Read Part 1 here
Read Part 2 here
Read Part 3 here
Several days have passed since my last entry, and things finally seem to be progressing forwards like a treadmill steadily moving through speed settings. The tentative tentacles of aim and ambition extended into the ether of cyberspace have returned scores of the disenfranchised who want to stand up and revolt, who want to follow me in taking the fight to the streets.
Fuck the Anonymous movement with their ‘V for Vendetta’ masks, the furious anger wrought across our faces must be entirely legible to those we direct them towards; repercussions should not be feared for indeed we have nothing to lose. The feckless and moribund money system, and the modern slavery it shackles people into, must be abolished, we must first destroy and then re-build.
All elitist privileges and property must be rescinded, appropriated and allocated for the common good. All systems of power and hierarchy must be dismantled; the police and the military, who will be our most ardent opponents, must be defeated and disintegrated.
Alternatively, enough traction needs to be attained so that they might judge their chances for survival to be higher were they to rally to our cause, like the choice faced by the Spanish Guardia in the failed military coup of ’81. This we must encourage until our battle is won, and then they must be dissolved, for no unaccountable authority can legitimately hold sway over any member of our new egalitarian society, in which law and order are matters of moral judgement and justice enforced by popular decree rather than a judicial elite in bed with the government.
Previously, I had gone along to evening gatherings of the Socialist Workers Party; threadbare branch meetings in fusty community centres. I had observed those in attendance with dismay: stale as breadcrusts dressed in knitted cardigans and donkey jackets, leather elbow patches and Tupperware lunchboxes, arguing the finer points of reactionary and revolutionary Leninism like it was a dogmatic pillow fight.
How, I wondered, had the socialist left in this country ever become so wretched? How despicable that while outside, working people were engaged in a constant struggle to keep their heads afloat in the shark-infested waters of capitalist society, this sorry band of prognosticators had fashioned a raft-of-sorts out of decrepit socialist ideals and theories that had long ago listed water; addressing one another as ‘comrade’ and pining for the ‘revolution’ that were it to arrive they wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do about it.
As far as I'm concerned, the old faith in socialism is dead, revolutions have burned and expired, Lenin is a cold grey waxwork on a mausoleum plinth, and the sooner the disaffected in this country take action against every incarnation of the oppressive state apparatus that persists, the sooner we will be able to finally take ownership of our lives.
Because there's such lethargy right now, so much wilful imprisonment in the benign cages we have colluded with the established forces to formulate. We are afflicted with the inertia of rampant technological advance, that subordinates our intuition, imagination and will to an omnipotent and monstrous sensory overload. The perpetual dopamine rush of a quasi-connectivity, the spurious notion of an informational nirvana towards which we all aim to transcend time and space.
On my way home the other evening, I walked past an apartment building, khaki-coloured cladding as though camouflaged in preparation for nature’s retaliatory resurgence. Through one of the windows I spied a cosmopolitan man in his 40s, clutching a goldfish bowl of wine, white shirt untucked at the back, the façade of slick city operator beginning to fray.
He stood at a well-endowed bookshelf, the aesthetically-pleasing camber of coloured spines, with a drained expression. He made a move to pull one out, half-releasing it from its clamped-tight captivity, but this was little more than a token gesture, a drop-in visit to this imprisoned title, and instead pushed it back in place and walked away.
I couldn’t help but see this incidental event as symbolic of so much of the desiccated intellectual state of our culture; so much knowledge and enlightenment within our grasp, and yet we have allowed powerful agencies to puree our minds to a mush of unoriginal thoughts, rhetorical suppositions, sanctioned logic and inane platitudes. We are free to be ourselves only as long as we conform to the templates laid down through the genealogy of power structures in the form of religion, military, industry and commerce.
I was fully immersed in visions of hand grenades being thrown into the Lloyds Building and land mines detonating in Threadneedle Street, when I arrived home to discover a mutiny had taken hold amongst my so-called ‘comrades’.
A congress was clearly in session around the kitchen table with Noam, Pierre and Anne-Marie sat like a trio of ambassadors from coalitioned nations of bullshit. All three looked ashen and uncomfortable, even Anne-Marie, although I could tell she saw this as a bout of brief and unpleasant foreplay before the pleasurable end-goal.
Noam, his pudgy face tinged with embarrassment, was the first to speak. "Mikhail, we're all really sorry but we've decided you're going to have to move out".
I tried to lock onto his eyes accusatorily but he evaded them, clearly longing to get back to the sanctity of his computer programs that could never subject him to this kind of awkward humanist altercation.
"Is that so?" I responded, imagining myself to be Burgess' Alex facing rebellion from his gang of droogs.
"It's the rent you see Mikhail, you've not been able to pay your rent since you lost your job", he plaintively continued.
"I quit my job", I snapped back, feeling it important that he be sure as to the proper facts surrounding my unemployment if he were to use it against me. Suitably fenced back by my corrective épée, Noam fell to a fidgeting hush.
"The facts remain the same", said Pierre, rallying to Noam's aid so gallantly. "We need someone who can pay the rent here. This isn't a doss house. We've put ads out for another young professional to move in."
I felt like I was rolling in a nettle bush of anger and betrayal. The strong solution of our revolutionary plans diluted by this sudden injection of cowardice from my recent friends.
"But Noam, what about the super-virus? You can't abandon that!"
Noam stopped twitching his hands and looked up, jousting with my resilient eyes for the first time. "I stopped working on it weeks ago Mikhail. The whole idea was ridiculous anyway, we'd have to be insane to have pulled it off, if it were even possible at all."
Sensing that I was splintered by such a riposte, Pierre wasted no time in launching in like a matador aiming for as clean a kill as possible to appease the crowd. "We're not at uni anymore for god's sake; Noam and I are professionals now, with good careers. The other week I was offered a raise to extend my contract another year. Your problem is you think the whole world's against you, and you can't accept that actually the problem might be with you..."
Urgh, just recounting his spiteful cod-psychoanalysis is enough to make me wretch. I knew that they had changed long before his confrontation, they had been mere poseurs, pastiching student disharmony and angst, whereas I had really meant, really felt it. It was just this kind of cowardly subservience to authority and the familiar orders that most likely reneged on and fatally hobbled all successful revolutions, from the Glorious to the Russian to 1968 France. As soon as the crutch-like structures against which they had railed were dismantled, they were the ones clamouring for a reinstatement, however much the names might be changed it was nothing more substantial than shuffling a deck of cards.
I was too livid with fury to countenance the idea of retaliation or back-biting; I needed to sever my ties with the deadwood that could only serve to infect my resolve, just when my plans appeared to be gaining shape. I would be glad to be free from them both; as far as I was concerned they could continue chugging along as shiny new cogs in the colossal machine system, but much sooner than they could anticipate, they would find themselves being choked by the disintegrating filaments of their own rust.
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