We Are The Proletariat

Anyone remember Y2K? And what the hell happened to those 'End of the World' prophecies that foretold of what was to transpire once the New Millennium dawned (got some freeze-dried rations to sell? anyone with a slightly used generator up on the auction block?)?

I guess many were just preparing for the worst; part of human nature. What with the recent proliferation of mass casualties at the hand of Mother Nature (and with a not too slight assist from humanity's contribution to warming the Oceans of the Earth) it may turn out to be that those rations and forecasts, those doomsday scenarios and generators, were not only apt responses to a historical turning, but increasingly necessary items in one's daily affairs.

The Y2K'ers could have the last laugh after all. Look at the situation in the majour metropolitan areas when any disruption of basic services has taken place. Evidence Katrina and Wilma. A disruption in public services shows, in stark and unrelenting light, just how dependent (mark that word, dependent) that the Metro-Polis is. The Metro-Polis has no independent existence (sorry you New Yorkers and Los Angelinos) of its own. It is a body that requires a constant and unrelenting influx of energy and resources just to be maintained, let alone to grow. One can see the kind of chaos that ensues when those flows of resources and energy are disrupted.

There is no river one can go to. And if there is it is a heavily trafficked and chemically polluted Mississippi or Hudson. There are no trees from which to pluck dead limbs and stoke a fire to warm the hearth.There is no capacity to hunt and gather some mushrooms or berries. And there sure as hell ain't no game to trap and snare, so as to cook over a warm fire (but one can always go to the Zoo and harvest a Panda or two!).

Seriously, though, one cannot help but realize the tenuous nature of Civilization in the form of the Metro-Polis when one is given a glimpse of momentary disruptions such as we have seen lately. One is given a realization as to the 'interdependent nature' of all entities--whether those entities be cities or salamanders, cultures or crawdads. Everything that exists depends upon 'others' for its continued existence. The Metro-Polis depends upon the farmer and logger and oil-rig hand. The Metro-Polis depends upon the unfair labour practices and the plantations of South America; where sugar, bananas, and coffee are grown under conditions any American would find deplorable (and don't we need immigrants George W. Bush says to do work that Americans will not do--and why, because we are too good? or because we would not tolerate working under such conditions? but hey, if we can coerce others to do so via games of economic blackmail and existential coercion then so be it, right? its our capitalist-imperialist advantage/right/prerogative).

Karl Marx was one of the first to comment, in at least any analytical form, the materialist basis of high-society. Those who may see themselves as being of another race or breed--purer, more exalted--have the proverbial rug pulled out from under them when and if the flows into the Metro-Polis are disrupted. Without the surpluses of energy and resources (and they are not really surpluses, but that is for another discussion) being made available to the Metro-Polis there is no Wall Street, no Guggenheim, no Metropolitan Opera, no Saks Fifth Avenue, no Rodeo Drive. Each of those entities subsist on the back of the 'working class'--the proletariat in Marx's terminology.

Proletariat? Yeah, proletariat... by which Marx meant those who actually produced the material means by which a society/culture were sustained upon the basis of. Those who grow the food, who mine the resources, who deliver the materials, who transport the goods are the proletariat. And when the movement of the proletariat is disrupted Civilization falters. It is always and forevermore an empowered, functioning, flowing, mobile proletariat that sustains culture; that allows for extensions of culture and society into previously unknown realms--whether good or ill.

There is no adventure into Space or the Human Genome without the proletariat. Culture and Technology flow from the ground up. It is perhaps why America succeeded where the Soviet Union failed--the American proletariat was empowered (upwardly mobile, much moe free to a larger degree) where the Soviet proletariat was essentially held captive by governmental pressures that robbed that culture of its Eros.

That ability to rise and move and express and create and give birth and be mobile in a free and uniterrupted fashion and manner is what can be seen as the 'Engine of Culture.' Eros as the force of the flow itself. And where Eros is disrupted and the erotic movement of that 'rising force' is denied then the Culture which depends upon that movement and mobility will suffer.

It is why Civilization requires an empowered proletariat. It is why Capitalism needs Marx. It is why Culture is not bland with an 'empowered working class'... but the best it can be because of that 'working class.'