Note found in a bottle

Wandering the beach in late spring I found a bottle lying negligently, wedged between two rocks. Inside was this badly-stained note, no doubt the last words of a suicidal leftist, a final message to an uncaring posterity.

I guess pomposity, long-windedness and earnest seriousness are typical of such moments and such people.

--

"Some people think ideologies and theories succeed in dominating the popular imagination because they are true.

A cursory look at the culture wars and the dominant memes of the liberal mainstream media show that to the contrary, ideas are taken up and weaponised to programmatically advance the interests of this or that faction.

Much identity politics (which has almost completely replaced Marxist class analysis) is there to rally this or that elite faction and their allies in an ongoing battle for their greater privilege.

Well-educated, aspirant white liberals protest vehemently against 'racism' .. to rally 'minority ethnic' forces behind their own efforts to get more of the elite pie.

No empirical study of root causes is ever undertaken, vociferous moralism is what's needed.

The lack of sub-Saharan 'heritage' individuals in the top echelons of liberal bastions (TV, the broadsheet press) testifies to the hypocritical instrumentalism at work here.

---

Marx said humanity only sets itself problems it can solve:

"Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."

Karl Marx 1859, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

What did Marx mean? That if a social transformation was going to happen, it could happen. The solution would present itself and be compelling to the masses; a promise of a change for the better which would be actually delivered, in some way. This was what happened in the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the destruction of absolutism.

Intellectuals can imagine many things, including many utopias disconnected from the recurrent practices which constitute social reproduction.Such utopias are, by definition, unrealisable; if attempted they lead to unforeseen and baleful consequences.

Mass political and economic organisations are a response to the problems posed to the masses by the ups and downs in the fortunes of capitalism.

Social-Democratic parties are easy to explain, and historically pervasive (until now, with the atomisation of the organised working class).

Communist Parties, with their utopian perspectives, are not stable and succumb: either to putschist vanguardism or social-democratisation. Strangely, they never quite vanish.

Today, in the decaying period of the pure neoliberal project, we encounter the lowest levels of class consciousness in the masses ever encountered. The contemporary politics of protest is the politics of a resentful fraction of the proletarianised middle class, abandoned in relative 'gentile poverty' by the super elites. The tragedy of the left has been to confuse this politics of identity and entitlement with a genuinely anti-capitalist movement.

Never was the accusation of petit bourgeois opportunism more apt!

... I suppose at some level it hardly matters what happens to these mobile blobs of protoplasm, each with their own set of self-indulgent, self-serving confabulatory narratives .. but while a shred of humanity remains there will always be struggle .. ."

---

I wondered if I should give this bottle with its pathetic message to a museum or something, but decided to chuck it into a municipal waste bin instead.