On 1 October 1946, one of the first films about nuclear espionage was released in the United States. Just a year had passed since the atomic bomb had been dropped, the war was over but no one felt at peace. On the poster, a mushroom-shaped explosion formed the background to the film’s title: Flight to Nowhere. 

The flight that flies to nowhere has reappeared in the following century. And it did so during a period psychologically accompanied by a sense of proximity to the apocalypse. This time, it is a tangible flight, though — beyond the screen and out of metaphor. The year is 2020.

Before the pandemic made a mess of our habits, the Hong Kong Express Airways Limited fleet of Airbus A320s flew over ten Asian countries, from China to Japan to Thailand. It is a low cost airline founded in 2004, the younger sister of the Hong Kong national airline (i.e., Cathay Pacific).

Since mid-October, its planes have been taking off from the main hub, the Hong Kong International Airport, to fly around the city in circles. The campaign is called #UOFlycation, its subtitle reads “Rediscover the joy of travelling” and 110 passengers were on board for the maiden flight. They paid 388 local dollars (about 43 Euro) to watch and film Hong Kong from above. And to then return to the ground in the very same place they had boarded.

The company stated that this should be understood as a warm-up for the passengers, with a view to a return to normality — of travelling, and beyond.

HK Express is just one of the companies in the world that have taken action to arrange this type of flight. By the end of summer, for example, All Nippon Airways had already entertained three hundred passengers with a “Hawaiian resort” themed flight over the Japanese archipelago.

It seems very unlikely for other carriers not to pile up with the list. As early as September, travel agencies were already finding interest for this kind of experience in both India and the United States. Protests from local environmental movements, however, have managed to prevent Singapore Airlines from joining.

Royal Brunei is one of the pioneers of this phenomenon: since August, it has been offering its journeys without destination (furthermore, it did not even ask passengers to wear masks). However,  the Taiwanese Eva Air had ranked first for a few days, setting up a non-stop “Hello Kitty” themed flight on 8 August (the local Father’s Day), which moved over the Taiwanese coast and pushed on to the Japanese Ryukyu Islands before coming back.

An institution like Australia’s Qantas prefers to call them “scenic flights” and articulates them in a more complex way. A seven-hour non-stop flight in the Australian skies, from Sydney to Uluru and back, costs 787 Australian dollars (about 475 Euro) minimum. One has time to photograph Ayers Rock without even getting one’s shoes dirty. It looks like the near future of air travel: from a distance and for a few pockets. Being able to testify that one’s been there — but without moving from the seat cushions with the name of the flight embroidered on them for the occasion.

Those on board spoke of a “joyful and exciting” atmosphere. Obviously, at a time when everything is experience (think of the Airbnb obsession with this concept), Qantas’ communication insists that this is an alternative “flight experience”. For the company’s first scenic flight, all 134 seats were sold in ten minutes. 

Sebastien Filep, a Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, sees an explanation for the increased desire to escape due to pandemic constraints.

As the New York Times pointed out, global civil aviation produced 918 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018. The contagiousness of the COVID-19 virus does not even beed to be mentioned.

Therefore, in the age of ecological awareness and in the months in which the world has had to adapt to the so-called social distancing, it is really difficult to find a justification in T. S. Eliot’s famous phrase, “The journey, not the destination matters”. Nor does it seem to be consistent with the verse in which the Colle der Fomento*** said: “To travel standing still is the best”. 

Because every flight to nowhere manages to pollute and assemble people at the same time. And without even responding to the function of an aeroplane, i.e., to shorten the space to move people or goods. 

If extracting value from immobility is a new frontier, it smells like a pond someone is ransacking with a makeshift stick.

flight-to-nowhere

FLIGHT TO NOWHERE

 On 1 October 1946, one of the first films about nuclear espionage was released in the United States. Just a year had passed since the atomic bomb had been dropped, the war was over but no one felt at peace. On the poster, a mushroom-shaped explosion formed the background to the film’s title: Flight to Nowhere.   The flight that flies to nowhere has reappeared in the following century. And it did so during a period psychologically accompanied by a sense of proximity to the apocalypse. This time, it is a tangible flight, though — beyond the screen and out of metaphor. The year is 2020.  Before the pandemic made a mess of our habits, the Hong Kong Express Airways Limited fleet of Airbus A320s flew over ten Asian countries, from China to Japan to Thailand. It is a low cost airline founded in 2004, the younger sister of the Hong Kong national airline (i.e., Cathay Pacific).  Since mid-October, its planes have been taking off from the main hub, the Hong Kong International Airport, to fly around the city in circles. The campaign is called #UOFlycation, its subtitle reads “Rediscover the joy of travelling” and 110 passengers were on board for the maiden flight. They paid 388 local dollars (about 43 Euro) to watch and film Hong Kong from above. And to then return to the ground in the very same place they had boarded.   The company stated that this should be understood as a warm-up for the passengers, with a view to a return to normality — of travelling, and beyond.  HK Express is just one of the companies in the world that have taken action to arrange this type of flight. By the end of summer, for example, All Nippon Airways had already entertained three hundred passengers with a “Hawaiian resort” themed flight over the Japanese archipelago.  It seems very unlikely for other carriers not to pile up with the list. As early as September, travel agencies were already finding interest for this kind of experience in both India and the United States. Protests from local environmental movements, however, have managed to prevent Singapore Airlines from joining.  Royal Brunei is one of the pioneers of this phenomenon: since August, it has been offering its journeys without destination (furthermore, it did not even ask passengers to wear masks). However,  the Taiwanese Eva Air had ranked first for a few days, setting up a non-stop “Hello Kitty” themed flight on 8 August (the local Father’s Day), which moved over the Taiwanese coast and pushed on to the Japanese Ryukyu Islands before coming back.  An institution like Australia’s Qantas prefers to call them “scenic flights” and articulates them in a more complex way. A seven-hour non-stop flight in the Australian skies, from Sydney to Uluru and back, costs 787 Australian dollars (about 475 Euro) minimum. One has time to photograph Ayers Rock without even getting one’s shoes dirty. It looks like the near future of air travel: from a distance and for a few pockets. Being able to testify that one’s been there — but without moving from the seat cushions with the name of the flight embroidered on them for the occasion.  Those on board spoke of a “joyful and exciting” atmosphere. Obviously, at a time when everything is experience (think of the Airbnb obsession with this concept), Qantas’ communication insists that this is an alternative “flight experience”. For the company’s first scenic flight, all 134 seats were sold in ten minutes.   Sebastien Filep, a Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, sees an explanation for the increased desire to escape due to pandemic constraints.  As the New York Times pointed out, global civil aviation produced 918 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018. The contagiousness of the COVID-19 virus does not even beed to be mentioned.  Therefore, in the age of ecological awareness and in the months in which the world has had to adapt to the so-called social distancing, it is really difficult to find a justification in T. S. Eliot’s famous phrase, “The journey, not the destination matters”. Nor does it seem to be consistent with the verse in which the Colle der Fomento*** said: “To travel standing still is the best”.   Because every flight to nowhere manages to pollute and assemble people at the same time. And without even responding to the function of an aeroplane, i.e., to shorten the space to move people or goods.   If extracting value from immobility is a new frontier, it smells like a pond someone is ransacking with a makeshift stick.  *** an Italian hip-hop band from Rome

       «I am not the prince of Denmark and this hotel is not bloody Elsinore.»

                                                     Sid Vicious, New York 

It is the 7th of November, 2020. As dusk sets in London, images streamed from the United States, of jubilation and protest in streets flooded by some kind of Indian Summer skies, follow the announced victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris against Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the 2020 US elections. 

The images are striking not only for their intensity and for the diversity of crowds, but for the fact that all the participants do face masks. Faces disfigured and made anonymous in order to protect oneself and others. Even the new president-elect and his running mate show their adherence to the rules introduced to avoid contagion, as they take the stage where SUVs gathered in a car park in Delaware during the night. 

This has been our reality since March of this epochal 2020: we have been living confined on our own bubbles, with our houses transformed either into a permanent bootcamp for kids or into a silent hermitage for old people and singles. For more among us, all the essential workers obliged and compelled to travel to work each given the day, the quiet of home more a mirage. For more of us, the pain of keeping distanced from our beloved ones. 

During the short and anodyne summer, we allowed ourselves to the illusion of holidays, but that brief experience is now gone. Summer has been a season felt like a suspended sentence. We are back into the pinging noises of our social messaging services and the fuzziness of our conference calls. And the cloudy skies of Fall. 

We adapted to this new version of modern life, with a strong dependence on working connections and delivery services. Monades with virtual escape routes. Tablets and smartphones what illuminated codices were for the first millennium’s monks. 

Our immune systems are now slightly weaker than before the pandemic as we miss on the usual concoction of germs and bacteria we were used to share with others in public transports and workplaces. 

Yet, the planet is not a different place than the one we left when we entered this suspended state in the first quarter of 2020. All the risks and the big trends are there, from climate change to the accelerated substitution human/machine. And a growing and baffling difficulty of the political milieu to grasp these changes and to define what are the key trade-offs and what are the big decisions facing us as individuals and as society. 

We live confusing times, where abundance of data and overload of information do not translate on decision mechanisms or policy making adequate to the fast times we live. And where horizontal societies (I use the plural purposely) cross wires with different transversal agendas, being them equality, supremacism, environmental activism or citizen/consumer awareness. Though within a context of low objectivity, often. Politicians are the first ones, in some cases, to validate the confusion and the a-factual theories that circulate around. Using a simple metaphor, the new normal in politics is to point at the moon and claim it is an artificial satellite built by aliens billion years ago. 

So, as a large swath of the world population sits on its own cocoons, waiting for new lockdown rules to be launched or implemented, there is a strong sense of lost direction. Or a sense of ‘no future’ ahead of us. Or each direction is taken, occupied, gorged with ideas and influencers. A traffic jam of epic dimensions, like the 800 kilometres of queues of cars trying to escape Paris before lockdown.

     2. No future or one too many futures 

We are into the midstream of a singularity, or a combination of different singularities, as some key tipping points are reached (as example, the accelerated melting of Greenland’s glaciers or the recent experiments with microbots to connect neural cells – a first step towards a cyberization of humanity). We are beginning to observe a new world, a new normal. If we ever had a normal to adhere to. 

What is concerning for most of us is the array of scenarios with different degree of dystopia or challenges. We live, as never before, in a Montecarlo-simulated world. Where each scenario seems difficult to be priced, if not with the rosy lenses of market players. 

These non-dystopian futures may seem aligned to the ‘no future’ war scream of Johnny Rotten/John Lydon when the Sex Pistols, more than forty years ago, spearheaded the punk revolution in UK, a precise moment in our recent history when chaos and innovation were once again intertwined, in some form of anarchism/old establishment carousel. 

No future, they were telling us then. And it seems we are back to that moment in time, when the young generations were facing a similar period of radical changes in society, after the long austerity of the Seventies. The world back in 1977 was, especially in Western countries, a relic of a glorious past. Whatever promise of wealth and prosperity our parents imagined, the young generations had to deal with a world with an increased level of geopolitical complexity and the first reckoning to climate change. Let alone the absence of any intergenerational transmission of power if not through entitlement. 

