Honestly, I’d rather not be. If I thought you could tweak and adjust the country through the parliamentary democratic systems we already have in place, and that you could really make people’s lives better and fairer, I would be an even-handed centrist. I don’t love the idea of revolution, I know that real change would be like being in an earthquake for me, my family, many of the people I love. I grew up middle-class, I’m qualified to work in a high-tech industry that can only exist in times of social stability, I have the very strongest incentive to live my comfortable life in peace.
While any moral person would be compelled to fight injustice, even if it might not affect them personally, on a practical level I must act because I don’t see peace even as a possibility in my lifetime. I have watched what’s been happening in this country with mounting horror, and as I explained yesterday I have good reason to believe there is a wall approaching fast, and after we hit it the pieces will be bent and remade into a new way of living – God knows what that will involve.
This idea is uncomfortable if you’ve a rational interest in not rocking the boat, but it’s also uncomfortable because we live in a strange time where it feels like history has stopped moving, and we’ve reached the final form of human society. Even “communist” China has adopted many of the characteristics of liberal capitalism, with privately run businesses coexisting with state-owned industry, albeit ruled by an authoritarian one-party government. So, there is no alternative. The debate is over.
And so middle-class lefties are often content to argue that we should try and get someone elected who’ll pass laws to make capitalism a little bit nicer. Those of us with savings or who own land could stand to lose a lot if things really, truly changed. But you should beware, because whatever advantages you have are seen by the capital class as ripening fruit for them to pluck, and now they’ll be rewarded for doing so. For example, during the last recession the Royal Bank of Scotland deliberately destroyed thousands of small businesses through their “Global Restructuring Group”, and they were rewarded with bailouts from the government. The executives who consumed all those dreams and livelihoods are still on the board. If you come into some money and want to strike out on your own, they’ll make another recession, burn your shop down and walk away rich as hell.
It’s a similar story with pensions, which have been gutted in the last decade, with education, which now is a debt-millstone around the necks of the next generation, and so on. While the USSR and trade union movement were still around, both Liberals and Conservatives felt they had to make working people’s lives at least tolerable, that they had to limit how much they allowed their donors to squeeze us, because a leftist revolution with powerful backing was always on the cards. Now we’ve arrived at the end of history, they aren’t going to protect the middle class from the depredations of the billionaires anymore. If we get ahead, those rich guys are going to contrive a way to take it all from us.
As an aside, the complacency of our rulers has extended to their old means of control. Soldiers and cops have seen their wages cut and their pensions raided too. Like the Russian army guards in 1917, they will at some point realise that there’s no reason for them to keep firing into the crowd.
So this is why I act and think the way I do, and why I think everyone should too. Most of my working class friends are already aware of the rottenness of liberal capitalism with its co-morbid imperialism, subtle but pervasive racism and grinding exploitation. But if your life has so far been comfortable, you should be aware of what this world really is, how unstable it is, and how it will disintegrate in our lifetime.