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The intervals

Since this blog post deals with my recent trip to Oxford in the U.K. I decided to write it in the native tongue over there, which is (I suppose) some kind of English. As some of you may know, I’m nearing the end of an attempt to write a whole thesis in this language, so just bear with me. Out there in the world there are at least three persons (true heroes), who actually have to suffer through a considerable lot more at the hands of my English.

Anyway, so I was in Oxford for two weeks in February as a so called Academic Visitor. I had been in contact with a professor over there many years before, whose writings at some point of my research had given me some food for thought. So I was going to meet her and discuss my thesis with her, but as I knew something from before about how academic people in certain positions worked (psychologically…), I mainly prepared for our meetings by way of re-acquainting myself with her stuff in order to be able to flatter her with my knowledge of her writings. Especially during our first meeting this strategy proved to be fruitful, as at some point the professor even exclaimed how much she would love to come to Uppsala (actually, she had never even been to Sweden!). However, by the time of our second meeting I could sense that her enthusiasm was already fading, and when I shook her hand after our third meeting she had definitely grown tired of me. She now answered my query regarding the prospect of her visiting Uppsala with a laconic “yeah, maybe some day…”.

So, that was that as far as the professor goes. But in truth my visit to Oxford was motivated less by my meetings with her and more by the possibility of me spending some time all by myself, and hopefully beginning to find my way back to inner peace as well. Here, in one of the oldest university cities of the world, there were certainly ample opportunities for doing just this, as my Academic Visitor deal included free access to all the university libraries, including the famous “reader only” Bodleian Library (in which pretty much any book pertaining to humanities can be found). And then there were the paths along the Thames-river, of course. Some days (or quite a few, actually) I went for long runs along the river and through the city in the morning, then to the hotel gym, then for a three course lunch to the city center and then spent the rest of the day in the Bodleian library, just reading all kinds of stuff I hadn’t had the opportunity to look at before. Those days were certainly the best. But I did do some real training during my visit to Oxford as well, namely some track running intervals with the Oxford Athletics Clubs.    

I had been in contact with the club president beforehand, asking to join their training sessions, and had received a very enthusiastic welcoming. So one day I took my running shoes and my shorts with me to the library and, as night came, went from there directly to the university club’s tracks. At the tracks I instantly spotted a bunch of 20-year olds who looked like they might have been running sometimes in their life. When asking them about the training I received the answer, however, that they were all sprinters, and that probably no distance runners would even turn up for the session. So I waited for a while on the side of the tracks, but as indeed no long distance runners turned up, I started warming up by myself, having decided to do 10 times 400 meters at moderate speed, i.e. somewhere between 70-75 seconds each lap for me.

As I started my third interval I heard one of the sprinters commenting to his friend “that guy thinks he is fast”. The first pair of 400 meters I had done had been in 75 seconds each, and I bore no illusion whatsoever of being fast. Still the comment had pissed me of, and while the sprinters had started doing some 100 meters sprints on the near side of the tracks, I suddenly got childish. When one of the guys passed me, and took in in front of me as I was heading for the final third of my eight interval, and as I rapidly increased my speed to catch up with him, I heard one of the girls behind me exclaiming “he’s racing” and then a “whaa…”, as I catched the sprinter in front of me. By this time we were both running as fast as we could and I finished the lap in 63 seconds right behind the guy, who apologized with a “sorry, mate” (for having sprinted in front of me). After that lap I again dropped down to 75 seconds, which felt more mature.

After training there is two things I usually like to do: eat and read. But this time I didn’t feel like going back to the Bodleian. Instead I settled for the bookshop Blackwell’s book. My strategy was clear. I would read one book in the shop, and then buy another one. The book I bought was Paul Mason’s recent best-seller. The choice could have been worse.      

Postcapitalism

I thought especially the following lines, on page 144 in Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: a Guide to Our Future, had a peculiar ring of truth to them:

Technologically, we are headed for zero-price goods, unmeasurable work, an exponential takeoff in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. Socially, we are trapped in a world of monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market and a proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs.’

