortcomings. But social problems are only taken up by the institutions and media of this deceptive society in falsified form. All that we see are misrepresented failings and spurious remedies. The prevailing babble about youthful ‘anti-social behaviour’ is no exception. We are typically given to understand that delinquents are rejecting the norms of society, and respectable citizens are being impoverished by a loss of the tranquil enjoyment of ordinary life. This way of viewing matters is perfectly misconceived. The problem is not that young delinquents have gone too far in their defiance of the dominant society, but that they have not gone far enough. The problem is not that the lives of the respectable citizens of this society have become disturbed, but that they have remained frozen. Delinquency does not so much cause the poverty of everyday life as continue it in different guises.

2.

I shall not offer exhaustive definitions of what I call the "delinquent" and the "respectable citizen". Who cares for such tedious exercises in procrustean classification other than the spent souls of academia? Suffice it to say that my delinquents include, amongst others, (a) bored kids who try to draw a line between themselves and the shitty world around them with music, dress, and the frugal use of cool talk; (b) the loose, local groups of friends and acquaintances who come together from time to time to sneer at passers-by and indulge in unlawful kicks and perhaps a little criminal enterprise; (c) other minor street criminals who ply their trade in order to pay for their partying; and (d) the more consistently crimiminal associations sometimes referred to as "gangs". But not everything I say applies to each kind of delinquent equally. As for my respectable citizens, well, I'm sure we all know one when we see one. At bottom, what is important, at least to me, is that you consider whether you recognise some part of your own everyday life in what I have to say. If you do, I am afraid that it is up to you to determine what practical consequences follow from this. One step toward refusing the dominant society consists in breaking the habit of expecting one's thought and practice to be handed down to you.

3.

It is often lamented that delinquent youths lack respect for figures of authority. But it should come as no surprise that teachers, the police, parents, etc, do not attract respect, for the very simple reason that these contemptible roles do not deserve it. Why on earth should we treat with deferential regard those who would reduce us to the shrunken lives this society permits? The very notion of deference is merely a demand that we quietly and blindly submit to the external authorities who have placed themselves above us. It is loathsome. The delinquents are to be congratulated for taking steps towards a practical recognition of this. Unfortunately, while they reject some of what the society offers up for respect, they defer to other elements of the alienated life we are asked to lead. What is worse, they have come to admire and desire the very alienations they have failed to contest. For as long as this persists, they will remain stultified.

4.

To dependent youth, the unemployed, the working poor in shit jobs, and the residents of ghettos, it is all too obvious that boredom, subordination and contempt are no small part of their lot. There are several different ways of responding to this insight. One is to grin and bear it in the hope that conformity will eventually be rewarded by higher status and better-paid work. This is perhaps the most common response. Another is to contest the society that produces so much dead time. A third is to pursue alternative sources of prestige and money within this very society. For all too many, delinquency is in essence a search for such illusory alternatives.

5.

Consumer capitalism expropriates the whole of humanity's capacity to create its own world, the whole of its labour power, and subordinates it to the production, circulation and praise of commodities. In return, it offers to the individual a selection of goods, and of images of the good life, to consume within the narrow confines of his or her private life. This is not just a matter of offering a pallid world of subdued, suburban pleasures to the well-behaved middle classes. Far from it. There are only so many washing machines that can be sold. There is only so much grief and disappointment that can be assuaged with replacement furniture, a holiday in a European hill village, or an unending succession of polite men and women on screen and disc. Modern capitalism must offer something different, something more, if it is to survive.

6.

