Descent (13 page)

The aim of this high-risk operation is to save the patient, not kill it. In the long run – not so long, for us – the system will get back on its feet. A good thing, you might think, until you remember on whose shoulders those feet will be standing. State capitalism may solve some of our problems. All sorts of schemes of participation and democracy may be tried out to tie us in to it. Some will even call the result socialism, and rail against it or rally to it. We’ll all learn better eventually. Why not now? Do we really have to go through all this one more time?

For the moment – for days, for weeks at the most – capitalism is in intensive care, kept alive by the state machine. This is our chance to strike. We don’t necessarily mean walking off the job. Instead, let’s walk on the job – and stay there. Let’s talk to our workmates, our colleagues, our neighbours, and decide what to do.

It’s not difficult. We have the numbers. We know the drill.

If you think you don’t know the drill, take a look inside.

And I did, appalled. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the Big Deal would make any more of a difference than previous emergency measures had. From what little I knew of the revolutionaries, I might have expected them to decry it for that very reason. To see them argue that it would work and that the best hope was to cause so much disruption that it would fail struck me as monstrously perverse. How could such people have, as they claimed, the best interests of everyone, or at any rate the majority, at heart? It seemed to confirm the conventional view of their cynicism, and that they indeed held that ‘the worse it gets, the better’.

Almost despite myself, I found the reports and think-pieces intriguing, and I wanted to find out more of whatever ideology lay behind them. There I drew a blank. There wasn’t a website address on any of the pages. No physical address either, which didn’t surprise me, but – not so much as a PO Box? I searched online and found plenty of sites about the revolutionaries, but none by them. Weird, I thought, but then realised it made a strange kind of sense: word of mouth communication, face-to-face organisation, and distribution by hand of printed paper all kept their activities off the net, and thus below the radar of the state’s search engines and algorithms, imposing the higher costs of face-recognition trawls through surveillance-camera recordings, and no doubt also of police shoe leather, the wages of agents and infiltrators, the slush funding of bribery and blackmail …

The front door opened and closed. I hid the paper at the back of a bookshelf and went downstairs. My mother had just dropped her shoulder-bag on the table and sat down. She looked tired.

‘How did it go?’ she asked.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I think.’

‘Modern Studies,’ she said. ‘I should bloody hope so.’

‘Well, yes,’ I said.

‘So that’s it over.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yay! Freedom!’ I put my hands behind my head and leaned back, closing my eyes and stretching.

‘No doubt,’ Mum said, dryly. ‘Meanwhile, I could really do with a cup of tea. And when you’ve done that, there’s nettles out the back need cutting for this week’s soup.’

I took the hint.

While working away with the pruning knife and my dad’s leather gardening gloves with the holes at two fingertips that I had to be wary about, I found myself turning the revolutionaries’ bulletin over in my head. I was at the age when you don’t just dismiss anything you read that you disagree with or that questions your view of things. That’s an adult skill, which most people find all too easy to acquire. No, I had to take it seriously, to try to fit it in with what I already knew about the world or – if that proved impossible – revise what I knew. All very scientific.

The very scientific hypothesis that I came up with was that, if the revolutionaries were right and the Big Deal really was a big deal, then I was right about the secret cabal of rational people inside the US Government and/or the global ruling class. The same people who had planted the rationalist message in my head had taken over – or at least (because, I told myself sternly, I had to be cautious here, and not let my imagination run away with me or anything like that) had their policies adopted. That they couldn’t be all-powerful, I understood. I knew enough about the seductive nonsense of conspiracy theories to dismiss as ridiculous any thought of Bilderbergers or Illuminati or some such pulling the strings.

I took my bundle of nettles into the kitchen. My mother was by the cooker, minding a large pot of water coming to the boil while watching the news on her phone.

‘Look at this,’ she said.

