TRASHFUTURE - Riley's Commie Book Club: People of the Abyss

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

It's that time again. Riley (@raaleh) grabbed a book, grabbed a mic, and opened up People of the Abyss, a 1903 book by American travel writer Jack London, about his experiences living in East London in that time. His observations on poverty, housing, inequality, capitalism, and imperialism are basically all analagous today. Enjoy! Also follow us on @trashfuturepod.

It's a beautiful day over here in Ines, London. The sun is setting. I'm sitting on the canal. We're just approaching golden hour and it's time to record another episode of Riley's Kami Book Club. Who's ready for some slightly more serious in tone version of me saying stuff? So further ado, welcome to the Kami Book Club May edition where we are talking about an unusual book because the other ones I've done have been, I think, more or more recent books about sort of current issues. And I thought this one was really interesting because it's a much older book. That's still about very relevant issues. So People of the Abyss by Jack London. It is available free online. I'll include a link in the episode description. But what we're talking about here is

it was originally written sort of as a travel piece. It's Jack London, despite the fact that he's called London's American guy, a travel writer from California, who was also a sort of ardent socialist, anti-imperialist, all this good stuff, who was on assignment initially to go to London to cover the coronation of King Edward, I think in Edward, in like 1900-ish. And the assignment was to do so sort of mixing with the characters from the East End. However, what he saw while in London and in the East End kind of provoked him to do something different. He ended up staying there for seven weeks, mixing in with the people who lived in the East End, worked in the East End, embedding himself in the work houses and in the sort of what they were called coffee shops,

but they weren't really coffee shops. And the houses and the dwellings, interviewing people and trying to find out the real dimensions of the causes of poverty. It became a sort of anthropological study. Now, people of the Abyss, just before we start out too much, it's an interesting work. One of the things I think it's easy to be reminded of is, it's like James Bloodworth's book on working on Amazon, which has been criticized as basically just being poverty tourism. And I think that comparison is not entirely unfair, but what People of the Abyss does is it accompanies that sort of visceral first-hand experience with reams and reams of statistics and frequent generalized calls for revolution. I think as a piece of emotive writing,

it's very effective and very powerful. And I've also got some, as I always do, excerpts that I think relate directly to our political situation today. So for some further context, East London in this time was surprisingly enough, not as it is currently. The fact that I'm sitting in Tower Hamlets, being a middle-class professional of person, graduate, whatever, would be completely unthinkable in that time. Now, because as we all sort of know, I think we're vaguely all aware that East London, in fact, most of these sort of poorer bits of British cities, which were actually mostly in the East because the profiling winds blow East, so all of the factories in the cities blew all the shit East, which is probably why a lot of East ends of cities are cool now,

as a sort of ultimate cause. That and also rampant gentrification and poverty speculation, but I digress. The East end of London was dangerous, was dirty, it was basically all slumland. It was a very, very, very different place. It was also the site of quite a bit of industry. Also, remember, there was the East Indian docks were an enormous shipping port. There had been sort of artisans living in this area around like Brick Lane and Commercial Road and stuff for centuries from the Ugénot, or however you pronounce that, coming in from France to work as weavers, to the Jewish diaspora, to the Bangladeshi diaspora, to fucking everybody. Everybody comes here first. In fact, it's worth noting that 36 years, because I think this book

was published in 1900, I should really check these things, like in 1936, Battle of Cable Street was sort of the emblematic of what I think the East end could possibly be at kind of, in some ways, its best. The British Union of Fascists had decided to march along Cable Street in order to intimidate the large sort of local immigrant population, much of which was Jewish at the time, and a group of communists, trade unionists, Jews, socialists, other immigrants. I don't know if the Bengalis were here at the time, but everyone who actually lived around this area all basically banded together to fight off both the police and the Fascists, because of course the police were helping the Fascists, because the police basically always helped the Fascists. Anyway, so this is

sort of a story of an area just as much, and at the time that Jack London was there, fast rewinding back to 1900-ish, is it was utterly miserable. It was, it's kind of a bit of a a bit of a hellscape. In fact, one of the first passages I'm going to bring out is just to give you a picture of kind of the inequality of the area. I don't know if it's just the area effect of all of England and Wales, so he writes, in all England and Wales, 18% of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief, which at the time was one of the key ways in which you would get kind of poor relief. There were state mandated poor laws, but a lot of those were distributed through parish councils, which would also run things like

