(image courtesy of Carys Bryan)

What is the right way to go about protesting against the capitalist system? This is the debate which has been at a deadlock in my mind since I returned from the Protests against the government Cuts on March 26th in London. The massive cuts to state welfare were the issue which fused so many groups into one massive demonstration, but they were wrapped in a mass of other causes which have all been caused by the capitalist system.
Truth be told, for all of my anger, despair and objection to the direction that the system is taking humanity in, demonstrations are something relatively new to me, and despite my age I am still unsure of myself within the social sphere and have always found joining in and acting on beliefs in public very hard (the past few weeks have been full of missed golden opportunities to do at least something: first I went to the protest outside the Liberal Democrat Conference in the nearby city of Sheffield, only to stand there shy and confused, like a crap football manager, not knowing what foot to put in front of the other; the next day, again in Sheffield, meeting work-friends, I was walking through Sheffield’s roof-covered Winter Gardens only to see Nick Clegg of all people walking from the hotel directly towards where I was! I just buckled and turned my head, pretending to look at the tropical plants in there, giving away an opportunity which thousands of people outside had been dying to have! – although a friend kindly pointed out that if he had noticed that someone was finding a leaf more interesting than him, it may have been quite ego-shattering! That wasn’t the end: out running a few days ago, the Google camera-car came driving past me, stopped for a bit and then drove on, probably ensuring my appearance on one of the last things I would ever want to feature on – it will look like I just willfully let it copy my image). The well known phrase ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself’ may well apply, and I am trying to overcome this, but it is a long hard road, especially when I still have so many attachments hooking me to the system, even as I know with (pretty much) certainty that the world as we know it is teetering on the brink of collapse (whether you locate this reality’s death as the return of pre-democratic capitalism to western shores or as environmental chaos).
The sense of what reality is is the main thing that really left an impact on me and my friends who I went to the demonstration with, as we left for our train back to the north of England. Due to having requirements in the north, such as having to work for a wage the next day, we had to leave almost straight after the bulk of the protesting which meant that we had to quickly switch from one experience of reality to a very very different one indeed. This forced-transition was emotionally draining to say the least. This is because the reality we experienced in London that day wasn’t as simple as an attempt at bargaining with a capitalism system which is threatening to be crueler to us, by pleading with it not to crush our welfare system and to keep things like they have been for as long as living memory (although I’m pretty sure most demonstrators didn’t just want a return to this, and wanted more also); the protests to us (especially as certain groups came into clashes with the police) seemed to suggest not an anomaly/a one-off disruption of the capitalist reality we are familiar with, but the seeds of new realities (positive and negative) and the blueprint for what is to be more common from now; more and more disorder as more and more angry people take to the streets in disobedience of the system’s requested of them, and a more frequent usage of the more authoritarian side of the police force by the state (the helicopters were hovering above the streets for a duration that I have never witnessed before, provoking an anxiety which made me feel like I had finally arrived in an ultra-authoritarian state). And alongside this experience of the increasingly repressive state, what we experienced/what we could almost taste (bearing in mind that, as I have said, none of us have had that much experience of protesting before) was glimpses of a new non-capitalist reality, the beginning glimpses of the seeds for potential revolution; it is the first time I have had the feeling that the time to grasp for system change (from capitalism) is coming within reach again.

(image courtesy of Carys Bryan)  
(Image courtesy of Sam Vickers)But it was my friend who said that it seems like it can only go so far and then it just turns into a festival/carnivalesque event, which can then only celebrate itself, until it simmers out into nothing, and the simmering out of another reality/another way is what made up most of the exhaustion as we then had to make the transition to the mindset for the reality we are used to living in, confused as to where we were, and where we actually wanted to be. Where are we in time? and does the fact that our pubs are still there, are electricity still on hand, our soaps, shower gels and toothpastes and everything else which has been there in our pasts, make us not care that much in order to keep on fighting to sustain another reality?
The carnivalesque atmosphere was happening whilst other groups were taking more radical steps just a few blocks away, rioting in certain locations in order to damage the worst of the worst businesses on the high streets (the bank branches and tax avoiding companies such as Topshop and Vodaphone and places that cater for the very wealthy such as the Ritz hotel). I had an instant shock at the point where the separate groups came into view of the main march, as I noticed, for the first time, conflict between the protesters. One man started shouting ‘wanker’ at somebody. I thought it must have been aimed at a cocky Tory trying to cause trouble by belittling the march, but it was anger aimed at a group of young people with their identities covered (The Black Block/Anarchists). Another woman shouted “cowards! why don’t you show yourself? What have you got to hide? and tried to grab the arm of a young woman who came running through the march with a group all covered in Black clothing.
There is no doubt at all that these people who were hiding their identities were responsible for most of the damage done the high street businesses, and for the ever-present threat of kettling from the police in the hairier situations up and down central London. What troubled me the most was whether their profoundly more direct approach was the right one, and whether I should have been part of a more direct approach also (a fundamental approach which means a rejection and fight against the whole capitalist system, which is more akin to my own rhetoric) or whether just for the sheer numbers (bearing in mind that I am still very scared on waging direct action in fear of a reprisal damaging the ties to the system which I do currently depend on), the peaceful and institutionalised demonstrations were the right approach. This showed on the placard I was holding which I picked up off the street earlier in the day: one side was a union message saying the “cuts will kill” and on the other side I wrote “only a few years until irreversible climate change. End of capitalism now!” and I kept on rotating the placard like a diner sign in the wind, as although I thought both were right, I was nervous as to which one I should publicly want to declare.

