MUM, I’M OVERTHROWING CAPITALISM
Though her son was embarking for a university seventy miles distant, in the
family SUV, he might have been about to trek alone the Huashan plank walk
unattached and blindfolded. Angela Lane packed his suitcases, unpacked them,
re-ironed everything, packed them once more, took everything out, put it
through the washing machine, dried it, ironed it and packed it again, but
stood gazing at the cases wondering if she had missed some small patch of
damp which might give the whole contents a musty odour
making Jordan’s new friends think he came from a neglectful home.
“I think I’ll give it all another wash, Phil,” she said.
“I’m loading them.”
“You can’t leave them in the car overnight, they might get stolen.”
“In the garage, with the alarm, and the dog?”
“You know what burglars are like these days, nothing stops them.”
“Local opportunists, not Vladimir Putin.”
He took a suitcase in each hand and, returning for the remaining
pair, found his wife stuffing the contents into the front loader.
“We haven’t time, Angie.”
“But they’re all creased now. I’ll have to iron them.”
“Barely creased at all.”
Her husband folded the shirts, jeans, t-shirts, jumpers, socks,
underpants, hoodies, pyjamas.”
“Do we really need to pack these?” he said.
“It’s the end of September, Phil. It might be freezing in a few
weeks.
“I suspect he won’t need pyjamas to keep him warm.”
“Didn’t you wear pyjamas at university?”
“Not even in bed.”
For weeks, Jordan has listened to his mother’s advice, warnings,
admonitions, injunctions, proscriptions together with her explanations of
the perils of the journey: the frequent hold-ups on the motorway; the
incidence of accidents in which people were killed or seriously injured; the
possibility of storms, fog, ice, snow.
“Snow?” said Phil. “In September.”
“It happens,” she said. “It’s been known to snow in May.”
“When?”
“I can’t remember, but I know it did.”
“It isn’t going to snow, Angie, and I’ll drive at fifty in the inside
lane all the way and our SUV is rated the safest in the country.”
“Maybe, but it’s the other drivers who are the problem. Drunkards,
drug addicts, ninety year-olds who can’t see.”
“They don’t let them drive when they can’t see, Angie.”
Pale with accumulated fright on the morning of his departure, Jordan
swung his backpack into place and paced the parquet hallway.
“Have you got your toothbrush?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t forget to brush at least twice a day, and use the
interdentals. Get gum disease you’ll have all your teeth out.”
“He hasn’t even had a filling,” said his father. “He’s got the best
teeth for his age in Europe.”
“It’s not his teeth I’m worried about, it’s his gums.”
Jordan sat behind his dad, next to his brother who was intent on his
phone. Dread had colonised his mind and body so completely he couldn’t
imagine anything but a catastrophe. Yet his mind couldn’t conceive the
precise nature of the disaster. Would he be mugged by desperate Fentanyl
addicts who would take his cash and cards and leave him for dead? Would he
be unable to make friends? Would he be shunned by everyone? Would his
capacity to make himself toast and tea for breakfast desert him leading him
to starve to death in his study room? Or maybe it was all a scam. When they
got there, perhaps there’s be no university, just an expanse of wasteland in
the middle of which would be a hoarding reading Gotcha!
The campus was expansive but compact because all its buildings,
however distant from it, were offspring of its central Bowker Square, named
after a local landowner who had once ruled over the space the seat of
learning now occupied. Jordan’s room was on the ground floor of a squat,
three-storey block. He had a bed, a desk, a rug, a wardrobe, curtains and a
wash basin.
“Oh, it’s not really like home, is it?” said his mother.
“If it was like home no one would want to come here,” said her
husband. “Come on, let him settle in. Let’s go.”
“We can’t leave him to unpack, Phillip. Imagine what a mess his
clothes will be in.”
“Imagine what a mess his life will be in if we don’t.”
But Mrs Lane was already taking the fresh smelling,
conditioned-by-the-frequently-advertised-liquid, items from the first case
and laying them in the drawers in the wardrobe.
“But there are no hangers!” she said.
“He doesn’t need hangers. He can lay the stuff flat. Come on, leave
him to it.”
