We have got to get it together

[will vine]

I went on the save our jobs/save our social services/give us some fucking money march last saturday. Though the anger pulses through me rightly enough, the act of marching, assembling, and listening to dumb rhetoric does not come easily to me. I felt every bit as much an observer as a participant, a statement I could, in fairness, equally make about the rest of my life.
So, we're all milling around in Hyde Park, an impressive congregation (whatever number you choose) and I'm taken back to the last time I was here in this park amongst this many people - The Stones in the Park-1968 wasn't it?
Now a woman with an unfortunately strident voice walks up to the microphone...HELLO HYDE PARK! Oh fuck, it's like a rock concert. I cannot, I will not, holler back.
1968 comes echoing back..Sam Cutler (for it is he) Hey people dig this, there's now over a quarter of a million of us here. and sure enough the woman here today shoots the same line, as later will Brendan Barber, Ed Milliband, Dave Prentis et al. who all deliver inadequate speeches focussing mainly on the fact that we are there. They leave pauses for echoes of approval, and still I can't, I won't, holler back.
What then strikes me is that throughout my formative teenage years and well well beyond I have been listening to hippie and post-hippie exhortations at festivals, on records, and in the media, to "get it together"...."We have got to get it together now"..."Come on, come on, let's work together."................"We are all one band."
As a generation we never have got it together.
On saturday I only wanted one question answered - "What's the plan?" No one gave us an answer.

[Hugh Weldon]

I felt very similar Will. Sort of feeling dutifully obliged to go and then wondering what difference it made to anything.

As a generation we never have got it together

implies that an age group shares certain priorities - I don't think so. And who are 'we'? - not the ones with the power or the purse strings certainly. Unless things get really bad - and when you march down Oxford St among the trade union types and the anarcho hoodies and the whole rainbow alliance and see the shoppers queuing for the new iPad - well it's just going to be impotent anger, assuaged by a little pride that you at least got up off your arse and made some sort of stand.

This pic I took seemed to sum it up quite well. But we need better slogans.

Picture 170 by agustin_77_uk, on Flickr

[Rob Hall]

I don't wish to be pedantic Hugh, but I think it is important to point out that the (official) march didn't go along Oxford Street on Saturday.

[Adam Blake]

Organised run on the banks. If 250,000 people closed their bank accounts on the same day, I think they would have the government's full attention.

[Des]

Organised run on the banks. If 250,000 people closed their bank accounts on the same day, I think they would have the government's full attention.

NIce idea but as my salary (salary - what a joke) is paid direct to my cuddly co-op bank account it would mean I wouldn't get paid. A bit scary as I find it difficult to keep within my overdraft as it is. And I'd have to move to an even cuddlier bank (Triodos).

Excuses excuses.....

I suggest a GENERAL STRIKE.

[Adam Blake]

Yeah, but then they'd send out the police and the army to beat up the strikers and it would all get really ugly. I know that many people are overdrawn, or rely on their overdraft facility (like me for example) but we would have to make the necessary adjustments. Civil service workers such as yourself, Des, would have to make representation, via your union, to make arrangements for your salary to be paid some other way. Oh I know it would never work unless enough people did it at the same time - then it would work, and it would scare the ruling class shitless.

The point is the government, under orders from their paymasters, have made a decision to make the poor pay for the folly of the rich. Marching and demonstrating, even striking, will not change that. What will change that is having it made clear that the poor peoples 50p's outnumber the bankers 50millions if they move as one block.

[Jonathan E.]

. . . The point is the government, under orders from their paymasters, have made a decision to make the poor pay for the folly of the rich. . . .

That is the apparent and obvious manifestation in the UK this political season. But it's window dressing. Essentially the process has been going on for a good long time, since the early 80s if not earlier. All statistics show a massive transfer of wealth from the less well endowed economically to the rich and heartless at the top in this time period; that is, it's a massive increase in economic inequality. What you're seeing now is the boot going in after you've been knocked to the ground. The process is not confined to the UK and US, although some European countries seem to be more concerned with keeping at least some semblance of social welfare alive — but when you look at what's been done to the Third and developing worlds in the name of economic stability over the past thirty years, it's truly shocking.

Yes, we have to get it together — but, as Will implies, most of us would rather be left alone 'cos there's a certain banality to all this struggle. And, as is later inferred, none of us are quite up to the task 'cos we're all entangled with the system and don't really want to take too much personal risk.

[Pete Fowler]

A General Strike, Des....how likely do you think that to be?

I guess that some of our background is likely to be similar, though, if it isn’t, don’t shout, I can handle being told I’m wrong. But my guess is that we both come from a leftist past formed a few decades ago. When the answers to the questions weren’t so much blowing in the wind as staring us in the face: the need for the collective rising of the working class. The overthrow of capital by the exploited. Our day on the barricades. Stopping the pram falling on the Odessa Steps.

