Manifesto
Comrade, Comrade,
Can you feel the revolutionary foment? The fog of ideology is lifting from our eyes – let us complete our historical mission!
We listened on with equal parts admiration and revulsion, swayed before your certainty. You had the look, comrade, of all those of the time. Like you’d made a secret pact with the future. You’d acquired the right to act in its name.
Were we so blinded by ambition? What kind of a slate was history? We were bewitched by history, drunk with the thought of riding its back, feeling it gallop beneath us.
We foresaw the inauguration of an era in which for once, man would stand not outside of history, nor under history’s heel – but creating it, directing it, putting our queer shoulders to the wheel.
The End of History
Comrade, Comrade,
Our fingers twinkled our consensus when you proclaimed the manifesto of the generation, cries resounding full force from the loudspeakers, that our gods were to be critical theorists, Hegel, Honnett, Habermas – you called Marcuse our archangel.
I too doted on your mailing list. I too distributed Leninist Vanguard pamphlets in University Avenue weeping and undressing amongst the socialist alternative.
Were we just another crowd of longhaired youth, partakers in the age of immaturity, staggering, yelling, spitting out saliva and words, in demonstration of our wild need to be recognised?
We clicked our accord when you waged war upon the chattering classes, upon institutionalised disingenuity, public sector seductions, the cult of performance, the Neo-Taylorist obsession with productivity, efficiency, speed. We waited for an upsurge of genuine radicalism.
The Generational Attitude
Comrade, Comrade,
When I joined your march, we wore boots of tarnished leather, scuffed dungarees, hand me downs. Drank home brewed beer, ate preserved jams. Claimed to be grounded, to cling to the earth. We sat on the floor, a gesture signifying simplicity, hospitality. Completely I came to share the mentality of my contemporaries, delighting in anything that was common, plebeian, ordinary, or rustic. We reveled in Tay Tay and Ga Ga.
With public announcements we renounced our parents, we renounced their tidy lives and comfortable living, their artificial fireplaces. We renounced them their Begonias, their complacency, their carefully preserved middle class optimism and brood of mediocrity.
The Grand March
Comrade you told me the fate of the nation was at stake. We all sensed it, myself included. I was with you for Kevin 07, scrutineering, counting marginal ballet-votes as they rolled in, where victorious we smashed down whisky bottles and stomped our feet on sticky bar-tops, singing solidarity. Solidarity forever. Bawling KheSan, arms slung about each other’s shoulders swaying tremulous.
I said “Honor to Labor” and left.
The University Encampment
Comrade, Comrade,
I stood beside you loyal, at the university encampment, Youth League and student union offices, where we passed our summers in Coombs Seminar Room B, Marxist dilettantes, fortifying our zeal with the tactics of a revolutionary movement.
I joined you when temperatures were rising, when water tables falling. I joined you in opposition to university fees, CSG, mining, and trade agreements. Together we critiqued hegemonious free market thinking, the opacity of global supply chains, patterns of first world consumption.
You asked me: do you think socialism can be built without optimism? And diligently I cast aside all traces of cynicism, of indifference, I embraced the early morning calisthenics, took part in discussions of current events, praised the reigning healthy atmosphere under the watchful eye of the political commissar.
Cauterized Faith
Comrade, Comrade,
I saw you worrying the flesh off the bones of the church like an angry dog. Desecrating the halls, laughing at marriage and faith and tradition and culture and values and god. Yes you cast aspersions upon the solemn speech, the rites of passage, attending only ceremonies purged of all biblical motifs, secularised, cauterised.
You told me again and again, how the roots of socialism lay in a rationalist tradition, that socialism otherwise was inconceivable. Do you really think that the god-fearing are incapable of nationalising factories?
Communal Dispossession
Comrade, Comrade,
You spoke truth – man indeed lived cut off from man, everyone for himself. Baptism, you told me, begins with the dissolution of individualism.
Yet what fine lines you walked, when you renounced the private life, in favour of communal living and unity in shared purpose.
But tell me comrade, would communal dispossession liberate people from the yoke of their isolation?
Do you feel so free and natural naked, but for a wristwatch and the Kremlin in miniature dangling from its chain?
Generational Repetition
Comrade, Comrade,
Or revolutionary forebears united the nostalgic vocabulary of the old, of mama and papa and nature and spring and flowering and the bearing of fruit with the vocabulary of duty, the state, responsibility, the model citizen, loyalty, solidarity, the march of progress, the trajectory of the future.
The past era has merged into an indistinct mass, deformed by incomprehensible jargon. Yet these five years past I have been bought with parallel words spoken by enthusiastic organisers and scripted school children.
Times have changed. The words too have changed.
You now marry together the words sustainable and cooperative, with opposition to the conformist ethos of academic one-up-manship, bewailing of the creation of knowledge factories and high performance academic culture diverting research into a mind-numbing kafkaesquekafkaesquekafkaesque search for high ranked publications. You prayed for the environmental crisis to play catalyst to your revolution.
And this was the unity of kitsch – that different voices with different words, said the same things in unison. The revolutionary priest of each era intones holy words in stirring song, and the people repeat them after him. It was a litany.
The Significance of Finitude
Comrade, Comrade,
And what of our renounced parents? And our renouncement of the manifesto of their generation? Would the conciliatory waters of time wash away our quarrel? Efface the differences and miscommunications?
I do not live in eternity; I am anchored to my 25 years. Time washes away distinction, but we are creatures of distinction, short-lived, and so we fight the flood of time, and fight the flood of conciliation, and never detach ourselves from our quarrels, for they mark the significance of our finitude.
A resident Hobartian, Julien Tempone is a scraggly haired ruffian who likes stone fruit amongst other things.