workhouses. This poor relief at the time, the modern welfare state basically didn't exist, but parishes were also much more official in terms of their capacity as like engaging in local government, so you wouldn't recognize the governance of England today as it was then. Anyway, 18% of the whole population of England and Wales are driven to the parish for relief, and in London, according to the statistics of the London County Council, 21% of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief. Between being driven to the parish for relief and being an out and out popper, so completely homeless, completely destitute, there is a great difference. Yet London supports 123,000 poppers, quite a city of folk and themselves. One in every

four in London dies in public charity, while 939 out of every 1,000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty. Eight million simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and 20 million are more, are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the word. But it should come as no surprise to anyone in particular that there is sort of an immense amount of, immense and worsening amount of poverty, and that poverty is fatal. I think we don't need to sort of imagine sort of much exaggeration. It's not such a great leap to sort of go from this to thinking about people sort of dying while waiting for their personal independence payments from the government. It's not such a leap to look over the, over the Atlantic to the United States,

where the social safety net is falling apart, and life expectancy is sort of flatlined at like 79, last time I checked. It is no great leap to imagine that when people are in society, but there is no society for them, that their lives sort of quite simply wither. So this is roughly speaking the picture in numbers of the Jack London paints of England. Now he also paints a very sort of alarming picture of London, and I'm going to read a rather long passage here. Passing Le Mans street, we cut off the left in his spittle fields and dived into frying pan alley. A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs in the bottom of a dry pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over

her, sat a woman with a young babe nursing at breasts, grossly naked and libeling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black and narrow hall behind her, we waited through a mess of young life and essayed an even narrower and fowler stairway. Up we went three flights, each landing two feet by three in area and heaped with filth and refuse. There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house, and in six of the rooms, 20 odd people of both sexes in all ages cooked, ate, slept and worked. In the size, the rooms averaged eight feet by eight or possibly nine. The seventh room we entered, it was a den in which five men sweated. It was seven feet wide by eight long and the table at which the work was performed took up the major portion of the space.

On this table were five lasts, which guys were making shoes, and there was barely enough room for the men to stand through their work. For the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles. Now, there are two things I want to pull out here. The first is the obviously problematic way that Jack London is actually talking about the poor, and you'd say, well, he's a socialist. Why would he do this? I think it's because what he's trying to do is show that these are people that society is turning into monsters through neglect. Now, the fact that he keeps returning to this trope of talking about how

the bodies of these people are bent and broken, how they are reduced to inhumanity and so on, he's basically talking about them without dignity, and he's reporting on them in a way that you can see what he's trying to do, which is to create a sense of outrage in the reader on their behalf, but I think in so doing, it's like, come on, cool it. Essentially, you can calm down now, Mr. London. I am sufficiently complimented, but I think the other thing to note is the way that we're talking about dwellings. What this puts me in mind of is, you know those on vice, there are those, I think Joel Golby does them, rental opportunities of the week, where more and more houses are presented as essentially cupboards with fucking, with a little Murphy bed and a toilet that's also

your sink. Then these sort of are coming up more and more and more and getting more and more expensive and taking a larger and larger portion of our incomes to live in. You can also see, you can also, this puts me in mind of somewhere like WeWork or WeLive, the living version of WeWork, where it's aimed at the young professional who just wants flexibility in a co-living space, but is actually reducing the sort of dignity and autonomy of a living space to the simpler and simpler, narrower requirements. It's getting more and more minimal. It's remaining extremely expensive and they're cramming more and more and more people in. I mean, that's a bit more of a stretch, because those places are also pitched as relatively premium, but the sort of the drive for efficiency

in housing, I think is one of the key things that has always removed dignity from the people who actually fucking live in it. Also, the whole idea of these people are sort of forced to live and work in these same shitty conditions all the time. It's something you can't really forget. The interesting thing, one of the most interesting things about this, is that housing is really never far from Jack London's mind. I think that is incredibly interesting. So, in terms of rental economics, he says, it is notorious that here in the ghetto, the houses of the poor are greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich. Not only does the poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays proportionally more for it than does the rich man

for his spacious comfort. A class of house sweaters, so these people, has been made possible by the competition of the poor for houses. There are more people than there is room and numbers are in the workhouse because they cannot find shelter elsewhere. Not only are the houses let, but they are sublet and sub-sublet down to the very rooms. In fact, London describes, and it's confusing, right, London and London, he describes a system called the relay system by which a tenant of a sort of sub-sub-sub-sub-sublet flat would actually go even further. He would rent eight hours of the flat at a time, so he would occupy the bed for eight hours, and he would get out and go to work or much more likely wander the streets in search of pennies, and then someone else would come in who just from

