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[...] The delusion and fantasy of the ruling classes kept pace with the wishful thinking of idealist. The edifice of established order practically tesselated cracks. And most of them were cosmetic, sure, but it only took one fatal line of distress. When the structure came down, it would come down in a hurry. History taught s much. It would come down fast and unexpectedly and later we would say, inevitably, looking back and seeking to restore our faith that behind history sat a governing narrative logic. First though people would need leaders, answers, and a program. They would need the idea of a future to strive into. So strange, wasn't it [...] that a world built on stuff, on the gross practically of the human body, in fact rested on a background webbing of ideas. Ethics, theories, ideals. On a vast immaterial buy-in, our collective faith in an order we never more than half-consciously espoused - its reality, inevitability, and justice. [...]
'[...] you're also describing, or supposing, a world in which people are more self-serving, narrow-minded, and fearful than I believe they are. And yes, you might say they've become this way, overworked and undereducated and cut off from the forms of association through which we find meaning and common cause. Or you might say the world has changed and new technologies have introduced new degrees of top-down control, distraction, or isolation -'
'Or that things are good enough? People don't want to jeopardize the life they have? Perfect is the enemy of the good, and so on.'
'And you'll find no shortage of people who agree with you,' Topel said. 'And not just conservatives and mainstream liberals, but class collaborationists. Labor leaders, unionists. The descendants of Debs - of Laski and Attlee in Britain ... But the question is for whom are things good enough? For how many? You assume that a revolutionary movement needs a disaffected bourgeois class. This isn't even a vanguardism Lenin or Trotsky subscribed to. Mao saw the peasantry as the revolutionary wellspring. Maybe history tells a different story so far, but recent history has also written a fairly bleak epilogue to the labour movement. To the whole collaborationist notion that leftist movements can work within democratic and capitalist systems to advance human rights, legal protections, and broadly shared wealth. What I see instead is that we keep drifting to the brink of catastrophe and pulling back. Drifting and pulling back. For many in this world, life is already one long catastrophe. And in this situation one of two things happens, I think. Either we drift too far one day and can't pull back. Or we come to see the insanity of this yo-yoing - which, let us be clear, is by no means natural or inevitable, but simply profitable. For a tiny minority. The misery we see everywhere we look is rooted not in scarcity, but in greed.'
like i said, kinda heavy-handed, but a good discussion
[...] The lineage of the control and ownership of land traced back invariably to violence. Behind possession of any sort: dispossession. Today's notion that wealth testified and attached to merit - to the quality of ideas and tenacity of labor - made an attractive but thin veneer on the true store of wealth accumulated in earlier dispossessions. It was this capital, after all, that invested in the good ideas and profited from the hard work of others. We held out hands to catch the crumbs falling from the master's table and called it meritocracy. [...]
[...] he hated the police. In a deep simple way he hated this embodied power arrayed against everything and everyone he cared for. They would unleash violence with impunity, as they always had. But he did not mistake the violence of a power structure, insinuating itself in the false consciousness of a working people, for the corruption of the individual. Those who wielded institutional violence were its victims too, maybe worse victims since it demanded that they sacrifice their humanity in its name. [...]
the first few sentences are trite but then it gets interesting