Dictatorship of the Old and the Dead
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”
It strikes me there are three dominant forces defining the conjuncture, broadly, these are the Old, the New and Denial. To take the famous Gramsci quote and use it another way; we know what the New looks like, it looks like Climate Strikes and Corbynism, it looks like BLM and Bernie. We know what the New looks like because, as a social force, the New has been born. But the Old refuses to let it be, as the Old is dying it wraps the New in its cold embrace and drags it into the depths with it. This is not Old as in older people and older generations, it is Old as a social force, it is decay and spite and despair-at-change made manifest as the dominant political force of our times. Denial is the force that has refused to see this, it refuses to recognise the dying and so it refuses to recognise the New. Across the world these political forces confront each other and across the world it is the force of Denial that sets itself as the prime opposition to the Old, and it loses.
These losses are not momentary electoral defeats, they are on the plane of social struggle. Biden may beat Trump, but the Old will still be dying and the New will still be denied.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”
The Old as a social force has often been mobilised as a defence of capitalism (in principle), of whiteness, of hetero-normativity and of conformity. It is in these traditions of oppression that the Old can most clearly see the New, in staring into the face of a newly birthed force that rejects those traditions the Old can see its death, and out of spite it chooses to drag the New down with it. Denial looks away, Denial sees itself as above those traditions, its grown beyond them with gay marriage and minimum wages and civil rights and illegal wars and border controls and legitimate concerns. Denial of the conjuncture, and Denial of complicity.
“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
The power of the Old is inherited from the dead. The Conservative Party literally draws its capital from death and from Capital, which is dead labour. The economic crisis is partially a crisis of hoarding, of those with dead labour in their hands refusing to give it life again through investment. The economy decays because the labour of the past sits dead in vaults as the labour of the present is exploited in harsher more brutal ways. Denial is refusing to see this, Denial is looking at the crisis and saying it’s only minor, we just need to wait it out, the good times will come back. The New is being drained.
“The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say — we will never forgive you.” / ”I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
We are being failed and we have been failed. The Old looks at Greta Thunberg as a representative of the New and it seethes with rage, with conspiracy and dismissal and cruelty. Denial thinks they’re on her side, they stand up and applaud, they want to fix the problem, but it’s complicated. There’s a lot of valuables in the house and it’s really important to protect them, we shouldn’t rush into things.
We live in a dictatorship of the old and the dead, only the new can tear it down.