A picture of an aged John Lydon with a Make America Great Again t-shirt, a far cry from the skinny and spiky aired himself of nearly 50 years ago, taken in 2018, surfaced again and it created a substantial noise among his fans. In one of those thought-provoking chats in a social media, somebody claimed that, maybe, Lydon was right and Trump could be considered himself a punk, a disruptor of the finest nature. A kind of the bug of the system, or a swamp-drainer, on his own words.

Though considering Trump a punk completely misses the point not only about him but also about the way in which we can read these divisive times. More than with John Lydon, who continues to act as agent provocateur since he left the Sex Pistols and he invented with his new band PIL the post-punk movement, the real comparison could be thrown with Malcolm McLaren, another ginger haired mogul and the original mind behind New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols. 

Both Trump and McLaren were the result of rich inner city elites (McLaren’s parents were diamond traders), with a strong sense of entitlement, based on census and ethnic origins transcending and annihilating the primal desire of the punk movement (in its truer forms after the evanescent period of the Sex Pistols) for a new freer society or rooting for the absence of it. 

Both of them were the result of a post-Warholian society, based on instantaneous gratification via notoriety or via expensive objects (it doesn’t matter if copies of copies, like most of Warhol’s ‘masterpieces’). Trump’s perpetual grin, filmed by few hours by Warhol, would have been another classic like Empire. 

He firstly exploited the traditional media notoriety, becoming a kind of It-kid in the New York socialite scene and, after a series of debacles in the real estate world, he moved into the reality show buzz. The Apprentice, where he was playing a gruesome and successful CEO. A fictional character that allowed him to become a caricature but more relevantly, to enter into the houses of every American. Like Ozzy Osbourne became a cartoonish hard rock god on his own reality family show, Trump became the archetypical American businessman. All testosterones and guts decisions. 

Then, as The Apprentice closed, the damage was done. Trump discovered the incredible power of social media, where everybody is entitled to an opinion and where the high frequency of messages and feed of news and tweets expanded proportionately the capacity of influencers to thrive, in a kind of continuous, somehow delirious, sequencing of 15 minutes of fame, repeated each day million times. 

Trump created then his own show, surrounded by millions of Trumpers and Anti-Trumpers, replicating a similar phenomenon of the one of Justin Bieber and his Beliebers. With a difference. Justin Bieber was still selling music, shows, entertainment. Trump realised that his own person was the product to be sold to Americans. His credibility as political agent/body and then as legitimate candidate for the Republican party was becoming stronger by the day. With the result we all know. 

So, Trump’s life is a perfect parable of entitlement and notoriety, based on the extremely advantageous starting point he had. He was born under a good sign and, throughout all his life, he never conceded his spot on the limelight, even when discredited as businessman but as the ultimate product of the American all-white-male way to leadership. 

Punk was different, it was a disillusion with the future as narrative of the generation immediately after the Boomers one. 

It was a critical moment in UK History and the ‘punk’ movement was only part of a group of movements predicating radical change and eversion. When punk exploded as sub-culture in UK and US, in Continental Europe we had internal forms of terrorism (France, Italy, Germany and Spain) and the sense of fragility and confusion was very similar, with the main difference that the unrest was out there in the streets and not, often, confined into the realm of social media. 

Trump is not an anarchist or a promoter of a radical agenda, but the extreme guardian of conservative values, not even trying to embody them. As the message is not anymore one of resemblance and assimilation but a mirrors game, where Trump and the Republicans engage with the racist and radical right and the more extreme fringes of evangelical movements as intermediary agents. 

Trump does not need to behave, but he needs to defend a series of positions now threatened by modernity. With the big problem that the existential threat to the conservative American way of life is not into the political opponents or essential rights like LGBT ones or planned parenthood, but in much more radical transformations of our society and the world around us (e.g. climate change). 

But this doesn’t matter to Trump or his accolites. His thirst for endorsement and fame has been so pervasive that he left not much space for other discussions, a deafening background noise not only for Americans but for all the global citizens. As Trump has been, like Malcom McLaren, a master on interpreting a series of current anxieties and tensions, using them for their own benefit, being power grab or filthy profit. And, moreover, substituting a discourse on how to cope with the evident realities and risks of this juncture in time with a continuous self-reference to himself, a continuous Trumpeness made of videos, tweets, soundbites, all passed through the echo chambers we all became. Me included, with this oped. 

Trump is not a punk, for sure, but we have been all punked by him. 

Trump thrives on a liquified or nearly gaseous society, where the political discourse is confined to the 140 characters of a tweet, or the even lazier action of a click of a retweet. Communication happens through Short Tik-Tok videos and we are exposed to some form of Tinderisation/polarisation of choices. In this kind of short-breathing and superfast now-here land, each opinion is counted and coded as a ‘like’, but no views seem to stick or count anymore. 

A desirable long-term vision of the future is replaced by the continuous reaction and patching back to millenary fears we never abandoned since the last century. 

It is a subtle game of fear tactics vs. strategies of hope or coping ones: the live streaming of chaos and unrest, wildfires in Australia and California and devastating floods and storms all across the rest of the worlds seems to reaffirm the fact we are living dystopian times, but the issue is that the culprits mask themselves as the victims. 

As we are running on empty in terms of natural resources, our society is pushed, voluntarily or not, towards an accelerated introduction of forms of societal control via images and snippets of half truths becoming opinions, political parties, movements. 

The social media-filtered chaos could be the best vivid dream for an anarchist, if it wasn’t for the fact that the anarchist views expressed by uber socialist thinkers have been slowly replaced by a very conservative and bigoted view of the world. 

The society imagined by our grandparents after the Second World War, especially in Europe, was one where the scars of the conflict were supposed to heal, rebuilding a connecting tissue among the different classes and views of the world built around understanding and respect, nonetheless through continuous debate and regular rebalancing between the dominant political and economic philosophies: socialism and liberism. 

The world post-1989 and post-2008 (two pivotal moments of disintegration or extreme challenges to both systems) has been one where the traditional conflicts, the ones of ideologies or countries opposed to each other, have been substituted by divisions and fractures in the society created in a rather horizontal and transversal manner. Also, thanks to the virtual blows of a small extremist minority (or minorities), able to influence or keep the silent majority at bay. 

These fault lines built around the traditional ones associated to gender, race, wealth (and related access to education and health), have been boosted by other divisions, based not on tangible differences, but on extremization of views of the world, like the flat-earth and no-vax movements. The abundance of conspiracy theories or all-encompassing explanations of the world bring the risk to create substantial confusion and to lose sight on the adequate addressing of the biggest global social shock since the Second World War. Let alone the environmental stress we will have to endure. 

The magmatic concoction of conspiracy theories has today reached the mainstream and, with it, the silent majority, thanks to social media and the proliferation of smart phones. The emergence of Breitbart boosted Trump’s chances to be elected, with a similar approach followed by QAnon, with its dissemination of fake theories, built on a mix of religion, numerology and pseudo-scientific theories. In a sauce of gossips and using celebrities to validate gossips and rumours, in a kind of Perez Hilton’s fashion. 

The process of distribution is via social media, mostly Facebook or Twitter. Each new tweet or post is amplified by related sites and outlets of right-wing/populists, in a kind of virtual leafleting. The target of these theories is the same population target as the Tea Party during the 90s: the disillusioned middle class who survived the biggest financial crisis of the last century but which was hit deeply on their own aspirations and, for annuity holders, their future. 

The phenomenon of the ‘disillusioned middle class’ is a communal aspect of European and American societies. In Europe, other factors are having an impact on the society’s stability: the age structure of many European countries, the end of fixed jobs and the perceived (yet not real) threat of a continuous replacement of ‘Europeans’ with immigrants or machines. 

The disillusioned middle class considers itself more and more marginalised, having to deal with the absence of a stable and prosperous set of ‘futures’. Hence, figures like Trump in US, Farage in UK or Salvini in Italy offer a vision of traditional values and of the potential step into a past that does not exist anymore. The Punk’s ‘No future’ vs the Conspirationists’ ‘Back to the past’. 

On the left side of the political spectrum, the fall-out of the financial crisis and the demolition of the middle class ambitions allowed the emergence of a kind of neo-radical communist thinking, far more left than the wilder Slavo Zizek or the recently deceased David Graeber. These ideas are well-represented in the books of The Invisible Committee and Tiqqun (written by collective of anonymous French left-wing thinkers published by Semiotexte, a Californian radical publisher distributed by MIT Press). These are proper handbooks for the revolutions to come, where the Euro crisis and the Northern Africa’s ‘Spring’ are considered heralds of new, communist times. 

These books offer an intellectually exhaustive guide to channel dissent, but a cultured and well-educated one. And this where outlets like QAnon are more aligned to a society where people do not read books and where the attention span requires icons and symbols more than complex social theories. They don’t embolden the disparaged middle class with sophisticated explanations about social disparity and inequality and the right to fight back the ‘powers’, but they build a gory and mysterious narrative around some alleged powers (often aiming against progressive policies and leaders), to justify Donal Trump as a kind of angel of revenge. 

