What a suddenly beautiful day today is! I sat out for a good two hours this afternoon, photosynthesizing to my hearts content. Does you wonders, sunlight. Helps you forget your woes, like the vicious rotting-egg-stink that will not lift from your house’s kitchen. The less said of it the better.
I made my triumphant return to the gym today. And by triumphant, I mean that I really didn’t want to, and I’d slept in so I felt groggy, and since it’s been a month since I last went I had to drop my weights on several exercises and felt embarrassed despite the fact that no one around me knew what weight I’d been doing before anyway…
On the way back I ran into some socialists. And by ran into, I mean saw the red colour scheme and miscellaneous labour tools enblazoned on their table’s banner and tried to steer clear, but I was the only pedestrian in range so they addressed me (not even in a “hey you” fashion either, but in that small-voiced, vague way that people giving out flyers have when they want you to know that they’re not like all those other flyer-givers who impose on your attention), and I came over.
They asked me if I believed in socialism or Marxism at all, I said I dabbled. They said they were part of an all-Ireland movement of some vague sort, to which I asked if they had any affiliation with the Socialist or Workers party here, or any other group, to which they said no. I then asked about the literature on the little table and they just said it was some of the stuff they published, then I wished them a good day and left.
In hindsight it seems like they were solely there to convince those who had no real conception of Marxism of its merits, though how successful the guys standing there, slack-shouldered and half-smiling behind the table, would have been, I have some doubts. In any case I found the whole thing annoyingly vague, the litany of leaflets scattered on the table had pictures of Lenin and sickles, and rhetoric about the injustice of our system and the trampling of the working class. Inspiring words about a movement towards liberation, where the liberation is left undefined and the movement’s form left as an exercise for the reader.
Those two guys’ interest in actual revolution was as real as their identification with the working class. Standing there with philosophical slogans set in Soviet typefaces, telling the masses blinded by capitalism that the hour is near for the down-trodden to rise, is entirely the point. If the pedestrians did all come and hear their indoor-voice volume monologues on privilege and prejudice, read the tracts on The Man and all He’s taken, and shouted “By Jove, this is it! The scales are fallen from our eyes, the rich will rue the day they enslaved us”, and took up arms and began marching, table and literature in tow, towards City Hall and the banks and the high-rise apartments… if all this that those weak-kneed under-grads preached for came to pass in front of them, they would not like it. Even if we ignore how blatantly comfortable their own upbringings likely were, they still would not like it, for it would mean no more standing there, by their table, feeling the virtue of proclaiming the truth to the unseeing.
Those with ears to hear…