There is no doubt that from the writing I saw sprayed on shops, the stickers pasted over The London Underground and the places where they aimed their anger that in theory there would be very little for me to disagree on with the Block Block/Anarchist section. I refuse to condone the damage done to these shops, banks and hotels, whether it was done in the belief of a noble cause, or just by those for whom vandalism is the latest fad. Nevertheless, I do have doubts as to whether it was the right choice of action, precisely because it gives the mainstream media surplus ammo to ram home disproportionately covered footage of violent action to scare the populace into fearing anything other than capitalist realism, and I saw this fear resorting to anger of its own, in isolated incidents, whilst making my way home. But also, I couldn’t help but consider whether it was right to bring riots to the streets in front of children in what was largely a family orientated protest, threatening to cause distress to people who are after all out support a just cause (but, yet again, I saw little evidence of children in distress whilst attending the demo – I only saw it being emphasized on BBC news 24 when I got home later on), or were these necessary displays of a complete rejection of a system we must so crucially fight if these children are even going to have any future at all? (Capitalism’s inherent need to grow, thus continue to tear up the environment – surely this makes any attempt at its overthrow a necessity?).

(Tiny Mindless Minority, a cartoon by Martin Rowson, in The Guardian on monday 28th, perfectly sums up why, even if they don’t think the violence was the right choice of action, many people certainly DO NOT condone it.)

And for this reason, it wasn’t completely down to the rioting and the potential of real violence from the police, as to why I became so unsettled towards the end of the day: it was the inner conflict of who I am and what I really believe and what I want to see happen in the world. Part of me really wanted to see, and wished to partake in (if only I didn’t have a certain fear of being lambasted by those who I depend upon and a infuriating instinctive reaction of apology to any authority figure) the smashing up of a branch or two of big businesses and, to go further, the desecration of all things bourgeois in the near vicinity. However, another side of me longs for peace and togetherness, and a hope (and sadly I think that a hope is all that it is) that the right things for the people can be brought about by peace and togetherness (almost like the bizarrely simplistic ending to the famous 1920’s film Metropolis, where the leader of the city ever so easily comes to realise the errors of his ways and goes forth to run the city for the benefit of all its citizens) – which is pretty much a summing up of the main protests held by the Trade Unions. Knowledge tells me that the government simply won’t give in to such a peaceful protest, and, more than that, the system won’t even be tested. But this relates to a much more total problem as we still live in a time where capitalism is still massively asserted as the only option, thus making most campaigns and protest merely appeal for capitalism to be a little bit nicer instead of an attempt to challenge it (although, as I have said earlier, there is some signs that people are starting to search beyond capitalism again). It is a dilemma of whether to look for a complete overhaul or to just help do our best to make capitalism be better to the people; the latter being the more instantaneously self-congratulatory choice of action, but also largely futile; the former being the right choice over all, but much more difficult to follow, and even possibly inhumane to those around us who need our instant help, not some far off goal.
I am having the very same dilemma, whilst writing this blog, as I leaf through a letter from charity group Action Aid, asking me to lobby my MP to support action on global poverty and to tackle global hunger. Of course I think global poverty and global hunger are totally awful, unjust and unnecessary problems which need to end. But this is precisely why I am unsure that charity is the right method for ending it: like the bulk of the march 26th demonstration which was intending to fight to save the welfare state, it is campaigning within the real of capitalism, bargaining with it in acceptance that “there is no alternative” to it, not attempting to fight for a world where these gross inequalities need not exist.
Slavoj Žižek rightfully, but controversially, states how charity, although it has truly good intentions, merely perpetuates the inequalities it aims to challenge because it tries to ease them rather than abolish the system that makes them. He made the example of how the worst slave owners were the ones who treat their slaves well because they diverted the issue away from the abolishing of what, no matter how better treat the slaves were than before, was still a repressive and totally unjust and unfair practice. At the same time, again appealing within the real of capitalism, there is some truth in the fact that charity (especially in its high street form, where the logos on the jackets of their workers strangely reflect the logos on the shops and merely add bulk to the idea of consumerism) appeals to the pervasive consumer mentality of buying to make ourselves feel better; in this case, spending to slightly relieve us of the guilt of generally participating in a system which causes much more misery than we experience, to other people in less fortunate parts of the world. This doesn’t mean it is an unjust or bad procedure, but is perhaps the wrong choice if we do actually want to see things such as extreme poverty abolished and not just for an occasional easing of it and a release from guilt for ourselves, which would require actions taken outside the veil of capitalist realism.
The unwillingness, or incapability (which probably includes myself) to challenge the real of capitalism sadly seems true of the bulk of the anti-cuts campaign. The cuts are awful, unjust, and letting the elitist trolls off the hook, but merely appealing to the system to be fairer to us all simply doesn’t seem to be the answer we need, not to mention relying on morals from a amoral system which, even if some ground against the cuts can be made, only puts them off until they surface again in the future – bigger and harsher.
Yet, although I believe all this, I also see the inhumanity which could be enacted if we were to dismiss charity and welfare-appeal in order to see a bigger picture, and the sheer crudity in both asking those who devote their lives to just charities to give it up for the ‘bigger picture’ and never giving to those in need again because it isn’t the answer to the overall issue; this would abandon vulnerable people who need help immediately, and the good nature and wanting for a better world from those bargaining for a fairer world through capitalism means that they simply shouldn’t be left to do this by themselves. The radicalism which is required to challenge rather than merely fight back against the worst aspects of capitalism is a hard practice to live by; where do you begin? and how do you sustain it? And in respect to the demonstrations, should one go with the direct actions of Black Block and The Anarchists (I am still not sure who did what at the protest so I have referred to them both, if it was either and not mainly people working for the media and authorities) knowing that there is a possibility that 1; some of them aren’t in it for the right reasons and possibly just want a riot and 2; that the power and pervasiveness of the mainstream media means that more negative and fearful feeling about these actions can be generated within the majority of the nation’s population than positive feeling; or should one go with the more peaceful demonstration which, unlike Black Block/The Anarchists, doesn’t have an air of challenging and other-throwing the system, but merely wants it to look after us better, knowing that most of these demonstrators do have the hearts firmly in the right place?
Not to mention my inability to act, and persisting fear of the unknown, although this might be exacerbated by a confusion which seems to increase with the more that I learn. The later and more tired I get, my depression kicks in as a noble justification to give up and hide away. Out comes my mp3 player, on comes the music which speaks to me of hurtling towards a dead end more than anything else; the music of Joy Division; “who is right and who can tell and who gives a damn right now?”
How to act outside the veil of capitalist realism with the intention of fighting it, well that’s a problem (both in my art work and in my search for content and freedom from the consumer mentality) that has been causing me mental havoc for years now, as it has done so too for many an artist, poet, and musician, and arguably playing a significant role in the famous suicides of our ‘fallen stars’.
Philosopher Alain Badiou’s idea that subtraction from the real of capitalism, rather than trying to replace the state with a new state (thus running a major likelihood of repeating the disaster of 20th century communism) is a truly inspiring idea, but I cannot think of many ways of acting this out. Perhaps, however, a good example is in the actions of the UKUncut direct action group who, despite their name which may give over the idea that they are predominately appealing from with the framework of capitalist realism, gave a really good example of subtraction from the state, when in the midst of the Saturday demonstrations in London, they occupied some of the main high street shops and banks (unjustly arrested after being tricked by the police into believing that would be set free, but this is another issue) and turned them into make-shift health-treatment centres, places to stage musical comedy performances etc, excellently turning ‘Dave’ Cameron’s phoney ‘big society’ idea against him, making something which if implemented and repeated more so across the country with preplanned tactics, could really test the legitimacy of this government. Returning to the march, out of all groups UKUncut are perhaps the ones with the right ideas. All that is left to do (personally) is to fight my own condition which (because it has affected and is still affecting so many young people, has been given a name) Mark Fisher labeled as ‘reflective impotence’, rather than the much more more simplistic apathy.