punked-and-trumped

PUNKED AND TRUMPED – The sharp margins of politics

        «I am not the prince of Denmark and this hotel is not bloody Elsinore.»                                                      Sid Vicious, New York         1. The Pandemic mindset   It is the 7th of November, 2020. As dusk sets in London, images streamed from the United States, of jubilation and protest in streets flooded by some kind of Indian Summer skies, follow the announced victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris against Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the 2020 US elections.   The images are striking not only for their intensity and for the diversity of crowds, but for the fact that all the participants do face masks. Faces disfigured and made anonymous in order to protect oneself and others. Even the new president-elect and his running mate show their adherence to the rules introduced to avoid contagion, as they take the stage where SUVs gathered in a car park in Delaware during the night.   This has been our reality since March of this epochal 2020: we have been living confined on our own bubbles, with our houses transformed either into a permanent bootcamp for kids or into a silent hermitage for old people and singles. For more among us, all the essential workers obliged and compelled to travel to work each given the day, the quiet of home more a mirage. For more of us, the pain of keeping distanced from our beloved ones.   During the short and anodyne summer, we allowed ourselves to the illusion of holidays, but that brief experience is now gone. Summer has been a season felt like a suspended sentence. We are back into the pinging noises of our social messaging services and the fuzziness of our conference calls. And the cloudy skies of Fall.   We adapted to this new version of modern life, with a strong dependence on working connections and delivery services. Monades with virtual escape routes. Tablets and smartphones what illuminated codices were for the first millennium’s monks.   Our immune systems are now slightly weaker than before the pandemic as we miss on the usual concoction of germs and bacteria we were used to share with others in public transports and workplaces.   Yet, the planet is not a different place than the one we left when we entered this suspended state in the first quarter of 2020. All the risks and the big trends are there, from climate change to the accelerated substitution human/machine. And a growing and baffling difficulty of the political milieu to grasp these changes and to define what are the key trade-offs and what are the big decisions facing us as individuals and as society.   We live confusing times, where abundance of data and overload of information do not translate on decision mechanisms or policy making adequate to the fast times we live. And where horizontal societies (I use the plural purposely) cross wires with different transversal agendas, being them equality, supremacism, environmental activism or citizen/consumer awareness. Though within a context of low objectivity, often. Politicians are the first ones, in some cases, to validate the confusion and the a-factual theories that circulate around. Using a simple metaphor, the new normal in politics is to point at the moon and claim it is an artificial satellite built by aliens billion years ago.   So, as a large swath of the world population sits on its own cocoons, waiting for new lockdown rules to be launched or implemented, there is a strong sense of lost direction. Or a sense of ‘no future’ ahead of us. Or each direction is taken, occupied, gorged with ideas and influencers. A traffic jam of epic dimensions, like the 800 kilometres of queues of cars trying to escape Paris before lockdown.          2. No future or one too many futures   We are into the midstream of a singularity, or a combination of different singularities, as some key tipping points are reached (as example, the accelerated melting of Greenland’s glaciers or the recent experiments with microbots to connect neural cells – a first step towards a cyberization of humanity). We are beginning to observe a new world, a new normal. If we ever had a normal to adhere to.   What is concerning for most of us is the array of scenarios with different degree of dystopia or challenges. We live, as never before, in a Montecarlo-simulated world. Where each scenario seems difficult to be priced, if not with the rosy lenses of market players.   These non-dystopian futures may seem aligned to the ‘no future’ war scream of Johnny Rotten/John Lydon when the Sex Pistols, more than forty years ago, spearheaded the punk revolution in UK, a precise moment in our recent history when chaos and innovation were once again intertwined, in some form of anarchism/old establishment carousel.   No future, they were telling us then. And it seems we are back to that moment in time, when the young generations were facing a similar period of radical changes in society, after the long austerity of the Seventies. The world back in 1977 was, especially in Western countries, a relic of a glorious past. Whatever promise of wealth and prosperity our parents imagined, the young generations had to deal with a world with an increased level of geopolitical complexity and the first reckoning to climate change. Let alone the absence of any intergenerational transmission of power if not through entitlement.           3. Trump ain’t punk   A picture of an aged John Lydon with a Make America Great Again t-shirt, a far cry from the skinny and spiky aired himself of nearly 50 years ago, taken in 2018, surfaced again and it created a substantial noise among his fans. In one of those thought-provoking chats in a social media, somebody claimed that, maybe, Lydon was right and Trump could be considered himself a punk, a disruptor of the finest nature. A kind of the bug of the system, or a swamp-drainer, on his own words.  Though considering Trump a punk completely misses the point not only about him but also about the way in which we can read these divisive times. More than with John Lydon, who continues to act as agent provocateur since he left the Sex Pistols and he invented with his new band PIL the post-punk movement, the real comparison could be thrown with Malcolm McLaren, another ginger haired mogul and the original mind behind New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols.   Both Trump and McLaren were the result of rich inner city elites (McLaren’s parents were diamond traders), with a strong sense of entitlement, based on census and ethnic origins transcending and annihilating the primal desire of the punk movement (in its truer forms after the evanescent period of the Sex Pistols) for a new freer society or rooting for the absence of it.   Both of them were the result of a post-Warholian society, based on instantaneous gratification via notoriety or via expensive objects (it doesn’t matter if copies of copies, like most of Warhol’s ‘masterpieces’). Trump’s perpetual grin, filmed by few hours by Warhol, would have been another classic like Empire.   He firstly exploited the traditional media notoriety, becoming a kind of It-kid in the New York socialite scene and, after a series of debacles in the real estate world, he moved into the reality show buzz. The Apprentice, where he was playing a gruesome and successful CEO. A fictional character that allowed him to become a caricature but more relevantly, to enter into the houses of every American. Like Ozzy Osbourne became a cartoonish hard rock god on his own reality family show, Trump became the archetypical American businessman. All testosterones and guts decisions.   Then, as The Apprentice closed, the damage was done. Trump discovered the incredible power of social media, where everybody is entitled to an opinion and where the high frequency of messages and feed of news and tweets expanded proportionately the capacity of influencers to thrive, in a kind of continuous, somehow delirious, sequencing of 15 minutes of fame, repeated each day million times.   Trump created then his own show, surrounded by millions of Trumpers and Anti-Trumpers, replicating a similar phenomenon of the one of Justin Bieber and his Beliebers. With a difference. Justin Bieber was still selling music, shows, entertainment. Trump realised that his own person was the product to be sold to Americans. His credibility as political agent/body and then as legitimate candidate for the Republican party was becoming stronger by the day. With the result we all know.   So, Trump’s life is a perfect parable of entitlement and notoriety, based on the extremely advantageous starting point he had. He was born under a good sign and, throughout all his life, he never conceded his spot on the limelight, even when discredited as businessman but as the ultimate product of the American all-white-male way to leadership.   Punk was different, it was a disillusion with the future as narrative of the generation immediately after the Boomers one.   It was a critical moment in UK History and the ‘punk’ movement was only part of a group of movements predicating radical change and eversion. When punk exploded as sub-culture in UK and US, in Continental Europe we had internal forms of terrorism (France, Italy, Germany and Spain) and the sense of fragility and confusion was very similar, with the main difference that the unrest was out there in the streets and not, often, confined into the realm of social media.   Trump is not an anarchist or a promoter of a radical agenda, but the extreme guardian of conservative values, not even trying to embody them. As the message is not anymore one of resemblance and assimilation but a mirrors game, where Trump and the Republicans engage with the racist and radical right and the more extreme fringes of evangelical movements as intermediary agents.   Trump does not need to behave, but he needs to defend a series of positions now threatened by modernity. With the big problem that the existential threat to the conservative American way of life is not into the political opponents or essential rights like LGBT ones or planned parenthood, but in much more radical transformations of our society and the world around us (e.g. climate change).   But this doesn’t matter to Trump or his accolites. His thirst for endorsement and fame has been so pervasive that he left not much space for other discussions, a deafening background noise not only for Americans but for all the global citizens. As Trump has been, like Malcom McLaren, a master on interpreting a series of current anxieties and tensions, using them for their own benefit, being power grab or filthy profit. And, moreover, substituting a discourse on how to cope with the evident realities and risks of this juncture in time with a continuous self-reference to himself, a continuous Trumpeness made of videos, tweets, soundbites, all passed through the echo chambers we all became. Me included, with this oped.   Trump is not a punk, for sure, but we have been all punked by him.           4. The Disillusioned Society   Trump thrives on a liquified or nearly gaseous society, where the political discourse is confined to the 140 characters of a tweet, or the even lazier action of a click of a retweet. Communication happens through Short Tik-Tok videos and we are exposed to some form of Tinderisation/polarisation of choices. In this kind of short-breathing and superfast now-here land, each opinion is counted and coded as a ‘like’, but no views seem to stick or count anymore.   A desirable long-term vision of the future is replaced by the continuous reaction and patching back to millenary fears we never abandoned since the last century.   It is a subtle game of fear tactics vs. strategies of hope or coping ones: the live streaming of chaos and unrest, wildfires in Australia and California and devastating floods and storms all across the rest of the worlds seems to reaffirm the fact we are living dystopian times, but the issue is that the culprits mask themselves as the victims.   As we are running on empty in terms of natural resources, our society is pushed, voluntarily or not, towards an accelerated introduction of forms of societal control via images and snippets of half truths becoming opinions, political parties, movements.   The social media-filtered chaos could be the best vivid dream for an anarchist, if it wasn’t for the fact that the anarchist views expressed by uber socialist thinkers have been slowly replaced by a very conservative and bigoted view of the world.   The society imagined by our grandparents after the Second World War, especially in Europe, was one where the scars of the conflict were supposed to heal, rebuilding a connecting tissue among the different classes and views of the world built around understanding and respect, nonetheless through continuous debate and regular rebalancing between the dominant political and economic philosophies: socialism and liberism.   The world post-1989 and post-2008 (two pivotal moments of disintegration or extreme challenges to both systems) has been one where the traditional conflicts, the ones of ideologies or countries opposed to each other, have been substituted by divisions and fractures in the society created in a rather horizontal and transversal manner. Also, thanks to the virtual blows of a small extremist minority (or minorities), able to influence or keep the silent majority at bay.   These fault lines built around the traditional ones associated to gender, race, wealth (and related access to education and health), have been boosted by other divisions, based not on tangible differences, but on extremization of views of the world, like the flat-earth and no-vax movements. The abundance of conspiracy theories or all-encompassing explanations of the world bring the risk to create substantial confusion and to lose sight on the adequate addressing of the biggest global social shock since the Second World War. Let alone the environmental stress we will have to endure.   The magmatic concoction of conspiracy theories has today reached the mainstream and, with it, the silent majority, thanks to social media and the proliferation of smart phones. The emergence of Breitbart boosted Trump’s chances to be elected, with a similar approach followed by QAnon, with its dissemination of fake theories, built on a mix of religion, numerology and pseudo-scientific theories. In a sauce of gossips and using celebrities to validate gossips and rumours, in a kind of Perez Hilton’s fashion.   The process of distribution is via social media, mostly Facebook or Twitter. Each new tweet or post is amplified by related sites and outlets of right-wing/populists, in a kind of virtual leafleting. The target of these theories is the same population target as the Tea Party during the 90s: the disillusioned middle class who survived the biggest financial crisis of the last century but which was hit deeply on their own aspirations and, for annuity holders, their future.   The phenomenon of the ‘disillusioned middle class’ is a communal aspect of European and American societies. In Europe, other factors are having an impact on the society’s stability: the age structure of many European countries, the end of fixed jobs and the perceived (yet not real) threat of a continuous replacement of ‘Europeans’ with immigrants or machines.   The disillusioned middle class considers itself more and more marginalised, having to deal with the absence of a stable and prosperous set of ‘futures’. Hence, figures like Trump in US, Farage in UK or Salvini in Italy offer a vision of traditional values and of the potential step into a past that does not exist anymore. The Punk’s ‘No future’ vs the Conspirationists’ ‘Back to the past’.   On the left side of the political spectrum, the fall-out of the financial crisis and the demolition of the middle class ambitions allowed the emergence of a kind of neo-radical communist thinking, far more left than the wilder Slavo Zizek or the recently deceased David Graeber. These ideas are well-represented in the books of The Invisible Committee and Tiqqun (written by collective of anonymous French left-wing thinkers published by Semiotexte, a Californian radical publisher distributed by MIT Press). These are proper handbooks for the revolutions to come, where the Euro crisis and the Northern Africa’s ‘Spring’ are considered heralds of new, communist times.   These books offer an intellectually exhaustive guide to channel dissent, but a cultured and well-educated one. And this where outlets like QAnon are more aligned to a society where people do not read books and where the attention span requires icons and symbols more than complex social theories. They don’t embolden the disparaged middle class with sophisticated explanations about social disparity and inequality and the right to fight back the ‘powers’, but they build a gory and mysterious narrative around some alleged powers (often aiming against progressive policies and leaders), to justify Donal Trump as a kind of angel of revenge.   An angel that seems to have clipped his own wings, with the lack of realisation that an externality like a pandemic would have triggered even wider and deeper fears than the one of the ‘different one’ or of the evil immigrants from Latin America.  A rhetoric which served him well in 2016. But not in the world of 2020 battered by an invisible enemy. As the election’s results have shown clearly.   As the sense of crisis linked to immigration, inner city violence, libertarianism was playing well for the radical right, insofar winning the votes of the scared and fearful white working classes, Covid-19 has once again brought us back to the real fears we all share, the ones for a world changing so fast we may not recognise our own lives before the pandemic.   The pandemic led us to realise that, apart the theories and the fake news, we live in a ‘society at risk’, where the continuous pressure to the asymptotes of ideological distribution will not offer us solution, but more aggravation.   So, if there is a silver lining of this period, it may be the realisation that we should reacquire the true spirit of the punk movement of the end of the Seventies: making the most of scarcity of resources and redesigning a better no-future for all.   In order to save our society from dissolution or exacerbation of verbal conflicts into riots and disorder, we need to reaffirm the present as the main domain of action, a place of respect and challenge of ideas but without the psychotic social-media vandalism of the last decade. A place to re-imagine society, within the opportunities offered by technology but without the fear of using it and within the needs of environmentally and socially sustainable growth.   And, of course, in a Covid free world. 

