#working classes

There’s lot of posts mocking those who are now only learning the mistake they made at the election. I understand this desire to get angry at them. To get angry at the uneducated for not educating themselves before voting. Like it is bloody frustrating when the information is out there and so obvious etc etc Brexit and Tory victories always brought out worse in me, bitter hatred, deep disappointment, feeling of fuck it all.

But

It’s also a failure of the opposition that their message never reached these people. Or only reached them afterwards. Campaigners need hard look at where they failed. Not just blaming others and moving on not changing or adapting strategy etc

Left wing politics has always strived to improve literacy levels for uneducated and often working classes who are always left with no options in past. You got to know that person could easily be you or in another life could be you. Esp with misinformation fooling not just uneducated etc

But more so

If your message is not accessible to the uneducated and illiterate. If it only reaches those with privilege to get into higher education. Your movement isn’t about freedom or equality and it will fail.

Peasant revolts, working class movements before libraries were public show that you don’t need high literacy to understand oppression and inequality. They feel and see it when overworked, when hungry, when they have no money and the boss has more for less work. They are reachable and aren’t always your enemies if the root cause is a poor education and lack of accessibility to the information. The liars who exploit their lack of education are the enemies.

No matter how hard it is or how much other message is louder. You shouldn’t give up or not try. This shit is struggle, it’s tough, it always has been but every now and again someone or some message breaks through and you’ll never find it if you don’t believe it exists or you don’t try. Even in the face of being ignored, mocked or rage.

Too many politicians do give up easy on this but often grassroots activists who live there don’t. Make sure to support people fighting with heart who haven’t given up yet to get the message through. You got to help them or start the long discussion and strategy meetings on ‘how can we reach those who are not engaged, not highly educated, who vote based on misinformation etc’

The scorn of many conservative intellectuals comes from their belief that soccer-worship is exactly the religion people deserve. Possessed by soccer, the proles think with their feet, which is the only way they can think, and through such primitive ecstasy they fulfill their dreams. The animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riff-raff get what they want. In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate soccer because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardor. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers’ consciousness becomes atrophied and they let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.

- Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano was a famous Uruguayan writer, journalist, and left wing political activist until his death in 2015. He was most widely regarded for what his supporters called a series of incisive critiques of Western imperialism and capitalism. On this I think he was more wrong than right, but he when he was right he was right.

Above all I had a grudging respect for his lilting, graceful prose. He was a great prose stylist.

His most notable work, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (or Open Veins of Latin America) offered a sort of people’s history of Latin America, weaving a narrative framed by economic exploitation and political instability. His life’s work was committed to telling the story of Latin America, describing his own work as a writer as “obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.”

Football fans will know him as the author of El fútbol a sol y sombra, or Soccer in Sun and Shadow. The book offers a cultural history of the beautiful game, using his trademark poignant verse to shape history and politics and economics and personal experience into a sort of paper sculpture - beautiful, unexpected, and somewhat transient.

There’s a lot of darkness in the story Galeano tells - the “shadow” in the book title, as it were - yet he unfurls and shares his joy and love for the sport throughout. Football, for Galeano, was an intimate and indelible part of life - and more often than not, it represented the better parts of it. Galeano was more than a fan; he was a pilgrim, telling a story that was equal parts hard labour sentence, passionate love affair and fleeting moment of rapture.

I first came across his works by accident when I was backpacking across Argentina with my sister and Argentine friends who were football mad. Even if disagreed with his politics I could heartily agree with him about football, for here he was an incisive and wrote as a fan of the beautiful game. Many football fans would share his lament, “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.”

Käthe Kollwitz. Zertretene (The Downtrodden). 1900.

Etching and aquatint on paper. 12 1/8 × 9 3/4 in (30.8 × 24.8 cm). 

“Käthe Kollwitz believed that art should effect social change. She originally envisioned The Downtrodden as part of a triptych related to her cycle of etchings called The Weaver’s Rebellion, but ultimately developed it as an independent work. 

The Downtrodden forces viewers to confront the vulnerability of working-class people struggling to survive. A woman cradles the head of dead or ailing child in her lap; the man standing to her left turns away, covering his face with a hand. 

As an expressionist artist, Kollwitz skillfully manipulated her black-and-white medium to maximize the etching’s emotional impact on viewers. Kollwitz contrasted the inky background with the delicate cross-hatching that defines the adult figures. Against these dark areas, the child’s head and shoulders appear startlingly pale. 

With only a few Summer Fridays left, we'll be exploring Coney Island every Friday this month by showcasing artworks depicting our local seaside escape.

Pictured here is a work by Irving Underhill, a commercial photographer who helped spread the image of Coney Island as a capital of leisure—one accessible to families with a small disposable income and only one day of the week free. Interestingly enough, in the 18th-century, sea bathing was considered a fashionable spa experience reserved only for the upper-class. But, thanks to growing public transportation, it soon became associated with pleasure more than health and spread to the working classes in the 19th-century.