work and then take that place, and then eight hours, and then another person would do the same thing, and most commonly three people would share the same bed doing this, and then another two would do the same relay under the bed, and this was more or less the only way you could find housing. This should be familiar to everyone who has ever walked into a disused, x-counsel, not disused, into an x-counsel flat that's been sort of converted with the living room chopped in two, so two single beds could be put into it, and with the kitchen jammed into a closet. You know, there is no, and there has never been an incentive on landlords to provide any kind of quality housing when the market is this in their favor. Quite simply, this, what this book

proves, or one of the many things that this book proves, is that landlords are and have always been pure scum. One other important thing to grasp here, and this is sort of a preview, there are two previews I think in this sort of first section talking about sort of housing, and the standard of housing, and sort of dynamics defining housing, sort of prefigure, sort of two things we talk about later. The first is that towards the end of the chapter on housing, one of the workers that London interviews says, this is the last year of this trade, making shoes. They're getting machines to do away with us. So what does, as a worker's perspective here, is that they're basically being made obsolete, and when they are done away with,

then the only thing you can do is, of course, go to the workhouse, which we also have mentioned, and which is sort of where I would like to take our inquiring next. So the workhouse was one of the, was the fact, the primary means for distributing poor relief around this time. It was, of course, it was cruel, of course, it was unnecessary, and of course, it was predicated on the idea of the, what was it called, principle of least eligibility, which was the way in which the British reformed their poor law in the Victorian era, where they said, okay, look, if we're going to give anyone poor relief, we need to make sure that the condition in which they receive poor relief is worse than that of the lowest workman, otherwise everyone's just going to go on poor relief.

Sound like a familiar idea? We're going to make work pay. And so one of the principle ways they accomplished this was the workhouse, which I think was some principle we're all familiar with. If you want to sort of be given food and bed for a night, what you would do is you would head on over to the workhouse, where you would be sort of taken in, separated from, if you had a family, you'd be separated apart, the men we put in one bit, the children in one bit, the women in another bit, and set about to sort of doing humiliating, painful, or otherwise sort of bad menial work. This could be picking oakum, breaking rocks, doing something with jute, I'm not really sure what jute is,

and then you would be given a, basically given a meal, basically given a bed, and there we go. Now, in addition to being cruel, it also was extraordinarily complicated, even to get in. So London says, I found that it's not easy to get into the casual ward of the workhouse, which is where you go if you need to go there for a night. I've made two attempts now, which will shortly make a third. The first time I started out at seven o'clock in the evening with four shillings in my pocket, herein I committed two errors. In the first place, the applicant for the admission to the casual ward must be destitute, and he is subjected to a rigorous search, and he must genuinely be destitute, and four pence, much less four shillings,

is sufficient affluence to disqualify him. In the second place, I made the mistake of tardiness, seven o'clock in the evening is too late in the day for a pauper to get a pauper's bed. But that's not all, they don't just search you for money, they also searched you for anything that could be construed as any kind of luxury, or any kind of, say, immoral possession, the worst of which was tobacco. So if you came in, you were genuinely destitute, and you also had tobacco, they would turn you the fuck away, because fuck you, I guess. And again, I think that connecting this to modern British welfare policy is not hard. If you think of, for example, work or job search requirements, sort of imagining that the poor are just sort of poor because they're indolent,

and welfare needs to sort of exist to make them stop being indolent, or also if you, again, looking across the states, because the states is, for now, more kind of a barbaric, cruel, and asinine system than ours, is it's very common to drug test welfare recipients to ensure that the upstanding, white, suburban, crypto-fashist taxpayer isn't funding anyone smoking a fucking joint. So when you're sort of submitted yourself to all of these humiliations, you are then basically given enough food to more or less stay alive. It was a sort of pint of something kind of slurry, maybe a small amount of meat and some bread. Now, most of these people were like, I don't know, 110 pounds or whatever. I don't really know kilograms, because I'm from elsewhere.