Beneath a steady and continuous wind, in the British far west, the quicksand of Morecambe Bay emerges rancid from the subsoil. They cling to the confines of the island and prevent it from drifting.

If José Saramago’s “stone raft” broke away from the continent and wandered the ocean in pursuit of utopia, the British concrete island told by James Ballard declares its separation from the European Union without having the ability to leave. It stops, motionless, ready to be swallowed up by the same financial capital that this fracture has provoked and led.

Before Morecambe Bay, there is Lancaster. A Roman outpost, in the Middle Ages it became one of the most important cities of the Kingdom and the site of the most famous witchcraft trial: The trials of the Pendle witches. Today, Jeremy Corbyn sits in the dock.

He moved the party too far to the left. And actually only got one million more votes than Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, and two million more than Gordon Brown, the last centrist Labour candidates. He’s an old wreck, the son of ancient ideologies that don’t keep up with the contemporary times. And in fact he triumphed in the 18-30 age group, and won in the 30-50 age group. He lost by a little in the those aged +50, and by a lot in those aged +65.

Jeremy Corbyn is like witches, guilty until proven guilty. Guilty of showing the possibility of another, better world. Guilty of wanting peace.

“Jeremy Corbyn was guilty before the trial even began. For months, the press turned him into the target of the most blatant personal contempt and abuse. He was literally the ghost that roamed Britain with a manifesto of social transformation that, for the first time since World War II, dared to protect jobs, the environment, change taxation and refinance welfare,” Francesca Coin, senior lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, says.

“It is the greatest deception of capital, that which leads people to vote, or even fight, against their material interests. If we can call this mix of austerity, racism and neoliberal policies that await the Kingdom fascism, then they also includes the promises about ‘doing’ and ‘controlling’ that characterised the Tories’ election campaign,” John Foot, professor of contemporary history at Bristol University, says.

In the most recent history, the imperial one, Lancaster was home to the textile industry. And  to slavery. Between a canal and a gothic spire, a flea market as crowded as ever and a pub where one can drink to remember to forget, a painting appears. Made by school children, it represents one of the city’s “benefactors” holding what looks like a glove. It is the hand of his slave, who cut and buried in the cemetery at the death of his faithful servant.

It is the eternal return of the Empire, under old and new forms.

“Neoliberalism in bankruptcy can only relaunch a nationalist protectionism that, just like a wall, keeps the crisis and migrants at a distance. Here as elsewhere. Now, there will be an inevitable strengthening and extension of the Commonwealth’s ties. And an even closer — and vassal-like — link with the US, Trump or no Trump, and with other English-speaking countries,” Leonardo Clausi, correspondent for “Il Manifesto” from London, says.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next few years, Great Britain became a kind of Dubai, a tax haven that offers freedom to capital and entrepreneurs, and in which the working class lives in a proto-slavery condition. I expect an increase in unemployment, a final privatisation of health care with an aggressive entry of American pharmaceutical companies, education in essence is already private, further assaults on social protection. Freedom of movement of capital for the rich; borders, cuts, police and exploitation for everyone else,” Francesca Coin adds.

The quicksand of neoliberalism is at work. Andy Capp no longer has a chance.

From Hartlepool to Middlesbrough, from Leeds to Bradford, from Manchester to Blackpool, from Lancaster to Morecambe. From East to West, from dawn to dusk. The winter of our discontent finally fell on this excrescence of land emerged in the North Sea.

Roy, owner of the Edmonsons fishmonger in Morecambe Bay, proudly displays black and white photographs of a charming resort town with a huge, crowded swimming pool. All around, in the background, fishing and trading ships calmly cut through the icy sea.

Today, this is no longer the case. Morecambe Bay is just another British ghost town. The “Food Bank”, which distributes food to those at the most advanced point of development in the West who do not have the money to eat, is under attack. They’re young, white, British. They believe in the Empire. They voted Boris Johnson. They’re ready for war.

Here, in 2004, about twenty Chinese irregular immigrants arrived in containers in the port of Liverpool, and where then distributed as slaves along the coast, were swallowed up by quicksand. They were almost all in their twenties. They collected shellfish on quicksand in exchange for starvation wages, paid under the table. They all died, for the glory of the Empire.

It was a tragedy of slavery that did not scratch the Blairism grandeur, a cry of alarm that was not understood. Today, migrants die daily in camps and construction sites, in factories and containers. Today, the inhabitants of the Kingdom shop at the Food Bank and vote against their own interests. They mourn the empire and vote for Brexit, which will mark its end. They hate the migrants and rejoice at their deaths, covering their eyes so as not to understand that they are killing themselves.

Lo specchio è ignobile, perché mostra che l’altro siamo noi.

The mirror is vile, because it shows that we are “the other”.

With disarming innocence, seraphic, Roy points to the election poster hanging in the window of his fishmonger, and says: “The Tories with austerity have cut all services, welfare and public health. That’s why I voted for them. Because now, with Brexit, they’ll get us back on track.”

Barrow In Furness, in front of Morecambe Bay, is the place where Mark Fisher — one of the most lucid analysts of the quicksand of neoliberalism, of their ability to swallow every dimension of the human being, depriving him of any possibility of escape, even imaginary —was born.

Forty years of austerity policies, of indiscriminate cuts, have eroded all hope. “It’s not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are ‘fake’ but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated,” William Davies wrote on The Guardian.

In the “burnout society” told by Mark Fisher and Byung-Chul Han, which the Kingdom is the most sublime manifestation of, in every public or private bathroom there is a button, through which customers can be more or less satisfied with the level of cleanliness of the room. Everything is under control, everything is in competition, everything is judged.

If you press the red light, they fire half the workers because they didn’t clean properly. If you press green, they fire half of the workers because obviously less are needed to do the job. If you press yellow, they fire the workers because in the performance society you always have to excel.

The secret of this stingy humanity is found in the loos of the Kingdom.

Imprisoned in the most violent system of discipline and surveillance ever implemented in history, the human being uses his last strength to judge and be judged. The trials of the Pendle witches can be found everywhere today.

Walking along the Morecambe Bay promenade, between a permanently lowered shutter and a building about to collapse, pubs and amusement arcades are the only lights that illuminate the untimely night.

Viva Las Vegas! Where the neon signs flash your name, the one-arm bandits cash in, all those hopes down the drain… … …

Morecambe Bay is finis terrae. Beyond the quicksand, there is nothing. Only the end of the Kingdom, and the beginning of Alfred Kubin’s Other Side. Prophetically written a few years before the beginning of the Great War, the novel tells a world “burdened with a permanent mystery, conceived as a mosaic of ruins, antiquities, and decrepit and corroded remainders of the past.”

The failure of the Cop25, the world climate conference, and the Brexit to come after the British elections, resulting in the disintegration of Europe, are linked. They are the latest declaration of war by catastrophic capitalism. Yet another repeated attack in Sarajevo. The endless casus belli.

“Brexit as the first step of the dismemberment of Europe, one of the mainstays of the post-war order, will mark the beginning of a phase of extraordinary instability. A bit like the suspension of the convertibility of the pound to gold in 1914 marked the beginning of a phase of instability culminating in the first (and then second) World War, so we are witnessing the long agony of the geo-monetary order after World War II. It will be anything but pleasant. What frightens me is that, even in the last century, it was necessary to go through the worst nightmares to become human again,” Francesca Coin says.

The journey at the end of the night of the Kingdom’s dissolution and the end of Europe ends in front of the Old Pier Bookshop. A Borgesian labyrinth library of infinite dimensions, containing all the books ever published since the dawn of time.

Ronnie, the bookseller, shows a copy of the second original edition of George Orwell’s The road to Wigan pier, which had identified the end of the Kingdom at the time of its greatest expansion.

He had fought Fascism not only in Catalonia in 1936, by taking up arms against the Bando Nacional, but also and above all at home, identifying the adherence of the British white working class to the imperial ideology as the seeds of its defeat.

“I can’t sleep at night because of what happened: one day, we will wake up and realise we have been fooled. It is easy to repeat the mistakes of the past, if you no longer remember them. And we know what happens when Europe is not united. How long has it been since we have seen war between European countries, how much longer can peace last?” Ronnie wonders.

Quicksand has swallowed up all hope. Andy Capp is getting ready for war.

