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Future humans Glasshouse. By Charles Stross. Ace Hardcover. 2006. 352 pages. ISBN: 0441014038 (published in US) If you go to the Science Museum in Kensington, up to the top floor, to the aviation gallery, you can discover a sign on the wall that informs us that the technology for flight has existed for hundreds of years, but that the obsession with flapping prevented any actual heavier than air flight until well towards the close of the nineteenth century. This highlights the importance of exploring ideas and technological changes - and being bold and speculative. Contemporary science fiction performs much of that role today - dreaming up new technologies that seem impractical now but will soon become everyday. In a real sense, compared to the founders of our party, we are living in a science fiction world now - sadly it's a dystopia. Charles Stross has recently been awarded a prize for his fiction by the transhumanist association (they hold that humans whilst they have evolved technologically are still the basic animals they were half a million years ago, but that soon the technology will exist to change our bodies and begin a new technology driven phase of biological evolution - the capacity to re-write our bodies). His book, Glasshouse, is an examination of the effects of technological change on our society - starting from the fact that within the last hundred years alone that human life has been fundamentally altered by technological innovation, and that the rate of change will increase dramatically within our lifetimes. Set several hundred years from now, it features Robin, a historian who has wiped his memory agreeing to take part in an historical re-enactment of late twentieth century life as part of an experiment. He finds himself in the role of a woman, trapped both in her own biology and the social roles that come with that. The participants in the experiment have to live in a panopticon - their every action potentially observed - with rules which they gain or lose points by following - and have to ensure that their 'team mates' (their local community) don't lose them points. It thus forms a useful device for examining the construction of social life and power. Some players - the score whores - unreflectively play the game as presented to them but Robin (renamed Reeve) tries to find ways of breaking out of the restrictive role given her by reading the rules sideways. She cannot, however, escape the rules and the inertia of the score whores; and she has to stand by and witness the horrors of the rules of the game which she objects to but cannot escape from. As such it is an acute depiction of dissidence in society. The book is thus both an examination of social power and the power of ideas, as well as a meditation on the importance of memory and history for understanding where we are and where we are going. A flight of fancy that depicts the present in a deeply realistic way. PIK SMEET Glasshouse. A Rebels Guide to Gramsci. Coriolanus Top Western vanguardist A Rebel's Guide to Gramsci. By Chris Bambery, Bookmarks, 2006. 60 pages.£3. This is a short introduction, from an SWP viewpoint, to the life and ideas of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader who died from natural causes in a fascist prison in 1937 . Gramsci appeals to the SWP and Western Leninists generally because of his more sophisticated version of vanguardism than Lenin's. In his Prison Notebooks he distinguished the situation in Tsarist Russia and some other parts of Eastern Europe from that in the West. In Tsarist Russia, he argued, the state was e v e r y t h i n g and the ruling class relied directly on repression to maintain itself in power; in this situation the task of revolutionaries was (in B a m b e r y ' s summary of G r a m s c i 's views) "to lead a direct assault on power when the opportunity arose", as the Bolsheviks had successfully done in Russia (only to install themselves, we would add, as the embryo of a new ruling class).. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the ruling class ruled mainly through the "hegemony" it  exercised over the
working class rather than through direct force. In Bambery's words
again:"In Western Europe . . . the ruling class rested mainly on consent and was able to rely on a variety of institutions within civil society which organised and reinforced this.Gramsci described these as acting like a complicated series of earthworks surrounding a great fortress - the state. So institutions like the church, the media, the education system and political parties helped secure the consent of the masses allowing force to be used sparingly and only in the last resort . . . So these networks of support for the ruling class and the ideas they helped to reinforce had to be undermined first through a long ideological struggle before a direct assault on the ruling class was possible . . .Communists had to set themselves the task of undermining the consent, however grudgingly given, which allowed capitalism to rule." This is an analysis we can accept and indeed had made ourselves. But the conclusion Gramsci drew from it was not the same as ours. We concluded that, as socialism too could only exist with the consent of the working class, the task of socialists was to directly, incessantly and exclusively campaign amongst fellow workers against capitalism and capitalist ideas and for socialism. Gramsci concluded that a vanguard party should seek to establish its own "hegemony" over the working class, by assuming the leadership of the workers' day-to-day struggles. ALB Top Glasshouse. A Rebels Guide to Gramsci. Coriolanus
Coriolanus at the Globe This play features the citizens of Rome, as was customary for Shakespeare, as a fickle and foolish lot, shifting wind under the power of the words of their rulers and betters. The performance of it at the Globe leads to the intriguing twist of bringing the action into the audience (most of whom stand as a crowd before the stage for three hours of more). We were thus cast as part of the mob, the mob despised by the title character - Gaius Marcius (given, during the play, the name Coriolanus for his part in the capture of the city of Corioli). As Coriolanus ranted how he hated the mob, he moved within the audience, speaking to placed actors in period costumes. The sentiments towards the mob must have jarred with the generally democratic instincts of the modern population. The play centres on his being appointed Consul (leader) of Rome, and being compelled by the plebeians to gain their votes - for which he must plead and show his war wounds. He believes that consulship is his by right, and resents asking the scum for their voices. The action then focuses on what is essentially a revolution. The play began with the people in revolt for more bread - which won them tribunes - a representation in government. The tribunes then organise to bring down Coriolanus - as a fierce opponent of democracy. This leads to him being banished - only to return at the head of a rival powers' army - much to the consternation of the revolutionary tribunes. Eventually, he is persuaded by the entreaties of his wife and mother not to wage war on Rome, and he returns with his army to be murdered as a traitor to the rival power. Coriolanus himself is presented as a utopian idealist. He fights for glory, revelling in war. He actively refuses a share of the spoils, claiming only glory motivates him. At war with the world, he wants to be 'the author of himself', without any bonds trying him, living only for his glorious legend.His defeat is organised by more worldly Machiavellian politicians. This raging anti-democrat still manages to hold our sympathies because of his idealism and his proven abilities. He stands as the ultimate individualist - who scowls like a schoolboy when chided to behave by his mother. The play is littered with corporeal imagery - the state is a body with hands, feet and head. The common people are reduced to mere voices, as airy as Coriolanus' own glory. It is this sense of powerlessness and insubstantiability that being in the crowd conveys. Audience members could easily recognise the regret of the crowd in making Coriolanus' the consul for much the same way that most modern politicians - like Tony Blair - are appointed to disappoint by our simple voices. PIK SMEET Glasshouse. A Rebels Guide to Gramsci. Top SOCIALIST STANDARD INDEX An index to articles in 2005 can be obtained by sending 2 postage stamps to: Socialist Standard, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN |
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