Left Lullabies: Consolations for a Millennial Would-be Revolutionary
- N. A. Dawn
- Aug 16, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 19, 2020
We need to stop looking forward to some cataclysmic rupture with all that has gone before and focus on planting those seeds.
Snooze. You slap the alarm and your arm sags to the floor.
Goddamnit, you think. Not another day.
Stings, doesn’t it? It’s alright, you can admit it. This is a safe space. (But after Snowden, is anywhere really safe?)
You took the Red pill – not their Republican-red pill, I mean the real one – and already, even from the Southern Suburbs, Cape Town looks a lot shittier than it used to. Everything – and I mean everything – has devolved into a symptom of a culture predicated on overlapping forms of structural violence culminating in the total annihilation of the biosphere, and it’s not even 6:30am.
For starters, you haven’t yet rubbed the sleep from your eyes when you remember that most working-class people of colour, living in marginalised villages and under-resourced townships – some 40% of the country’s population – have already been awake for several hours. There they are, just a freeway away, ready for another day of underpaid toil: bucket-bathing their children in hand soap with the same hands that have spawned all of modernity: the roads you traverse with your small, smelly decades-old Ford, the corner shops selling affordable nonsense to the people who can’t afford it, the houses to shelter the wage slaves and the hamster-wheel-esque office blocks to put them to use. Likewise the malls, the hotels, the casinos and the banks. Oh god! You’ve just remembered the banks.
Why oh why did you ever watch The Big Short?
Five minutes on and you haven’t even had your coffee when you remember that coffee is imported from bankrupt postcolonies chained into a global neoliberal order orchestrated by puppeteers in the IMF, WTO and a gaggle of oligarchs who like to joke about democracy when their jobs are on the line, and laugh about it when they’re not.
You sigh. Guess it’s tap water then.
Oops! You almost forgot about the drought.
Dystopia smells like air-freshener. You suppose, all things considered, that’s not so bad – except that you’re struggling to steal a moment’s respite from the thought. Armageddon’s gonna be fresh af.
Suddenly, all the products on supermarket shelves are brightly coloured reminders of labour exploitation, unbridled materialism and the distant oceans of discarded packaging seagulls visit to drown. A cashier drones listlessly, “Cash or card, sir?” A parking attendant addresses you as “Boss”, and all you want to do is cry.
Your cousin has a baby and you’re mortified to find out the parents have already chosen the child’s gender for them. (Sorry Judith.) Despite all Ken Robinson’s dry wit, teachers are still regurgitating curricula designed for obedience and nothing else. Nauseating selfies of people cuddling their pets press you to consider the animal agriculture industry’s annual slaughter of millions, all the while generating mountains of waste, while guzzling land, energy and water, polluting the atmosphere, and dispossessing indigenous peoples of their territories.
“Congrats on your kitten, by the way.”
“Thanks! His name’s Madiba!”
Eventually you start to despise everything. Pop culture appears either as an onslaught of hedonistic distraction or worse: outright bigotry. (Why are all the superheroes in these movies spending so much time punching aliens when they could be building a directly democratic, post-scarcity society of the commons? And are people still playing “Blurred Lines”?) Meanwhile, elite culture remains a bourgeois province. (Tell anyone you cried to that montage of the planets in Tree of Life and you’re cancelled, for sure.)
Small-talk exhausts you, because ignorance is no longer bliss.
“Lovely weather today?”
“Actually I was just wondering whether the next generation will ever see a blue sky with their own eyes.”
‘Real’ discussions online, however, typically dissolve under a barrage of trolls, misogynists, racists and (cringe!) relatives!
By this point you’re so alienated you can barely greet a stranger without yearning to link arms, don ski masks, light Molotovs and join the black bloc.
You sigh, a little heavier this time. Cocktails anyone? No? Oh, that’s alright. You’ll just stay home with a bowl of cereal (soy milk, naturally) and fantasise about the dictatorship of the proletariat to VICE footage of the French Mayday riots last year.