“He has to have hangers. Shirts have to be hung. And sweaters and his
hoodies. We’ll have to go into town and buy some. And what about ironing?”
“There’ll be an iron somewhere, or there won’t,” said her husband.
“He’ll be fine, Angela.”
“We’ll be back in half an hour. Or do you want to come with us?”
“No, he doesn’t want to come with us. Other people are arriving.
He’ll want to get to know them.”
“Well, keep your door shut till we get back. You don’t want people
wandering in.”
Phil Lane had to drive into the nearby little town and follow his
wife as she searched for coat hangers, bought fifteen, some bleach, window
cleaning spray, disinfectant wipes, toilet cleaner.
“They employ cleaners, Angie. He’s coming to study. They don’t expect
the students to pull on rubber gloves every morning.”
“You’re right. Rubber gloves,” and she hurried off down the
supermarket aisle.
On the return journey, Phil pulled into the car park of the little
pub he’d spotted by the canal; a whitewashed, old place, with tables and
benches in the garden and welcoming lights in the windows.
“What are you doing?”
“Peckish. Aren’t you?”
“We can’t eat now, Phil. We’ve got to get back and sort out his
room.”
Defeated, he nodded, started the engine and set off. Jack was still
on his phone.
“What do you think of the place?” his dad said.
“What?”
“The university, what do you think?”
“Cool,” replied the boy without lifting his eyes from his device.
Two and half hours later, Mrs Lane still wasn’t sure the clothes were
hung and stacked quite as they should be, but admonished by her husband
agreed not to take them from the wardrobe and start again.
“I’ll just do the windows,” she said, grabbing the spray.
“No, you won’t.”
He eased the container from her grip, turned to his elder son, shook
his hand and said:
“Good luck, Jordan. You’ll be fine. Keep in touch,” and with that he
ushered his wife and younger son through the door.
The first person Jordan spoke to was a Scouser swinging a plastic bag
of petty groceries which he consigned to his kitchen locker.. As he’d never
met a northerner, he was shy. They exchanged niceties about courses and A
level results. The second was a girl who stopped him as he was trying to
orientate himself to the campus to ask if he could direct her to the
Tomlinson Lecture Theatre. Not sure if he’d passed it a few minutes earlier
he stuttered, looked over his shoulder, pointed in one direction then
another, before she thanked him with a pitying look and went on her way. For
four days, his encounters were no more substantial. On the fifth, crossing
Bowker Square where students obviously more at home than himself were
sitting on the steps in groups, pairs or singly, a very pretty young girl
thrust a flyer at him and said, “Are you a communist?” Though he had nothing
but the vaguest idea what a communist was, though his parents were
wanderingly quasi-political, and his dad’s motto was “always vote for the
least worst option”, he took the flyer willingly and said, “I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure? Have you read Marx?”
“I’ve dipped into it,” he lied.
“Come to the meeting. Newton lecture theatre, one o’clock. How to
prepare for the revolution.”
“Okay,” he said.
He read the leaflet as he walked, folded it, slipped it in his hoody
pocket and wandered in a daze, finding himself in the same place several
times, retracing his steps, but unable to work out how one walkway connected
to another.
“Excuse me,” he said to a brisk, tall woman with big, heavy glasses
he assumed was a lecturer, “can you tell me where Newton lecture theatre
is?”
“Yes,” she said, “opposite the entrance to Sheridan college.”
She was gone. He was lost. But a beautiful girl had invited him to a
meeting. It took him an hour to find Newton. He decided to linger for fear
of not being able to find his way back in time otherwise.
Though he’d hoped to be able to talk to her, the lovely girl didn’t
recognise him. He sat on the back row wondering if he’d find a way to
approach her at the end. She turned out to be the main speaker in what was a
baffling flow of terminology most of those around him seemed to understand
intuitively.
“We know, comrades, that technological revolution brings economic
revolution and where there is economic revolution there must be political
revolution. We are living through an era of extraordinary technological
change. The logic of history is clear. The revolution is at hand. We must
bring it to fruition. The ruling class is unaware of the revolutionary
forces it has unleashed, but be in no doubt, capitalism is digging its own
grave. We, the vanguard, must be ready when the working-class rises, as it
must, to overthrow the system. We may have no more than weeks to prepare
ourselves…
The applause was loud and long. As he left, he took another flyer
from the girl, smiled and said
hello. She looked at him as if he was a maniac.