the-war-that-comes-brexit-vol-

THE WAR THAT COMES. BREXIT, VOL.3

 Beneath a steady and continuous wind, in the British far west, the quicksand of Morecambe Bay emerges rancid from the subsoil. They cling to the confines of the island and prevent it from drifting.  If José Saramago’s “stone raft” broke away from the continent and wandered the ocean in pursuit of utopia, the British concrete island told by James Ballard declares its separation from the European Union without having the ability to leave. It stops, motionless, ready to be swallowed up by the same financial capital that this fracture has provoked and led.  Before Morecambe Bay, there is Lancaster. A Roman outpost, in the Middle Ages it became one of the most important cities of the Kingdom and the site of the most famous witchcraft trial: The trials of the Pendle witches. Today, Jeremy Corbyn sits in the dock.  He moved the party too far to the left. And actually only got one million more votes than Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, and two million more than Gordon Brown, the last centrist Labour candidates. He’s an old wreck, the son of ancient ideologies that don’t keep up with the contemporary times. And in fact he triumphed in the 18-30 age group, and won in the 30-50 age group. He lost by a little in the those aged +50, and by a lot in those aged +65.   Jeremy Corbyn is like witches, guilty until proven guilty. Guilty of showing the possibility of another, better world. Guilty of wanting peace.  “Jeremy Corbyn was guilty before the trial even began. For months, the press turned him into the target of the most blatant personal contempt and abuse. He was literally the ghost that roamed Britain with a manifesto of social transformation that, for the first time since World War II, dared to protect jobs, the environment, change taxation and refinance welfare,” Francesca Coin, senior lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, says.  “It is the greatest deception of capital, that which leads people to vote, or even fight, against their material interests. If we can call this mix of austerity, racism and neoliberal policies that await the Kingdom fascism, then they also includes the promises about ‘doing’ and ‘controlling’ that characterised the Tories’ election campaign,” John Foot, professor of contemporary history at Bristol University, says.   In the most recent history, the imperial one, Lancaster was home to the textile industry. And  to slavery. Between a canal and a gothic spire, a flea market as crowded as ever and a pub where one can drink to remember to forget, a painting appears. Made by school children, it represents one of the city’s “benefactors” holding what looks like a glove. It is the hand of his slave, who cut and buried in the cemetery at the death of his faithful servant.  It is the eternal return of the Empire, under old and new forms.  “Neoliberalism in bankruptcy can only relaunch a nationalist protectionism that, just like a wall, keeps the crisis and migrants at a distance. Here as elsewhere. Now, there will be an inevitable strengthening and extension of the Commonwealth’s ties. And an even closer — and vassal-like — link with the US, Trump or no Trump, and with other English-speaking countries,” Leonardo Clausi, correspondent for “Il Manifesto” from London, says.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next few years, Great Britain became a kind of Dubai, a tax haven that offers freedom to capital and entrepreneurs, and in which the working class lives in a proto-slavery condition. I expect an increase in unemployment, a final privatisation of health care with an aggressive entry of American pharmaceutical companies, education in essence is already private, further assaults on social protection. Freedom of movement of capital for the rich; borders, cuts, police and exploitation for everyone else,” Francesca Coin adds.  The quicksand of neoliberalism is at work. Andy Capp no longer has a chance.  From Hartlepool to Middlesbrough, from Leeds to Bradford, from Manchester to Blackpool, from Lancaster to Morecambe. From East to West, from dawn to dusk. The winter of our discontent finally fell on this excrescence of land emerged in the North Sea.   Roy, owner of the Edmonsons fishmonger in Morecambe Bay, proudly displays black and white photographs of a charming resort town with a huge, crowded swimming pool. All around, in the background, fishing and trading ships calmly cut through the icy sea.  Today, this is no longer the case. Morecambe Bay is just another British ghost town. The “Food Bank”, which distributes food to those at the most advanced point of development in the West who do not have the money to eat, is under attack. They’re young, white, British. They believe in the Empire. They voted Boris Johnson. They’re ready for war.  Here, in 2004, about twenty Chinese irregular immigrants arrived in containers in the port of Liverpool, and where then distributed as slaves along the coast, were swallowed up by quicksand. They were almost all in their twenties. They collected shellfish on quicksand in exchange for starvation wages, paid under the table. They all died, for the glory of the Empire.  It was a tragedy of slavery that did not scratch the Blairism grandeur, a cry of alarm that was not understood. Today, migrants die daily in camps and construction sites, in factories and containers. Today, the inhabitants of the Kingdom shop at the Food Bank and vote against their own interests. They mourn the empire and vote for Brexit, which will mark its end. They hate the migrants and rejoice at their deaths, covering their eyes so as not to understand that they are killing themselves.  Lo specchio è ignobile, perché mostra che l’altro siamo noi.  The mirror is vile, because it shows that we are “the other”.  With disarming innocence, seraphic, Roy points to the election poster hanging in the window of his fishmonger, and says: “The Tories with austerity have cut all services, welfare and public health. That’s why I voted for them. Because now, with Brexit, they’ll get us back on track.”   Barrow In Furness, in front of Morecambe Bay, is the place where Mark Fisher — one of the most lucid analysts of the quicksand of neoliberalism, of their ability to swallow every dimension of the human being, depriving him of any possibility of escape, even imaginary —was born.  Forty years of austerity policies, of indiscriminate cuts, have eroded all hope. “It’s not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are ‘fake’ but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated,” William Davies wrote on The Guardian.  In the “burnout society” told by Mark Fisher and Byung-Chul Han, which the Kingdom is the most sublime manifestation of, in every public or private bathroom there is a button, through which customers can be more or less satisfied with the level of cleanliness of the room. Everything is under control, everything is in competition, everything is judged.  If you press the red light, they fire half the workers because they didn’t clean properly. If you press green, they fire half of the workers because obviously less are needed to do the job. If you press yellow, they fire the workers because in the performance society you always have to excel.  The secret of this stingy humanity is found in the loos of the Kingdom.  Imprisoned in the most violent system of discipline and surveillance ever implemented in history, the human being uses his last strength to judge and be judged. The trials of the Pendle witches can be found everywhere today.  Walking along the Morecambe Bay promenade, between a permanently lowered shutter and a building about to collapse, pubs and amusement arcades are the only lights that illuminate the untimely night.  Viva Las Vegas! Where the neon signs flash your name, the one-arm bandits cash in, all those hopes down the drain… … …   Morecambe Bay is finis terrae. Beyond the quicksand, there is nothing. Only the end of the Kingdom, and the beginning of Alfred Kubin’s Other Side. Prophetically written a few years before the beginning of the Great War, the novel tells a world “burdened with a permanent mystery, conceived as a mosaic of ruins, antiquities, and decrepit and corroded remainders of the past.”   The failure of the Cop25, the world climate conference, and the Brexit to come after the British elections, resulting in the disintegration of Europe, are linked. They are the latest declaration of war by catastrophic capitalism. Yet another repeated attack in Sarajevo. The endless casus belli.  “Brexit as the first step of the dismemberment of Europe, one of the mainstays of the post-war order, will mark the beginning of a phase of extraordinary instability. A bit like the suspension of the convertibility of the pound to gold in 1914 marked the beginning of a phase of instability culminating in the first (and then second) World War, so we are witnessing the long agony of the geo-monetary order after World War II. It will be anything but pleasant. What frightens me is that, even in the last century, it was necessary to go through the worst nightmares to become human again,” Francesca Coin says.  The journey at the end of the night of the Kingdom’s dissolution and the end of Europe ends in front of the Old Pier Bookshop. A Borgesian labyrinth library of infinite dimensions, containing all the books ever published since the dawn of time.  Ronnie, the bookseller, shows a copy of the second original edition of George Orwell’s The road to Wigan pier, which had identified the end of the Kingdom at the time of its greatest expansion.   He had fought Fascism not only in Catalonia in 1936, by taking up arms against the Bando Nacional, but also and above all at home, identifying the adherence of the British white working class to the imperial ideology as the seeds of its defeat.  “I can’t sleep at night because of what happened: one day, we will wake up and realise we have been fooled. It is easy to repeat the mistakes of the past, if you no longer remember them. And we know what happens when Europe is not united. How long has it been since we have seen war between European countries, how much longer can peace last?” Ronnie wonders.  Quicksand has swallowed up all hope. Andy Capp is getting ready for war.

It is the beginning of the end. Dawn rises fetidly behind the arcades and amusement parks of Blackpool South, a ghost town with no future, where the Tories, after more than twenty years, have regained a decisive seat. The stench of shit has come all the way here.

It is the beginning of Brexit, of the break-up of Europe, of the coming fascism. It is the end of the socialist utopia of tens of thousands of young people who, for the first time in a UK devastated by the crisis, had approached militancy. It is the beginning and the end of any political consideration or analysis.

Between the hope of building socialism and the comfort of holing himself up in fascism, Andy Capp chose the latter.

In reporting the exit polls, which will then prove to be all too accurate, the compassed BBC presenter uses the word “catastrophe”. He hadn’t even done so in cases of war or terrorist attacks. 

The Tories triumphs with 365 seats (66 more than in previous elections) and well over the required majority of 326. Their leader, Boris Johnson, announces that Brexit is imminent. The Labour collapse to 203 seats (42 less) and face one of the worst defeats in their history. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, resigns.

The SNP obtains 48 seats (plus 13), beyond all expectations. Its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, announces the next referendum that will sanction the inevitable independence of Scotland from Great Britain.

The beginning is a bus leaving from the eastern suburbs of Manchester in the morning. In another dawn, so remote that it seems to belong to a different historical era. It is Thursday, December 12, voting day. For over a century, people have been voting on Thursdays here, because Friday is payday and people start spending their money in the pub, and they are constantly drunk ever since. On Wednesdays, they have run out of money. On Thursdays, they are sober, hopefully.

The bus is joyful, full of hope. Under the aegis of Momentum, the left and youth wing of the Labour Party, students, workers, activists and the unemployed, average age under 30, are heading to Blackpool South. It is one of the constituencies hovering in the dystopian British single-member electoral system.

It’s the place to start the rescue from.

The boys arrive in Blackpool, take the material from the Labour’s headquarters, the list of Labour voters and the undecided. And, in the dirty pouring rain, they go out into the streets to campaign door-to-door. They knock, they smile, they chat, they nod, they explain, they listen. They move on to the next house. One after the other. All day long. While the rain blends in with the sea.

Rebecca, 26, is in charge of musical events. “The media played everything on the opposition between the two leaders, avoiding talking about the programs just to benefit the Tories. Presenting Corbyn as a tired, resigned, anti-Semitic old man, too much on the left, they killed two birds with one stone: on the one hand, they frightened the electorate, on the other, they could avoid saying what Labour would do for this country and what the Tories would not.”

Ashiya is 31 years old and works at “The Modernist” and “Tribune” — socialist magazines. She is in charge of Mcr Fem, a feminist collective in Manchester. “The dominant narrative has made it possible to put health care and migrants together, with fake news on the verge of ridicule, making  people believe that the disastrous situation in which the health care system is comes from immigrants, and not because from privatisation, savage cuts and austerity implemented by the Tory government.”

Sasha is 22, a student, she has lived in Marseille and speaks a little Italian. “We’re doing everything we can, but people are now selfish and think only of themselves. Since Ms Thatcher, every sense of community and solidarity has gone. Even people who say they are worried about the state of public health actually think only of Brexit, because they are convinced it will give them more benefits.”

Ashiya, Rebecca, Nuria, Sasha, Emma. They walk all day in the incessant, infected rain, knocking on each and every door, talking, listening, marking on a sheet of paper who they have convinced and who they have not.

Hope painted on their young and cheerful faces, conquering the Blackpool South constituency. It will be a failure. A catastrophe.

Blackpool is a synecdoche of this country. Former holiday resort of the North British working class — the miners, during the two weeks of the year when the mines closed for maintenance, were the first to come here after the Great War. In the years of the economic boom, it exploded as a tourist centre.

Amusement arcades, amusement parks, brothels, seaside resorts and fish and chips shops. Neon lights and iridescent signs at every corner. A wheel that imitates that of London, a tower that mimics the Eiffel Tower. Something in between Rimini and Las Vegas.

Today, with low cost companies you pay less to go to Spain or Greece, and Blackpool has been abandoned to its fate. It has become a ghost town. There’s nobody around anymore. People emigrate, tourists don’t come anymore. There are only empty amusement arcades. And lights, which no longer illuminate anything.

It’s catastrophe, as the BBC said. A debacle which is not born on a night of election results, but is the result of forty years of neoliberal policies. A domination of hearts and minds, to which people are so accustomed that they are placidly resting in the arms of future fascism.

Brexit is not just the sick dream of the Andy Capps of the North. It’s the miserable economic gain of the upper class of the South, of those arid and selfish characters told in Jonathan Coe’s “Middle England”. It is the financial speculation of investment funds based in tax havens around the world.

It is the capitalism of catastrophe, which gains from climatic, political and economic disasters. From the joyful phone calls of entrepreneurs during the earthquakes in Italy, to the young people’s eyes that light up in the City of London as they watch the effects of the tsunami in Japan on a screen. 