Since the Second World War advanced capitalism, and the quest for contentment through consumption that it fosters, has generated a long series of consumable youth rebellions. This has included the teds, mods, rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks, rave culture, and the worlds of hip-hop and rap. Each of these has put forward its own particular array of clothes, music, drugs and cool behaviours as an authentic and ecstatic alternative to the misery of unskilled and semi-skilled work and the ways of life that honest and conforming people pursue. Indeed, where mainstream employment and commerce have more or less completely abandoned an area (as in ghettos of North America), cool culture and cool criminality may appear to be the only realistically available means to avoid poverty and obtain a sense of dignity. But none of these rebellions has marked the slightest departure from the global domination of the commodity and its logic. They have served only to assimilate young people into yet more external models of thought and action, and yet more waves of commodity production and consumption. The delinquents of today remain stuck in this pseudo-rebellious process. Consider, my friends, their sportswear, trainers, caps, and jewellery, the ways in which they walk, talk, fight, fuck and get high, and their view of what makes up the good life. Do these not reveal the extent to which they are seeking to gain status and pleasure by acting out a small local variation on a few global gangster templates the dominant society has shown to them ("It probably had a little to do with the gangster films we saw. Like a gang had a lot of drugs or money. They did drugs, had the coolest cars and chicks, that kind of thing...mostly we got it from films and those kind of things" — Swedish heroin user)? Consider, too, their unbroken, nervous concern for the visible approval of their friends. Does this not show how the individual is subordinated to a domineering collective? For all their defiance, the delinquents essentially live much as others do. Assimilating oneself into an external image of the good life, and submitting to a collectivity, is a perfectly ordinary form of alienated existence in the existing society. The delinquents are mistaken to associate this state of affairs with autonomy, excitement, shrewdness and freedom. They may purchase some fragile self-esteem, kicks and acceptance, they may even secure some precarious means of survival, but they pay for them with the usual currency of self-alienation.

7.

The admiration that delinquents have for what the dominant society says is desirable is not necessarily confined to its pseudo-rebellious products. Delinquents may straightforwardly yearn for some very ordinary consumer goods ("I want nice clothes, to get my hair done, I want nice bags and all the other shit...The right shampoo, the right shoes, the right fucking name on your T-shirt: it's life, it's all there is" — prostitute in the north east of England). They may dream of such widely-admired trappings of success and affluence as widescreen televisions, sports cars and the kinds of gaudy wives and homes preferred by professional footballers ("one of them proper top-notch houses, swimming pool and that...a nice car, top-class bird" - criminal in the north east of England). In the end, they may wish for nothing more than to have the things they read about in tabloid newspapers and see on television ("them massive plasma screen TVs all over the place...a proper mansion and that, big gates and CCTV cameras" — criminal in the north east of England). Aside from their criminal methods and their taste for a few illegal commodities (notably drugs), their submission to the degraded tastes of their era may be total.

8.

The conservatism of many delinquents can equally be seen in their attitudes towards gender roles. The ideology of gender roles, the utterly idiotic notion that each gender has its own distinctive set of attitudes, emotions and behaviours to which individual men and women must adhere on pain of ridicule or violence, has been one of the more destructive prisons of human possibility developed by the dominant society. Its practical repudiation across everyday life has been, and remains, an essential means and end of any real project of human liberation. Yet it is almost entirely absent from the lives of the delinquents. They continue to value toughness, aggression, unintelligence and a lack of emotion outside of sport in men, and submissive domesticity or submissive sexual availability amongst women. Why? These roles were only the alienated means by which working class men and women once adjusted themselves to the needs of harsh manual labour and imperialist warfare. The women maintained the men, and the men maintained the production and profit of the bosses. This division of labour was part of the surrender of a defeated working class. The roles it created may have allowed those who adopted them a small sense of dignity, but it was never anything other than a dignified prostration. There is nothing to admire or emulate in these straightjackets of human behaviour. Those who continue to live within their narrow limits betray a very unfortunate taste for bondage. Of course, it is true that one has to be tough to survive in some of the social environments in which delinquency flourishes. But that need for toughness is in part precisely a product of the predatory violence to which delinquent machismo itself leads. Moreover, the options available to delinquents are not restricted to machismo or a wimpishness that encourages victimization. Becoming a macho idiot is not the only way of not being a "pussy". Merely transposing a few elements from one gender role to another (for example, by adding a dash of violence to the old femininity, or vice versa) does not help: if you mix together two types of shit, you still end up with shit. It is a matter of discovering new types of 'toughness' that reject the old solutions to the problems of surviving in harsh circumstances and supersede both masculinity and femininity. You might start by developing a consistent cruelty to the man and women within you: by treating the gender roles you have picked up along the way as the fatal alien implants they really are.