“Do I know you?” she said.
“We met on the square,” he said.
“Did we?” and she turned away to shove more leaflets into the hands
of the filtering crowd.
True though it was that the beauty of the girl had overthrown his
reason, it wasn’t long before the intoxication of coming revolution had
displaced his disappointment in her lack of interest. He bought a dog-eared
copy of The Communist Manifesto and was raised on the wave of its
timeless wisdom. Previously, the dutiful boy who had feared failing to match
his parents’ and teachers’ expectations, carried along in the flow of
accumulation of good marks and exam passes, he now experienced the
incomparable thrill of revelation. He’d arrived at university with a vague
sense of his future as some kind of success, which meant, according to
everything he’d been taught or absorbed, a good job, probably with a big
company, a nice house, car, expensive holidays, a girl his mother would
approve of, membership of the golf club. Now, he was in possession of the
future. Though he was slightly unnerved by lack of familiarity with the
proletariat, his school having been thoroughly middle-class and his
mother having disdained the rough necks and bimbos who
attended the non-denominational comp ten minutes from their front door;
being subsumed to a class, to an homogeneity whose historical role was
determined for them, whatever they might think, reassured him: there was no
need to know them as people. He knew them as a force.
The nervousness he’d suffered about initiating or continuing
conversations with the students in his block, lectures or seminars,
evaporated. His opening gambit was: Are you a communist? Whatever the
response, he felt justified. Mostly, his contemporaries turned away or shook
their heads or gave a little laugh or made some foolish remark like,
“Politics gives me a headache”; but rebuffed, indulged, agreed with, he
always felt justified.
He was admitted to the Revolutionary Workers’ Party and
required to hand over ten percent of his weekly allowance. It’s moving
spirit was Ahmad Malik whose booming voice, definitive pronouncements,
thick, black mane and spectacular moustache intimidated neophytes.
Discussions proceeded by Malik enunciating a truth, everyone agreeing with
it more or less, those who dissented being subjected to a rant reminding
them of the basics of Marxism, after which there would be a vote, which
Malik never lost, putting an end to any further debate. Once or twice,
l’esprit d’escalier took hold of Jordan as he walked back to his room or
lay on his bed ruminating on the proceedings. Perhaps he should have dared
to speak up when he had an idea which contradicted Malik; but he’d found a
home and he feared being expelled.
Towards the end of his first term, somewhat jaded after spending the
day writing an essay on the influence of Fanny Burney on Jane Austen, he was
reluctant to attend the weekly meeting, but knew his absence would bring
questions and rebuke. The guest speaker was the RWP’s national secretary,
and his subject, The Coming Crisis.
“Coming to the bar for a game of darts?” said Ben who occupied the
room next to his popping his head round the door.
“No, I’ve got a meeting.”
“Is she nice?”
“Not a rendez-vous. A political meeting.”
“Oh, fuck that for once,” said Ben, coming in and inspecting the
essay, open on Ben’s laptop.
“I have to go.”
“Says who?”
“I’m committed to it.”
“You’re obsessed with it, mate. Look at these posters. Who’s he when
he’s at home?”
“Engels.”
“Some beard. What did he do to deserve his mug on a poster?”
“Predicted revolution.”
“When?”
“In the mid-nineteenth century.”
“Was he gambling man?”
“He was a dialectical materialist.”
“He was a diabolical idiot if he predicted revolution in this
country. Are you comin’? There’s five of us. You join in we can make three
pairs.”
“No, I can’t.”
“See you later. Enjoy the boring meeting.”
On his way, Jordan passed Claughton bar where through the huge pane
which was its east-facing wall he saw the lads congregated near the
dartboard and experienced a fleeting regret: maybe it would have been
pleasant to waste a few evenings doing nothing, downing a few pints,
throwing a few darts, knocking balls around a pool table, but the high call
of the revolution nudged aside all lesser intentions. He convinced himself
he was the lucky one. When the day arrived, Ben and his like would be swept
up in events they hadn’t anticipated and didn’t understand, while he and his
enlightened comrades would lead the rebellious masses.