(Images courtesy of Sam Vickers)

Referring back to the Black Block and the Anarchists, If anything did make me slightly skeptical about them it was that, despite their faces being covered up, one could see that their body frames were nearly all very slim/slender with narrow shoulders, making it blatant that most were not out of their teenage years. My instant doubt was that many of them were possibly taking part for excitement and too young to have developed such a concrete philosophy. However, reflecting on these assumptions, and taking into account my views about the state of the world and that turning a blind eye to it is almost impossible due to the sheer amount of information out there, maybe it is possible that the reverse of my assumptions is true; that many of today’s youth are in such absolute despair about the world that is being passed onto them that they already do have concrete philosophical and political beliefs, a necessity in order to try to do something about it. Maybe, after all is said and done, the spirit of revolution is genuine this time? A long shot it’s true, but still, something new may actually be brewing.
Nethertheless, the other thing which did cross my mind, however, was in regards to a protest in 2010 in Toronto, Canada. Similar incidents of property damage (thus prompting extreme police tactics) had occurred involving the Black Block, prompting the anchorman for The Real News Network (and independent, unbiased online news broadcaster) to condemn their actions, airing a suspicion that many of the people enacting the violence may not be not who they said they were, and were actually working for the authorities, instigating criminal damage so that the police forces then had a legal justification to charge on, and oppress the bulk of the protesters in general. This is not unheard of; it happened in the 1984 miners’ strike, where someone dressed in plain clothes from the authorities would stand with the striking miners, and throw something such as a rock at the police which then gave them authority to charge forward (in fact there is now footage from the March 26 protests which show an ‘hooded individual apparently showing a pass to officers before walking through police lines. Likewise, a friend of mine told me of how a friend of his who was involved in the protest was offered a brick by a SKY TV journalist, with the offer of money if he threw it through a window).
However, a dominating factor in my initial doubts/suspicion may be a reflex to ease me of the guilty feelings from being inadequate at, and fearful of confrontation and direct action in the face of authority; I know that my body is still full of institutional toxins leading me to buckle and to give in when coming face to face with a figure, or building which possesses authority. The images of the Police with their shields and batons, protecting the Ritz, put as much fear into me as it did anger. I felt like I just wasn’t up to this; and there came a point when I just wanted to leave the streets where ‘the ‘action’ was happening; I wanted to get out of this ‘mad city’. And because of all this fear of change and the disorder that surrounds it, conflicting with the knowledge that this is precisely what we require at the moment to pave ourselves any kind of future, I am currently feeling very lost, and less sure of who I actually am than I have been for some time. It must be said that although I am battling hard to alter my outlook on life, I am a depressive: I see deadlocks and I actually fear change even when I know it could be for the better (for example, ask me take on something new in life and my first reaction is fear not opportunism).
But this depressive outlook – that any fundamental shift is a terrifying unknown – is the natural state of a media-fed citizen of a capitalist nation, in which freedom is only advocated, and allowed as long as it is the narrow definition of freedom-to-purchase-commodities, from one purchase of freedom to another, where anything beyond this horizon is pose potential disaster to our hedonistic trail. This world says “switch on the screen, switch yourself off; consume, be the same; stay in and watch the BBC, the Dave comedy channel and the endless stream of “warnings from history” about fascist Germany on the Yesterday channel” (whilst the world outside slowly starts to resemble a dictatorship itself!) “Because, remember, life under capitalism may have shit parts/gray days but it could be much much worse, and would be much much worse. Hey! Why don’t you get something nice from the fridge? You deserve it!”