There were other voices in the 60s, those who bizarrely identified the intelligentsia as a possible agent of change, the new vanguard; and there were those who espoused violence as the only possible answer: Baader Meinhoff, the Weathermen, the Angry Brigade, elements of the IRA, the Basque Separatists. But none eventually stopped the onward march of capital; and the only ones who were right at that time were those who scripted the rise of what they called at that time ‘monopoly capitalism’, a form now so entrenched that it runs the world and will, if it continues, run it into the ground, tearing the world from its very bearings, casting it off into an environmental hinterland only fit for the staging of the next act in the evolving drama of the planet – the reduction of Man to the Dinosaur, just another act in the play, just another staging post in the history.

You and I, we’re past it. We haven’t got the energy. I could no more go and face an adolescent policeman in Fortnums and Masons than I could run a mile in under an hour. When those kids were occupying that store, I was running into the front room to tell my wife that a woodpecker was lurking above our fatball on the clothes line. Past it. If I dream of shooting things, it’s the bloody Jays attacking the nests of the long tail tits...

But we do, though, have our minds in gear; and we do, though, have an immense experience. And we do all understand that we have to continue to learn. We can’t just stop our mental activity, even though physically I think it safe to say that we’re past the stage of shagging our nights away. We can both look and stare at the Jaggers and the Stewarts, and gaze in a bemused wonder that they still, after all this time, think it’s important to hold on to being twenty; but we know that’s not only a ridiculous dream, but a stupid one. We have to accept that one attribute diminishes – but another, the experience and the continuing learning, becomes much more sharply into focus.

I learned a lot from joining this forum, but it’ll surprise you to know from where. I learned a lot from Neil Foxlee. I followed each and every one of his leads, and ended up emailing him and thanking him – Dave Malone’s blog, to which he so frequently referred, led me to read all kinds of things that made me re-assess, and question my own beliefs: the very essence of learning.

Which, in turn – because I already have a real history, with a real experience – made me very much more powerful in passing the messages down the generations, to my kids, their partners and even their kids, and to others I meet.

Their battle is going to be much more critical than ours. But their field of battle is hardly the same as it was for us forty years ago – because the times have moved so decisively on.

And their answer, very definitely, will not be couched in the language of our youth, dominated, as it was, by a nineteenth century analysis by an extremely clever German.

And they will need, from us, not the parroting of The German Ideology and Capital – but opinions that are shaped not only by what did happen in the past, but what is happening, now.

And, thankfully, they have the energy. And all we can do is to add to that energy from our experience – and our continuing learning.

[Des]

a woodpecker

Unacceptably vague, Pete - presumably a Great Spotted? And the predations of Jays and other corvids have very little impact on songbird populations compared with the domestic cat and a whole set of other environmental factors.

[Jonathan E.]

. . . But their field of battle is hardly the same as it was for us forty years ago . . .

And not only did we of a certain age possibly choose the wrong battlefield back then, but it's becoming harder for anyone of any age to identify the battlefield today. Perhaps because the battle is everywhere — and apparently, if one is to ascribe too much credence to what one reads or hears in the "news", going badly for what I'll describe as our side. However, firstly, there is a great resurgence of energy and sanity in the twenty-year-olds of today — and, who knows, maybe they'll grasp the nettle more firmly than a certain previous generation, although I'd like to point out that nobody knows just how grim contemporary times would be if the sixties and their associated changes hadn't happened; we're still reaping many benefits from that time — don't be confused about it. Secondly, nature bats last as they say and plays on a longer time span with higher odds than any of us really grok.

Now, about the woodpeckers: we have three kinds here, maybe four actually. There's the Pileated, quite large, very red head, the somewhat smaller Hairy, and the very small Downy — in addition, there is the Flicker, a most beautiful bird. There are also various quite small birds that peck away at the branches of the alders primarily, but in practice seem to check out everything. The real woodpeckers mostly go for what are called the softwoods here, basically the evergreens — they carve great big crevices in the cedars. They're also fond of wood that's already down. All of them are very active at this time of year and you'll hear the Pileated's distinctive calls most times you're out in the day, a bit like the stereotypical Woody Woodpecker of cartoon fame. I'm also particularly glad to hear that corvids are not considered a threat to the songbird population.

[Pete Fowler]

Great spotted, Des.....stands there, just a couple of times a year, above the crowd, and makes the occasional pounce...lurks at the top of the willow and stares for a while....it knows most everything, though; even that the tree on which it perches is dying from the inside. You must remember that song. The Bitter Withy.