Small, intense and with a curious self-indulgent smile playing on his
lips, the national secretary sat behind the table hung with posters calling
for revolution and advertising meetings and conferences, surveyed the
gathering small audience and nodded.
“You,” he said, once Malik had completed the introductions, “are part
of a social movement which will make the Chartists look insignificant. The
signs are obvious: social dislocation alienation, stagnant growth,
increasing poverty, breakdown of the international order. The capitalist
system is crumbling before our eyes and it is our good fortune to be the few
who see what is happening. The day of reckoning is coming, there will be
serious violence, that’s the only thing the bourgeoisie understands. They
will concede nothing without bloodshed. But we are ready. We will seize the
levers of power, take over the barracks, make the weapons ours. Many will be
killed but we will stand triumphant on the piles of corpses…”
A horrible thought grabbed Jordan: would his parents be killed? Jack?
Surely that couldn’t be right. He lacked confidence to challenge the tenor
of the meeting. Back in his block he found Ben and a gaggle of
semi-intoxicated darts players in the kitchen.
“How was the meeting, Jordie?” said his neighbour.
“Very good.”
“Is the revolution coming?”
Wary of their combined mockery he replied only that the speeches had been
inspiring, took his cup of tea and retired to his room. The dog-eared bible
of communism was to hand. He flicked its barely attached pages. What did
revolution mean? Did it have to be violent? He searched the internet.
Liberty leading the people, bare-breasted, carrying a bayoneted rifle, the
boy beside her waving two pistols, the corpses underfoot; was this 1789. No,
he read, it was the revolution of 1830, about which he knew nothing. His
head began to swim. He googled most famous revolutions. From
as long ago as two and a half thousand years BCE, there were uprisings,
revolts, rebellions almost all of them violent. It hadn’t occurred to him,
when the image of the heroic, all-virtuous proletariat overthrowing the
despicable, profitgrubbing bourgeoisie had lifted his spirits and granted
him a sense of rightness and certainty, that the cost might be his parents
bleeding in the gutter and his brother with a bayonet through his guts. He
stashed the book in his bedside drawer, played fortnight for a hour, pulled
on the pyjamas which smelled of home, brushed his teeth and turned in.
He dreamed the little national secretary was standing in the middle
of the dining table in his parents’ house, one foot pressing down on the
roast of beef. His mother, her breasts bared, appeared carrying the garden
rake. Ahmed Malik was addressing a huge crowd in an open space. The king
mounted the steps to the guillotine and waved to the crowd which cheered as
his wife’s neck was sliced. He was in a lecture on George Eliot. The
lecturer was Karl Marx who took out a pistol and began shooting the
students.
Subsequently, an irritating doubt persisted. He attended the
meetings, gave out the flyers, marched and handed over his money dutifully,
yet all the while the lurking repulsion from violence troubled him. Wasn’t
this a moral question? Wasn’t killing people wrong? How could it be
justified by appeal to the aim of a classless society?
The very pretty girl was forever present at subversive events. One
chilly Wednesday she sat next him in the Eddington lecture theatre as he
waited for a meeting to begin on the question of schoolkids’ strikes as a
way to begin the revolution.
“Here,” she said, and thrust a pamphlet at him.
“Thanks.”
It was a ten-point explanation, authored by the national secretary,
of why only revolution could bring an end to injustice and exploitation.
Section eight was entitled: Can Voting Change Anything? He read quickly
though its short, definitive paragraphs. Looking over his shoulder, the
beautiful girl said:
“Good, isn’t it?”
He met her lovely green eyes and from some unknown source came the
boldness to say:
“I’m not sure violence is justified.”
His words brought immediate interest.
“The bourgeoise are oppressing the workers. Everyday. That’s their
form of violence. How can we fight back if we aren’t prepared to rise up and
overthrow the system?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe we should just refuse to cooperate.”
She let out a little laugh of derision. The meeting was called to order.
“We’ll go for a coffee after,” she whispered, “ and I’ll explain it.”