Hear that? It’s the sound of mutual unintelligibility. You can’t remember precisely when, but at some point you stopped making sense to the people you know. Now that you’ve discarded your former life and joined the endlessly arguing improv class that is the Millennial Left, everything you say is either a self-deprecating Instagram meme or high-minded gibberish in the vein of whatever the hell the Frankfurt School declared fifty years ago.
Your vocabulary has been infected with critical thinking, and you’re confusing the normies again. Quick: forget Derrida for a second and jot down translations to common terms and phrases!
Job: mindlessly competitive industrial serfdom, but if you’re lucky, slightly better. Education: disciplinarian indoctrination, and silly outfits to make twelve-year-olds look like little colonists. Innovation: robots for reactionaries, and Elon Musk in a red cape. (No, not that red.) Care for the Environment: scrub a penguin and commodify the trees. Also, ugly light bulbs. Health: skinny white people with medical aid, PhotoShopped teeth, and smoothies brighter than their luminous running shorts. Clothing: rags from sweatshops, but imprinted with the names of Western plutocrats. Food: the spiced corpses of tortured nonhumxn mothers, but the smiley cartoons on the packet make carnivores feel better. Gifts: meaningless commodities exchanged in lieu of solidarity. Laws: rules protecting the bourgeoisie, except for the Constitution, which is awesome, but just happens also never to be applied in practice. Politicians: publicly funded conmen. Government: publicly funded conmen who control the military. Democracy: making an X on a page every four years so that publicly funded conmen can make all the important decisions on your behalf, except entirely in their interests. The Media: corporate propaganda for whom publicly funded conmen are celebrities, but look: puppies, and Freshly Ground’s on at Kirstenbosch next Sunday! The Economy: playground for publicly funded conmen and other snakes of the 1%; doubles as an all-purpose justification for felling rainforests and detaining immigrants. Money: no idea. Happiness: no idea. Hope: imagining a better world to relieve the pain of enduring the real world.
This is worse than being a hipster. Not only are you chronically misunderstood by The Masses, but you yearn for their comradeship. Now you know what Emma Goldman was on about: here you are fretting about the Will to Power, while everyone else drools over Big Macs and MTV. How do you convince them that all these terrifying opinions you’ve developed come from a place of love?
Wait, what’s love again? (Checks notes.)
Love: quasi-spiritual sentiments fossilised into anthologies of 17th century poetry, usually diluted nowadays to fake flowers and chocolates in heart-covered boxes from Woolworths.
Great, you think. Another thing you can’t afford.
Heartbreak #1: We have a situation, people. Heartbreak #2: Ignorance dramatically worsens the situation. Heartbreak #3: Knowledge makes life emotionally inhospitable. Heartbreak #4: As a survival strategy, resign yourself to despair.
You’ve broadened your political consciousness with an acute awareness of a speciesist, ableist, white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchal, climate-disfiguring state-capitalist global hegemony. But you’re traumatised, and your struggle is no longer with the system – but with your own mind. The world is a horror movie, and you can’t, as it were, Get Out. Being right – or rather, Left – affords you only pain, as everything you see soaks in the toxic colours of apocalyptic greed. Peeling back the curtain may have been a brave move, but no child ever conquered the bogeyman by depressively acknowledging, “Well, this is very, very bad.” We’ve seen the bogeyman, comrades, and we can’t go back.
Moreover, the alternative to former ignorance doesn’t involve stockpiling weapons and launching a coup at midnight. (And not just because that’s when night-time data becomes available.) The old Left’s conception of revolution – an epochal clash between armed proletarians and their false gods – has expired in a puff of hammers and sickles, leaving in its wake a generation of vibrant nobodies who wait, abandoned, for a magical, bearded white man to descend from the heavens and save us from ecocide.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Jesus? Or is that Marx? What! Slavoj Žižek!?
Guess it’s really all over then… Now what?
An appetite is growing for a new flavour of politics, one better suited to contemporary taste buds. Environmental activist George Monbiot perhaps puts it best: Our current political failure is, at its core, a failure of the imagination. Which is good news for the Millennial Left, who up until now have spent our restless ideological infancy throwing an understandable, but utterly unproductive tantrum. We’ve been torn between two formulations of who we’re supposed to be, and fallen short of both: incendiary Bolsheviks on the one hand, and amicable Rainbowists on the other. Discovering we’re neither Rambo nor Bambi leaves us with two negative-identities and nothing to feel positive about.
