Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here
Well, my personal crusade has been sluggish and slow to take off. I feel like so much talking and cajoling and ranting has done nothing but increase the viscosity of any real progress; what’s desperately needed is the dilatory mechanisms of action.
Without my job tying me down to the endless restocking of more and more lowest common denominator shit, I have been able to delve deeper into the pool of anarchist revolutionary thinking, from Bakunin and Vaneigem to Kropotkin. You might think I could be tempted, with my new-found liberation, to fritter time away bed-bound in my shoebox room (prime London real estate for the budding unemployed), watching as the damp patch undergoes an achingly slow continental drift across the ceiling.
On my more cerebral moments, usually before losing consciousness, I see this patch of damp as strikingly symbolic of the rot manifesting itself throughout society, created by some undetected leak of malignancy that, without being addressed, would continue to spread wider and wider, perhaps over many years, until eventually the whole ceiling would succumb to decay and come crashing in.
The problem is, I end up realising, the patches of damp are dispersed across the ceiling’s expanse like acne staining teenage cheeks. Apart they are ineffectual, whereas if they were ever to coalesce, the structural stability would all at once become far more susceptible to collapse.
But no, languish I do not. I am up and down in the kitchen before Noam or Pierre can slump down in their uniforms of drudgery. Pierre, I have noticed, has become several degrees colder towards me since I announced that I had quit Poundworld. Occasionally, as he goes to the fridge for his bottled water, I try to impart upon him some drafts of the revolutionary manifesto I had written the day before for him to review on the tube ride to work.
“Sorry”, he says. He’s currently hacking chunks off of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ and can’t afford to lose focus on it even for a couple of tube journeys; the chasm that would open up in his conceptual understanding would then be wider than the inequality documented by Piketty’s data.
On Tuesday of last week we had become chorylatic in our discussion, as it came out that Pierre had attended a business gala evening at the terrace bar of the Houses of Parliament. My imagination running riot with ideas of Guy Fawkes, or at the very least a surreptitious turd on green leather, I was dismayed to hear how Pierre had failed to take full advantage of this unprecedented admittance to the seat of power.
“I did steal a side plate from the buffet though”, he said as he brandished the diminutive crockery with its gold-embossed portcullis seal.
“You couldn’t get much foie gras on that plate”, chortled Noam, enjoying his familiar balance on the diplomatic fence between Pierre and myself.
“What are you planning, to tear down the establishment one side plate at a time?!”, I spat at him.
“Look, this was a feat in itself. The security at that place is intense. I was pretty scared I’d get caught and hauled off to the Tower.”
As I said previously, occasions such as this only served to illustrate just how much of a joke those two were gradually beginning to see their old convictions, as if suddenly it had all become rather kitsch when not sat nursing pints in the students’ union.
In inverse correlation to this, Anne-Marie has doubtless instigated a propaganda war against me; Pierre subject to a prolonged exposure to her invectives as to my failings, whilst I am limited to the occasional air drop of counter-narrative during chance kitchen encounters. I'm fairly convinced that she has a pathological suspicion complex, which got me thinking of the grey area that confuses the borderline between healthy cynicism and out-right suspicion.
With her crystalline gaze that bleeds scorn, she casts aspersions as to my character and predicament, doubting the firmament of my will. Every so often, just briefly, the sun reflects off the fine web of jokes that she and Pierre have clearly spun at my expense. Pierre is, I can increasingly recognise, shuffling and being lead, like the rest of the bovine herd, into the abattoir of the neutered life, ready almost to place himself on the proffered hook of acceptability and obedience.
The sooner Noam's super-virus is ready, the better. Meanwhile, all I can do is print off several hundred copies of a hastily thrown-together poster, a Kitchener call-up for a guerrilla army of the oppressed, and distribute them during long rambling derives across the city.
All the while, my imagination overflows with visions of leading this straggling collective of malcontents across London Bridge and taking the fight direct to the City's streets; ransacking and hijacking the financial institutions, claiming them for our own ends in a grand hecatomb.
I see myself as a modern-day John Ball, whipping up a new Peasant's Revolt against the tyranny of the established order and perhaps, just for a moment, catching a glimpse of some mystical alternative.
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