In the Year 2035

To coincide with my retirement this week, I want to draw some lessons from my involvement with the British and European Left over the last 55 years since 1980.

I’m also going to draw this blog to a close. I suppose I could keep it going from my retirement flat in Nice but I think I’ll find better things to do there after I escape from snow ridden and sodden Britain to a place where at least there is a chance of sun in the summer. (Whatever happened to Global Warming?).

I had expected, at various times in my career, to be able to retire on a full pension at the age of 60, 65 and then at 70. I‘ve had to wait until I am 72 - it’s worse for many more. Whilst I have worked longer than I expected, like many I'm also now in a position to know how much longer I have to live.

Some of my health treatments, including the arterial unclogging and the installation of a heart support filter, have added a bit over five years to my lifespan. My latest gene analysis and inner body scan predicts (with a 96% probability) that I have eight years left to my death (barring accidents).

I do admit to wondering whether I should give up the idea of watching the seals and polar bears from the window of a flat besides the Mediterranean and use that money to instead buy another couple of years of life. In fact, for just a bit more than the cost of the flat, I'm told that I could be sure of a further 26 months.

Of course how long you live is pretty much now directly related to how much money you have. God knows what percentage of the Cuban national economy is being spent on ensuring President Castro gets to see 110 - all the sugar crop, claim some.

But once, long ago I wanted to live fast and die young. So now I would be happy to surrender a few months for better food, a decent cafe and the forlorn hope of meeting another Hélène or a Thérèse.

I’m unsure whether one of the early pensioners, some time after World War I, was in a better or worse situation than myself with their similar expected period of retirement. Is the ten more years of my life, compared to theirs, an extra decade of Christmases or just a further ten years of having to sell my labour power?

Capitalism still rules

Capitalism has been responsible for a fantastic wave of human advancement. It took just 63 years from the Wright brothers’ first powered flight to landing a man on the moon. I recall, at the start of my working life in 1985, that it cost £1.60 a minute to telephone India. The last time I remember it being separately charged was in 2007, when I could make a call for just an eightieth of that first figure. Now, of course, utility costs are bundled together in whatever package you buy, but analysts generally say that the telecommunications costs of your provider are practically zero.

It's been clear, for over 150 years, that capitalism wasn’t overcooked when prodded by Marx, it was barely starting to simmer - even now I wouldn’t like to say when it might be done. But who has enjoyed the benefits of the great technological advances (that seem to have accelerated even more in the last decade or two)? Did the widespread computerisation and automation of the 1980s and 1990s lead to less work for all? Why is there now an effective treatment to completely reverse baldness but still no cure for malaria?

Treading water

Whilst in the mid 21st Century we’re certainly not galley slaves or fishing in canals for food, nevertheless our just treading water hasn’t prevented us from being pulled backwards by the tide. One of the major, yet strangely unnoticed, defeats in the last decade has been the increase in the working week. With the general use of NoSleep pills from about fifteen years ago, we’ve seen the average working week drift up to 90 hours. If we'd organised, those extra 56 hours could have been ours.

Of course no-one is forced to work all those hours that were once lost through sleep - I have been part time, working just days, for a few years now and I have learnt to get by. In the same way a gun wasn’t put to your head, when I signed on in the early 1980s, to force you to work at all - you could get by subsisting on the dole for long periods. If you don’t want to take a job with these hours, others are happy to be employed, not least because of the illusion of a greater standard of living earned through working longer.

The Work Club associates even point out that the 90-hour working week is actually an advance - it means a few more leisure hours than we would have enjoyed before the pill.

Incidentally, I’m sure their predecessors, the Trade Union leaders, would have said similar if they were still around. But only a very few now see the need for such 'dinosaur' organisations as Trade Unions. Most consider themselves as their own bosses these days - contracting daily to work at places like WHWoolworths or TescoM&S.