And, you know, Jack London, who says he's 175 pounds, which is, I don't know, maybe I think I'm a little heavier than that now, but that's the weight of me, was sort of embarrassed to be walking around with that, you know, stature. And one of the points that London sort of makes over and over and over again, is that this system is sort of bizarrely cruel and Byzantine, and that it's not really accomplishing anything, much like sort of modern sort of means testing or sort of over policing of recipients of state security, state benefits, rather, also accomplishes basically fuck all, where he actually sort of out and out notes, you know, in a system where one person is dedicated to producing the clothes of another, there is going to be someone who gets

no clothes. And there are going to also, as we talked about earlier with that one sort of shoemaker in the sweat, sort of complaining about, not complaining about, but sort of suggesting that sort of automation was going to, you know, completely remove him from his job entirely. They had four months left or so, living even in those squalid conditions before himself being subjected to the workhouse, that this, that a system where some people are made to be useful to others, and sort of their only existence is to be useful to others, is going to just casually toss them on the scrap heap. In fact, towards the end of the book, he says, essentially, the unfit and unneeded and miserable are despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles,

the progeny of the prostitution of men and women and children of flesh and blood and sparkle in spirit, and brief the prostitution of labor. If this is the best that civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery, far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert of the cave and the squatting place than to be a people of the machine and the abyss. And the reason, and I think the abyss is a very, very interesting metaphor for early 20th, late 19th century East London, because Jack London sees it as a place that you fall into, because he has this excellent concept that I think is still very useful in talking about sort of precariousness, but he calls the thing, right? So he calls this thing,

well, that's what he calls it, he calls it, quote, the thing. And there's a good example, he says, and then someone, a family is sort of living comfortably, but hand to mouth, you know, maybe their father is an artisan, maybe the mother makes some money sewing on the side, but they have a house in a safe house on a safe street. It's not nice, but it works. Their family is basically safe. But then he says, then there is the accident, the thing happening, the death or disablement of the husband, father and breadwinner. Here is a man with a wife of three children living on the ticklish security of 20 shillings per week. And there are hundreds of thousands of such families in London, but forced to even half exist, they must live up to every last penny of it. So that a

week's wages one pound is all that stands between this family and pauperism or starvation. The thing happens and what then? So the thing is, you're working and you get hurt. And then you can't make ends meet for that week. So then, then what? How do you eat? Well, maybe you scavenge. Maybe you have to get a worse or more casual job. Maybe it's so bad you have to go to the workhouse, but then you're kicked out of your house. Then you live on the street. How do you get another job when you're living on the street? And the simple answer is that you don't. And over and over and over in this book, London paints these portraits of people to whom the thing is currently happening, you know, the family where the breadwinner has just sustained an injury or the able seaman who

has just been, you know, demoted for whatever reason or someone whose job has been automated. There's nothing for them because they're unneeded because they're no longer necessary to produce the coats for all the people with power that the people with power can get better coats cheaper. And these other people were only worth coats. And so we then must police them. Because of course, as the imagination goes, there is no reason for them to continue sort of existing because how dare they exist off of the largesse of others without proving themselves worthy, without pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But the whole narrative of bootstrapism becomes utterly ridiculous, because what happens when you have been kept in bootstraps by

relatively precarious work that you then lose? One of the strengths, great strengths of this book is the extent to which it reveals the sort of sheer barbarity of what British civilization was. And to be perfectly honest, basically still is. It's just got a lot more art than coffee shops about. In fact, the whole thing kind of puts me in mind of something Walter Benjamin said, as we all know, I'm a big fan of Walter Benjamin, which is that there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism. This is actually demonstrated nowhere better than when London talks about those who are not just cast into the abyss of the workhouse, but for those who are unable to receive any accommodation at all, which at the time is

called carrying the banner, which basically meant as night fell, you just kept walking around outside. Here's another quite long passage that I think really illustrates the kind of barbarism of civilization that London was looking at. Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of opening its gates earlier than the other parks. And at quarter past four in the morning, I and many more entered Green Park. It was raining again, but they were worn out with the nights walking. And they were down on the benches and asleep at once. Many of the men stretched out full length in the dripping wet grass. And with the rain falling steadily upon them, we're sleeping the sleep of exhaustion. But then why were they having to walk around all night?