They sat in the crowded Cudworth bar, she with her skinny latte, he
with his espresso and he at once became aware of himself as the companion of
the prettiest girl in the place, if not on the campus. Her green eyes shone
in the artificial light, she hooked her thick auburn hair over her ear, as
she spread wide her arms to remove her neat, leather jacket the glory of her
heavy breasts made his heart skip.
“The point is,” she said, leaning forward across the low table, “we
don’t choose violence. It’s historically inevitable. History decides, we are
subject to its decisions. The bourgeoisie won’t give up its power. It’s
historically destined to pursue profit by the oppression of the
working-class. It obeys the law of surplus value. The new society has to be
born by overthrowing the ruling-class. There’s no alternative. We can’t
choose peaceable means of change. We can’t choose at all. Everything is
inevitable before it happens. The revolution will come whether we want it or
not. We have to make sure we’re on the right side of history.”
His ears may have been responding to the movements of air,
transforming them into electrical impulses, his brain may have been picking
up on them and potentially turning them into meaning, but he had no idea
what she was saying. He was looking into her eyes, watching her lips move,
marvelling at the whiteness of her teeth, stealing, when he could,
surreptitious glances at her breasts, and when she uncrossed her legs and
shifted in her seat, he fixed the tight crotch of her jeans and his heart
almost flew out of his mouth.
Subsequently they met several times a week so she could tutor him in
the essentials of Marxism-Leninism. He discovered that minor objections
increased her intensity.
“But,” he said, “I read that Marx blamed the bourgeoise for his
carbuncles and called them swine. That’s a moral judgement, isn’t it? But if
the bourgeoisie is fulfilling its historical role, how can moral judgements
of them as swine be viable?”
She sighed and flicked her hair behind both ears.
“Look,” she said, holding before her the hands whose long, elegant
fingers he imagined stroking him, “Marx may have made a joke about the
bourgeoisie being swine, but his theory is clear. We are products of our
historically developing economic and social circumstances. Right?”
“But we produce those circumstances by the choices we make, don’t
we?”
She rolled her eyes.
“No, we enter into specific relations which are indispensable and
independent of our will in order to produce our means of life, and it’s
those relations which make us what we are and which drive history.”
“Why do we object to capitalism then? If it has made us what we are,
why do we find it unacceptable?”
She shook her head vigorously.
“We don’t. That’s all bourgeois sentimentality. History will make
capitalism redundant, we don’t make moral choices about it.”
The idea sent a little shock through him. All the same, he didn’t
object too strongly because he feared she would give up on the instruction
if he proved too recalcitrant a pupil.
It happened, faute de mieux, they got together in his room. He
sat in his pew of a chair while she perched on the edge of the bed. Her
presence in his intimate space sent his heart bouncing like a solid rubber
ball.
“Well,” he said, after she had explained at length once more the
infallibility of dialectical materialism, “how does Marxism account for
language?”
For a second she was lost for a response.
“What?”
“I mean,” he said, trying not to fix his eyes on her bared cleavage,
“if we are entirely products of our historical economic and social
circumstances, how did they give rise to language.”
She stared at him for two seconds before falling back on the bed, making her
head comfortable on the pillow and stretching her legs.
“That’s just a stupid question,” she said.
He was thinking of the condoms in his bedside drawer, bought in hope and
unused in despair. With a boldness that surprised him he sat beside her.
“No, it isn’t. I mean, there has to be an explanation. People had
language in slave societies, in feudal societies. It’s just part of being
human.”
“Yes,” she said, sitting up suddenly and setting her face ten
centimetres from his, “but it changes all the time. That’s history. That’s
the dialectic.”
“The fact of being linguistic doesn’t change,” he said. “Just like
our physiology. People didn’t have three arms and four legs in feudal times.
That’s biology. We have a nature which doesn’t change with changing
circumstances.”
She blinked. Her head tilted slightly to the left. She fell back on
the pillow. For few seconds she stared at the ceiling, then switching her
eyes to him she said:
“You can kiss me if you like.”