The jury’s out on whether we have 'progressed' in how much we get from our lives. Last year, I had a great time staring down at Earth, floating on a wire, on my first space flight but I’m not sure that the sense of wonder was anymore than that I experienced going to a neighbour's, aged 5, to watch my first colour TV programme.

Constantly fluctuating market pricing of so much of our expenditure - our bus journey or lunchtime sandwich could, in extreme examples, cost 75 % less or maybe four times as more as it did the day before - means that we pay more? or is it less? - than some ill remembered ‘before’. I do know that I seem to spend time doing calculations - such as working out which day it is financially less painful to take a sickie - that I didn’t once need to undertake.

Waiting, not watching

Predictions from earlier this century about the ever encroaching state were true - to a degree. But the clocks still don’t strike thirteen, not least because the cost of watching, catching and preventing ‘crime’, though marginal (with technology), is nonetheless a burden that the state sometimes won’t bear.

The state will never deploy its resources to do things like stop street robbery in poor areas. A PCSO may use his immobiliser on the likely suspect to do anything from incapacitate him and make him lose bowel control right through to ensuring his hospitalisation - it much depends on the officer’s mood and the perceived seriousness of the offence. And it’s informally accepted that this action - no trial, no paperwork and no criminal record - suits both sides.

Many have been happy to give up their privacy for small benefits - lost wallets, drunk drivers, or waiting for late trains are things of the past for most - due to radio tagged devices, Alcohol Consumption Monitoring Orders and Daily Route Tracking.

But if you do give them a reason to get on their radar, the complete surveillance network and other monitoring will give a pretty much 24/7 record of what you do and with whom to those watching. You may even then get to meet a police officer; they're generally now only seen on TV.

Left without direction

The last Left print publication must have been distributed at least 20 years ago. A few Left groups have adapted well to new circumstances - I zapped over a Left group’s sample broadcast today onto my phone from a fly download point outside a station - but the greater entry price to political activity has proved burdensome to those with few members or little initiative.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be a ‘web party’ (there are now 28 mutually antagonistic outfits claiming to be ‘the’ Communist Party of Great Britain on the web, three of which I set up myself whilst on the bus home the other night). Anyone can use Talkwriteback software to populate their 'party' outlets with authentic looking, but entirely computer generated footage of well attended meetings, conferences and the like.

Software to write articles, conduct online arguments, flame wars, etc. is also used by many Left parties who only need to undertake minimal customisation to make it look authentic. Indeed some of the 100% software generated ‘discussions’ are a lot better argued than those I remember being made by real life socialists in the early days of blogging.

But the biggest advance, such as it has been, has not occurred through strike waves, wars or cultural change but by a judicial fiat. It was the unexpected fallout of a corrective action taken in the interests of efficient government in the bastions of cronyism in east Europe that led to the introduction of proportional representation in all elections in the European Area.

Coupled with the later abolition of the 4% minimum vote for representation, this lead to a splurge of small Left parties and who did enjoy some early successes. I was bemused to become reacquainted with many whom I thought to be Ex Lefts, and who apparently hadn’t withdrawn from activity because they’d become senior managers (as I had mistakenly thought) but instead had been working abroad for years or had suffered from long term ME, etc. - or so we were led to believe.

These little Napoleons retook their previous prominent positions in the parties. A few of them even walked into slots as 'United Left' Council Leaders and MPs. But the political world had changed - no longer were they facing Tory ministers across the floor but StrongWomenTogether members of the Cabinet or Secretary of States from Tories-21, after the Conservatives split first into the latter - a socially liberal and economically conservative party - and the rump, which was the same but even more rancid.

On occasion I even found our great returned Left leaders quoting back to me some of the arguments that I have become known for - the need to start out all over again. Only I don’t ever recall writing that we needed to ditch the old politics, I’ve always said it’s the presentation that’s at fault.

Nothing is ever new under the sun. Most of our representatives went along the predicted route rightwards, often to a career in the 'Coalition' as LeftLabour MPs - implementing the capitalist knife, but with a cheery smile.