Because, and this is yet another policy that should be very familiar to the denizens of modern Britain, it was basically illegal to be homeless. If you were sleeping under an arch, a police officer would nevertheless come and chase you away because there were anti-vagrancy laws. So this was also criminalized. In fact, one of the people London talks to says, I was down under the arches when it was raining the hardest and a Bobby comes out and chases me out. But when I come back, he comes there too. He says, what are you doing here? And I goes out, but I says, think you I want to steal the bleeding bridge, which is true. If he's sleeping under the arch of a bridge, what's he going to do other than fucking sleep? So London goes on. And now I wish to

criticize the powers that be there. They are the powers therefore that may decree whatever they please. So I make bold only to criticize the ridiculousness of their decrees. All night long, they make the homeless ones walk up and down, they drive out of the doors and pastures and lock them out of the parks. The evident intention of all this is to deprive them of sleep. Well, and good, the powers have the power to deprive them of sleep or of anything else for that matter. But why under the sun do they open the gates of the park at five o'clock in the morning and let the homeless ones go inside and sleep? If it is their intention to deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleep after five in the morning? And if it is their not their intention

to deprive them of sleep, why did they let them sleep earlier in the night? And so, dear, soft people, should you ever visit London Town and see these men asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not think that they are lazy creatures preferring sleep to work. Know that the powers that be have kept them walking all the night long and that in the day they have nowhere else to sleep. And that it is in many ways the sort of sheer barbarism of the civilization is that they feel the need to protect the people of the West End from the people of the East. But the people of the East End are made miserable by living in precarity to struggle and labor for the benefit of those in the West End. It seems a situation out of which there is

precisely no way. And something else I wanted to bring up that I hinted at a little bit earlier was that if you are in a situation where you must be at the workhouse or where you've been carrying the banner, so to speak, you're stuck completely and utterly stuck. Because when London goes to the Salvation Army, he finds that when he's let in with everybody, he is forced to take part in a prayer service if he's going to eat. When the prayer service is finished, he is then ejected onto the street, but it's about 11 in the morning. If he wants to make it to the workhouse for that evening, then at what point is he going to be able to get some kind of gainful job that is going to actually pay him for a full day's work? Well, he's not. And that

all of what this goes to show is that for all of history, any system which has tried to locate the cause of poverty in the impoverished themselves and attempt to correct their behavior while not looking at the systems that produce that behavior, essentially just reproduce and worsen the poverty itself. And to any liberal who thinks that education is going to be the way out of this that lifts the boat for everybody, you only have to look at the story of Dan Cullen, a docker to whom an entire chapter of this book is dedicated. London goes into his municipal dwelling off of Le Mans Street, one of the central streets of East London, and notes that his room was hardly a room. It was a dark, dingy den. But unlike many other manual laborers,

London notes, he had impressed his personality on his miserable surroundings sufficiently to give him an inkling as to what sort of man Cullen was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns, and other labor leaders. Well, on the table lay one of Walter Besant's novels. He knew his Shakespeare, I was told, and he read history, sociology, and economics. However, he was not, this was not enough to save him from the abyss. In fact, it almost was something that seems to have doomed him. Because the story of Dan Cullen is that he was born into a working class, and he toiled with his body during the day. And in the evening, he had taught himself to read, he had taught himself everything, not everything, but he had

taught himself quite a bit more, leading him to become more contextually aware of his situation, which then caused him to become a labor leader. So he became a leader of the fruit porters, representing the dockers in the London Trades Council, and then wrote for the labor journals. He did not cringe to the other men, London writes, even though they were his economic masters and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his mind freely and fought the good fight. In the Great Dock Strike, he was guilty of taking a leading part, and from that day was the end of Dan Cullen as he was a marked man. And every day for 10 years and more, he was paid off for what he had done, because docking is casual labor, work ebbs and flows, and the bosses can discriminate

against you if they don't like you. So Dan Cullen was called in maybe two or three days a week. He was not given anything close to adequate hours to keep himself at all healthy, but they called that being disciplined. But it means being starved, and 10 years of it utterly broke him, and left him a small, desiccated corpse, who ultimately was admitted to a hospital for a short time, but then was just put aside and died on a popper's couch in a charity ward. So I think we've established over and over and over again that poverty in London, the way Bulpjack London is describing it, is systemic. It is imposed. It is created by structures that make it impossible to escape from. It is an abyss into which people fall. And what distinguishes

this book, I think in many ways, is that there is also quite a bit of theory attached to it. There is a sort of, almost a moral theory, firstly, where he says, in a civilization, frankly, materialistic and based on property, not soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over the soul, and that crimes against property shall be considered far more serious than crimes against the person. And so he then goes on to cite over and over again, sort of assaults, making some false witness to get rent a flat, to have the, he says, the audacity to sleep outside are sort of consistently punished much, much, much harsher than a fight. Because if a popper assaults a popper, its society considers it no great loss.