Some half a year ago one of my oldest friends, on hearing that I had bought an apartment in Uppsala, congratulated me to having worked my way up “from a ‘squatter’ to a home owner”. Nothing like this ever happened, though. I still haven’t “done” anything, for myself, or for anyone else for that matter. What happened three and a half years ago was that a kind Swedish intellectual, a man in his early forties, took mercy on my (literally) poor soul and arranged so that monthly financial transfers of unheard of sums, (subjectively speaking), started to flow in to my (previously completely empty) account. But really I didn’t “do” anything. There never was any anachronistic transfer to a post WWII world of a haircut and a real job (how could there have been, for whom is there anything like that anymore?). I just continued with what I always had done, because as a matter of fact I couldn’t “do” anything. I kept reading and writing (and sweating, but in a highly unproductive way, in between). Yet, suddenly there was no longer any need for that yearly break of 3-4 months in my “occupation”. My days of hunting the out-of-the-box summer jobs, which were available simply because no one else had thought of applying for them (or actually even knew of their existence), were finally over (at least for some years). So I had more time to read, and to write (and to train of course, in order to be able to read even more). There was a side-effect to all this, however. I learned more (non-useful) things, and after a while I felt that I was able to transfer parts of this (useless) knowledge to others. (At least some) people seemed to take interest in what I was writing and talking about, even though it was self-evident that nothing useful, nothing productive in a material sense, could ever come out of it. I had been freed from the “need to maintain the illusion of productivity”, i.e. essentially freed from the burden of ‘bullshit jobs’. I had become “the postcapitalist man”. But how long could it go on? For a long time I felt, and perhaps I still feel, that I was living the ultimate lie. Shouldn’t I just continue my suffering along with all those unprivileged people who were still young when the “eternal recession” of the post 2008 world kicked in (“the real lost generation”)?

Actually the pessimist in me (which I’m afraid very often gets the upper hand) wishes to throw Paul Mason’s book right out of the window. As André Gorz wrote, the working class probably had died already in the 1980s, but in the following decades, during what quite accurately has been dubbed the victory march of neoliberalism, the work-force of the world was made global and it was doubled. Today, however, the “positive” effects of this “globalized exploitation of work-force” have surely been outworn, and so we have finally been riding out that last long “Kondratieff wave” (the famous K-wave of the Wall Street “intellectuals”). This means, in essence, that there will be no more major upswings in global economy. The last K-wave was prolonged by means of utter globalized blood-sucking and high reliance on so called “financialization”. But truly the signs have been there for quite a while that we are, as a matter of pure fact, nearing the end of “the 240-year lifecycle of industrial capitalism”. For “normal people” in the developed world this will result in, I believe, first of all the final destruction of the illusion of everyman’s duty to play along in the game of “maintaining productivity”. But can we really trust in some kind of utopian ‘economy of abundance’ replacing the 250 year old corpse of industrial capitalism? Isn’t the most likely alternative anyway more of what we’ve seen before, more nouveaux pauvres and a generally hastening inequality (along, of course, with the reality of the climate disaster and the pressing threat in form of global overpopulation), and all of this to a much higher degree than before? I haven’t really heard anyone, except Paul Mason himself, taking seriously the possibility of people feeding their families by means of an “internet of things”.

What I fear, as the real “guide” to our postcapitalist future, is the prospect of a total upheaval of all the political polarizations of the age of industrial capitalism (such as the now surely outdated opposition between left-wing and right-wing politics) and a regress to one of the most horrifying aspects of the ancient world, namely the total polarization among human beings into a small in-group of “full humans” and a large alien group of “sub-humans”. But this, I hope and pray, is just an illusion, stemming from my darkest hour, and while I wait for that not to happen, I try to make the best of what remains of my existence as the postcapitalist man par excellence:

Dort, wo der Staat aufhört, da beginnt erst der Mensch. Dort, wo der Staat aufhört, so seht mir doch hin, meine Brüder. Seht ihr ihn nicht, den Regenbogen und die Brücken des Übermenschen?