J Marsh - Apocalypse Rising

When the timing’s right, we’ll all think ourselves on the right side of history, not merely the winning side but the moral side as well. When the timing’s right, it’ll all come crumbling down, and when we’re left standing in the rubble of the old way of things, it’ll still be unclear, to some, just who among us was truly in the right. Ours is a whole made from the many, a cause that capitulates only to the idea of the great international, and in so capitulating we find unity in strength. Ours is no colour, no creed, and ours is a production that seeks its own love. It’s all a fraud, though. Stuck as we are in the grips of a mindless decay, we are made to be maligned as we put one foot in front of the other and pull ourselves through the day, we are declared lazy, shiftless, lacking in ambition even as we arrive home in the evening tired, sore, dirty all over, and we are, above all, forever consigned within the way of things to the ideological margins, forever, until we learn to take it upon ourselves to fight back. Still yet we’ve not arrived at the precipice of the revolution, despite all the indignities and all the injustices visited upon the working man. Still yet all the acts of resistance blend into a rising action that escalates through our shared history and which must surely lead to something, anything at all. The first acts of resistance, centuries ago, were ill-advised, over before they began. Each successive act, though, was a little bit better planned and executed and lasted a little bit longer.

A young woman, perhaps in her mid-to-late twenties, named Isabella Bennett works as a maid in a luxury hotel not far from the city centre. Every day she changes sheets, cleans floors, and washes linens and clothes for the wealthy guests who come here from around the world. Every day she earns her own pittance, supplemented with what meagre tips the hotel’s wealthy guests give her. And every month, she sends a sum to relatives living in their home country, keeping for herself only the minimum she needs to survive. But the sum she sends has been shrinking for a while, each month the remittance a little less than the last. In the streets, she sees anger, and in the moment of weakness she gives in to her anger, pocketing a watch she finds among one of the rooms. In an age where hardship is made to be experienced alongside abundance, women like Isabella do what they must to make ends meet. Every day Isabella Bennett changes bedsheets and washes floors for wealthy guests who think nothing of spending on a night’s entertainment more than she makes in a month. She comes to work in clothes clean, skin without a blemish, and in hair perfectly bound in a ponytail reaching halfway down her back, chosen to serve the hotel’s wealthy guests because she is pleasing to the eye. One night, near the end of her shift when there are few other staff on this floor in the hotel, she finishes folding towels in the bathroom of the wealthy guest’s suite, the one she’d taken that watch from, turning to find standing in the door that very wealthy guest. “I know you took my watch,” he says. He steps towards her and shuts the door. It’s over quickly, but for Isabella it seems to last an agonizingly long time. When it’s over, she leaves the room and makes her way to fire escape’s stairwell, letting the door shut before sitting on the steps and crying softly into her hands. The night, for her, soon ends. Even as she’s been punished for her act of theft, hers has not been an act of theft but an act of return, this small piece made of the exploitation of labour and now made whole by its return. And so is visited on her punishment for her act of liberation. It’s a small act, one lost in the disorder slowly extending through the streets, but in smallness lies the essence of our times.

That night, Isabella heads down through the stairwell to the laundry room in the basement, there telling her co-worker what’s happened. Nothing comes of it. Of course nothing comes of it. The next day she returns to work, able to compose herself by forcing a friendly look onto her face and by working her way through the day by reciting from memory a series of motions as is the way of people like her. But inside she’s changed. When she next comes across the wealthy man who’d taken her, she can’t look him in the eye, walking past in the hall quickly and quietly. At the end of the hall, she looks back and sees the wealthy man looking right at her, a wicked look on his face. All through this time she continues to wire her wages back to her family abroad, seeming to find the wherewithal to keep sending the same sums by cutting back on her own, sewing up torn clothes in strategic places so no one can see the stitches, still looking like the perfectly-kept young woman the hotel’s wealthy, foreign guests expect. But she’ll get even. Although she’ll never be the same, although she’ll always have the memories of being so violated, she’ll never lose the will not only to live but to survive through it. As she is of the working man’s stock, she doesn’t know how to do anything else but survive. Like all working men and women, Isabella Bennett is infinitely strong, in her resiliency lying the future.

At last, the troopers attack. In the early morning hour, papers are posted to the doors of each apartment in the block next to Valeri’s, papers announcing the impending eviction of every resident in the building. Mysteriously in the night, that night, a sign is posted along the building’s façade boldly proclaiming the impending construction of some new luxury villa with every section already sold. ‘Thank you,’ the sign seems to cynically say, ‘for making this new community a success.’ But as Valeri watches, the little old ladies living on fixed incomes and the single mothers dressing their children in second-hand clothes must come to grips with what’s been done. The actual evictions take some time; before even half the residents are gone crews have already started tearing out finishings and copper wiring from the walls. It’s a sad irony that these crews should be made up of the same kind of persons as those working men and women so unceremoniously put out of their homes and onto the street. But a grander game’s afoot. This eviction is an attack, part of a broader offensive mounted by the criminals in parliament, working men across Britain finding the same notices posted to their doors. The wealthy man senses the coming revolt; this campaign of evictions is but an attempt to forestall the inevitable. The wealthy man’s folly lies in hastening his own demise.

Already the thin wisps of smoke have begun to emanate from the little cracks in the sidewalks, from the storm drains lining the gutters, feeding into a dark cloud that will soon engulf us all. The dark essence that’s watching from above, it slowly gathers strength as it’s been slowly gathering strength for so long as there’s been men like Valeri to bear witness to the pit of despair the working man finds himself in. Soon enough there’ll be a pivotal moment when this dark essence will descend on us, exactly the moment when the working man should rise, the two to meet high above the surface of the earth in a cataclysmic display that will realize our historical inevitability, at last. At the polytechnic, classes are underway, Sean Morrison and his classmates studying through crippling shortages and not-infrequent power failures. But meanwhile, they plan. After the immigration raids have disappeared scores of men from the streets, if only for a short period of time, the students declare their solidarity with the migrants and prepare their counterattack. It’s while they plan that their first, critical error is made. Sean and the others in the students’ union openly declare their intentions, going so far as to publish bold declarations on the screens of the world that the end of the current order is at hand. Meeting in a classroom at the polytechnic with some of his fellow students, he says, “theory urges us to take direct action. We strike to take direct action by seizing the streets and holding them.” Another student, Julia Hall, says, “every moment we can hold the streets is a moment we deny them to the wealthy who control them.” But not all are sympathetic to their cause; one of the students in their group’s a spy.