On the way back through the underground system I was reminded of the depressing but ‘safe’ (for now, at least) existence of the conventional reality: advert after advert containing images of generically beautiful women, who as much as I am conditioned to pine for, I will never actually see in reality becasue they only exist on photoshop files. Then I was reminded of the police state infrastructure via the endless and repetitive automated tannoy announcements (voices too sharp not to penetrate) and the posters advertising the usage of CCTV cameras within the location, with words and the visuals of peering eyes, reminding us to the fact that the extent of the surveillance state is so far down the line of normalisation that the vulgar similarities between the imagery and the warnings from writers such as George Orwell no longer even raise a voice of concern amongst the commuters.
As we got on the train we were already expecting that the coverage of the demonstrations on the main news channels would be predominatley negative – speaking as the voice of capitalism’s superego; shocked and perplexed as to why people would be so ungrateful and aggressive to it after the “good life it’s given us” – because we’d already received a small dose of negative comments as we walked back through the city with our placards (even though we had been peaceful protesters). You could tell that these opinions had been formed from being informed by
the mainstream news channels (no surprise, as I turned on the television when I finally got home, to find the BBC news reporter treating the whole incident as if he was being led by the police through a landscape of fire-loving ghouls, acting out the image of the rational, reasonable, law-abiding face-mask of the state, informing us with the air of shock that “he had already been threatened”).
As the train was waiting to leave London a group of reasonably drunk me came and sat in the carriage (from what they were saying they’d been to watch a football match and were heading back to Wath – a village not far from where I live). From the offset they were being very loud/rowdy. After some time some of the other passengers had had enough and told them to quiet down. The aggressive reaction of the men that followed sparked an argument, in which two men who had been to the demo, by all accounts, joined in.
Without being able to hear much of what was said the drunken men, who were speaking considerably louder, started slagging off The Labour Party and the smashing up of the windows of Topshop in aim of the two men who had been to the demo. Without knowing if these two men stood for either of these or anything in-between, the drunken men seemed to lump everything that could possibly be related to the demonstrations in the same boat, in one big slag-off of it all. There was a hostility to it all, and it instantly reminded me of the power the mainstream news channels and the most dominant newspapers have for generating fear and anger in so many people, in defence of things most often not in the interests of the people consuming the information – and one begins to fear those who are possessed by this fear, in case of nasty reactions.
At this point, I began to feel ever-more regret for not having the confidence nor the guts to leave my system-tied life behind (by putting it into jeopardy to join the more direct protests) towards this system, by which we are so easily fooled by the nicey niceness of the mainstream news into believing is an OK thing (for a long time Ive contained a muted longing to smash the windows of high street stores, without the injustice of tax avoidance fueling my rage; feelings which are more to do with the sheer destructiveness that the consumerist environment perpetuates). True to what I was more or less expecting to see, the argument got violent: one of the drunken men grabbed the neck of one of the other men, and started shaking him aggressively. I’m not sure what was actually said, but the conclusion that we came to on our own table was that any threat of a tear in the “way things normally are” (capitalist realism) frightens people, making many aggressive; learning the true cause of discontent/unhappiness and accepting uncomfortable truths (evident to one who has witnessed aggressive reaction) is a long and painful journey which can be made very hard to even get the chance to take due to the environmental one is raised in (this is in fact the diagnosis of the popularity of far right groups such as the British National Party; as global capitalism is at the route of all their discontents of those who vote, and stand for them, but they react by blaming other groups of people, easier targets to locate, who are in fact forced to live in the same areas as the dejected white working class because they too are being exploited and uprooted by the system). I did wonder, however, for how much longer so many people can devote all their eloquence to ‘football talk’, because the disgraceful amount of money now involved in professional football all-but guarantees its eventual collapse.
From this confrontation then came the police (I’ve never seen so many police in one day), boarding at Doncaster station, questioning all but the one who actually grabbed the neck of the other man, who spotted the police on the platform and made a dash for an exit further down the train. What this dramatic day seemed to reveal, for me, was a tester for the future, whether I like it or not. I am already very aware of how the streets will be become more unsafe with angry and confused people as the cuts begin to slap us in the face; tensions about and within groups of immigrants will grow as more and more leave their homelands due to war caused by resource exploitation or environmental disasters; we can expect more upheaval both in protest, despairing outbursts and unexplained violence, and we can expect more and more police blockades and interventions, perhaps becoming more repressive as the system carries one as it shakes off all its democracy as it tries to save itself.
“Where will I be, and how will I deal with it?” I keep asking myself this. I am currently at a crossroads in my mind (maybe a rock and a hard place is more accurate to the way I feel) Do I fight the system in every way I know, risking an immediate risky upheaval in my life? Or do I capitulate further more to my fear and depressed reflexes which call me to build mental walls, and hide behind physical ones in the cocoon of my broadband internet access room? It isn’t so simple as to put up a fight.
I feel very much like Theo, the lead character in the Film The Children of Men. To use Mark Fisher’s explanation of the importance of this film to our present situation in his book Capitalist Realism, The Children of Men is an “extrapolation of or exacerbation of” our current world. It is a dystopia which is not an “exercise in such acts of imagination” but is rather like the world we live in already but where a gradual deterioration of societal qualities to an extent which we in our world would find shocking has been slowly normalized (“internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist”).
Without paying too much attention to the reason behind the predicament of the human race in The Children Of Men (mass sterilization meaning nobody has been born for a generation), Life in the film seems to have followed a path right from our present; a route that gets increasingly unbearable (the film is set in 2025; I’d say that there is evidence from all parts of the social spectrum that life is already considerably less bearable under capitalist realism that it was at the turn of the millennium – fear and pessimism are much closer to the surface). Theo has taken the path of trying to forget; he is passive, has a dull office-like job and drinks and smokes to anesthetise him to the madness going off around him. (With bombs going off often, having to walk past refugees in detainment cages as if they are stray dogs, feral groups living outside state control who attack the well-armoured passenger train he travels in, he strangely manages to ignore/forget about it in a similar way that people today can ignore the desperately poor and the homeless who exist in our city centres). This is the world I expect, if we do not fight capitalism, and Theo (who he is at the beginning of film) is the type of person who I would have to become in order to survive this world, without fighting back against the awfulness slowly culminating under capitalism. Actually, one of the experiences of the protests was shockingly Children Of Men-like: amidst the peak moments of the protest, there were people sat in chain cafes talking, reading, not showing any response to what was going off directly behind the pane of glass that separated them. Each of us independently remembered how weird this looked (we only spoke about it, well over a week after – these few sentences are a later addition to the blog). Perhaps this was because we could see ourselves on both sides of the window (depending on how we proceed to deal with the world now a return to blissfully naivety is just a most-missed memory)?.
Despite the numberless hooks this system has stuck into, one thing does seem certain to me now: in every possible meaning of the two words, death is capitalism and life is communism. Do I have the guts to go down fighting for the right world instead of vegetating in the wrong one? I really cannot be sure; I keep thinking that one day I’ll be strong enough, but I may be putting this off, as if the choice had to made tomorrow I think that, sadly, I’d buckle and stay under the wrong one to lead a life in a constant search for sedation, dreaming about ‘the old days’.
As I got off the train at Wakefield Westgate and went in search of a taxi back to Barnsley, I remembered that it was a Saturday night, and that the wait for a taxi may be long. Facing waiting on the main ‘nightlife’ street of a British town on a Saturday night is not a very welcoming proposition for someone who is stone-cold sober at the time. 18 to 50 year olds were stumbling around, pink and red signs were flashing back to each other from each side of the street, and loud music and the smell of take away food competed with other for peoples’ attention.

