So... what next?

[Cain]

The title is, of course, in reference to, well, politics in its entirety.  Our economic system no longer benefits the majority of people, and our politics are a sham, always the same actors, always the same elites, the same slogans and the same failed promises.

Well, everything has to come to an end eventually, and it will probably be through collapse as much as anything.  The question then becomes: what happens afterwards?

Adam Curtis looks at the history of the Soviet Union to give us an idea.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/01/the_years_of_stagnation_and_th.html

Instead, in the 1980s, many Soviet youth turned to a new kind of music and culture that also borrowed from America, but it was one that attacked both the hypocrisy of western bourgeois capitalism and state communism. It came directly out of the punk movement in New York in the mid to late 1970s.

One of the key early figures was a Russian avant-garde write in exile in New York called Eduard Limonov. He had been expelled from Moscow by the KGB in 1974 and he arrived in New York just as the punk scene was taking off. Limonov became friends with people like Richard Hell of the band Television, Patti Smith, and the Ramones.

Limonov took the punk vision (best expressed, he said, in Richard Hell's song Blank Generation) and fused it with with Soviet disillusion. Limonov argued that that the West was in many ways just a more sophisticated version of the Soviet Union, with more sophisticated propaganda - plus a similar intolerance of real dissent.

In 1979 Limonov expressed this in a novel called It's Me, Eddie. In it he portrays a fictional version of himself on a dark, violent and pornographic journey through the hidden underworld of America. It was funny but also a cold and merciless depiction of the real effect Power has on modern American society and those in it. It shocked many people - but it became a best-seller in France and Germany, and Limonov was hailed as the voice of a new punk avant-garde.

These ideas had a big effect on the blank generation in the Soviet Union - and a new avant-garde underground grew up in Leningrad and Moscow who turned to culture, above all music, as a way of expressing the absurdity of their society, something that they believed politics was incapable of doing.

In 1986 the BBC captured the tamer end of this underground in a documentary they made about a Leningrad musician called Sergey Kuryokhin and his friends.

Kuryokhin was a classically trained pianist who had embraced the new musical radicalism - and formed a band called Popular Mechanics. Here are some extracts from the film - with Popular Mechanics rehearsing, conducted in a wonderful way by Kuryokhin. It is also a very good picture of the mood of that group, many of them children of high-up party members, who have completely detached from believing in any political future.

But the punk movement was not just composed of the children of the party bosses. In the 1980s a very big and influential cultural underground flourished throughout Russia, and it was much more than just a copy of western punk. One of its leading bands came from Omsk in Siberia, it was called Grazhdanskaya Oborona which translates as Civil Defence (the name was shortened to GrOb - which also means grave or tomb).

GrOb was led by a legendary singer called Yegor Letov. He was once incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Omsk for three months because of his rebelliousness. The music that Letov created was far more interesting than the western punk that had inspired it. His songs mixed modern noise with Russian folk in a full on attack on the emptiness of the world he saw around him.

The very perceptive journalist Mark Ames who edited the eXile magazine in Russia throughout the 1990s, and knew many of the avant-garde, says that Letov was one of the great geniuses of Russian literature.

Ames wrote of Letov:

"Punk may have started in New York and London, but the bravest spawn of all was Letov and his followers. When he began in the 1980s, Letov shunned the artsy irony of other anti-establishment bands in favour of raw violence and reckless confrontation against the blandness of the Soviet Union and the vapid optimism of Gorbachev's Perestroika. He left every band and every dissident in the dust, and they never forgave him for it.

Letov himself was the incarnation of what Edward Limonov calls "Russian Maximalism", the tendency to take things to their extreme."

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Interesting stuff. Ill have to look into this more.

[Scribbly]

Thanks for sharing this Cain, a very good article.

I think more and more people are starting to understand the flaws in the system. I don't know anyone my age who engages with any political party (though almost everyone I know is engaged in politics).

I honestly don't know where we go from here, though.

