07 July 2006
the worst of all capitalist worlds
When I visited NY for the first time at the beginning of the year I was overwhelmed by the blatant 'humanness' of the place, its utterly pleasant atmosphere - its fully functioning service industry, its subtle consumer-led friendliness shrugged off as something like a favour for an old friend. Not a patch on the weird, outdated version of NY we have in our heads (snippy men in suits pushing you out of the way on their way to Wall Street, or something). Obviously there's a sense in which NY is infinitely more alienated (to be old-skool for a moment) than its British counterpart, that 'the only game in town' has really reached its casual zenith, all the more seductive for its ease of use, its relative cheapness, the ability to get an (often free) drink at 3am without guilt, secrecy or confrontation...particularly if this is opposed to something like 'the other America' - hipster cool as political 'fuck you' to a reactionary, temperate scolding other.
Thinking of London whilst in NY was like contemplating the sick infinitely-close-to-you inhuman thing conjured up by your unconscious in Solaris; you understand it, it draws you in, you can't resist it - but it's just all wrong. The claustro-chrome nightmare of the tube, the tiny cramped pavements, the blatant aggression, the chronic insanity refracted through a congealed mixture of absurdity and comic paranoia. And the most striking thing of all in comparison with NY is the version 0.0 of capitalism we have so lamely and in every possible way accepted: a service industry in which hostility is the primary affect (well, at least it's honest!); a level of expense for things like 'eating out' which should logically only be paid by someone suffering from a level of personal guilt akin to that of an unreformable kitten-killer; a rationing mentality that turns every potential expense into a worry that implodes into a fuck-it act of gross expenditure that can only perpetuate the implausible horror of a peculiarly British existential economics; an attitude towards 'pleasure' in all its forms that can only culminate in a devastating desire to have done with consciousness altogether...if there isn't a revolution over one or more of the following things in the next year I'm cutting off my tail to spite my fur and moving to Micronesia: train fares, our post-colonial passive-aggression-aggression, the flabby lazy-oppressive hard-working lack of production that characterises our immaterial labouring classes/politicians, the total destruction of education as a necessarily non-useful process of the expansion of human capacities in a generic and egalitarian sense, the class differentiation of food ('Taste the Difference', cos only middle-class folk should be able to eat tomatoes that don't taste of rotten water, obviously), the 'tee-hee, ha-ha, snicker-snicker' idiocies that pass for politics, even and especially as we condemn thousands to death in a war (or two, who's counting?) in which we don't even pretend to be an equal participant.
