Architects of Tomorrow
February 17, 2012
Let’s play a game. Let’s see if you can guess the author of the following diatribe. The language is a little salty and the reasoning unclear, but let the avalanche of rhetoric roll right over you anyway. It’s what the author wants and generally gets away with.
Precarity is opportunity. Fuck social mobility. Fuck security. Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class rather than with it. Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition we were bullied into pursuing. We should have abandoned them long before we were obliged to do so, and now we have no choice… We have five years until catastrophic climate change becomes a foregone conclusion…
Contrarianism, nihilism, apocalyptic fantasies? All clues.
Doomed youth isn’t so sympathetic when it’s screaming defiance in your face.
Operatic victimhood, comical bluster? Oh, come on.
We tried terribly hard to save each other, in the way that young people do, sharing out whatever meagre bits of work and welfare we could get our hands on, nursing one another ineffectually through the shock of walking out of school and college into a world that didn’t want us… The lost boys and girls of the credit crunch with no jobs, no prospects, no safe places to live, none of the things we played the game for all our young lives…
All our young lives.
No? Okay, one more.
It has to be war… The cracks in capitalism are getting wider, and if we are smart enough and brave enough we can force those cracks open until the whole thing shakes. We are the new left: precarious, rootless, ruthless, entitled, digitally enabled, and we are beginning to set the agenda…. The narrative of class transcendence held up to the superstructure of free-market ideology. Now that narrative is collapsing, threatening to bring the whole thing crashing down. So let it come down. There is more than enough room for us to build new lives in the rubble.
Ah, thought that would do it. Yes, it’s the stoical and subtle philosophy of Laurie Penny.
Elsewhere, Laurie returns to the subject of pubic glitter and its political ramifications:
If even the most private, intimate parts of us are being neutered and colonised by capitalism - stripped and shaved and made to sparkle like a chicken fillet covered in glitter - how are we possibly supposed to lead healthy emotional lives? If the surveillance of patriarchy and profit has now reached inside our knickers, we could be forgiven for not having the space or energy to fight back.
I’m guessing Laurie’s on the upswing of her manic-depressive cycle.
For more of Ms Penny’s trademark understatement and Olympian logic, see this, this, this and this.