9.

With some delinquents, the old masculinity has been fused with a callousness towards others characteristic of the most predatory capitalists and managers. These delinquents have the same taste for power and degradation as the managers, the same absence of humanity, and the same willingness to subordinate others to their own narrow self-interests ("Oh, yeah! Its like, ‘That bugger didn’t want to give the keys up for nothing!’, ‘Had to beat him to death’, and all that. We get a buzz off it. I love it. Love the cars and the buzz" — criminal from the south west of Britain). Their craven inability to step beyond the tastes and ideas of their masters, their submissive aping of the worst oppressions visited upon ordinary people, condemns them. Even where violence is indifferently practiced by gangs of criminal entrepreneurs for such utilitarian purposes as enforcing payments from customers, it nonetheless leaves them with all the charm and subversiveness of a firm of unscrupulous bailiffs. They may have stepped outside the law, but they have not gone beyond the alienated social relations of the dominant society.

10.

One social space in which delinquency often flourishes is the school. For those who do not wish to be in school, who are failing to succeed within it, delinquency provides an apparent means of defence against the depredations of schooling, as well as an alternative source of status and satisfaction. Through disobedience of teachers and school rules, vandalism and truancy, delinquents curtail their own education and disrupt individual classes and events. However, their impact on individual schools and the system of mis-education tends to be small and transient. Even where they manage to exercise a widespread terror over their fellow students, and prompt the authorities to introduce ever-greater security measures, it all leads nowhere. They quickly become prematurely satisfied with an inadequate revolt, settling for bad reputations, mistreatment of the more studious, the same old antics, and escape. They do not deepen their refusal when they find that the school has survived what they have so far thrown at it. They do not subvert the majority into joining them (indeed cannot because their bullying of the more compliant students only repels them). They do not forge cooperative links with delinquents in other schools. They do not seek out a shared project of negation with those who suffer different forms of subordination outside of school. Like minor aristocrats in a small country, they blindly pursue in doomed isolation the same clichéd roles, impoverished privileges and debased abuses as their forerunners did. Sooner or later, they leave their schools much as they found them and join the ranks of the working, the unemployed or the incarcerated.

11.

One of the paler variants of delinquency can be found amongst middle-class youth. During the long adolescence through which they must pass on the way to higher educational qualifications, they possess few of the conventional badges of status. Some abjectly submit to the authorities placed over them, content with the prospects before them. Others, however, puff themselves up with the cartoon nihilism of gangster rap (or some other facet of popular culture) and act out a jaded pantomime of bad manners and intoxicated hedonism for the approval of their peers. It does not last long. These accountants-in-waiting quickly grow old, as they graduate and take up other roles more appropriate to their new professional status. Less risible are those who grow disgusted with their education and falter on the path to affluent respectability that has been mapped out for them. However, many dissipate their incipient rebellion by directing it into deviant sub-cultural consumption. To the extent that they content themselves with different clothes, music, argot, drugs and gestures, their dissatisfaction is contained and recuperated. It does not matter how outrageous the content of the sub-culture may be. If it sustains itself by producing and consuming commodities, if it confines itself to the space, time and choices left over by the state and employers, it leaves the dominant society untouched. Regardless of the intentions of its originators, it functions as one more component of advanced capitalism's spectacle of pseudo-opposition.

12.