In Monaco, French soldiers tramped along boulevards. Belgian tanks nosed through back streets in Luxembourg. US marines, laden with kit, splashed ashore on Bermudan beaches, parachuted into Panama. Royal Marines stormed St Kitts and blockaded St Vincent. The Russians had landed in Dubai.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘Is it the war?’

Mum snorted. ‘Not exactly. Just a crackdown on tax havens. Every last one, except Switzerland.’

‘Why Switzerland?’

‘Read up on Swiss defence policy,’ she said, peering into the pot. She looked up as I reached for my phone. ‘Not now. Give the nettles a rinse.’

A lot of things happened that summer. Some of them were connected, but I was too busy joining my own dots at the time to see the lines. I passed all my Highers, and was offered a place at Edinburgh University – on the BA course because, rather to my surprise, I did much better in English, History, French and Modern Studies than I did in Maths and Science. Calum applied for and got a place at Strathclyde, in Aerospace Engineering and Business Studies. In the meantime, I’d taken a summer job – several short-term openings had come up, for the first time in five years, in the local supermarket. Marie received a letter from the student loan company, informing her that her loan was suspended but that she should apply for a grant instead. She almost had to look the word ‘grant’ up in the dictionary. I applied to the new funding authority and got a student grant for my first year.

There was uproar, rising as far as riots in London, over the Golden Parachute scandal: the government had handed out billions to top banking and financial executives, by way of compensation for losing their jobs or taking a massive pay cut – an offer conspicuous by its non-occurrence in millions of earlier cases of rather less well-paid workers who’d had to make the same choice, when they’d had a choice in the matter at all. My mother came home early one Wednesday evening in August, to report that the soup kitchen and the refugee centre had almost run out of people to help. The old container port was about to re-open, and every able-bodied person, including illegals, had been offered a job clearing the place up, and the definite possibility of work at the port when it got going. My parents got a letter from the building society, informing them that the mortgage payments had been over-calculated for decades, and the loan had in fact been paid off five years earlier. The overpayments had been credited to their joint bank account.

The gigantic Firth of Clyde Tunnel construction project was announced, and the consortium began hiring immediately. The abandoned computer factory on Inverkip Road was retooled and reopened as a biotech plant, and required in the first instance hundreds of unskilled workers, all of whom had the prospect of training for technical work over the next couple of years as production came on stream. Thousands more got employment on what were called upgrade projects: the high school, for example, was refurbished entirely over the summer, a railway line reopened, and the parks regenerated. Retired, disabled, or part-time workers were in huge demand for information collection, machine supervision and auxiliary tasks. Those still on various doles and schemes suddenly found their money went further, as prices and rents unaccountably began to drop. Small businesses opened or re-opened all over the place. The smell of burning tyres left the air, to be replaced by that of fresh-poured concrete. And that was how it was in Greenock.

If you’re old enough, you remember. It was much the same where you were.

At the Freshers’ Fair I joined the Humanist Society, the SF Society, the Geology Society and the Archaeology Society, then wandered along the stalls. There were a lot of cultural societies for overseas students, and a slightly smaller number of wildly diverse religious societies among which the Union of Muslim Students and the Christian Union looked like voices of moderation. At each I helped myself to armfuls of free literature, nodded politely, and strolled on. I did the same at the stalls of the few political societies for the mainstream parties, and at those for two or three left-wing groups, whose stalls stocked Marxist literature that had long outlasted the states in which it had been printed and whose stall-keepers hawked tabloid newspapers with red mastheads and big black headlines like
FIGHT THE CUTS!
and
GENERAL STRIKE NOW
. The sellers looked as bemused as I felt. I picked up some dusty Marx pamphlets and – cheaper and more useful for my coursework – a shiny memory stick of the Marx and Engels
Collected Works
.

At the very end of the row of tables was one with a stack of copies of
What Now?
and a heap of memory sticks. A young guy in the now predictable smart suit and tie stood behind it, flicking through his phone with a bored expression. I looked down at the front page:

GOODBYE, AND GOOD LUCK

We failed.

