Thomas_More
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Thank you. You know a great deal about Latin America and Africa, and you speak Spanish, which I do not. You shine a light on the Spanish-speaking world’s contribution to socialist thought and you have travelled a lot and done a great deal that is interesting and of importance to communities.
I do not speak or read Old English, which is the name for Anglo-Saxon. But I have studied Old French and Occitan (Provençal).
Before the Victorian age soldiers were despised by other workers as those doing the dirty work of the masters. “No son of mine will don a red coat” was a common saying. Recruits for the army and navy were tricked into it or press-ganged. The press gang was a regular terror, raiding taverns at night and dragging men off while drunk, hunting them down through the streets and/or clubbing them unconscious.
Class hatred was personal, as in the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Upstart rural bourgeoisie were known by their tenant workers and both would exchange abuse and threats when the latter were prosecuted in court, their master presiding.
A popular song rang through London during the French Revolution: “God save the guillotine, which shaves the head so clean from King and Queen.” The British royals in their carriages were pelted with rotten fruit and stones whenever they ventured forth.
By the end of the 19th century and the death of Victoria the patriotic lie had destroyed the last vestiges of the old and personal class hatred of capitalism’s earlier centuries.
But the working class is not the same everywhere. I would say there is less class consciousness in places like Britain than there is in S. America and Africa, where the class struggle is more personal – as it was here in the days of the Chartists.
The poorest here in Britain are generally the most patriotic, reactionary, and punitive, and the most fawning and admiring of the bourgeoisie. Their communal sentiment is nationalism and pride in the military, macho, personality. The phenomenon of the autodidactic worker with his home library has mostly disappeared, and most people rely on the state for their education and on soundbite TV news programs and internet slop.The young and rebellious are drawn to crass conspiracism, and the young and conservative to the military or business.
If there is class consciousness, I think it more likely to be found in the so-called third world than here.
Hot phase to start by 2029/30.
Izvestia: https://iz.ru/en/node/2168250
Rehearsing the blockade of Kaliningrad and isolation of St. Petersburg.
https://tass.com/politics/2188671
Readying to attack Russia soon.
Families in Russia able to buy gas masks as thousands of bunkers are prepared.
Putin lifts 30-year gas mask ban, restores bunkers as Russia prepares for ‘worst case’
Tass – Very short war warning.
But awareness of history, never great, is at an all-time low. Many have no chronological sense of it at all, let alone any interest in or knowledge of working class history. Many even ridicule an interest in history and are actually proud of their ignorance of it. It is considered “dead and gone” and not worth thinking of.
” Present generations would eventually learn this without a group of organised socialists passing this on, but the growth of the understanding of what needs to be done would be slower.”
Really? We are so small a number and most never hear of us. Would it really be any slower without us?
I agree with everything here. But there is a consideration we need to note.
Capitalism has always been destructive, but it is only in modern times that it is threatening all of us with final destruction. Not just its WMDs, but the climate crisis too.Plus, the extinction of species, especially of bees, plankton and corals, affects the climate, the food chain, and oxygen levels. Plant, as well as insect and animal diversity, affects us, because all life is connected. Pollution in air and food produces cancers and capitalist production and waste disposal practices lead to disease.
I’m not a scientist, but I think you have an idea of what I’m saying, if generalising.People and other animals died in the summer heatwaves around the world. Droughts and floods kill, and capitalism is causing them, and each year will be worse. We could be wrong about time beyond our finite lives. There mightn’t be any.
Every suffering society, from antiquity onward, has had apocalyptic anxieties, but the difference now is that, whereas theirs were religious, ours today are witnessing real physical destruction happening as never before, and confirmed by science.
