Morning Comrades.
I am getting old and that is manifesting itself in a number of very particular and interesting ways. The physical aspect of making it past the middle age mark - with the average lifespan in Germany / England being 81 years I am now past the halfway point - is definitely something worth talking about, outside of the materialistic hollywood-esque fascination of looking and functioning like a 20 year in a 45 year old body and I will, very briefly, touch on that. Today though I wanted to share some ideas about what people my age and older can do to remain important to the revolution, the progression of human kind towards an egalitarian future by not repeating the mistakes made by previous generations, specifically, that of our parents.
As always at the beginning of the week, here is a brand new playlist for you to help you get through this week.
The Weaponisation of Fear in a Materialist World
It is fair to say that the mid to late 60s saw a social revolution across the Global North West, a break with inhibiting numbness of a post WW2 societal order imposed upon this region by forces known to all. There are plenty of debates as tho what sparked them, what finished them and there isn’t space here to take them all apart. For the sake of argument though, societal change happened rapidly across our world and this being the important part, got utterly destroyed 15-20 years later.
A lot of the following is very subjective to be clear. I am in the midst of thinking about my role(s) and possible contributions whilst trying to remain aware of the forces working against me. Breaks with the norm, questioning the status quo and acting against it often, if not always, come from youth. Logically so, as our societies are not only ageing rapidly but that power usually rests in the hands of the old - power being measured by wealth and thus influence, unlike the notion that power should rest with the wise.
The tools available to the youth thus are predominately direct action. Not only does this satisfy the powerless but hell, nothing works for effectively when it comes to making the powerful pay heed and even possible change their ways than burning down their mansions. This certainly was true for myself. As a poor white trash youth running around having to make my way around the world, there weren’t many possibilities to express, let alone articulate my rage at whatever injustices I felt were directed at me - inequality, poverty and subsequent insecurity about everything in the face of a advertising created reality that I would never obtain - let alone the growing awareness that the world in itself was gruesome and unjust, so, violence at the powers that were, it was.
Without direction, leadership, theory and hard work this is where I would have remained and landed in prison for, as I did, several times over. Not so fun, but luckily youth also brings a massive lack of material and metaphysical responsibilities with it and once my sister had grown up and started her own life, there really was only me to look after. This where our system is profoundly anti-revolutionary and works just as intended.
It is not just that with growing age that you grow interested in other parts of the material world on offer but that the system we exist in weaponises growing age against you and your youthful idealism for a better tomorrow. Somewhere along the line of “growing up”, you accumulate “stuff” - from clothes, cars, art to apartments and a lifestyle we are forced to believe represents success - tangible only by quantifying meaningless objects that the capitalist system and its pawns in advertising and media have formulated to be understood as inherent worth. This happened to me, for a few years and in retrospect it is wild to dissect and understand it today.
The more you have, the more afraid you become to lose it. In our created reality that solely benefits the capitalists ( granted, predominantly on a material level, but since we live in a material world, baby, they’re in charge ) the more you achieve the more likely you are not going to buck the system that enabled you to gain status, access, respect and abilities. This is not an accidental by product but the core of conservative ideology, a tool to keep and one that has kept the rising middle classes since the 18th Century in check and effectively has created the biggest bulwark against progression since then. Give a peasant a little and they’ll defend the giver, no matter who and what, against anything and anyone that wants some of that too. Without wanting to dip into 80 years of academia here, but that essentially summarizes any and all studies of fascism.
In case you ever wondered what happened to the hippie and cultural revolutions of the late 60s, there you are. Tom Wolfe penned his influential essay, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” in which he argued that the communitarian ethos of the 1960s had shifted into a prosperity-driven, individualistic quest towards self-realization. He notes how the Boomer generation in the 1970s began asking themselves “what will the Real Me be like?”- In his essay, “Decade of ‘Image, Skin Flicks and Porn,’” Norman Mailer said that the 1970s were a time when “people put emphasis on the skin, on the surface, rather than on the root of things. It was the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on.” Boomers in the late 1970s seemed to have altogether abandoned their hippie ideals in exchange for corporate jobs, traditional marriages, and houses in the suburbs. It was a time that Bruce Schulman described as “an era of narcissism, selfishness, personal rather than political awareness.”
This where we come in because once again, we are looking to repeat history and quite frankly we do not have the time to fuck it up like that generation did, again.
Coming back to the question of how I and anyone in and around my age can best serve the revolution, in simple terms: do not give in to conservatism and remain vigilant in your progressiveness.
To be clear, my time in the front ranks, black blocs and so on is well and truly over, which, to be clear, does not mean I won’t go out on the streets, I just can’t handle the vanguard anymore. Aside from the legal and physical restraints, I firmly believe in the idea of making space for the youth and allowing them to fuck around and find out as I did. That does not mean my ( or your ) role in that part of progression is over. There are plenty of roles necessary to make all of this work, from reproductive care work to utilizing your standing in society at 40 plus - trust me, cops are weary when I approach them, well dressed, well spoken as Dr. Vogel, allowing the lovable rascals to run away and more. You know what I mean.
More importantly, however, I find, is for people at our age to not fall into the traps that our parents did and letting the fear of “losing” anything, whatever that may be, mandate that progression means you losing “anything” - that is one of the core mechanisms of our enemies. They equate change with your personal loss and that is one of the wildest, yet clearly most effective lies that we have to not only combat but destroy in its entirety.
Society is a man made construct and like everything natural, in constant, necessary, evolution and that includes us. Keeping an open mind, listening to the youth, supporting them with our privilege are tools to combat this faux-fear of losing that leads to conservatism. If there is one truth I may share about life: you can and potentially lose all your material gains upon which your standing in our capitalist society is based on. I did. I’m still here and better off than before. Yes, it can be scary but rest assured, life goes on and we should never give in to reactionary, bourgeois conservatism, the younger generations deserve this, at the very least, from us.
Yours, warmly,
V.