Although Britain has an history steeped in drink, the binge-drinking culture seems to correlate with a more recent history of cultural and political changes: the hedonist-nihilist tendencies of post-modern culture and the move towards free market global capitalism. But the general assumption made of late capitalist revelers that their attitude to life is that “you only live once so you might as well enjoy it to the full/there is no alternative to capitalism; communism is a nice idea but it doesn’t work, so lets just enjoy life hey?”, is not the full picture, possibly not even a fraction of the full picture these days. I cannot stress more that the need to get so drunk is just as much to do with a need to forget the unpleasantness’s of life; also that the need to party on a regular basis is also just as much to do with fooling oneself into believing that these are the ‘good times/great days/a constant veneering of a otherwise thankless life. I think this takes on extra emphasis when we live in an age where it is difficult to picture a bearable future. None of the people out around Wakefield, and any other town that night are ignorant to the critical predicament of the human race at this moment (with looming ecological catastrophe and a growing demand for fewer resources), it’s impossible not to know. But what do people do? I’m an heavy drinker also when I get going, and I’m no stranger to stumbling around the streets of my home town on an evening, and Ive been doing this at least 1 day a week, most weeks, for the best part of a decade now. I looked around at the middle-aged drinkers in town that night and wondered whether I wanted to be still drinking to anesthetise myself at this age (when the task will become much more difficult to achieve), trying to do my best to forget and avoid, or will I, and many others (for that matter), stand up and do all we can to try to bring about a future worth living in?
this question needs answering.

Why, I wondered, do I only notice Telescreens (the object itself, rather than what it is showing) when they are turned off? Looking up at the sleeping boxes as I enter the transport interchange, there was suddenly something more about their presence; they almost had a creepy presence as they hung above my head, and all the other heads on their way home. If they were switched on it would have been giving me information – what us humans gasp for, and can’t ignore, even if it bears no importance to our own endeavours.

Our lives are surrounded by screens. Something about the image on them, be it another humans or just simply text, has an authority over us. For example, just look at a conversation and how the communication going on in physical reality merely acts as an interval between the urge to get back to what really matters: text chatting on mobile phone screens. For another example, put a TV in a pub/bar and suddenly the place becomes like a theatre with a captive audience rather than a place for conversation.

But when the power goes off, we have these blocks and squares staring at us. And it feels really weird. It is as if our leader has abandoned us. “What the hell do we do now?” We can only hope they are switched back ASAP and that things get back to ‘normal’.

And still the screens advance! Barely any of us drive places without guidance from the sat-nav screen; we now read books on screens rather than carry real ones about; I also find myself feeling that my music player is incomplete if there isn’t the album sleeve of the currently playing artist beaming back at me as I stare down at it, whilst frantically clicking at its buttons (mind you, that’s also just a tactic because I’m scared of eye contact with the hyena-like gangs of teens running about in the transport interchange, to be rude to them and true to how they make me feel).