From the business of racial segregation, after Hurricane Katrina, to the huge financial movements that anticipate and direct the South American coups. On the ruins of the United Kingdom and Europe, ravenous vultures have already gained hyperbolic figures. Andy Capp was just kicked hard in the ass, as always.

The subject of the United Kingdom (almost) never rebels. As George Orwell writes in “The road to Wigan pier”, the British working class accepts the violence of power and the tragedies of life without turning a hair. “They endure everything, as long as they are told it must be so.”

The dawn of hope in Manchester fades into Blackpool’s sunset of anguish. And, finally, into the night of electoral terror. The boys and girls of Momentum return home, to school, to work. Unsure if they are to find them back where they belong.

Brexit is the beginning of the end. It is “the annihilation of space by neoliberalism,” in David Harvey’s words. Now Britain will break away from Europe. At that point, Northern Ireland will be abandoned to its fate — it is impossible to build frontiers along the Teorainn na hÉireann — and will have to reunite, at a price that promises to be bloody, with the Irish Republic. And Scotland will in turn detach itself from the UK, through a referendum to remain in Europe. The vote was clear in this regard.

Whatever the political and economic consequences of this process, a conclusion is inevitable. The UK will be dissolved, the monarchy will disappear. Elizabeth II will be remembered in history as the last monarch of the island.

Boris Johnson turned out to be the most unsuspected Republican militant ever born on British soil. His insistence on Brexit, his quarrel with the Northern Irish Unionists, his lack of interest in resolving the Scottish issue, read in retrospect, had only one purpose: to destroy the Crown.

It is the beginning of the end of the monarchy.

Dawn rises again in the ghost town of Blackpool. It is the cold, sharp dawn of the day after the catastrophe. The boys and girls of Momentum have done all they can, and will continue to do so.

Emma is 32, studying for a PhD in Manchester. “Corbyn was right to resign, they’d have fired him anyway. But now he should be replaced by someone from the Labour left, perhaps a woman from the North, I’m thinking about someone like Rebecca Long-Bailey.”

Nuria is 23, a part-time student working half a day making French fries to make a living. When they fired her, she went to the Job Centre, where they told her that, if she wanted the subsidy she had to stop studying and apply for a full time job, otherwise they wouldn’t have given her anything. And they did. “The reason for the defeat is Brexit. The Labour was too late in proposing a second referendum, and many remainers lost confidence in it.” She also wants Rebecca Long-Bailey instead of Corbyn. “She works well on TV and in the media, and at the same time she can speak to the working class, because she’s from there.” 

Catastrophe comes from the ancient Greek καταστροϕή, which means reversal, upheaval. The embryos of a new world are moving in a catastrophe. The end of the Kingdom contains the beginning of every possible revolution.

Ashiya, Rebecca, Nuria, Sasha, Emma and all those like them, who believed and still believe in it, are ready to start again. And they will do it now. They will continue to fight in the streets and in the collectives, to oppose the neoliberal fascism that imposed on them the vote of an old and devastated country, weak and incapable of dreaming.

They will dance on the rubble of the Kingdom to come.

As Joe Strummer — a boy who fought against the war on the poor brought by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and lost it — said: anything is still possible. Andy Capp chose fascism, but for his children the future is unwritten.

andy-capp-does-not-live-here-anymore-brexit-vol-

ANDY CAPP DOES NOT LIVE HERE ANYMORE. BREXIT, VOL.2

 It is the beginning of the end. Dawn rises fetidly behind the arcades and amusement parks of Blackpool South, a ghost town with no future, where the Tories, after more than twenty years, have regained a decisive seat. The stench of shit has come all the way here.  It is the beginning of Brexit, of the break-up of Europe, of the coming fascism. It is the end of the socialist utopia of tens of thousands of young people who, for the first time in a UK devastated by the crisis, had approached militancy. It is the beginning and the end of any political consideration or analysis.  Between the hope of building socialism and the comfort of holing himself up in fascism, Andy Capp chose the latter.  In reporting the exit polls, which will then prove to be all too accurate, the compassed BBC presenter uses the word “catastrophe”. He hadn’t even done so in cases of war or terrorist attacks.   The Tories triumphs with 365 seats (66 more than in previous elections) and well over the required majority of 326. Their leader, Boris Johnson, announces that Brexit is imminent. The Labour collapse to 203 seats (42 less) and face one of the worst defeats in their history. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, resigns.  The SNP obtains 48 seats (plus 13), beyond all expectations. Its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, announces the next referendum that will sanction the inevitable independence of Scotland from Great Britain.   The beginning is a bus leaving from the eastern suburbs of Manchester in the morning. In another dawn, so remote that it seems to belong to a different historical era. It is Thursday, December 12, voting day. For over a century, people have been voting on Thursdays here, because Friday is payday and people start spending their money in the pub, and they are constantly drunk ever since. On Wednesdays, they have run out of money. On Thursdays, they are sober, hopefully.  The bus is joyful, full of hope. Under the aegis of Momentum, the left and youth wing of the Labour Party, students, workers, activists and the unemployed, average age under 30, are heading to Blackpool South. It is one of the constituencies hovering in the dystopian British single-member electoral system.  It’s the place to start the rescue from.   The boys arrive in Blackpool, take the material from the Labour’s headquarters, the list of Labour voters and the undecided. And, in the dirty pouring rain, they go out into the streets to campaign door-to-door. They knock, they smile, they chat, they nod, they explain, they listen. They move on to the next house. One after the other. All day long. While the rain blends in with the sea.  Rebecca, 26, is in charge of musical events. “The media played everything on the opposition between the two leaders, avoiding talking about the programs just to benefit the Tories. Presenting Corbyn as a tired, resigned, anti-Semitic old man, too much on the left, they killed two birds with one stone: on the one hand, they frightened the electorate, on the other, they could avoid saying what Labour would do for this country and what the Tories would not.”   Ashiya is 31 years old and works at “The Modernist” and “Tribune” — socialist magazines. She is in charge of Mcr Fem, a feminist collective in Manchester. “The dominant narrative has made it possible to put health care and migrants together, with fake news on the verge of ridicule, making  people believe that the disastrous situation in which the health care system is comes from immigrants, and not because from privatisation, savage cuts and austerity implemented by the Tory government.”  Sasha is 22, a student, she has lived in Marseille and speaks a little Italian. “We’re doing everything we can, but people are now selfish and think only of themselves. Since Ms Thatcher, every sense of community and solidarity has gone. Even people who say they are worried about the state of public health actually think only of Brexit, because they are convinced it will give them more benefits.”  Ashiya, Rebecca, Nuria, Sasha, Emma. They walk all day in the incessant, infected rain, knocking on each and every door, talking, listening, marking on a sheet of paper who they have convinced and who they have not.  Hope painted on their young and cheerful faces, conquering the Blackpool South constituency. It will be a failure. A catastrophe.  Blackpool is a synecdoche of this country. Former holiday resort of the North British working class — the miners, during the two weeks of the year when the mines closed for maintenance, were the first to come here after the Great War. In the years of the economic boom, it exploded as a tourist centre.  Amusement arcades, amusement parks, brothels, seaside resorts and fish and chips shops. Neon lights and iridescent signs at every corner. A wheel that imitates that of London, a tower that mimics the Eiffel Tower. Something in between Rimini and Las Vegas.  Today, with low cost companies you pay less to go to Spain or Greece, and Blackpool has been abandoned to its fate. It has become a ghost town. There’s nobody around anymore. People emigrate, tourists don’t come anymore. There are only empty amusement arcades. And lights, which no longer illuminate anything.  Andy Capp does not live here anymore.  It’s catastrophe, as the BBC said. A debacle which is not born on a night of election results, but is the result of forty years of neoliberal policies. A domination of hearts and minds, to which people are so accustomed that they are placidly resting in the arms of future fascism.  Brexit is not just the sick dream of the Andy Capps of the North. It’s the miserable economic gain of the upper class of the South, of those arid and selfish characters told in Jonathan Coe’s “Middle England”. It is the financial speculation of investment funds based in tax havens around the world.  It is the capitalism of catastrophe, which gains from climatic, political and economic disasters. From the joyful phone calls of entrepreneurs during the earthquakes in Italy, to the young people’s eyes that light up in the City of London as they watch the effects of the tsunami in Japan on a screen.   From the business of racial segregation, after Hurricane Katrina, to the huge financial movements that anticipate and direct the South American coups. On the ruins of the United Kingdom and Europe, ravenous vultures have already gained hyperbolic figures. Andy Capp was just kicked hard in the ass, as always.   The subject of the United Kingdom (almost) never rebels. As George Orwell writes in “The road to Wigan pier”, the British working class accepts the violence of power and the tragedies of life without turning a hair. “They endure everything, as long as they are told it must be so.”  The dawn of hope in Manchester fades into Blackpool’s sunset of anguish. And, finally, into the night of electoral terror. The boys and girls of Momentum return home, to school, to work. Unsure if they are to find them back where they belong.  Brexit is the beginning of the end. It is “the annihilation of space by neoliberalism,” in David Harvey’s words. Now Britain will break away from Europe. At that point, Northern Ireland will be abandoned to its fate — it is impossible to build frontiers along the Teorainn na hÉireann — and will have to reunite, at a price that promises to be bloody, with the Irish Republic. And Scotland will in turn detach itself from the UK, through a referendum to remain in Europe. The vote was clear in this regard.  Whatever the political and economic consequences of this process, a conclusion is inevitable. The UK will be dissolved, the monarchy will disappear. Elizabeth II will be remembered in history as the last monarch of the island.  Boris Johnson turned out to be the most unsuspected Republican militant ever born on British soil. His insistence on Brexit, his quarrel with the Northern Irish Unionists, his lack of interest in resolving the Scottish issue, read in retrospect, had only one purpose: to destroy the Crown.  It is the beginning of the end of the monarchy.   Dawn rises again in the ghost town of Blackpool. It is the cold, sharp dawn of the day after the catastrophe. The boys and girls of Momentum have done all they can, and will continue to do so.  Emma is 32, studying for a PhD in Manchester. “Corbyn was right to resign, they’d have fired him anyway. But now he should be replaced by someone from the Labour left, perhaps a woman from the North, I’m thinking about someone like Rebecca Long-Bailey.”  Nuria is 23, a part-time student working half a day making French fries to make a living. When they fired her, she went to the Job Centre, where they told her that, if she wanted the subsidy she had to stop studying and apply for a full time job, otherwise they wouldn’t have given her anything. And they did. “The reason for the defeat is Brexit. The Labour was too late in proposing a second referendum, and many remainers lost confidence in it.” She also wants Rebecca Long-Bailey instead of Corbyn. “She works well on TV and in the media, and at the same time she can speak to the working class, because she’s from there.”   Catastrophe comes from the ancient Greek καταστροϕή, which means reversal, upheaval. The embryos of a new world are moving in a catastrophe. The end of the Kingdom contains the beginning of every possible revolution.   Ashiya, Rebecca, Nuria, Sasha, Emma and all those like them, who believed and still believe in it, are ready to start again. And they will do it now. They will continue to fight in the streets and in the collectives, to oppose the neoliberal fascism that imposed on them the vote of an old and devastated country, weak and incapable of dreaming.  They will dance on the rubble of the Kingdom to come.  As Joe Strummer — a boy who fought against the war on the poor brought by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and lost it — said: anything is still possible. Andy Capp chose fascism, but for his children the future is unwritten.