The main feeling I get when people talk about politics is exhaustion. It isn't just that people think things won't get better, its that they don't see any way it could be better. Because people see that 'Communism failed' and democracy is sold as the only plausible model for modern life, there's no grand plan out if it. The strength of the current system is that it has convinced people there are no alternatives. So nobody looks for one.

Limonov has a good point about the desire of the West to crush dissenting points of view, too. We're very proud of our freedoms, but in reality we don't allow people to articulate certain viewpoints. The primary purpose of the state is to keep the peace and maintain the status quo, and anything which is a threat to that is neutralized as quickly as possible.

So I don't know where we go from here. I hope that over the next five to ten years, the system will eat itself. People are starting to comprehend that money and power are concentrated in ways which are fundamentally unjust and incompatible with a 'truly' democratic society. Perhaps we'll see some concerted efforts to change things from within. I suspect that any violent attempt to change the system would be doomed before it even began.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I think most people are just going to belch a bit and keep watching whatever incarnation of "American Idol" is playing at the time.

I know that sounds cynical and jaded and all that happy horseshit, but I honestly believe it.

[Cramulus]

That was very interesting. Do you think we can see the shape of what's coming in our contemporary youth movements?

Is the jaded post-ironic Brooklyn hipster a synechdoche of 2012? --detached, disinterested, desperate to find the authentic experience in a sea of plastic and mirrors?

As the baby boomers gradually retire or die, and Generation Y begins its slow climb into the driver's seat, will the values of today's youth be perserved? or transformed (like how the hippies themselves became boomers?) It would be nice if in 20 years, the politicians were aligned towards the topics that the 20-somethings at #occupy are burning up about today.

There is an emptiness to all of it, a pervasive loneliness.. a modern irony: that the digital world is our meeting ground, so we're most connected when we're physically isolated.

As for politics - I have no idea what's coming next. I'm just going to try to remain in a good tai chi posture, feet on the ground, breath centered, ready to respond. For us individuals, the balancing act is to discourage the bad politics, encourage the good politics. But it's hard, because we're jaded and cynical, and when the right movement, the right political energy comes along, we may not be able to recognize it because we're accustomed to bullshit.

[MMMW]

That was very interesting. Do you think we can see the shape of what's coming in our contemporary youth movements?

There seems to be an increasing interest in hip-hop. However, there's still a lot of bullshit rappers in the spotlight. I'd love to see a movement of conscious hip-hop with politically charged lyrics. "Giving a fuck" could be the new "not giving a fuck". Something like that with an absurdist spin could carry a lot of momentum. My two cents, anyways.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

 Recently we've seen the growing popularity of everything from Marxism to Fascism(more in Europe than here). Hell, Ayn Rand is more popular now than ever. This decade is a fucking gold rush for ideological snake oil salesmen. As things get worse who knows what kind of crazy shit could become popular?

One big factor that differentiates the US from the USSR is the militia movement. We have a large segment of people who like to get together on weekends, talk about how much they hate jews/liberals/blacks/NWO/Reptilians/Commies and shoot assault rifles. They have been preparing quite some time for the collapse of the US, and recent events such as NDAA and a black man being elected have made them itchier to overthrow the Government than usual. Even if they don't have a big impact on what happens next they will probably make the transition very bloody.

We also have Global Warming and Peak Oil both to worry about. Both have the power to very drastically change the political landscape that the next order will grow out of.

Whatever comes next, I'm guessing it wont be very pretty.

[Kai]

Youth movements? How about the protests at universities that got maced?

I would hope that over time our system will become more like that of northern Europe, but I don't see it happening.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Youth movements? How about the protests at universities that got maced?

I would hope that over time our system will become more like that of northern Europe, but I don't see it happening.

The only way it will happen is if enough people trace the problem to its roots and pose enough of a threat to the government that it capitulates and gives us campaign finance reform and throws corporatism out of government so that democracy can be restored.