And once again, you can see that in modernity. It's dressed up differently. It's given a different name. It might be, oh, these are priority areas for policing or what have you. But when it comes to protecting people from, say, abusive spouses, we are much, well, we're much better at protecting shops from getting vandalized. We're much better at protecting, at punishing sort of thieves than we are at actually protecting people. So next time someone asks you why you're a police or a prison abolitionist, you can say that because these are largely set up for punishing people who are committing crimes against property. And that to imagine anything else is to be a sort of prisoner of ideology.

But one of the other theoretical elements of the people of the abyss that I think is extremely worthwhile is the arguments about sort of waste and false consciousness. Because just like today, there is a whole chapter where he recounts a conversation where people are talking about how the Jewish population immigrating into Whitechapel is undercutting the wages of the workers who are already there. And one of the sort of labor leaders he quotes says you can't blame them, they're just like us, they've got to live. Don't blame the don't blame the man who offers to work cheaper than you and gets your job. Blame the man who's making you compete. Blame the man who's withholding the wages. It's the fault of the competition. It's the fault of the fact of

competition, not your competitor. I mean, again, this could just be fucking written now. But he also says, and this is the bigger point here as well, that it is a matter of sober calculation here in England that it is much softer to work for 20 shillings a week and have regular food and a bed at night than it is to walk the streets. The man who walks the street suffers more, works harder for far less in return. And I've depicted the nights they spend and I've sort of related some of these here. It is characterized by constant exhaustion, constant stress, and sort of otherwise just genuine sort of awful trapidness. And that London says that essentially it's more or less inefficient on the part of authorities. It is sheer robbery. They

give men far less for their labor than do the capitalistic employers. The wage for the same amount of labor performed for a private employer would buy for them better beds, better food, good cheer, and greater freedom. But the state must punish these people because the labor market has rendered them superfluous. It's basically like you stub your toes, you kick your dog. It's completely absurd on its face. It doesn't actually make sense. It's a failure of logic. It's a failure to establish causes and effects and act on causes. Which again, all the logic patents, the only thing they know about the logic is that ad hominems are somehow bad, but then they interpret every criticism of them as an ad hominem. A sort of Ben Shapiro

were listening to this. He would say that actually by criticizing British government policy, I was engaging an ad hominem attack against Britain. But look, I don't want to get too distracted from the inefficiency thing because what essentially London is drawing attention to is that what we have is we have a large workforce that we're sort of underexploiting because we're trying to punish them for being workers, essentially. And one of the things keeping them poor is that none of them have enough money to pay one another for anything because the state is being so stingy by distributing aid through the workhouse. And we ask the whole time why civilization, if this is what it means, if 963 people out of 1000 are dying on state aid,

if one in four people are living their entire life in poverty, more or less what's the point of doing this? You know, he says, you know, to the young working man or working women or married couple, there is no assurance of a happy or healthy middle life nor of a solvent old age. Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure. It's all a matter of chance and everything depends on the thing happening or not happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do, the some chance I did that injury, that bit of bad luck, the trade drying up something, the thing that kicks them from, you know, able to live to unable to live. And to his credit, as problematic as Jack London is, he never goes so far as to say, ah, yes, well, if maybe if they could stop drinking

or maybe if they could just save or whatever, that somehow they could get out of this situation. You know, he says, it is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people. The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries, but it is in turn the effect of other prior miseries. The temperance advocates may preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain. Like, I swear to fucking God, if a modern Tory welfare, yeah, welfare, if a modern Tory DWP minister could be forced to read this, well, they probably would just think it was liberal propaganda. But still, you know, if it just goes to show that the problems that we're experiencing are not unique problems and

anyone, anybody who says that the social problems are today, the inequality, the precariousness, the sort of stupid, stupid cruelty of our system of sort of support are anything other than the simple end result of the capitalist form of industrial organization, that they're fucking lying to you and they're basically, you know, being sort of, they're mystifying the true source of the problem. They're engaging in some rhetorical bit of distraction because they probably want to protect it or maybe they're just really fucking dumb. Because this is, and I'm sort of going to finish talking about the book itself, I'm going to try to drive some more conclusions and discussion, because I know my discussion has stayed a little closer to the book this time than