Contrary to what disapproving conservative commentators like to suggest, delinquents often work for a living. This may involve participation in the legal world of shit work or involvement in less licit professions such as burglary, car theft, street crime, smuggling, fiddles kept from the prying eyes of social security officials, or the sale of stolen goods and illegal drugs. It is all work. It is all activity given over to the exchange of commodities, to the imperial imperatives of a separate economy that is not within our control. It is all alienated. However, delinquents’ practical criticism of work is generally limited. They may well be starkly aware of the vileness of the monotonous, humiliating and poorly-paid work in the service industries to which they are periodically forced to return by circumstances ("You going to the office? How late you working till? No fucking way...I thought they'd abolished slavery" — East London gang member). But their response when doing that work rarely goes beyond transient gestures of defiance and slamming the door behind them when they leave. They have little conception of acting with others to sabotage the operations that have quite rightly nauseated them or of putting an end to the social institution of nauseating work. Their critique of criminal work is more limited still. In some cases, the fact that this particular way of succumbing to the logic and the world imposed by the capitalist economy may not involve a boss or a rigid formal hierarchy is mistaken for a sign of freedom and autonomy. This is rather like those respectable citizens who regard themselves as free because they do exactly what is required of them before anyone tells them too loudly to do so. But much more important than any illusion of relative freedom, the delinquents are timid and defeated. For all their swagger, they cannot envisage a successful attack on the existing society and are persuaded that they themselves, in concert with others, cannot successfully overturn that society. They have settled for adjustment to what exists. They have limited themselves to desiring the goods and the illusions of consumable pleasure that advanced capitalism offers in return for abandoning the creation and control of the world to it. They have failed to recognize that the very tastes and pleasures they seek to indulge are externally imposed impostures. In place of pursuing in theory and practice a carefully-calibrated assault on a society that has excluded and enraged them, they have picked up a false image of revolt from the counters of that same society, from its spectacle of pseudo-opposition.

13.

The delinquents lack a critical relationship to their own practice and to the history of the delinquents of previous decades. Look at the delinquents of ten, twenty or thirty years ago. What they were doing then is very much the same as what today’s delinquents are doing now. Where have they ended up? No small number are dead, prematurely killed by violence, accident or disease. Others are imprisoned, or crushed by illness or addiction. Some are still hustling in the old ways, always hoping for a break into the big time that never comes or never lasts, while a very few have achieved ‘success’ in conventional or criminal terms, allowing them to have a little more of the same rubbish that everyone else does. Most have settled into the narrow mediocrity of family life and run-of-the-mill work. It is not just the broken and becalmed who are failures. They have all failed to create an everyday life that it is really worth living. Yet the current generation of delinquents has learned nothing from this. They persist with the same failed strategies and tactics, the same well-beaten paths down blind alleys, the same signposted roads to surrender.

14.

Failure stalks the present as much as the future. When they are not working, the delinquents try to make something happen that will break the prevailing boredom through fights, harassment, fucking, escapades, partying, etc. The results are invariable paltry. The 'real life' that delinquents like to contrast so favourably with the gullible drudgery of the respectable citizens is a mess of puerile pranks, pointless fracas, mechanical sexual encounters, and thin, fragile, artificial paradises built out of pneumatic beats, desperate dancing, and the chemical impairment of the senses. It is no surprise that at the heart of delinquent life is a conspiracy of exaggeration through which petty events are talked-up and retold afterwards. Nonetheless, boredom returns. The delinquents largely find themselves back where they began, tediously stuck at the bottom of a society over which they exercise no control.

15.

When the delinquents manage physically to intimidate the occupants of an area, their dominance is equally illusory. They may control some of the movements of some of the occupants some of the time, but they are not masters even of their own tiny terrain. Above and beyond them, decisions about public services, infrastructure, redevelopment, education, healthcare, employment, production, etc, continue to be largely made outside of their control. And when the state and capital decide to reclaim their territory, they are simply swept away. For example, no matter how numerous and arrogant the gangs of Chicago may have been, when it was decided that the two-mile stretch of land occupied by the Robert Taylor Holmes and Stateway Gardens housing projects was to be given over to Legends South, a new housing development largely occupied by the middle classes, they were ejected along with all the other residents. In the end, the delinquents are, at best, the temporary caretakers of abandoned ruins.