Those too stupid to jump right have generally lost their seats as the Left parties representation slipped behind that of other small parties - Football Fans United, In Christ and The Sexyparty.

We go on, but barely. Whilst Marx may have once been a Hegelist, all of today’s Left leaders are too young ever to seriously have been a Marxist. The conditions for communism remain as ripe as ever but the organisation of society doesn’t easily throw up its assassin - most of human history has seen grudging compliance rather than fractious rebellion and that’s how it is now.

It's just 100 years since the last bloom of anarchism - when masses flocked to the red and black in Spain. It was a current that had seen large support for some of its variants in Mexico, Russia and elsewhere. Indeed around the turn of the 20th century, kings and presidents were assassinated by those in favour of the propaganda of the deed.

I remember the remnants of this tendency in 1980s London - in squats, Class War, walking to Stonehenge, the Poll Tax Riot and Stop the City. I knew quite a few and some did want to overturn society rather than just live in an alternative manner. After the death of the last anarchist a couple of years ago, I was asked to record an 'oral history' piece at a museum, explaining what all these events were.

In this century 'anarchism' has only resurfaced as a hackneyed motif on the clothes of an avant-garde designer or as a term grossly misapplied to events like buccaneering banking arrangements that have come to grief.

And so for Marxism. It's only kept alive as a memory by those with a sentimental attachment to their youth. Like some of the ancient truths of the Greeks it will also disappear beneath the waves but with no guarantee that there will be the equivalent of the Arabs to rediscover it anytime this millenia.

Issue after issue

The Greenyfundys did score a ‘spectacular’ last year with their destruction of ten nuclear power stations around the world. In what passes for the Left web these days, you can’t get away from overheated discussions about what ‘our’ attitude should be towards them.

Can you be a socialist if you court Greenyfundys with their quack ‘science’ that claims organic food is better? Or are you sectarian if you don’t make common cause with those making the non-rational demand for the 'return of bedrooms' especially as it can synch with our demand for a 80 hour working week?

I see no reason to believe that the Greenyfundys particular brand of radicalism won’t also decay with a short half-life, like all the rest. Anything that doesn’t seek to kick over the table of class society but just seeks to rearrange the silver service place settings will always mutate or fade away.

But then I’m old enough to remember many of the earlier ‘issues’ that interested the Left and also kept many a spouting capitalist columnist in print. In the early 1980s, after the small uprisings that occurred in places like Liverpool and Manchester; it was ‘Toxic Toxteth’ in the Sunday Telegraph or ‘Black to Basics’ in the Guardian. The issue then was - what to do with inner city black youth?

Apparently the adoption of a Rasta lifestyle by an urban hardcore was going to lead to an explosion in illegal drug use and the evolution of dens of social inequity that would turn places like Islington and Hackney into twilight criminal territories, disconnected from the rest of London.

That issue was neutralised. The last young black with dreads cut them off sometime in the 1990s. Whilst a small number of blacks have established themselves in middle England, the large majority remain moribund on the Fixed Profit Company estates at the edge of the conurbations - no longer with a critique of society, but just a rarely scratched itch towards it.

And so the ‘Islamism’ scare of the early years of the century has, in Britain as in the rest of the West, pretty much gone the way of the Victorian Christian revival - many of the former mosques in Bradford, Brick Lane and Basingstoke now serve as 3Dtheques, carpet warehouses or StormSupply stores.

Retired

The Left lost. If only I had passed that ‘Socialist Youth’ seller in Mersey Square, Stockport in my youth and paid another visit out of curiosity to the Christian Science Reading Room on Greek Street, I may have ended up in a tradition that claims both scientific underpinning and an assured victory but is actually big enough to have an infrastructure.

Next week I intend to start repeating my weekly articles, starting from 24 September 2007.

If only I knew then what I know now. The horror.