Ok, using screens in this way isn’t a bad thing on its own. It’s our growing dependency on them which is the concern, and it only seems to hit home when they are turned off, and we aren’t blindly (not literally of course!) obeying the information they give us. More than that, all this is run on finite energy, what will we do if we find no new way of powering it all and it stops? Will we do what Thom Yorke Suggested in ‘My Iron Lung’, “just hum”?

The idea of the survival of the best/the most competent has certainly been normalised in contemporary society – as opposed to the pre-Thatcher era when there was more (but not much more) emphasis on equality rather than the equality of opportunity which compresses our outlook now, which began to take hold under Thatcher here in the UK.

This is even more so in our “current economic climate” (another phrase which has been normalised to the extent that we no longer question why it must be this way) when there is a distinct lack of jobs. I’ve stuck with the same, not very well paid job for 4 years now – it is not a ‘career’ job, a factor that makes a 4 year spell at the same place an oddity in modern times. I don’t even attempt to be a confident career aspirational, and my lack of confidence in my ability to stand a chance in the job hunting world has both made this refusal to partake and has been influenced by it from then onwards.

I only have to hear about my friends’ and family’s attempts to find work (work well within their experience and skill levels) and being rejected because there’s so many people from all over the land competing for the handful of jobs going in this “current economic climate” (stop fucking saying that!), to find myself seething with aimless rage about a world that is grossly unfair under the normalisation of extreme competitiveness.

This normalisation pressures us to live our entire lives trying to be better than others. Of course, many people believe in being good to other people at the expense of, or at least as well as, personal triumph. Nevertheless, they are always on the back foot. And they know it: they know that there’s enough of a force out there, made by social conditioning, to kick them down for trying to be fair with people, and they know that unless they adopt some part of this attitude that they are in for a life of strife and hardship.

We’ve all heard the sayings “you can’t go through life thinking like that” and “you’ve got to look after number 1 in this world mate”, well, it isn’t human nature which makes these ways of behaving rule over all others, they are ways of behaving which supersede all others because the systemic structure has normalised them to be so.

Once the word ‘brainwashed’ is used people turn away, presuming they are listening to a deranged conspiracy theorist. But there’s no need for conspiracy, the truth is laid bare that a system conditions people to think in certain ways, to act in certain ways, instead of other ways – isn’t that brainwashing?

It is a ‘design for life’ (as the Manic Street Preachers put it) and I feel a great pressure to adopt it in many conversation patterns I have, which roughly run like this

Me: “I don’t want to drive, it’s just adding to the problem (of too many cars)”.

Other Person: “But you need to learn how to drive if you want to get anywhere in life”

Me: “well, I don’t even earn enough money to learn how to drive”

Other Person: “Well, you need to start looking for a better paid job then. You can’t just work in this place forever!”

Me: “I’ve got no family, no girlfriend, no mortgage to pay, and I don’t want a job that takes up my life, because I want the free time to spend on my art work”

Other Person: “Yes, but you don’t even try to market your work or get yourself out there more. Surely you want to be able to make a business out of it?”

Well, never wanting to fall out with people, I usually shut up at this point, when what I would want to say is “well, actually NO, I don’t want to make a business out of it, I don’t ant to reduce it to a fucking business. You say you like my work, but do you even take any notice to work my work is actually about?

This is when I hit the brick wall, unable to challenge this normalisation of the idea that competitiveness, thus business, should rule over all aspects of life.

An image that will always stick with me is one which was on a video in an exhibition commemorating the holocaust, at the Imperial War Museum, London. In a well-meant diversion from the Jewish Holocaust, the video narrator spoke of all those other holocausts which have happened since then in the late 20th century, mainly in the poorer parts of the planet, which we hear significantly less about. The moment which gripped me was about how these awful events come to be, as it spoke out to the whole of the humanity for our parts played in them, describing how seemingly minor actions made by citizens in richer consumer societies have an affect on other areas of the world.

.The camera focused on people drinking take-away coffee from some cafe-chain. This struck me, as I have (certainly did so back then) a fetish for buying ‘Mochas’ from cafe chains such as Costa, Cafe Nero, and at that moment I certainly was looking forward to one. Never quite escaping the bleeding obvious in this globally divided planet of exhaustible resources, I spent hours trying to justify getting my chain cafe coffee fix. The likelihood that that one purchase would trigger some genocidal rampage is low, but this is irrelevant as I am playing the game: I am keeping the entity of capitalism in motion/in power (at which point it must be pointed out that, far from fighting against racism/bigotry, capitalism needs them to be there, unconsciously, playing a part in the psyche of all able consumers – if aware of capitalism’s destructiveness, the bulk of consumers need some unspoken sense of superiority to allow them to carry on doing what they know is potentially harming somebody else). True to form, the battle for attention between the guilty me and the hungry-for-more me, played itself out, right through the rest of London visit, until I was at a familiar lull from where I realise that I cannot obtain enjoyment, thus a life devoted to the making of my artwork is the only saviour. The image of the people drinking coffee, which followed on from images of the Killing Fields of Cambodia were the iconic images of all that day’s trekking.