it has in the previous ones. That's because I think there are so many incredible passages in here that I wanted to read. What he says, so what's, he doesn't say what is to be done because, you know, we all know that particular big dicket book. But he says, well, it's the management. You know, if all of this is happening, if all of these choices are being made, if we know that we're feeding the workhouse officer a certain amount and we're feeding the popper in the workhouse much less, well then either we're feeding the popper an inadequate amount or if we're feeding the popper an adequate amount, then we could feed the workhouse officer much less and feed more poppers. I mean, he puts it in sort of such sort of stark, obvious terms that it becomes obvious that if

you like, the management is the problem. He says, even though civilization has increased man's producing power, five men can produce bread for a thousand, one man can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woolen's for 300. It has been shown throughout the pages of this book that English folk by the millions do not receive enough food, clothes or boots that arises the third and inexorable question. If civilization has increased the producing power of the average man, why is it not better? The lot of the average man and that can only be mismanagement. And so now this I think is pretty cool. For one, he puts a lot of this squarely on the British Empire that the British Empire is basically a large and costly enterprise that cheapens and humiliates

both the people who perpetrate it and commits unbearable crimes against the people upon whom it is visited. But here is, I think, perhaps to use my favorite adjective again, the single biggest dick passage in this entire book. He says, if the 400,000 English gentlemen of no occupation, according to their own statement in the census of 1881, are unprofitable, then let's do away with them, set them to work plowing game preserves and planting potatoes. And if they are profitable, continue them by all means, but let it be seen to that the average Englishman shares somewhat in the profits they produce by working at no occupation. In short, society must be reorganized and a capable management put at the head that the present management is incapable,

there can be no discussion is drained the United Kingdom of its lifeblood is enfeebled the stay at home folk till they are unable to struggle in the van of competing nations. It is built up at West End and an East End as large as the kingdom is large, in which one is riotous and rotten, the other sickly and underfed. Now, I don't think that the this I don't think that the 400,000 English gentlemen of no occupation could conceivably be profitable. So let's turn Buckingham Palace into a giant weather spoons, because I don't think that the survivors of Grenfell really are helped by the commercial jolt that the Queen or continuing to give the sovereign grant to fucking Beatrice and Eugenie. I don't think that the jolt to big commemorative plate is really

helping out anyone who, you know, lives here in in any average sense of the word. I don't think many of our structures particularly make a good case for civilization. I think what they make is a good case for maybe re civilization. I think the document of civilization, which is currently a document of barbarism, maybe we can rewrite it. Maybe we can make it a little bit less barbaric. I don't know. I know I'm probably crucially misunderstanding Benjamin here, because, you know, if we write another document of civilization, we'll just write another one of barbarism. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't, you know, find those 400,000 English gentlemen of no occupation or 400,000 hedge fund managers of no occupation of no useful

occupation or whatever, and maybe politely ask them to, I don't know, do something, or maybe impolitely nationalize everything they fucking own. So look, that's the kind of my walkthrough of people of the abyss. It's a, I'll be honest, it's a hard book to read. And, you know, I feel a particular connection to it because I've lived in East London for quite some time now. I know a lot of these streets that he's mentioning. I know a lot of the squares. I've, you know, I mean, there were slum clearances, so I'm sure many of the buildings were destroyed, but I'm sure many of the buildings weren't. I've walked past these very buildings that he's describing sort of filled up with, you know, people basically dying at the age of 30,

which was the average life expectancy in East London at a time, 30, despite the fact that it was like 55, almost double in West London. And I like to act really, you know, I wonder how much has genuinely changed, you know? I mean, East, sure, has East London changed? Well, yeah, fucking, of course, you know, it's now become a sort of gaudy tourist hub where, you know, it's either someone going on a Jack the Ripper tour or, you know, someone throwing up green colored vomit on Old Street because, you know, 10 years ago, some artists used to hang out nearby. You know, sure, these superficial changes have occurred. I mean, I don't think Broadway Market was as such a bougie, Dan of expensive prams, a nine pound Persian food, of quote unquote street food,

as it was then, obviously. But the underlying dynamics are no different. The areas are much nicer, but that's in no small part because it no longer houses the poor people, because many of the poor people have been moved because the areas where at least they could live have gotten too expensive and they've been told they have to fuck off. Are they trudging to the workhouse anymore? You know, no, not necessarily. The modes of control have been internalized. You know, people now have to be have to always be thinking about retraining and finding their next job and upskilling and going and going to the DWP and getting job coaching and showing a positive attitude or else maybe you'll get sanctioned. Maybe your food will get taken away and then you'll be starving. Maybe

