Dialogue with an Old Cynic

'I've read your pathetic sequence of posts. You write of the everyday but of what do you write? What is this category except the repository of old alienations, old ideologies?'

'I said the everyday was the diffuse, the boring, that this was the time which arrived when everything seemed completed. Finished time: a solution for all; universe recognition which falls from the sky like light. When everything was complete but all that had completed itself was the perfection of capital whose smooth movement has swallowed everything. That the everyday, seemingly innocent, ordinary, reveals its truth in the temporary worker and the unemployed. That it is in an immense, impersonal boredom that the everyday reveals itself.'

'You write of a world that although boring is safe; a world that might be stifling but in which you will always find food and shelter. The everyday: isn’t this a name, little bourgeois, for that awareness that the world will not care for you as you were cared for in your family home? A name from what turns away from you in the world? A name for the fact that you will never be what you were: "His-majesty-the-baby", in Freud’s phrase?'

'The everyday is not my delusion; it is not my experience alone. There are others, many others, and if other temps fill these companies in the South, might it not be that I have articulated a common experience, a common dispersal?'

'It is only an experience of a bourgeoisie which has been overeducated and overindulged, of those who have passed through the halls of learning, of upper middle class culture and who expect what they will never have: an upper middle class job. For a time you were a temp, but what, little bourgeois, is so bad about being a temp?'

'Then you’d agree with Tony Blair that what we should embrace a "portfolio subjectivity" whereby each will do this job and then that, taking our transferable skills with us, all the while experiencing great insecurity and uncertainty?'

'Pathetic, little bourgeois, that your generation dream of nothing more than stability! Pathetic that what you want is the life you think the bourgeois used to enjoy: mass higher education: a house, a job for life!'

'Then you refuse to consider that there might be other ways of distributing income, that there is a vast poverty beyond the everyday of a developed nation? Our misery is the misery of a casualised world – it is the misery of capital, being directly produced by capital.'

'You use suffering to decorate what you think of as your political "theory." But the poor are like ornaments to whining little bourgeois like you; you are indulged and you indulge yourself in trying to join your own misery to the misery of those who really suffer. This erases the difference between intellectual labour (the office life you complain about too eloquently) and manual labour (the great exploitation of the developing world). You pass over all the real differences which organise what you call capitalism.'

'You leave no room for radicalism, for social change.'

'I just know to expect nothing from you, little bourgeois, you who are content merely to aestheticise his experiences, indulging in lyrical pen portraits drawn a decade after the events he describes. Everything about you reeks of a safe distance: you are far enough from manual workers to evoke their suffering without letting it touch you, and far enough from your past to transform it into something which merely looks like a critique of capitalism. I know you and I know your type: you are the bourgeois who has to catastrophise the world in order to take revenge for what you see as your present misery. Whence your attraction for apocalyptic theories, your desire for environmental collapse. In the end, you want what every bourgeois wants: safety, security, a life lived at a distance, and your call for the great collapse is mere resentment that you have not received what you think is your due.'

'And you, old cynic? Where is your hope?'

'That you and your whining kind, little bourgeois, do not obliterate the real conditions of oppression in the world and conceal the truth which reveals itself in those manual workers whose suffering you cannot imagine and whose demands you cannot know.'

'Do you know them, old cynic? Or is this another way of defusing the beginnings of a great movement which might gather force in our suburbs? Which might bring us towards another May 1968?'

'Nothing gathers force, bourgeois. Not here. The struggle is elsewhere. You want catastrophe, but in the end you want nothing. For if it came, it would terrible. No, for you it must remain impossible, far off.'