16.

The alienated character of delinquent life is starkly revealed by the code of respect many live by. This code may serve to deflect the contempt directed at those at the bottom of society; nonetheless, it is an external and arbitrary system that ties an individual to a reputation miserably dependent on the approval or deference of others. One of its most destructive facets is the expectation that any display of disrespect is remedied by violence. Another is the encouragement it gives to newcomers to establish status amongst their peers and competitors by engaging in eye-catching acts of especially ruthless violence. All this has led to a reified contempt for life, disdain for open criticism, staggeringly high rates of injury and death (in Harlem during the mid-1990s, for example, young men were as likely to die violently as soldiers were during the second world war), more and more defensive weapons, and a ubiquitous ambience of threat and fear in the areas where delinquents live. None of this is in the best interests of the delinquents themselves, the worst of which have been reduced to veritable zombies by their relentless treatment of others as objects and the need to suppress all real thought and feeling about their patently loathsome actions. What is supposed to be the delinquents' own code has clearly escaped them. Like an angry god, it consumes those who worship it. More generally, delinquents' activities create blighted lives for themselves as much as for anyone else, but they doggedly persist with this self-immolation. "I dunno, they've got a brand new Merc outside but they're cracked out in some poxy flat with their mum. They can't use the front room in case someone shoots the house up, and they're looking at untold 'bird' if they get nicked. What's that about?" (London gang member). Even when things seem to be going well for criminals who engage in business, all they spread around them are alienated relations with suppliers and customers. Their relations with others are mediated and defined by the goods for which they have become the bearers and the mouthpieces. All they find around them, all they have created around then, are people who wish to buy from them, sell to them, or supplant them — people for whom they are merely buyers, sellers or commercial competitors. They strove to break free of the constraints around them; they ended up as hooded greengrocers of oblivion.

17.

As well as failing to confront their own reliance on alienated images of delinquency, delinquents have done little to disrupt the wider use of images of delinquency by the rulers of society. For decades, the threat supposedly posed by delinquents has been an important element of the state’s justification of its rule over society. In effect, the state has presented itself as a necessary defence for the respectable citizen against what are said to be their common enemies, the delinquents. For their part, the delinquents have rarely even attempted to disabuse respectable citizens of this illusion. Often confined in estates on the outskirts of cities and the poorer parts of town, they have not explored ways of breaking down their isolation and communicating directly with ordinary people who are better off than they are. They have not sought out common ground with ordinary people whose lives are as blighted by affluence as theirs are by deprivation. (Artistic specialists may have offered up depictions and discussions of the life in the margins through rap and music, plays, poetry, etc, but such portrayals and protests, having been framed as cultural products, merely end up being taken within the narrow private lives of the affluent and passively consumed as aesthetic experiences or news.) Worse, some delinquents seem perfectly content to play the part that the state’s spectacle of terror assigns to them, delightedly acting out their gangster role on the streets, the media and youtube videos, or simply dolling out rote discourtesy to passers-by. They are happy to feed the fist that strikes them.

18.

