Can You See The Glass A-gleaming? How The Prospect of Revolution Slipped Through Our Fingers
*Please note - this article was written before the Minneapolis riots.*
Revolution. The word that has changed our world so many times — from the suffragettes’ glass-breaking, hunger-striking women’s revolution, to the ending of South Africa’s apartheid which saw the ban on protests lifted, to the French Revolution. When we look outside the UK in the 21st Century, revolutions are happening everywhere, from the Arab Spring to the recent violent protests in Hong Kong, yet the UK has fallen silent in its ability to revolt. Protests that have occurred have fizzled out as quickly as they begun; radicalism exists, but is seemingly shrouded in powerlessness. There is plenty of anger here; plenty of intelligence; and enough understanding of our need for systemic change. Yet it seems to me that we’re whimpering, rather than shouting. We’re spitting on the glass and wiping it clean, rather than smashing it straight in. So I ask you: is revolution still possible here, and how would it look in 2020?
The UK and USA are at the epicentre of repeatedly electing right wing leaders, like sheep putting their fluffy little heads inside the jaws of a wolf, who promises she won’t feed us to her family, then does the opposite. It’s said by some that in every democracy there must be a swing from right to left, a “natural” pendulum between socialism and conservatism. But since the 1970s, the Left and Right are increasingly devoid of meaning, replaced by a neoliberal unification of market values. Shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek, in the protection of capitalism.
Academics Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argued, in their 2016 book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, that neoliberalism is the disease that has killed off the radical organisation of the people.
‘Much of the success seen by the new social movements today is confined within the hegemonic terms established by neoliberalism — articulated around market-centred claims, liberal rights and a rhetoric of choice. What have been sidelined in the process are the more radical and anti-capitalist elements of these projects.’ (p22)
To Srnicek and Williams, in order to establish liberty, you cannot do it from inside capitalism’s fist — yet that’s exactly what neoliberalism insists on. Many theorists have also spoken at length about this, and if you want someone to explain it much better than I can, I encourage you to indulge in the works of Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Mark Fisher, among others.
Under late capitalism, our freedoms are seemingly increasing: immigration is more widely accepted than ever; gay marriage has been made legal; abortion laws are modern. Yet what we must remember is that this is all reversible — we know this from observing the Wicked Witch Of The West, also known as Priti Patel, halting free movement just this week. Our freedom is highly conditional under these neoliberal terms, so can it be called freedom at all?
Recent years have seen the hijacking of sociopolitical movements, such as the Gay Pride parade, by capitalist institutions. Brands like Adidas have “come out” (pass me a sick bucket) in support of Pride; soon enough the event becomes ticketed; under-18s are excluded; and Pride becomes a party imbued by brand sponsoring, not a protest. Beyoncé — a billionaire icon who has been accused of using sweat shop labour for her clothing brand — has made celebrated works about black oppression in America. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this. But profiting institutions which already hoard wealth, using people’s real life oppressions as commodities, tastes bitterly in my mouth. It bears questioning, under Srnicek and Williams’ thesis, that these supposed progressions actually do damage to the liberty these movements fight for. For what does our liberty mean, if only to serve a market economy?
So we’ve been duped into thinking we’re already free by neoliberalism. How has it come to this? One might argue that our access to knowledge has dulled our critical thinking. Since the invention of that thing called The Internet, our knowledge has multiplied at a rate that even we can’t understand. Before the Internet, communities existed in a physical space, their boundaries clear and geographical. Now, our communities are allowed to blossom in a virtual space. People use online spaces as protest platforms; important discourses happen; movements are born and joined here. Our identities have seeped into this virtual space, and indeed, it’s worth questioning who owns these platforms in the first place. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are one huge company — Facebook — and we know that the ethics of these platforms are questionable and very limited. If these platforms profit from our use of them, can protest exist here? No. Of course it can’t.
Alright. Does this mean revolution has to be a physical overthrow? Must we storm No. 10, dragging Boris by his hair into the street, to free ourselves from the jaws of capitalism? I can’t even attempt to answer these questions. But the view from here is bleak indeed, and any potential future revolution appears to be taking its final, rasping breaths.
My answer to this quagmire of problems is that it’s not knowing everything, but the sheer osmosis of capitalism, which has exhausted our revolutionary potential. Capitalism is in our souls, now. Everything we do, and are, has monetary value. Families post on GoFundMe to afford funeral services; the quality of our education is seemingly monetary. And we are tired. Really fucking tired, and listless in our critical thinking. Under late capitalism, our obsession with work, and finding our core value within it, has shattered our ability to overcome it. Just last week, Americans were out on the streets, protesting the coronavirus’ lockdown, saying that they would rather die than stop working. That’s where neoliberalism puts us in checkmate. That’s where we’re at right now. Most of us are mentally and physically enslaved to capitalism, and our neoliberalist ideals place the mere concept of a revolution on the back foot. We would rather watch Love Island and switch off. Look around at the state of the world. Can we really be blamed for it?
We desire simply to be maintained. Addicted to the escape, our ability to engage in political action is heavily diluted by our tiredness. Unions exist, barely, and since their practical decimation in the 1980s and onwards, workers are expected to simply get on with it. Strikes happen, but pale in comparison to those of the past. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a strike on the scale of the miners’ strike of 1984-85; work is seen as a duty, not a rescindable service. Plus, our common enemy is skewed. Capitalism has convinced most of us that it cares about our wellbeing, despite the glaringly obvious signs that it does not. Even our Labour Party, the supposed representation of the Left in the UK, signed its own death warrant as a conceivably socialist organisation the moment it threw its first socialist leader in years to the wall, instating Sir Keir The People’s Warrior at the helm instead. We are a national case of Stockholm syndrome, marching blindly to the beat of our market economy’s drums, with no plans to overthrow anything at all.
Who’s to blame for all this? Somebody must be, but in a web of lies, money and corruption, it’s hard to say which way is up, let alone who’s behind it. The people, the society we know and love, are either suffering under the system and unable to combat it, or benefitting from it and voting for it. Socialists are left without a party to unite behind; right-wingers are licking their lips and enjoying every last drop; centrists are burying their heads in the sand, pretending it’s perfectly acceptable to take no stances at all. Even those of us who hate this system and believe it must change, fall short of sacrificing anything to get there. For where would we start? How could we know?
It’s hard to put into so few words, the power it would take to overthrow such a thing as late capitalism. It would require us all to roll up our sleeves, one by one, and break the fucking glass.
Written by Madeleine Goode
Madeleine Goode is a writer, tutor and barista from Manchester. She can be found cute-wrestling any dog she sees, watering her houseplant collection or making cheap jokes on Twitter. She likes to write about current affairs, neoliberalism and feminism, as well as poetry and journal entries. You can find her personal site at www.seizeyourlife.blog; on Instagram and Twitter she is @goodegracious