NEW BEGINNINGS/OLD ENDINGS

 

It was shortly after the Second World War that late-stage petty-bourgeois civilization began to get properly under way and a world arose which signified a break with the past, a new beginning, an aspiration, one might say, towards absolute proletarian criteria.  For centuries men had lived with paintings, novels, symphonies, wind-up watches, spectacles, carriages, ships, universities, houses, books, acoustic guitars, and numerous other things which it seems fair to associate with a period of history stretching from late-stage grand-bourgeois to early-stage petty-bourgeois times, from approximately the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, though some of those things of course date from even earlier times.

     But then, with the acquirement of new technologies and a desire to revolutionize life in some degree, all that changed, and post-war man, particularly in his late-stage petty-bourgeois manifestation, began to turn against the past and acclimatize himself to the ever-changing present.  Of course, the old things - wind-up watches, universities, novels, etc. - continued to exist, both in their historical and more contemporary manifestations.  But a growing number of people were preferring the new and thus living within a more civilized context, if by 'civilized' we mean artificial and transcendental.

     To be sure, there was still a large number of people going to universities, those traditional institutions of higher education, but there was also a large number, probably more petty-bourgeois/proletarian in character, who went to technical colleges, those late-stage petty-bourgeois successors to universities.  Admittedly, there were still a considerable number of people who preferred wind-up watches to digital ones.  But, even so, the number of digital wearers seemed to be on the increase.  If many people still read novels, there was also a more contemporary body of people who preferred their fiction in a magazine or comic book, and who went to the cinema as often as possible or, alternatively, sat at home and watched a film on television.

     The old and the new often overlapped, but there could be no doubt that the new was gaining in importance and influence as time wore on.  Even people with old-world habits and allegiances occasionally indulged in some form of contemporary activity or identification, if on a comparatively low-key basis.  A detailed investigation of people's lifestyles would probably indicate that most of them were far from consistent in terms of contemporary allegiance and behaviour, largely, one suspects, through ignorance as to the class-status of any given pursuit or identification, and possible ambivalence as to their own class-status in a continuously changing world.

     Hence the paradoxical and often amusing chimeras of, say, university students in jeans - those late-stage petty-bourgeois successors to trousers - or, conversely, of technical-college students in trousers - those more traditional kinds of legwear.  No-one is ultra-consistent, and I myself occasionally wear cords and a button-up shirt instead of a tee-shirt.  Nevertheless a methodology of homogeneous living is possible and could be systematically pursued by anyone intelligent enough to work out both his own class-status and the class-status of the things or habits available to him in the contemporary world, should he decide to harmonize the two in the interests of ideological perfection.

     Here, for example, is a list of some old and new things which might be of interest to anyone aspiring towards a more homogeneous lifestyle:-

 

                           universities                               technical colleges

                           condoms                                  the pill

                           ships                                     hovercraft

                           natural sex                              pornography

                           novels                                    short stories

                           plays/theatre                           films/cinema

                           books                                    magazines/tapes

                           paintings                                 posters

                           cameos                                   photos

                           spectacles                                contact lenses

                           trousers                                  jeans (denims/cords)

                           shirts                                     tee-shirts

                           wind-up watches                         digital watches

                           houses                                    flats

                           operas                                    vocal rock

                           symphonies                              instrumental rock

                           concertos                                 modern jazz

                           ballroom dancing                        disco dancing

                           stained glass                            light art

                           drawing                                  holography

                           sculpture                                 kinetics

                           skirts/dresses                           slacks/boiler-suits

                           prayer                                    transcendental meditation

                           beer/cider                               cola/soda

                           writing                                   typing

                           manual washing-up                     washing-up machine

                           hand washing                           machine washing

                           outdoor drying                          spin/heat drying

                           open fire                                 electric fire

                           gas cooker                               electric cooker

                           drying hair manually                   hairdryer

                           feather bed                              water bed

                           hand shaving                            electric/battery shaving

                           manual toothbrush                      electric toothbrush

                           woollen blanket                         electric blanket

                           liberal democracy                       social democracy

                           Protestantism                           Marxism

                           capitalism                                socialism

                           dildos                                     vibrators

                           prostitutes                               masseuses

                           girlfriends                                inflatables

                           bombs                                    missiles

                           truncheons                               plastic bullets

                           handkerchiefs                            paper tissues

                           candles                                   torches

                           matches                                  lighters

                           men's bicycles                           motorbikes

                           women's bicycles                        scooters

                           houses                                    flats

                           natural conversation                    telephone conversation

                           manual games                           autonomous games

                           potatoes                                  chips

                           fish                                       fishcakes/fingers

                           Catholicism                              Fascism

                           monarchs                                military dictators

 

This isn't by any means an exhaustive list, but it should indicate the nature of the distinction that exists between traditional bourgeois civilization and contemporary petty-bourgeois/proletarian civilization, the former preceding the Second World War and the latter succeeding it, the two generally overlapping in such open societies as prevail in the West at present, particularly in the more traditional societies of countries like Britain and France, which have a longer history than the more contemporary nations like Germany and the United States, not to mention Italy and Japan.

     Indeed, it is in these more contemporary nations that late-stage petty-bourgeois/proletarian civilization is more consistently upheld and most clearly manifest, such aspects of it as apply to the older Western countries often deriving from them.  No sooner does one think of America, for instance, than a veritable host of contemporary things and practices leap to mind, including jeans, tee-shirts, cola, cartoons, comic books, films, jazz, and basketball.  If America is the greatest of the petty-bourgeois/proletarian nations, one cannot discount the contributions made to contemporary civilization by countries like Japan and Germany, whether in terms of Japanese technology or German culture.  Even older, more stable countries like Sweden and Switzerland have played a significant role in furthering late-stage petty-bourgeois/proletarian criteria, not least of all in terms of pornography and digital watches!

     Of course, this civilization is not the ultimate one, and I personally have no doubt that another and better one will shortly emerge in which specifically proletarian criteria will prevail, replacing most of the contemporary things and attitudes which people in the West nowadays take for granted.  But, even so, the break with tradition that followed World War II created the basis for any subsequent evolutionary progress, and such progress as has still to be made will derive, in large part, from what currently exists, whether in science or art, religion or politics, society or sex.

     Certainly it is difficult to see how the pill, contact lenses, digital watches, hovercraft, and other such contemporary things could be bettered, though profound changes will doubtless occur and, indeed, already are occurring, as in the development of a new kind of pill, more long-term than the old, and the burgeoning plethora of plastic digital watches in succession, seemingly, to the older (and possibly more petty-bourgeois) metallic ones.  Probably either a late phase of petty-bourgeois civilization or an early phase of proletarian civilization is already manifest in many of these changes, which herald an age of absolute criteria.  Assuming they haven't been entirely eclipsed by computers, magazines may continue to be published in a proletarian civilization, but it is unlikely that they will be crammed full of adverts, as in capitalist societies.

     Other aspects of contemporary civilization, like photography and film, jazz and rock, motorbikes and bicycles, kinetics and light sculptures, short stories and posters, will undoubtedly die-out in the course of time, evolutionary progress having rendered them obsolescent, knowledge having placed them within a certain time-span relative to a given class-status and/or kind of civilization, and history having sealed their fate in the process of its inexorable unfolding.  Not everything contemporary is necessarily the blueprint for a higher development.  Nevertheless a significant proportion of it is, and in some cases that development has already been realized.