The winter of our discontent, recalling us of Shakespeare, is ready to fall on the United Kingdom. A land that emerged four hundred million years ago which at the time physically detached itself from the European continent is now preparing to do so again, politically.

“Brexit” is the buzzword running through the country. Against the Europe of austerity and subsidiarity, against the Europe that takes more money than what is given back, against the Europe that injects migrants into the veins of the island and devastates the welfare state.

Europe is “the other” of these elections. The antagonist, the enemy. The external factor that allows a general and widespread shedding of responsibility.

In the last ten years, the episodes of malnutrition certified by the public health service have risen from 3,000 to 9,000, the free meals distributed by food collections from 40,000 to 1,600,000 every year. A country devastated by the Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson’s neoliberal policies. Well, nope, by Europe and migrants. It was them: it was the others.

In his “The Road To Wigan Pier”, a trip to the mining towns of Northern England to tell the story of the fetid misery in which the working class of the 1930s survived, George Orwell, in a rare moment of tenderness, uses a very powerful metaphor, that of a few crows copulating in the few patches of mud that break the huge expanses of ice.

Today, not even that anymore. In the UK, schools and hospitals, shops and libraries are being closed. You eat poorly and badly, you just drink. You don’t even fuck anymore. There’s no hope. Births have fallen by ten percent in the last five years.

In Hartlepool, a small port town in the Northeast, Reg Smythe, the creator of Andy Capp — a wonderful character who moved only to bridge the gap between the sofa at home and the pub — was born and lived. One of the most violent attacks on the society of capitalist alienation ever appeared on a comic strip.

But the new Andy Capps now only hate the other Andy Capps.

Nick was a DJ for almost 30 years. “Mostly ‘60s, ‘70s music, a little dance. No techno. Now I still do it, but a lot less, I take care of my seven grandchildren and go on sunny vacations with my wife as often as I can.”

“Even though we’re a working class community, we’ve always had a good time here in Hartlepool, but now walking around has become dangerous. Too many immigrants. Mainly from Asia and Eastern Europe.”

The owner of The Harbour View, a lively local restaurant, quite full unlike the list of mangers and chains and fast food restaurants that crowd the desolate marina, is called Darab. He is an Asian immigrant, and a great supporter of Brexit. Like any good immigrant embedded in the economic and social fabric of the city, the thing he hates the most are immigrants.

“There are two types of immigrants, political and economic ones: the former must be helped and encouraged, the latter must not. This is a very generous country, it gives you housing, work, public health, so many people come to take it, but they don’t give anything back. I’m not racist of course, but they should be helped at home.”

Hartlepool is a hell of a town. They invented populism here, even before populism existed. During the Napoleonic Wars they hanged a monkey, the only survivor of the shipwreck of a French ship, because it was wearing the jacket of the enemy army. It was interrogated, tried and hung.

Two centuries later, when the city decided for the direct election of the Mayor, the winner was the mascot of the local football team: a monkey. The next term of office was still its. In the end, the city council changed the law and stopped the direct election. Now, it is the first municipality led by the Brexit Party.

From the “monkey mayor” to the mayor of the most right-wing party on the island, born on the ashes of the Ukip. Here, where at the referendum the leave had a 70% support, the Brexit Party has a good chance to elect its first MP, Richard Tice, a billionaire who comes from the rich South and is the number two of the party, after Nigel Farage.

“Since the socialist utopia was declared impossible by everyone, first of all by the socialist parties themselves, the British working class has tried to find its lost identity on what little was left: the place, the accent, the family, the ethnicity,” Paul Mason, journalist at The Guardian, wrote in the collective book “The Great Regression”.

Travor stands motionless in front of the lowered shutter of the ticket office at the Hartlepool Stadium. He used to vote Labour, now he doesn’t give a shit. All he wants is for Hartlepool Fc, that of the mascot who twice became mayor, to be promoted in the fourth series.

Depression, when mixed with alcohol, leads to fascism. 

Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Blackburn, Burnley, Bradford, Wigan, Blackpool, the winter of discontent spreads to small and medium-sized towns in the north of England and brings hatred, resentment, widespread racism. Everywhere.

Ismail is Turkish, he has been in Middlesbrough for seventeen years, and points out that he has always worked and paid taxes. “There’s widespread racism everywhere, people are starting to look at you badly in the street.”

Steven is white, he works in the Leeds market, he will vote Tory as he wants to leave Europe: “We need a system to regulate immigration. There aren’t too many of them now, but there will be. Immigrants are lowering the cost of labour and our wages.”

Sheila is 76, from Bradford, and she votes Tory. “I’m worried about my granddaughters. When I had cancer, they treated me very well. Today, you have to wait six months to see the doctor.” Middlesbrough, Leeds, Bradford, once they were all Labour. And maybe they will still be so, after the election. But the smell of shit is everywhere.

Daniel Trilling, expert of the British extreme right-wing and editor of the magazine “New Humanist”, is right to recall that Brexit is not the exclusive product of the impoverished, white trash working class. One risks falling into the short-sighted stereotype of the rust belt electing Trump. Just as the American president is a product of the stars-and-stripes financial aristocracy, so Brexit is funded by billionaires on both sides of the ocean.

But something’s broken. After the devastations of Thatcherism and Blairism, the end of the Western development model has left rubble everywhere. They are visible on every corner. Among vomit and puddles of piss, on the homeless people’s blankets, in the frightened glances of migrants who band together because going around alone is scary.

“The towns of the North are worse off than they were a hundred years ago (when Orwell described them in the worst possible way, — ed.). Instead of reinventing their economies, they have had to ‘replicate’ them — swapping coal mines for call centres and dockyards for distribution sheds, for example.

These cities tend to have created more jobs than they have lost in recent decades, but they have generally been in lower-skilled work. More alienating. They are lower paid and less secure. People have lost hope,” Paul Swinney and Andrew Carter from the Centre for Cities wrote.

High streets — the main shopping streets that characterise the villages and small and medium-sized towns of the country — have turned into ghost towns, according to The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper. But no one is reminded that the problem is the failure of the capitalist system.

No, the blame is always on the other, the different, the outsider. The election campaign is all about nurturing these fears. On suspicion and fear of “the other”.

“I’m disgusted by Tories, who want to privatise everything. They receive donations from billionaires and hide them in tax havens, then show up as patriotic. Unfortunately, the lies put out by the leave campaign — like the extra £50 billion we would have for public health, which is widely refuted — are also well regarded on the left,” Alysha, an 18-year-old political science student at Leeds Beckett University, said.

The taxi driver, the DJ, the pensioner, the cab driver, the football fan, the former policeman, the street vendor at the market, they are all complaining about the devastation of public health. “We wait weeks for an appointment, months for an operation.” But it’s not the fault of neoliberalism, of privatisation. No, it’s the immigrants’ fault.

Ronnie is unemployed. “I used to vote Labour, but no longer. There are too many immigrants. They took away my job, my welfare. They’ve given me a house in Oldham, Manchester suburbs, which is rubbish, full of people from Poland, smoking crack and cocaine from dusk till dawn. But I’m sick, I’m being treated, I come to Manchester to get my meds.” He asks for a cigarette, then wraps his arms around his coat. “The medication, you know? The illegal ones they sell over the station here.” That makes perfect sense.

I hate immigrants who do drugs. I’m here to buy drugs. Neoliberalism has destroyed the health care system and welfare, I vote for a neoliberal party that promises me that without immigrants it will all be the same as before. Not that Bolshevik Corbyn, who wants to tax the rich to rebuild public health from scratch.

In the winter of our discontent, it’s a free-for-all. Any kind of social bond, any kind of solidarity within the British northeast’s working class has been broken. The war of the poor has become the war among the poor. 

“The most impressive thing about families like the Brookers is that they repeat the same thing over and over again. They give you the idea that they’re not people, but a kind of ghosts who perform the exact same replica every night,” George Orwell wrote in The road to Wigan pier.

A century later, in a pub in Bradford, in front of the televisions broadcasting Champions League matches, in a city with the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and youth malnutrition in all England, a plethora of white faces, devastated by life and alcohol, silently watch xenon and neon gases light up the pixels on the screens. 

Like every night, again and again. A compulsion to repeat, without any point of reference. Without any hope. On Thursday, December 12, we vote against immigrants and against Europe. The winter of our discontent is ready to fall on the United Kingdom. 

Andy Capp has not only stopped fighting, he has stopped dreaming.