.It’s easy to imagine a future moment when one no longer feels so discontent with themselves so that there remains the desire to be constantly consuming, but this moment never arrives. The propagandist infrastructure, that surrounds us, constantly refers to this period when all finally rests OK around our necks – a point when there is no demon and angel battle battering us from alternate shoulders – but of course it would refer to this stage; it keeps us hooked into the matrix; constantly jumping from one failed holiday from work-time to another (and just to point out, most holiday-speak in postmodern Britain refers to binge drinking sessions which nearly always end in farce). To add to this, personally, it is easy to imagine a future weaned off capitalism, growing my own ‘veg’, being less worried about “looking a mess”, yet as soon as I meet people and go places that are more down this alleyway I feel a desire to be heading towards the city lights, railway journeys and the clean shaved feel. I feel disgusted with myself about this. I am reminded about my own stupid capability of making myself feel alienated and detached from everything once I am next to it. I put my hat on, my long black coat, my rucksack, and play Metanomic by John Foxx on my music player (dark synth-pop from the early 1980s) and set off to walk the streets by myself, and I feel myself again.

Today after a day/night trip to help on an organic farm my sister is staying on, apart from a love for the English oak and enjoying finding things buried beneath the soil, I felt so much more myself as I returned to my big coat, rucksack-on-back, as I entered the concrete gridded postwar town of Stevenage. I felt weird to feel at one in a human way of living which I am all-too-aware is provoking a disastrous 21st century, but I did feel more like me; a socialist-orientated thinker who ironically feels more at home in his isolated urban meanderings, looking for hope in places that he all-but-knows he will never find it in.

It is a slow process in becoming who you want to be; you’ve spent you’re entire life spoon-fed media and ideas that make you lose your identity and make you lose a true sense of enjoyment; in a consumer society, where we are bombarded by images of enjoyment and fulfillment, one should take note that they are profoundly lacking. I have taken note, yet my cockles are still warmed by the prospect of a night-out piss-up which usually, although nice for the the fist 2/3 pints, turns into a regrettable experience. Although possibly more screwed up by it, these ‘occasions’ are what most of us earn our wages for and anticipate with glee. The holiday is perhaps the greatest example of this, and thankfully the piss-up seems to be the only one I am still wired-up in – precisely because the act of getting pissed is the act of forgetting both the state of humanity and that state of ones own life (although both come back to haunt you after 6 or 7 drinks).

To be honest I can’t even be arsed with holidays. Take away the one thing that usually exempts me from guilty feeling – producing works of art/rantings that work as a defiance against my 21st century despair and also divert me from the truth about my inability to enjoy the present – and I feel constantly shit about the fact that everybody but me appears to be having a good time, in an apparent enjoyment which just seems to pass me by.

I always get the lyrics from the final song (Fragile Happiness) on the Super Furry Animals’ 2001 album Rings Around The World (which, it has to be said, is perhaps one of the best albums for depicting the postmodern condition, and seemed to be released just in time before alternative music got incorporated into, and began to solely exist for TopShop fashion parades). The lyrics go like this:

“well go to Miami
Take old friends and family
we’ll stay out and party
does Will Smith lie?
does he ever cave in and cry?” (Fragile Happiness, from the album Rings Around The World, SFA, 2001)

You see, as much as I know that breaking free, living off-grid, without a need for shaving foam, and moisturiser is the right thing to do, its those who are miserably trapped within who I resonate with. I suppose an artist has to live within the mess to depicted it; I just wish I could be certain that this was the main reason why I stay within it and not mainly because I enjoy being led by its carrots on sticks. I’ve made many works depicting the sinking ship of humanity in the 21st century, and know that this is because I’ll definitely be on it.
.I really wish I wasn’t so paranoid around people, and not so negative as to be unable to be part of anything which equates to helping the environmental cause, but I’m not this person. Sadly I’ve built myself into a pessimist who seeks morbid fascination in concrete jungles and dystopian music – I do not like myself, so I suppose I find the places that suit me.
The iconic factor of my inescapable addiction to the process of humanity’s self-destruction is possibly that of being constantly attracted to women who consent to the shallowness of late capitalism, living behind a veneer of brand-new clothes, make-up, ‘top’ hair does, and big nights out, as opposed to a woman who would actually probably be right for me. I don’t like what’s good for me; I’m captivated by what I see as I lift up a fold on humanity’s death throw. I am a decent bloke trapped in a western pigdog – or maybe it’s the other way around?

I had to trawl through all the old household photo collection to find what I wanted; you know, photos from a time when they actually meant something, before images of everybody from every place at every time where splattered upon the social networking sites; you know, the times when it took a couple of weeks before you’d see the photos – not just the next morning when you check your online accounts to finds photos of your drunken self from only 6 hours previous.

These are images of Woolley Colliery in the 1990’s – before it was demolished and whilst it was being demolished. (apologies for their poor quality).

(Woolley Colliery – in the background – in the middle of being demolished by explosives, in 1993)

(Woolley colliery – the left of the picture – before it was demolished and before the factories were built in the foreground)

Within the valley (upper Dearne valley) I grew up in, these were the last traces of a landscape and meaning of the place I was born into disappearing and making way for something else. I’ve been interested in my family tree a little more of late also. It seems sensible enough to assume that I do this at times when I do not see much of a future, and if one takes into consideration the full scale of the ancestry websites, making money out of people also looking up their family roots, then one can see that as a society we don’t seem to be able to see much of a future at present.

For me, personally the expectation of already irreversible (to some degree) environmental problems is what drags a landslip over a doorway to a future which I once expected to walk into. But for many it may be a realisation that the liberal-democratic order has failed us, after it wiped out any suggestion that there may be another way to build a better life for us all. Whatever may be the case, there is most certainly a lot less optimism than there was even 8 or 9 years previous. Something has to change.

