synopsis
by uzwi
Embrace austerity. Take the shit money, suck up the shit treatment. Let it make you hard, unforgiving & suspicious of everything. Appropriate all those faked-up calls for discipline & self control & make them real. Use them to build. Organise quietly in the evenings & at weekends. Don’t use the phone. Avoid the internet. Don’t be public. Don’t join the debate. Don’t bother with the left (the left allowed itself to be liquidated in one generation, not by vertical force but by the horizontal spread of philosophies of greed & narcissism). Real austerity is the last thing the one percent want to see in an economy. Real austereness is the last virtue they possess or want to possess. Real austereness is the last thing they expect from anyone. Real austereness is the last quality they want you to have, because they built their counter-revolution on selling self-indulgence & it’s the only technique they know. Reject comfort. Take austerity to yourself & use it. Be careful who you talk to. Learn how to be calmly determined & work for long term change.
For the sake of argument, I’ll take this as a direct screed instead of as the preface of a PKD-ish work of polemical fiction.
> Let it make you hard, unforgiving & suspicious of everything.
This is pretty much understood, I think. However, I suspect this is one of “their” goals, and total accommodation to this mindset would mean their victory.
> Organise quietly… Don’t bother with the left (the left allowed itself to
> be liquidated in one generation, not by vertical force but by the
> horizontal spread of philosophies of greed & narcissism)
Stipulating the truth of the parenthesis, how can you organise, even quietly, without some kind of ideological alignment? Surely a party that supports liberty, equality, and fraternity can’t be of the right? I grant that conceptualizing only a single political axis is rather limiting, but sadly I find it difficult to imagine another meaningful one.
> Real austereness is the last quality they want you to have, because
> they built their counter-revolution on selling self-indulgence & it’s the
> only technique they know.
I believe this is true, but I also think that the self-indulgence they offer is very far from hedonism. It’s a false indulgence in unsatisfying and even repulsive products that have very little to do with real pleasure. I’d say enlightened hedonism is just as legitimate a form of opposition as austeness, and hopefully somewhat more fun.
Anyway, reverting from screed to fictional framework, I must say this paragraph very accurately captures some sense of the stifling horror one feels on surveying the current corporate-neoliberal-tribalist landscape of western politics.
Surely embracing austerity to these lengths is a sort of self-indulgence?
miramon: I think I saw these shadowy cadres from a speculative fiction as rebuilding the left by discarding some of the received wisdom of the last 30 years. You’d have to give them credit for meaning what they said, ie, having come to it by a process of re-examination of the left we have now. Then, of course, you’d have to re-read every section of this blunt unappealing manifesto of theirs in the light of the understanding that they were quite aware of the unorthodoxy of what they were saying & hadn’t just made a lot of mistakes that could be easily pointed out by reference to ideas they had already discarded. As to the distinction between hedonisms, I don’t think they’d get what you’re saying, or see how it made a difference in the context of their work. & as to the practicality of the work, there are always new practicalities; and just because things have changed once doesn’t mean they can never change again–all ideologies tied to what appear at the time to be paradigm shifts suffer from this weak central assumption, why is that?
zxvasdf: I think my fictional rebels would probably regard that as one of the more obvious & easily available rationalising sophistries of the self-indulgent🙂