The crisis is over. The revolutionary moment has passed. Power has shifted from financial to industrial capital. The working class, atomised by generations of neoliberalism, has turned down its fleeting but real chance to make a bid for power. Although the free market in labour power has not been restored, the decades-long campaign to do so has pushed down wages and social provisions to a level compatible with industrial profit. A new cycle of accumulation has begun, and with it a new upsurge of the capitalist economy, at the expense of further distortions of the market. The new boom may be expected to last one decade at least, probably more, before it in turn goes into crisis. Just as radioactive decay passes through a series of unstable isotopes, some of which may last some time, so does a declining system. We never claimed to know in advance the half-life of capital.

No revolutionary organisation can outlive the revolutionary situation. If it tries to do so, it becomes at best a caricature of itself, at worst counter-revolutionary. Almost all previous revolutionary organisations have made this mistake. We do not intend to repeat it.

This is the final edition of
What Now?
The question posed by the title remains, but the answer has to change. What the former revolutionaries can do now is learn the lessons of the past few years, and analyse, without illusions, the present as it unfolds in order to prepare the struggles of the future. To do that, they need full freedom of thought, discussion and action, not the discipline of the revolutionary organisation, which is hereby dissolved.

If you want to find us, don’t come looking. We’ll find you.

And so we say goodbye …

UNTIL NEXT TIME

I picked up a copy of the paper.

‘Uh …’

The guy transferred his attention from the phone to me. He still looked bored.

‘Yes?’

‘That’s not true, is it?’

‘What?’

‘About the revolutionaries not being able to outlive the revolutionary situation. The Russian revolutionaries failed in 1905, and the Chinese revolutionaries were nearly wiped out in 1927, but they kept going, didn’t they? And they won.’

If I’d expected this snippet of Higher-level Modern Studies wisdom to impress him, I’d have been disappointed.

‘If you call
them
revolutionaries and
that
winning,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the
conditions
for revolution still existed in both cases. These societies remained in crisis. This one’ – he waved a hand around – ‘not so much.’

‘You really think the Big Deal’s going to work?’

‘It’s already working.’ He made it sound like an answer to a very stupid question. ‘It’s what Gramsci called passive revolution. The revolutionaries failed to unite enough people around them to overthrow the system, but the crisis didn’t go away. Society was at an impasse. The
necessity
for revolution didn’t go away. So the ruling groups are going to carry out some of the necessary changes, which together add up to as much of a revolution as is compatible with their remaining in power. A revolution from above, that keeps the people at the top
at
the top. The reforms add up to what most people who
said
they wanted a revolution really hoped for from a revolution. Peace, jobs for all, green tech, saving the planet … all that sort of thing. It’s a lot less than what we wanted, but it’ll stave off the revolution for another generation. We’re snookered.’

‘So you lot are – just going to go away?’

‘No point hanging about, is there?’

‘I guess not,’ I said, still puzzled.

He nodded down at the stack of papers. ‘I’m not kidding. This is my last gig for the revo. Take a copy while you can, because you won’t see any again. Consider it a collectable.’

‘How much is it?’

‘It’s free, as always.’ He shrugged. ‘The memory sticks have the complete run. Help yourself.’

‘Thanks.’ I stuck a stick in my pocket and the paper in my Student Union freebie bag.

‘Have you read it before?’ he asked, as I straightened.

‘Once or twice.’

‘What did you think of it?’

‘Not a lot. It just seemed a bit, you know, negative.’

He snorted, but said nothing. His continuing bored expression goaded me.

‘Still,’ I said, ‘it’s something to admit the revolutionaries are going out of business.’

His expression changed from boredom to pity.

‘“Out of business”?’ he jeered. ‘We’re going
into
business.’ He returned his attention to his phone.

‘OK, well, bye,’ I said.

He didn’t look up. ‘Until next time.’

I was down the stairs and out on the rain-wet cobbles of the Pleasance before I thought of the perfect parting shot. I played the dialogue in my head.