There is no doubt that the actions of delinquents disrupt the everyday lives of respectable citizens. Over the past thirty or so years, the majority of the population has chosen to pursue the rewards of conformity instead of the fruits of revolt. What they have been left with are ugly and stupid lives, ugly and stupid places, and a planet pushed to the very edge of destruction by capitalism's efforts to keep feeding them new promises of consumable happiness. But the thought that one is wasting one's life is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it. They have erected elaborate architectures of lies and self-deceptions in an attempt to persuade themselves and others that their work is not petty nonsense directed by contemptible bosses to idiotic ends, that their families are not desolate bunkers of mutual contempt and shared incarceration, that their leisure and friendships are not collections of inconsequential games and insubstantial interests, that their holidays are not banal tramps through despoliation, that the ways in which they think they avoid the common vulgarity are not entirely spurious, that their pleasures are not dreadfully small. They cling to these illusions with ferocious desperation; but the whole house of lying ghosts and grim parodies is a fragile one, and it is threatened by the depredations of delinquency. To the extent that delinquency prevents respectable citizens from misperceiving themselves as happy and free people who are blessed with rich experiences and continue to grow as individuals, it provokes their fury. It threatens to take away the very little they have, and replace it with nothing. It threatens to bring them face to face with a poverty of everyday life that has been there in one form or another all along.

19.

The rage of respectable citizens is compounded by their impotence. They have no control over their social environment, no ability to do anything other than stand or cower as isolated individuals in the face of the delinquents who harass them. They have given up the power to manage everything outside their front doors to others and accepted random collections of juxtaposed individuals in lieu of communities. Having refused to contest the separation and impotence that the dominance of the state and the commodity economy imposes on everyone, they can only clamour for more police patrols and harsher punitive regimes.

20.

At bottom, delinquency is a product of the absence of revolt, the abeyance of revolution. It is a pathological result of the unwillingness of men and women to act against the conditions of their own alienation. If respectable citizens wish not to be the victims of delinquents, they must precisely become less respectable. If they wish to open a dialogue with delinquents that is capable of superseding their mutual hostility, they must end that sheepish plodding through a lifetime of work and consumption which understandably makes them so contemptible in the eyes of delinquents. They must develop, by and for themselves, an autonomous, self-managed project of practical negation that is directed at the reigning alienation and reproaches the delinquents with doing too little against the dominant society rather than too much. They must invite the delinquents to join them in a richer and more subversive game. If that does not happen, if a process of revolutionary contestation is not created in which both the respectable and the delinquent can participate as equals, the same old nonsense will proliferate, and the same old failed pacifications will be regurgitated by the state. We shall all end up dying before we have even begun living.

21.

Of course, it is necessary to act against recalcitrant delinquents who insist on bringing misery and terror to others. This cannot involve cooperation with the police, local authorities and courts, or demands for more from them. These separate powers are part of the apparatus that dispossess ordinary people of control over their lives and they must always be treated as the enemies that they are. Ordinary people have to find their own solutions. We know that individual confrontations with groups of delinquents can be dangerous, so seek out and act with others who are prepared to stand with you. Propose shared, self-directed confrontation by word and deed to those who share your frustrations. Bring thoughtful strategy and tactics to the matter. Carefully study the activities and operations of the delinquents. Gain as complete a picture as possible of what they do, how they do it, and where they do it. Be clear about what you wish to achieve. Identify the weak points, the times and places where confrontation with individuals (including customers of delinquents engaged in criminal commerce), or destruction of things (for example, stolen goods, drug stashes), will have large effects but carry acceptably small risks. Be imaginative in your tools and methods. Do not feel obliged to confine yourself to what is lawful. Make sensible use of publicity. Paste up criticisms of individuals and groups on the physical walls of the area and on the internet. Through texts, pictures, sound recordings, and videos, make public that which they wish to conceal from the wider world. Be as anonymous and as cautious as you need to be. But in the end, such an approach can only be a complement to a revolutionary strategy that contests the social conditions that breed delinquency as one form of alienation amongst many others. In South Africa, an Islamic group, the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, went so far as to execute some 30 gang leaders in 1996 alone. The gangs still exist.

22.

There is no-one to save you. It is up to you. And me. Courage. So that the night triumphs no more.

Wayne Spencer
14 July 2010

No Copyright. Use as you please.

The author can be contacted at aqrj35@dsl.pipex.com