Read Part 1 here
I feel it incumbent on me to clarify, just for the record and before we begin, that I am not some crazed fanatic or a lunatic extremist whose vision of utopia is for everyone to be left scrabbling around in rags under tarpaulin amidst the meagre wreckage of their once fulsome possessions; all whilst being demonstrably free from the tyranny of state rule and humdrum grind of capitalist oppression. I’m not advocating that we be free with nothing rather than enslaved with things.
Merely, I aim to derail the speeding locomotive of vacuous valorisation that impoverishes the soul and disintegrates the morality and the spirit of the masses. I want to inspire others to join with me to shatter the ruthless economic despotism that holds industry (or, more appropriately, finance) to be everything and men to be subservient.
If that worm Alan Greenspan’s driver of a healthy economy can be said to be the steady growth of worker insecurity, then it’s up to a Guevara of the City to provoke these insecure antibodies to attack and weaken the central nervous system with a cancerous temerity.
In the words of Karl Marx – ‘the task is not to understand the world, but to change it’. Of course, to understand you need only rely on your own mind, but to affect change you very often need comrades, brothers-in-arms, who will band together with you in your cause. It’s axiomatic that any radical movement will be seen as more legitimate the more are aligned behind it, as opposed to being dismissed as the ramblings of lone political obsessive.
Therefore, the first recruits, my trusty lieutenants if you want to get militaristic about it, are my two housemates Noam and Pierre. We met at university and quickly gravitated together with amicable adhesive only born out of the insecure telepathy of misfits. We shared a sense of moral outrage and righteous anger about the economic meltdown that we rightly felt had been poured like slurry onto our generation, cementing the generally shite prospects for anyone who hadn’t already bought into the stable career/mortgage/young family template.
We would sit around on interminable evenings getting stoned and listening to ‘intellectual’ German electronica like Tangerine Dream and Neu! We would lament the dearth of any prominent left wing movement in the country and would ripple the air with disparagement regarding any ‘media lefties’ such as Billy Bragg (“he’s got a big house in the country, he’s a cunt”), and Russell Brand (“exactly how many TV producer dicks did he have to suck?!”)
At the time it was often mooted that we would migrate our angry sentiment into solid action by some kind of idealistic alchemy, but inevitably time conspired to unpick the loose stitches of these intentions.
Together we travelled to London, tanked up on rotgut red wine, to take part in the protests against the tuition fee rises, glorying in the adrenaline at Milbank ‘Tory HQ’. I remember thinking, ‘finally something’s happening, this is it, this is France in 1968, this is the spark of the revolution’. I couldn’t have been happier if, instead of dropping fire extinguishers on their fellow students, the frenzied mob had brought out David Cameron’s head and paraded it through Westminster on a stick.
Upon graduating it was inevitable that we would end up drawn together in London, if anything out of a mutual dismay at the prospect of having to forge strong relationships with any other people. Times have changed now though, and despite the camaraderie often taking on the same forms, I cannot shirk the feeling that for them it was all a student affectation, ill-fitting clothes to be shaken off once the real professional world beckoned. I often feel, not that I lack their intellect or their maturity, but instead that their purported ideals have been contorted with the malleability of insecurity, to fit the expectations of the society that prompts them.
Noam, insecure about his weight yet unhindered by the initiative to do anything about it, was always a stereotypical ‘nerd’ and destined to work in an IT company talking exclusively in code and metadata tongues.
Pierre, tall and with his prominent, angular features, was always more adept at relating to people, impressing them with what I recognised as ‘false charm’, and generally ‘getting on’. He had accepted a graduate scheme programme at Deloitte, to which I had been mortified, until he mollified me with assurances that his anti-establishment credentials remained intact but that every underground movement needed someone with first-hand experience of how the ‘overground’ operated, and with this I concurred.
At university he had wallowed in the nihilism of Nietzsche, affecting a carefully measured dosage of scorn and derision for just about everybody. He would wear charity shop tweed jackets worn thin at the elbows and stroll around campus smoking with a cigarette holder like Hunter Thompson.
The problem was though, the changes I recognised in Pierre were nowhere near as subtle as they were in Noam. Noam still professed to be trying to mastermind some kind of ‘super-virus’ that could infiltrate the security systems of major financial institutions and wreak untold data damage. Either that or he was spending a lot of time in his room watching porn. I can never really be sure…
Pierre, on the other (cleaner) hand, had got himself a French girlfriend Marie, and together they spent most evenings in his room watching pretentious Godard films like ‘A Bout De Souffle’, listening to The Smiths, reading Oscar Wilde, and, I imagined, engaging in the most intellectual sex of any couple in London. They reminded me in many ways of the hatefully portentous Kooples fashion adverts that were enough to make me step out in front of any bus that was emblazoned with them. As I write this, I cannot help but see Pierre as having been a little too taken in by the high-flying business world. He has even started keeping bottled water in the fridge. Sometimes I think I hate him.
On the subject of hate, I find myself beset on occasion with irrational bursts of resentment that leap like geysers from the firmament of my composure. This morning’s bus, for example, was swollen with people insulating themselves from the migraine of boredom within micro-worlds of mp3 players, ebooks, and smartphones. Such efforts were futile however, as a fat tuba of a woman blared away into her phone whilst her obnoxious offspring blew raspberries louder and louder against the window as though trying to compete with his voluminous mother.
It remains a source of resentful admiration I hold for such people that they can proceed through the world so strikingly oblivious to the blatant ire they provoke from those around them. As she bleated away about the status of one vintage clothes store over another I could not help but remain perplexed at how it seems those with very least to say of any value always seem to say it the loudest.
At times of such crimson rage I begin to long for a new Stalin or Mao to hammer down these nails of irritation into the hard wood floor of a totalitarian state. Or if they still insisted on rearing brats and spouting inane platitudes on crowded public transport then they should face the risk of being taken out by secret agents of the state who would patrol such quarters and summarily executed.
Alas, I digress onto facetious authoritarian tracts of thinking, and I would be advised to veer back on course before I begin to compromise my convictions prematurely.
That evening, I broke the news of my dismissal to my compadres, who appeared were a little bemused by my rambunctious reaction to such a perceived misfortune. Pierre made a muted inquiry about me being able to pay rent, but aside from that we were all agreed that such a development was positive in that I could now dedicate my time to the revolutionary uprising which I feel firmly must be approaching fast in the slipstream of my personal circumstances.
With my fevered encouragement, Noam expostulated further on the ‘super-virus’ he was concocting like some kind of cyber Dr. Frankenstein just waiting for an opportunistic lightning bolt to enervate his creation with life.
“It works as a stealth attack, these thousands of micro-viruses proliferate through the mainframe of the data system and implant themselves like barnacles on the hull of a ship. Then, once we know everything is in place, we hit detonate.”
...And watch as chaos reigns. Maximum data loss, cataclysmic fiscal losses, the banks would be caught completely off-guard and once and for all people would recognise the futility of the system in which they have been conditioned to place such begrudging yet tacit faith, reduced to little more than placid units of consumption with our trans fats, air pollution, ISA savings accounts, 5% mortgages, digital footprints, new fashion seasons, buy-one-get-one-free, incentive schemes, happiness defined by wealth…. Enough. The fight back starts here…
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