the-winter-of-our-discontent-brexit-vol

“THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT”: BREXIT, VOL.1

 The winter of our discontent, recalling us of Shakespeare, is ready to fall on the United Kingdom. A land that emerged four hundred million years ago which at the time physically detached itself from the European continent is now preparing to do so again, politically.  “Brexit” is the buzzword running through the country. Against the Europe of austerity and subsidiarity, against the Europe that takes more money than what is given back, against the Europe that injects migrants into the veins of the island and devastates the welfare state.  Europe is “the other” of these elections. The antagonist, the enemy. The external factor that allows a general and widespread shedding of responsibility.  In the last ten years, the episodes of malnutrition certified by the public health service have risen from 3,000 to 9,000, the free meals distributed by food collections from 40,000 to 1,600,000 every year. A country devastated by the Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson’s neoliberal policies. Well, nope, by Europe and migrants. It was them: it was the others.  In his “The Road To Wigan Pier”, a trip to the mining towns of Northern England to tell the story of the fetid misery in which the working class of the 1930s survived, George Orwell, in a rare moment of tenderness, uses a very powerful metaphor, that of a few crows copulating in the few patches of mud that break the huge expanses of ice.    Today, not even that anymore. In the UK, schools and hospitals, shops and libraries are being closed. You eat poorly and badly, you just drink. You don’t even fuck anymore. There’s no hope. Births have fallen by ten percent in the last five years.  In Hartlepool, a small port town in the Northeast, Reg Smythe, the creator of Andy Capp — a wonderful character who moved only to bridge the gap between the sofa at home and the pub — was born and lived. One of the most violent attacks on the society of capitalist alienation ever appeared on a comic strip.  But the new Andy Capps now only hate the other Andy Capps.  Nick was a DJ for almost 30 years. “Mostly ‘60s, ‘70s music, a little dance. No techno. Now I still do it, but a lot less, I take care of my seven grandchildren and go on sunny vacations with my wife as often as I can.”  “Even though we’re a working class community, we’ve always had a good time here in Hartlepool, but now walking around has become dangerous. Too many immigrants. Mainly from Asia and Eastern Europe.”  The owner of The Harbour View, a lively local restaurant, quite full unlike the list of mangers and chains and fast food restaurants that crowd the desolate marina, is called Darab. He is an Asian immigrant, and a great supporter of Brexit. Like any good immigrant embedded in the economic and social fabric of the city, the thing he hates the most are immigrants.   “There are two types of immigrants, political and economic ones: the former must be helped and encouraged, the latter must not. This is a very generous country, it gives you housing, work, public health, so many people come to take it, but they don’t give anything back. I’m not racist of course, but they should be helped at home.”  We are always strangers to someone.  Hartlepool is a hell of a town. They invented populism here, even before populism existed. During the Napoleonic Wars they hanged a monkey, the only survivor of the shipwreck of a French ship, because it was wearing the jacket of the enemy army. It was interrogated, tried and hung.  Two centuries later, when the city decided for the direct election of the Mayor, the winner was the mascot of the local football team: a monkey. The next term of office was still its. In the end, the city council changed the law and stopped the direct election. Now, it is the first municipality led by the Brexit Party.   From the “monkey mayor” to the mayor of the most right-wing party on the island, born on the ashes of the Ukip. Here, where at the referendum the leave had a 70% support, the Brexit Party has a good chance to elect its first MP, Richard Tice, a billionaire who comes from the rich South and is the number two of the party, after Nigel Farage.  “Since the socialist utopia was declared impossible by everyone, first of all by the socialist parties themselves, the British working class has tried to find its lost identity on what little was left: the place, the accent, the family, the ethnicity,” Paul Mason, journalist at The Guardian, wrote in the collective book “The Great Regression”.  Travor stands motionless in front of the lowered shutter of the ticket office at the Hartlepool Stadium. He used to vote Labour, now he doesn’t give a shit. All he wants is for Hartlepool Fc, that of the mascot who twice became mayor, to be promoted in the fourth series.   Depression, when mixed with alcohol, leads to fascism.   Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Blackburn, Burnley, Bradford, Wigan, Blackpool, the winter of discontent spreads to small and medium-sized towns in the north of England and brings hatred, resentment, widespread racism. Everywhere.  Ismail is Turkish, he has been in Middlesbrough for seventeen years, and points out that he has always worked and paid taxes. “There’s widespread racism everywhere, people are starting to look at you badly in the street.”   Steven is white, he works in the Leeds market, he will vote Tory as he wants to leave Europe: “We need a system to regulate immigration. There aren’t too many of them now, but there will be. Immigrants are lowering the cost of labour and our wages.”  Sheila is 76, from Bradford, and she votes Tory. “I’m worried about my granddaughters. When I had cancer, they treated me very well. Today, you have to wait six months to see the doctor.” Middlesbrough, Leeds, Bradford, once they were all Labour. And maybe they will still be so, after the election. But the smell of shit is everywhere.  Daniel Trilling, expert of the British extreme right-wing and editor of the magazine “New Humanist”, is right to recall that Brexit is not the exclusive product of the impoverished, white trash working class. One risks falling into the short-sighted stereotype of the rust belt electing Trump. Just as the American president is a product of the stars-and-stripes financial aristocracy, so Brexit is funded by billionaires on both sides of the ocean.  But something’s broken. After the devastations of Thatcherism and Blairism, the end of the Western development model has left rubble everywhere. They are visible on every corner. Among vomit and puddles of piss, on the homeless people’s blankets, in the frightened glances of migrants who band together because going around alone is scary.   “The towns of the North are worse off than they were a hundred years ago (when Orwell described them in the worst possible way, — ed.). Instead of reinventing their economies, they have had to ‘replicate’ them — swapping coal mines for call centres and dockyards for distribution sheds, for example.  These cities tend to have created more jobs than they have lost in recent decades, but they have generally been in lower-skilled work. More alienating. They are lower paid and less secure. People have lost hope,” Paul Swinney and Andrew Carter from the Centre for Cities wrote.  High streets — the main shopping streets that characterise the villages and small and medium-sized towns of the country — have turned into ghost towns, according to The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper. But no one is reminded that the problem is the failure of the capitalist system.  No, the blame is always on the other, the different, the outsider. The election campaign is all about nurturing these fears. On suspicion and fear of “the other”.  “I’m disgusted by Tories, who want to privatise everything. They receive donations from billionaires and hide them in tax havens, then show up as patriotic. Unfortunately, the lies put out by the leave campaign — like the extra £50 billion we would have for public health, which is widely refuted — are also well regarded on the left,” Alysha, an 18-year-old political science student at Leeds Beckett University, said.   The taxi driver, the DJ, the pensioner, the cab driver, the football fan, the former policeman, the street vendor at the market, they are all complaining about the devastation of public health. “We wait weeks for an appointment, months for an operation.” But it’s not the fault of neoliberalism, of privatisation. No, it’s the immigrants’ fault.  Ronnie is unemployed. “I used to vote Labour, but no longer. There are too many immigrants. They took away my job, my welfare. They’ve given me a house in Oldham, Manchester suburbs, which is rubbish, full of people from Poland, smoking crack and cocaine from dusk till dawn. But I’m sick, I’m being treated, I come to Manchester to get my meds.” He asks for a cigarette, then wraps his arms around his coat. “The medication, you know? The illegal ones they sell over the station here.” That makes perfect sense.   I hate immigrants who do drugs. I’m here to buy drugs. Neoliberalism has destroyed the health care system and welfare, I vote for a neoliberal party that promises me that without immigrants it will all be the same as before. Not that Bolshevik Corbyn, who wants to tax the rich to rebuild public health from scratch.  In the winter of our discontent, it’s a free-for-all. Any kind of social bond, any kind of solidarity within the British northeast’s working class has been broken. The war of the poor has become the war among the poor.    “The most impressive thing about families like the Brookers is that they repeat the same thing over and over again. They give you the idea that they’re not people, but a kind of ghosts who perform the exact same replica every night,” George Orwell wrote in The road to Wigan pier.  A century later, in a pub in Bradford, in front of the televisions broadcasting Champions League matches, in a city with the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and youth malnutrition in all England, a plethora of white faces, devastated by life and alcohol, silently watch xenon and neon gases light up the pixels on the screens.    Like every night, again and again. A compulsion to repeat, without any point of reference. Without any hope. On Thursday, December 12, we vote against immigrants and against Europe. The winter of our discontent is ready to fall on the United Kingdom.   Andy Capp has not only stopped fighting, he has stopped dreaming.

This is the opening of a post dated January 18, 2007.  It is the story of a suicide, entitled “A Moment Before Dying”.

It was written by Aaron Swartz on his blog, hactivist, programmer, co-author of the RSS format, Reddit’s corsair, computer string genius, but above all digital fighter for the “human right” of access to knowledge and information.

«Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. (…) It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.»

These are his words, along with those of other activists, written in black and white in the 2008 Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.

In 2011, Aaron was arrested for downloading about 4.8 million academic articles from the JSTOR archive from the Boston MIT secure network.

Six years after that blog story, on January 11, 2013, he was found dead, after committing suicide in his apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York.

Swartz’s life has been a hymn to the free dissemination of content, a battle for freedom of knowledge sharing and against the privatization of information.

What does it mean to be an intellectual? Swartz was wondering. It means to go further, it means to think.

“It’s the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.”

Doing counterinformation, moving within the galaxy of communication guerrilla, deconstructing the discourse of power, tracking down the media that do not always offer a collective service: this was his mission, to be carried out also through blogs.

«And so I believe blogs are important insofar as they help us move away from this sorry spectacle (it’s 2005 and he referred to some articles on the NYT, ed.) and towards a real democracy. Blogs, of course, can help spread propaganda — and no doubt, most do — but they can also help stem it. Political blogs can help pull people into politics, tell them things they wouldn’t otherwise hear, and lead them to organize their own projects (…) One of the most important things I think blogs do, though, is teach people. The media, as I’ve noted, is supremely unintelligent. But I don’t think the people of this country are. And one of the most striking things about blogs to me is how they almost never talk down to their readership.»

It has been four years since the suicide of the Aaron Swartz, and on “I Diavoli” we want to honor him through the “moral imperative” for which he fought: sharing.

As Guido Brera wrote in “La Lettura” del Corriere della Sera, “many things have changed inside and outside the impalpable spaces of global connection. Just think of a certain use of “falsehood” — once an instrument of playful resistance, inspiring irreverent provocations and refined sabotage (from Orson Welles’ famous radio drama to the media mockery organized by activists who identify themselves in Luther Blissett’s multiple-use name), useful to unveil the vices and tics of the information industry. Today, conversely, falsehood is perfectly subsumed by a new political business model in the production cycle of fake news, an essential tool for building consensus. Or, let’s consider the form that sharing has taken in the gears of the sharing economy, where pooling feeds the profit of some.”

This is why, today more than ever, it is important to share the text of the “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto”, the result — once again — of collective work and sharing (published in Italian here in “Aubreymcfato” and here by a group of activists on January 14, 2013, ed.)

«Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries  in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of  private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the  sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. 

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. 

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. 

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. 

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. 

aaron-swartz-the-corsair-of-open-access

 AARON SWARTZ, THE CORSAIR OF OPEN ACCESS

 This is the opening of a post dated January 18, 2007.  It is the story of a suicide, entitled “A Moment Before Dying”.  It was written by Aaron Swartz on his blog, hactivist, programmer, co-author of the RSS format, Reddit’s corsair, computer string genius, but above all digital fighter for the “human right” of access to knowledge and information.  «Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. (…) It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.»    These are his words, along with those of other activists, written in black and white in the 2008 Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.  In 2011, Aaron was arrested for downloading about 4.8 million academic articles from the JSTOR archive from the Boston MIT secure network.  Six years after that blog story, on January 11, 2013, he was found dead, after committing suicide in his apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York.  Swartz’s life has been a hymn to the free dissemination of content, a battle for freedom of knowledge sharing and against the privatization of information.  What does it mean to be an intellectual? Swartz was wondering. It means to go further, it means to think.  “It’s the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.”  Doing counterinformation, moving within the galaxy of communication guerrilla, deconstructing the discourse of power, tracking down the media that do not always offer a collective service: this was his mission, to be carried out also through blogs.  «And so I believe blogs are important insofar as they help us move away from this sorry spectacle (it’s 2005 and he referred to some articles on the NYT, ed.) and towards a real democracy. Blogs, of course, can help spread propaganda — and no doubt, most do — but they can also help stem it. Political blogs can help pull people into politics, tell them things they wouldn’t otherwise hear, and lead them to organize their own projects (…) One of the most important things I think blogs do, though, is teach people. The media, as I’ve noted, is supremely unintelligent. But I don’t think the people of this country are. And one of the most striking things about blogs to me is how they almost never talk down to their readership.»  It has been four years since the suicide of the Aaron Swartz, and on “I Diavoli” we want to honor him through the “moral imperative” for which he fought: sharing.  As Guido Brera wrote in “La Lettura” del Corriere della Sera, “many things have changed inside and outside the impalpable spaces of global connection. Just think of a certain use of “falsehood” — once an instrument of playful resistance, inspiring irreverent provocations and refined sabotage (from Orson Welles’ famous radio drama to the media mockery organized by activists who identify themselves in Luther Blissett’s multiple-use name), useful to unveil the vices and tics of the information industry. Today, conversely, falsehood is perfectly subsumed by a new political business model in the production cycle of fake news, an essential tool for building consensus. Or, let’s consider the form that sharing has taken in the gears of the sharing economy, where pooling feeds the profit of some.”  This is why, today more than ever, it is important to share the text of the “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto”, the result — once again — of collective work and sharing (published in Italian here in “Aubreymcfato” and here by a group of activists on January 14, 2013, ed.)  «Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries  in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of  private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the  sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.  There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.  That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.  “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.  Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.  Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.  But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.  Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.  There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.  We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.  With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?  July 2008, Eremo, Italia
 

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