Thursday 9 June 2011

The Contours of History: Now let’s re-appropriate

 Blade Runner? See link


A battle has been ensuing since the writings of Karl Marx and Frederic Engels who were the first to critique the political economy, of which they had seen the start of the capitalist process, the full extent of which they could never contemplate. They would never learn  the true extent  that the monopolisation of capitalism would have over the governing of the entire globe. The purpose of what Marx and Engels stood for most was class war and the ability of capitalism to manipulate and control, the violently pacifistic, classes, and dominate the workers of the world. This collective of the population has diversified immensely since the social capacities of the 18th century.

Never before has their existed a more populace globe than the era we currently inhabit and never before have we lived in an era where communication and information have been more readily available. What such a scenario has created is one where the greater the size of the population the lesser the amount the upper classes will number. However the rulers and elitists are still holding the reins of history, one where the workers, proletariat and underclass are being steered down a path of a dark future.

In large part this is to do the way neo-liberalism has re-appropriated the contours of history and how the West sees no alternative organisation to the world we live in. A world deeply disparate and unrepresentative of its inhabitants, this world caters for the survival and prosperity of the wealthy. No other example of this could be more clear than the fact that after the worst financial collapse in history the less economically endowed are becoming less so whilst the oligarchic, monopolistic, birth coincidence... amongst; bankers, bosses, hereditary wealthy are ever increasing their wealth.

Why have we let such a scenario go on for so long, and let them make us believe that we really don’t believe that, “There may be light at the end of the tunnel but that light might be another train coming towards us”,  Why does society choose to accept such contours of history? We know that we are affecting the temperature of the earth, or even we are at the whim of the earth’s temperature or anything else it has to throw at us; earthquakes volcanoes and such. What would happen if a huge population would be displaced by a mega volcanic eruption, and they do happen, where would the inhabitants go? We have no provisions to cater for such a scenario.         

The human catastrophe in the Congo as poignantly re-emphasised in the recent BBC episode by Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace what this episode highlights is how endemic the current neo-liberal capitalist construct is. This endemic disease prevents the abolition of charity, a world which would exist without the need for charities, a world where no one went hungry, without decent shelter and basic access to health care, a world which entailed little, if any, citizenry discrimination by the state and perhaps even its inhabitants, where no one was a migrant or immigrant but merely a citizen only the corrupt and murderers would be excluded. Exclusion would not be based on discrimination but on the basis of one’s actions. There would be no privileging of education all would be educated to the highest possible standard not with the intention of gaining wealth but to better the course of history toward a trajectory of global sustainability, the abolition of private property, and the increase in leisure time for the worlds inhabitancy who presently work with the bare minimum of leisure time to contemplate and evaluate the human experience, yet we are stuck with cultural capitalism.  

Many of the left today, amongst the ‘disenfranchised’ (or rather those violently pacifistic ‘apathetic, citizens) have forgotten or have chosen to ignore the formidability of the neo-liberal capitalist system. It is ingrained in our very being! The ruling class has given us the tools with which to fight it. It gave us multi-culturalism then demeaned it, and then we fought for it. It gave us charity, and then decreased it, and then we fought for it. It gave us protests, and then impeded them and we fought for them. They gave us trade unions, and they attacked them, and we fight for them. This is Capitalism with a human face... a little bit reform here and there.

The recent unrest we have seen at the end of the last decade and which continues today is a small window of grace, these are dark times the global edifice has never been more fragile and interdependent, the unrest represents the outbursts from the void. The void being the failure of neo-liberal ideology; where any real alternative is absent from debate. We see catastrophe movies by the abundance but never alternative realities in the movies. That is to say democracy in its current form is not democracy but a pathetic choice between two parties, parties which consist of the elites and in no way are representative of its mass population. The western culture under capitalism has failed to produce an alternative society and the regimes of the Middle East, which are a direct result of imperial intervention, are beginning to crumble in dramatic and in some instances in tragic ways. But lest not forget it is not the revolution that is the important part it is what happens after that matters. 

Now is the time to end the suffocation of the left and NOT continue fighting within the proposed parameters introduced by the enemy but to re-appropriate the struggle for humanity on our terms and fight for radical reform. To alter the contours of history. We must re-appropriate the contours of history.


Part 2 coming soon!

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