Or does it? From my hole in the ‘burbs, I spy with my Left eye at least three consolations our ancestors would envy: starting with legal protections. The civil liberties afforded to us by thousands of heroic predecessors like freedom of speech and voting rights weren’t conferred to us by benevolent snakes; they were fought for, and we ought to use them.
Secondly, information’s on our side, and often, free of charge. Left news sites like Truthout, Democracy Now!, Grist, The Guardian, The Daily Maverick, The Intercept, AlterNet, The Real News Network, The Baffler and YES! Magazine produce ground-breaking journalism on a daily basis. Finally, you can cut mainstream corporate news out of your life for good. Heck, if you know where to look, entire downloadable digital libraries of audiobooks and PDFs on everything from world history, socialist economics and radical philosophy brim before your eyes. You might not have the money for it, but the university’s in your pocket. Social media distributes everything, including misinformation, faster than Nigel Farage can resign after a referendum, but at least we can funnel in the right (I mean, Left) material to our comrades, not to mention organise ourselves like *snaps fingers*.
Moreover, the very nature of radical thought itself has mutated into something tantalisingly exotic. Forget incomprehensible sermons from dreary white men in tweed. Behold, the YouTube Left: LeftTube! A smorgasbord of quasi-academic vlogs from vivacious vegans (a privileged vegan, Reg Flowers, Abantu May, The Vegan Anarchist), feisty feminists (Marinashutup, Franchesca Ramsey), quirky queers (ContraPoints, Riley J. Dennis, Kat Blaque), adorable anarchists (anarchopac, Libertarian Socialist Rants, Philosophy Tube, BadMouseProductions) and savvy socialists (Shaun, Three Arrows, Hbomberguy) combine wit and charm with incisive argument and comprehensive research. Journalism, the classroom, pop cultural critique, videography, skit comedy and political dissent collide to create a colourful and contagious kind of consciousness. As Adam Krause puts it: “The revolution will be hilarious.”
Thirdly, and most importantly, compassion is our currency. Trigger warnings abound, safe spaces provide crucial pockets of respite, and you can’t so much as whisper “ACAB!” without accidentally befriending a blue-haired #gamergirl who freelances for Everyday Feminism and the Huffington Post. Self-care is a priority, and for the first time in ages, getting a good night’s sleep, eating your veggies and going to the gym are on the same agenda as the universal basic income and democratising the workplace. As feminist Laurie Penny points out in her article “Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless”, young radicals have tended to feel that ‘being revolutionary’ means sacrificing all prospects of wellbeing. Not anymore.
The point, of course, is not to censor authentic anger. The soul of activist punks like Rage Against the Machine lives on in the likes of Enter Shikari (“See, if we keep them silent / then they’ll resort to violence / and that’s how we criminalise change.”). But even spiky headbangers know that naked fury benefits from satire, synths and sick beats. Likewise, feminist rapper Akua Naru’s depictions of the black struggle in tracks like “One Womxn”, “The Journey” and “The World is Listening” arise alongside her more celebratory sensibilities in “Poetry, How Does It Feel” and “Sugar (HoneyIceTea)”. Across the Atlantic, British-Jamaican rapper Akala states in his second Fire in the Booth performance: “Fight, fire with fire, nah: fire with water / See the life you enforce is stronger than the destroyer”.
In the Solarpunk movement – a young and geeky shoal of optimists, innovators and intersectional ecologists – we believe hope, green technology and the lessons of history are not merely practical tools in building utopia. We believe they are utopia. What you’re witnessing isn’t so much a struggle between the status quo and a flower bed, but the seeds of the future, already planted, beginning to #flourish.
So count your blessings, comrade, for the night is yet young. And we’re all out to get lucky.
[For better or worse, I submitted the following essay for a Cultural Criticism assignment in a course on Contemporary Literature convened by Dr. Hedley Twidle (Hallowed Be Thy Name) at the University of Cape Town.]
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