you'll have to do something illegal because then once you do something illegal, then you get put in prison and then you've been put in prison, then you have a criminal record, then you can't do anything. The abyss hasn't really gone anywhere. I mean, the lives of the poor have, again, have the material improved since then? Sure. Yes, life spans are longer and yet they are longer. Why? I wouldn't think because of the natural forces of capital just sort of working away or at least that's probably not the major reason. When we think of Dan Cullen, he's put in some crappy infirmary and then he dies. It was through the organized labor movement that we actually brought about changes that we pressured for things like the NHS,

that we pressured for things like unemployment benefits, good high-quality social housing. These things were won. They didn't just happen and that's why life expectancy has gone above fucking 30. Anyone who likes to credit the capitalist mode of industrial organization with any of those developments is, again, a fucking fabulous and not to be taken seriously, let alone voted into office. In fact, that's one of the reasons I think it's important to be rude to people like Robert Colville because anyone says, oh, you have to treat your opponent with respect in the discourse. It's like, no, if they could, they probably would want to go back to an era where people were living until they were 30 unless it could be shown that it was better for

capital to have people live longer, which it more or less is because it means more people can work more at more jobs, harder and more complicated jobs. It's better not have a workforce dying all the time, but that's your basic reason for wanting people to remain alive is complete and human claptrap. I think it shows so much disrespect to, I don't know, everyone in the very concept of human life that it's completely worth sending him a picture of a pig shitting on its own balls every time he's trying to tell, he's trying to tell you that you're not being logical and that he's actually already won the argument because fortunately in the long term, as or at least as God, I don't even know if I can be a Hegelian anymore, but I'm really trying. But in the long

term, Robert Colville and his ilk lose, just like the capitalists here lose, they eventually will be taken down because every time we come together and make something like the NHS, every time we can push that life expectancy above 30, not because it's useful to industry, but just because we're all human beings, then that's a win. But those wins have to be guarded because we, for a while, we did have these things. We were winning these improvements. And then Thatcher was able to come in and dismantle them and start making people's lives worse. And all of a sudden, modern Britain feels a lot more like people of the abyss than maybe Britain would have some years ago in the sort of 80s before, well, but in the early 80s before Thatcher, you know, Thatcher was 80.

Even in the 70s, in the 60s, I don't know, all of these times had their own crises. I mean, I know we had electricity rationing in the 70s, but I don't think that necessarily privatizing the NHS and having the, and having electricity rationing are sort of, have any kind of causal relationship with one another. I think we can continue trying to build a better world for ourselves without having to wonder if we're going back to the 70s, because if we're not actively building a better world for ourselves, I'll tell you, we're not going back to the 70s. We're going back to 1900. And it's going to be the abyss again. And so we have to not let them do that, because there is no natural market process of improvement. It is all political, it's all choice, and it's all

down to management. And that's why we have to control the management, because when they do, then we're all Dan Cullen. Got a bit away from me, and away from me. I did get a little bit, I don't know, I guess it maybe wasn't the usual light tone of the show that people are used to. But there we go. Look, this is a great book. It's very educational, if slightly problematic. I mean, the older writers, you always have to deal with that. Understand the good, be able to criticize the bad and learn from it, I guess. And just get this book, it's free. Give it a read, get mad, and don't let the labor right take Lewish am East, because they want this to happen just as much as the Tories. Anyway, I also know I was supposed to do shirt shout outs,

but I want to do that in a more regular normal episode, because this one's just for the heads, this one's just for the fucking real troopers who like to hear my solo ramblings. So I'll do all of those lovely shout outs when we next do a normal episode. What else? I also, on the subject of shirts, buy a shirt. Commodify your dissent with a shirt. Go to Tiny Comrade and buy a shirt. We will shout you out if you do a good custom message. And also, do keep sending in your questions, because a lot of them are really good, and I'd like to have more, and I'd like to start handling them on the show more often. Let's see, what else? What else? What else? What else? What else do I have to say?

Here, thank you once again to Jin Sang for our theme song. Here we go. You can find on Spotify, and I strongly recommend that you do. Thanks to our producer, Nate, at In These Deserts, who you can also find and follow and thank him, because basically the show was like unlistensibly bad before he joined up. I don't know why any of you guys were fans, but unless you like hate your own ears, but you know, we are eternally thankful to him. Anyway, I think that's about it for me, so thank you for listening once again to this edition of Riley's Kami Book Club. Peace out.