..has a great chapter on anarchism and the gross social inequalities that
caused it. My research was brought on by a passing reference in last month’s
blogette (which you have forgotten already you ungrateful Christmas hung-over
swine!) to my antipodean romantic infatuation with the Black Flag of Anarchism.
The sheer panic that was engendered by Anarchism in the late 19th Century
was out of all proportion to its deeds or its effect. But like terrorism today,
it was easily exploited by the media and government to arouse some deep atavistic
fear in the urban middle class population. Anarchism opposed the status quo,
the predestined and order, the way that things were and should always be.
Most terrifyingly it was an Idea.
Tuchman wrote that the Idea was its hero. …… a transcendent ideal
future where all were equal, all contributed and where power lay with the
individual. But to achieve that it needed to create a spark to create the
conflagration from which the new world would emerge. And that spark was death.
Its assassins (and there were relatively few) …..
”…… came from the warrens of the poor, where hunger and
dirt were king, where consumptives coughed and the air we thick with the smell
of latrines, boiled cabbage and stale beer, where babies wailed and couples
screamed in sudden quarrels, where roofs leaked and unmended windows let in
the cold blasts of winter, where privacy was unimaginable, where men, women,
grandparents and children lived together, eating, sleeping, fornicating, defecating,
sleeping, dying in one room, where a teakettle served as a wash boiler between
meals, old boxes served as chairs, heaps of foul straw as beds, and boards
propped across two crates as a table. Where sometimes all the children in
a family could not go out because there were not enough clothes to go around,
where decent families lived amongst drunkards, wife beaters, thieves and prostitutes,
where life was a seesaw of unemployment and endless toil, where a cigar maker
and his wife earning 13 cents and hour worked 17 hours a day, seven days a
week to support themselves and their three children, where death was the only
exit and the only extravagance and the scraped savings of a lifetime would
be squandered on a funeral coach with flowers and a parade of mourners to
ensure against the anonymity and the last ignominy of Potter’s field.
Not for a few imagined minutes but everyday with no hope – with as much chance
of a better future than the fourth generation in a Palestinian refugee camp
in Lebanon.
The poor lived in a society in which power, wealth and magnificent spending
was never more opulent, in which he rich dined on fish, fowl and red meat
at one meal, lived in houses with marble floors and damask walls and of thirty
or fifty rooms, wrapped themselves in furs and were cared for by a retinue
of servants who blacked their boots, arranged their hair, drew their baths
and lit their fires. ……..
In a world where the jungles of Indonesia, the plains of Africa and the hills
of Pakistan are lit by the fitful blue light of televisions downloading global
program material the vast gap between the rich and the rest is highlighted
everyday for all of those whose eyes are wide with hunger.
Anarchism…. “ was the last cry of individual man, the last movement
amongst the masses on behalf on individual liberty, the last hope of living
unregulated, the last fist shaken against the encroaching State, before the
State, the party, the union, the organisation closed in.”
There was a brief momentary flowering of Anarchistic ‘non-government’
in Spain before the cancerous growth of Franco’s fascism smothered Spain
into neo-feudalism until the late 1970’s. And whilst anarchistic hope
lives on and through the internet that last cry of hope and despair grows
ever fainter.
The second book is “The Discovery of France” by Graham Robb.
France as we know it today is essentially a Parisian construct both linguistically
and geographically, its diverse dialects and geography only recently tamed.
For most of its history the land was largely agricultural and internally isolated
where the rural poor and townsfolk lived lives divided by the solstices, a
year of twelve months and two seasons.
“There was the season of labour when even the longest days were too
short and the season of inactivity when time slowed to a crawl and seemed
in danger of stopping altogether”.
And the season of inactivity was a season of sloth and sleep. Human hibernation
was a physical and economic necessity as lowering the metabolic rate prevented
hunger. Life expectancy was low: even in 165 the average life expectancy was
just over 37 years – but in many areas was much lower. Yet complaints about
the brevity of life was far less common than complaints about it inordinate
length.
In 150 years or less the landscape was as radically transformed as the Australian
landscape has been transformed. If you go to see the bay at L’Estaque, immortalised
by Cezanne you may notice some subtle changes.
If you live in Melbourne you may find that the Heidelberg school of painters
were painting bush landscapes in what is now an old and established inner
city suburb. But as much as the landscape had been transformed the lives for
the most of here has been more radically transformed into relative opulence
– and in the space of a very few generations.
We fail to realise that most of the world’s population is still living
in a world similar to that which created both anarchism or deathly despair.
Perhaps if we can truly imagine the past we can see the present and maybe
change the future