The lessons continued, sometimes pre and sometimes post, but Jordan
was more ironic in his responses. He continued attending the meetings, but
what thrilled him wasn’t theory or the prediction of coming social upheaval,
but that the most beautiful girl took his arm as they left. He took part in
marches and handed out leaflets but the confidence that came from having a
lovely girl in his bed and hearing her helpless little cries, diminished his
need for compensatory fulfilments. Together, in a little crowd of a hundred
and fifty, they were listening to a speech by Malik at the end of a march
through the town centre when he said:
“The lives of individuals matter little. It is History which is
important. History will sweep away the bourgeoisie and raise the
working-class and we are the vanguard. We must be ready to seize power…”
They retired to the Green Dragon, where a real coal fire
blazed in the medieval hearth, and sat side by side near the chimneybreast.
“Would you say,” he said, his shoulder close against hers, “a
salesman is part of the bourgeoisie?”
“Definitely. Why?”
“My dad’s a salesman.”
“What does he sell?”
“Lingerie.”
She choked on her g&t.
“You’re joking.”
“Why? It sells like ice-cubes in the desert. He says it’s the easiest
job in the world. He doesn’t have to persuade anyone. He just visits his
outlets and takes the orders.”
“What a way to make a living.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s parasitical.”
“Well, lots of women buy lingerie, or men by it for them. It has to
be made and it has to get to the retailers. Someone has to be the link
between the manufacturer and the retailer.”
“Unless people buy straight from the manufacturer.”
“Okay. But my dad’s firm has one big factory and people want the
stuff from Inverness to Ipswich.”
“It should be made locally.”
“Sure, but it’ll be more expensive and you can’t make the full range
in your front room or your attic.”
“Anyway, we can do without lingerie. It’s not a priority for the
working-class.”
“Don’t working-class women buy fancy knickers?”
“Only because they’re bamboozled by advertising.”
“Maybe you’re right, but if they’re so easy to bamboozle, what makes
you think they’re going to overthrow capitalism?”
“It’s inevitable.”
“Nothing is inevitable till it happens, and what’s about to happen is
I’m going to the bar. Another?”
What preyed on Jordan’s mind was the assertion that individuals
didn’t matter. Would Malik gladly see his parents arrested and executed as
incorrigible bourgeois? All the rhetoric of equality and an end to
exploitation lifted his spirits, but how could it be achieved through hatred
and violence? He didn’t know many working-class people. His dad earned
nearly a hundred thousand. The working folk lived in the terraced streets
and on the estates he’d never ventured to. But how could it be true they
were agents of revolution? At least while there was fishing, bingo, footie,
soap-operas, pop music, and the pub. All the same, his reservations didn’t
make him pull away, because Kate was a fervent believer and though he found
her conviction somewhat laughable, he was falling in love with her.
One Saturday morning he got a text from his mother: On the way to
see you. Be there in an hour. Gather your dirty laundry. Mum.
“Hey, Kate?”
“What?” she said, pulling the duvet up to her chin.
“My mum and dad’ll be here in an hour.”
“What the fuck!”
“It’s okay. Let’s take them to the Dragon.”
Angela Lane was impressed, shocked and almost pleased her son had
paired up with a stunningly beautiful girl. She’d brushed her hair, applied
make-up and put on a charming dark green dress. Phil Lane shook her hand and
said politely, “Pleased to meet you.”
“What are all these posters about?” said the mother.
“Revolution,” said Jordan.
“Revolution?”
“Yes, mum, we’re overthrowing capitalism.”
The father raised his eyebrows and put his hands in his pockets.
“Never mind capitalism. Put your dirty washing in this bag, I’ll take
it home.”
“It’s all done, mum. There’s a laundrette.”
“Laundrette. Have you ever heard anything like it, Phil? You can’t
get washing clean in a laundrette. Who knows who’s used the machine before
you? And who’s going to air and iron it?”
“We’ve a drying room and an ironing board. I’m a dab hand.”
“Nonsense, put it in here.”
They sat in the Dragon for two hours. Phil paid for the
battered haddock and chips and apple pie and gave the youngsters a lift back
to campus.
“You know what, Kate Addison?” Jordan said, his hands on her waist
when they were alone again in his room under the indulgent gaze of Fred
Engels.
“What?” she said, planting a quick kiss on his lips.
“I love you.”
When she slipped her dress over her head she said:
“Well, do you approve of my lingerie?”