Hauntology : The 20th C. was a mistake.

  Perhaps the line "The 20th C. was a mistake" is a bit inflammatory as there were some very good things to come out of the century (progress for civil rights, a change in attitudes towards colonization, medical breakthroughs, etc.). The ways in which our societies in the West function though seem to have taken a poor turn. I think that a lot of the progress of the 20th C. falls prey to the idea that all progress must be a positive, when in fact some progress could be seen as a side step or a backwards step.

  In this idea of Hauntology and that media consumed in our youth helps plant the seeds for how we continue to think about ideas, there was one summer in my youth that I picked up a book from the library. I never finished the book, but I think that some of the ideas that it helped inspire me to think about have continued in my mind. The book was The Great War: Walk in Hell by Harry Turtledove. (If an earworm is a song that we can't get out of our head because we didn't hear the end of it, so our mind replays it over and over in search of an ending, what does our mind do about books we never finish ?) It is an alternative history book about WWI. The setting for the book is in the United States, except that the American Civil War ended in an uneasy truce, with North and South developing into separate countries. With the outbreak of WWI in Europe, the North and South take different sides and the Civil War begins again. What I think this started to get me thinking about at a young age was this idea that the problems of the American Civil War were never really resolved and how they applied to a larger conflict connected to the Industrial Revolution. The story had the North siding with the Ottomans and Germans, while the South sided with the French and British. This, I would argue, shows the duality of the States and how industry and agriculture have different alliances. Kind of like how the US was slow to act in WWII. While the government sent aid to the Allies, the leaders of industry aided the Axis. But focusing more on WWI, I think that this war posed a detrimental domino fall to the direction that the 20th C took. The death toll of WWI led to calling that generation the Lost Generation or Le Génération du feu in French ("Gun"fire Generation). This domino was that in this little spoken of period of late 19th/early 20th C. there was a coordinated building of worker-led protests in Europe and the US. (For example ; The 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago that led to the creation of May Day, the 1919 Seattle General Strike that was the first solidarity strike between unions in the US, The Great Labour Unrest in the UK which included the 1911 Liverpool Transport Strike, and the list continues ...) Of course the one of these that does get a bit more attention is the Russian Revolution, but (at least in the US) it is treated less as a building sentiment amongst workers in the West and is presented as anti-Communist propaganda. Given that WWI killed off so many people and left many survivors with PTSD, I'd argue that these Leftist protests that could have led to a significant change in favor of the worker lost their steam. (I'd love to one day meet a historian with a bit more expertise than me to delve deep into a conversation about this idea.) Was the Communism of Russia really a failed attempt at an alternative to Capitalism, or was it that the concentrated efforts by rich industrialists to not lose their exploited workforce utilized their exploited workforce to create a resource burning to collapse the USSR ? Imagine if the workers of the world were united in working towards building a livable world instead of war machines for posturing. Imagine if WWI hadn't killed off or scarred a generation and had moved power into the hands of the workers.

Original 1906 caption : "From the Depths."

  In the Leftist meme sections of the internet that are populated with Millennials and Gen-Z there are from time to time political cartoons from this era posted with comments lamenting that these problems expressed from over 100 years ago are still so poignant while all that has really changed are the fashions that the people are wearing. As expressed in Matt COLQUHOUN's intro to the 2022 copy of Ghosts of My Life by Mark FISHER, “[Fisher] seemed fascinated by a younger generation with no memory of the Cold War or its immediate aftermath.  But young progressives are similarly less aware of the other failed leftist projects that defined our previous century and the potentials that still lie in wait amongst them.  The ‘harsh Leninist superego’ of establishment centrists, declaring everything has already been tried, only fuels the young’s defiance.  Capitalism makes these failed projects more accessible than ever, after all.  They float incongruously through popular culture and the churning maw of internet culture.  But it is up to us to seize them, and place them once again in tension with one another, denaturalizing our persistent retromania.” (pgs.XXIII-XXIV) But it feels that as these younger generations uncover these lost histories that the failure of distributing power to the people in the 20th C has created a seemingly insurmountable battle, book ended with the climate crisis. All the while, we are seeing the Right-wing political party of the US chip away at things like child labor laws.

Letter to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952.