The landscape in which these photographs are situated is an interesting one to point to especially: as the old coal mining towns/villages themselves suffered incredibly from the destruction of the sole meaning for their existence in the first place, the landscape improved and greened over massively during that same period, and although much is being leveled off for housing developments, it is still a much greener place than it used to be. Now, I do not for one moment intend to suggest that this is compensation for the heartless economic decisions made which destroyed so many peoples’ way of life, but it is a good in its own right – if it stays that way, that is, and developers do not run amok (which seems likely under the ultra neoliberal capitalism the current government are bringing through).

However, more than anything, I am making NO real point here at all – I’d be lying to pretend that I have any over-positive thoughts up my sleeve to finish this blog off with, so I will just idly try to relive the past like everybody else seems to be doing.

So, yet again I find myself in a personal battle to abstain from the technological dictation of communication. Caught in a dilemma, knowing full-well that abstaining from the social networking sites will sever many social contacts but also never ever forgetting the miserable state of mind I sink into whilst scrolling up and down my profile page (although this blog title is assertive the real me sways like a Silver Birch in a strong wind). However, a recent Facebook FAD has reviled me to the extent where I simply didn’t want to have any presence on the site full stop. To many this revulsion may offend, as it is all too clear that most see this application as nothing but harmless fun, but I sense a massive underlying sinisterism. I am talking about the ‘Fat-Face’ application which allows Facebook members to manipulate photographic images of their faces to see what they would look like if they were considerably more overweight than they actually are. Thus, people post these pictures on their walls, for digi-friends to hoot and howl at how they’d look if they were 7-8 stone heavier. What nobody seems to mention is that, because the program’s manipulations are convincing, it actually makes the enlarged faces look like real people in existence – you know, people who may actually be on facebook, like? friends of yours, like? On Facebook to try to make a better social life for themselves, like? As a former anorexic I take a severe dislike to this new FAD. Anorexia, you see, is a fear of being fat, in fact it’s more than that – its a terror of being fat. And this kick-starts an obbsessive disorder in a drive to become what society informs us is perfect; ultra-skinny. I wasn’t born seeing fatness as the worst thing possible, it was learnt behaviour which I became fully concious of in my teenage years. To be fat, although it is never stated in such a clear-cut way, is the worst thing to be in this advanced consumer society (the explosion of eating disorders no doubt runs side by side with the beginnings of Neoliberal Capitalism in the early 1980’s). I never knew until recently that the anorexia-causation-model-Barr-none Kate Moss actually once said “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. If one couples this quote with lyrics from pop-culture’s polar-opposite, The Manic Street Preachers “I am Twiggy and I can’t see the horror that surrounds me” (late lyricist Richie Edwards suffered from anorexia) you can easily see how when one is really skinny in a mass consumer society, it basically lets you off the hook – “you’ve no need to feel guilt, shame etc”. To be fat in a mass consumer society is to expected to feel like a nobody, a dis-likable blot on the landscape of desirable’s (even now, when I wake up feeling fat, I feel irredeemably depressed for most of the day). So, if you then go back and observe the jokes and hoots at the fat versions of people, you can see that it speaks as a mass denunciation and humiliation of overweight people. And I know that most people who have made a fat-face picture of themselves will be offended by this, but I’m not here saying that you intended for it to be an attack on the very overweight. Nevertheless, this is what your collective fat-faced images convey. I’m sorry, but when you’ve studied the societal hounding of physical imperfection for years due to the very fear of being hunted down, this is the conclusion that one arrives at.During my flitting on a off Facebook during that past 4 years it has, at times, appeared to be more of a Facebully. Its programs, add-ons often encourage users to attack those who society sees as the undesirables, those too ‘ugly’, too unpopular to be able post pictures of themselves on the site – an older application named ‘Compare your friends’ was equally as bad, as visuals appeared documenting the disparity between those who nobody cares for and those who everybody adores. Obesity is as much a symptom of late-capitalism as anorexia is; the incidences of each rising simultaneously almost in a sadistic compliment of each other as the system’s jaws open wider to unveil the dystopic beast. One of my favorite ever sayings is “it is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” and when the desirables who light up the aspirations of the population include people like Kate Moss and Pete Doherty this saying becomes ever-more pressing. If anybody with a Fat-Face App image of themselves on their Facebook account is reading this, try not to dismiss this post as an overblown reaction (I am in fact calmer than usual as I write this). Likewise, don’t dismiss it as an attack on you personally for your decision to use this application. All I’m saying is that the bigger picture of all the Facebook Fat-Faces, amongst the even bigger picture of society’s denunciation of all people without the perfect face and body (and personality, if you want to complete this picture) is one of a mass undetected discrimination. Thus, all I’m asking is for you to find fun and humour amongst yourselves without using this program, as it is a signifier of downward discrimination, which, because it has become a normal thing to do in society, few realise they are partaking in.

One of the reasons why there is more writing on this blog than artwork at present is ecause the place where I make my work is so cramped with old works that I can hardly move. I have provided truthful photographic evidence of this, for anyone bored enough to be interested in such A NON EVENT of me telling you that “nothing is happening”. There again, I kind of like the look of the studio when it looks like a trove of all the stuff in my head – but there again I would wouldn’t I? because it’s my head. So here it is a post about NOTHING IN PARTICULAR. But at least I’m not posting pictures of my every last carbohydrate being used up,to put on Facebook. If my studio continues to get more cramped – I’ll probably turn to this in a week or so. Sorry to waste the time of anyone who’s time is actually important.