  In the adage of "no war but class war" and the idea of alternative histories could we have perhaps seen a more successful Civil Rights movement in the US ? In the Leftist spheres of the US internet, there seems to be work in trying to broaden what the education system has told us about MLK and expand upon of his anti-Capitalist ideas. It is a bizarre time to live through when the Right-wing of American politics brings up MLK as a hero while proclaiming that racism has ended and protections fought by the Civil Rights Movement are being eroded by them.

Resource distribution within CHAZ/CHOP.

  At times it feels like the ghosts of these failed Leftist movements for the workers are popping up to give hope for change, but change is slow. I remember having high hopes for Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and this notion of holding the bankers accountable through removing money from large banks and instead focusing in on small regional credit unions. And of course the development of our local politics to develop a better means of representation. Of course, as we saw, the movement seemed to fall apart in a concentrated effort of disinformation and ridicule. One thing that I have also been noticing though with these briefly resurrected ghosts is that these movements seem to prefer a lack of a singular leader in favor of providing a voice to the mass of the movement. There is a certain contingent of people outside these movements who can't seem to process this idea that there is no singular leader. I wonder if their failure to process this structure sans leader stems from a strongly established psychological barrier. Similar to the ideas that people struggle with understanding the spectrum of gender because at a young age they are presented with people claiming that gender is a spectrum runs in opposition to their established mental basis that as a very young child they were only presented with two options. In attending the Seattle 2020 protests that culminated into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone/Capitol Hill Occupy Protest (CHAZ/CHOP), where the city police abandoned a precinct building and protestors occupied the blocks surrounding it, I noticed people struggling with this. The news media seemed to be constantly searching for a singular leader to become the face of the protest and no matter how many times they were told there was no leader they would briefly craft someone to be in charge. From my in-the-crowd observations, it felt like the ghost of a commune fell apart not from a lack of a singular leader, but from a lack of general representation and application of ideas paired with a bleeding over of city gang violence at night. What I mean by this is that while there was a great establishment of resource sharing where people would provide goods (such as clothing, food, books, etc.) but that the crowd drifted during the day towards trama sharing, finger pointing, and partying instead of trying to build a structure for how they would create a functioning commune within the city. Then at night they were multiple instances of violence that seemed to be connected to unrelated gang violence that bled over into the area. Perhaps this was due to a lack of police presense or perhaps due to people trying to turn the location into a street party, but it was probably a combination of the two. Once the city provided concrete barriers to reinforce the barricades and then moved them to barricade the abandoned police precinct seemingly sans protest the steam of it had fizzled. (Perhaps I'll make a larger post one day on observations and after-thoughts of that summer.)

The abandoned police precinct at the heart of CHAZ/CHOP.

  A direction that we saw the 20th C go in that I think needs to be reversed is that of global industrialization. The aspect that the goods that are needed and consumed in the West usually come from countries where factories have been outsourced to for their cheaper labor, which generates more profit for those at the top of the capitalist pyramid. In studying Art History, this era that I have focused into had the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. In these art movements, there was an idea of trying to establish small cottage industries to produce local goods in contrast to the larger factories. These cottage industries had their inspiration from the cottage industries of the Middle Ages to create quality goods from a collection of regional workers. As we continue to see the effects of Capitalism's overproduction and overuse of our natural resources, the sustainability movement has championed buying local goods. Which seems to play right back into this idea of resurrecting the cottage industries of Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau.

William Morris' Honeysuckle wallpaper pattern, 1874.

  A detriment that we have found with the 20th C. though is that we have lost many regionally specific skills in the making of goods. Like how cities used to have furniture makers, we have fallen to over-priced Ikea. An interesting element for how we fell into this plastics-infused furniture dominance that I discovered recently in my travels was made in reading about furniture at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland. In the display they showed the progression of regionally made furniture and after WWII the switch to infusing plastic with wood was, in part, because in order to reconstruct after the destruction of WWII resources such as wood and metal were rationed while plastics were not. It is my hope that the Right to Repair movement could function as a stepping stone in this direction of revitalizing cottage workshops. In a move towards combatting overconsumption it would be great to see small local shops begin with fixing goods to providing regionally unique goods perhaps made from components of goods they were repairing. I noticed while living in Liverpool recently that some of the vintage clothing shops would sell modifiied vintage clothing. These were mostly crop tops crafted from dress shirts, so nothing terribly imaginative, but hopefully as people's skills develop so will the available items. As we live in the belly of the beast of Capitalism, I like the idea that purchasing, using, and repairing second-hand items can be a small act of rebellion and a glimpse of seeing a sustainable future.