It’s a Friday evening, late in November. As 7pm rolls around you curl up on the sofa with your family in front of your shiny, 64-inch TV while a yellow bear with a spotty eye-patch dances across the screen. You’ve been looking forward to this for months and as the Aga hums in the background, you feel content.
Over the next three hours your family laughs, cries, eats Green & Blacks chocolate, but, more importantly, you’ve pitched in to help save the poor, disadvantaged children that have flitted across the TV screen.
Through the rather constant stream of tears, you gaze in awe at the ever increasing money pot on the screen: £20 million, then 25, then 30, then 40! That’s last year’s record broken. Then, suddenly it’s 10pm and it’s off to bed. The children that elicited such emotion are gone as quickly as they appeared, mum returns to her corporate job in the city, a proud Thatcherite, and you’re bundled into the family 4-by-4 on your way to school.
Although maybe more of an embarrassing expose of my own family, many like mine (unfortunately) exist. Whether it be Children in Need or Red Nose Day, families gather around the TV every year in a collective ritual of conscience cleansing for the British middle classes. Self-reflection is not necessary, instead throwing copious amounts of money at deprived children we will never meet, nor understand is enough to placate our guilty consciences.
This cognitive dissonance, donating money to children you feel sympathy for, while being actively complicit in the systems which oppress them, is not simply limited to nights like these, rather it is an endemic feature of the British middle class, a way of navigating our guilt without questioning our privilege.
The culture of activism and the aesthetics of principled left-wing politics is, similarly, an enthralling prospect for the student, offering community and hope which, in the context of a despairing world, is a sanctuary oft so hard to come by.
Many care about Palestine, they post about it, they talk about it, they might even attend the odd protest. They care about working class people, they talk about how awful Keir Starmer’s cuts are and talk about how capitalism is destroying our world.
However, after a night out, they’ll go to 24 hours McDonald’s for some drunk scran, they’ll forget to buy their friend a birthday present and so order some last minute tat off Amazon, they’ll do internships for private equity firms so, to look the part, they go to Primark and buy a cheap suit and, in their breaks, will buy a Starbucks, and when they go home after another hard days graft, they’ll boot up Disney + or Amazon Prime, they might even book a holiday on Airbnb to reward themselves for all their hard work.
Without principled action and sacrifice, slogans and appeals are nothing but words. Herein lies the contradiction, the reality of being deprived of your weekly big mac is too much to bear, so you would rather continue, while spouting jargon from the Communist Manifesto, to indulge on the spoils of war, and fund a genocide.
Students, and I myself have been guilty of this, so often perform in ways that give us comfort rather than engaging in genuine solidarity, there must come a time when we rip off the plaster and confront our own messy inconsistencies, only then can we reasonably claim to be fighting for a better future.
“A proletarian motto and soviet symbol under the roof of an old bulgarian communist monument at Buzludzha” by Nedko is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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Perfomative Wokeness: A Rather Long Tirade Against the British Liberal Middle Class
It’s a Friday evening, late in November. As 7pm rolls around you curl up on the sofa with your family in front of your shiny, 64-inch TV while a yellow bear with a spotty eye-patch dances across the screen. You’ve been looking forward to this for months and as the Aga hums in the background, you feel content.
Over the next three hours your family laughs, cries, eats Green & Blacks chocolate, but, more importantly, you’ve pitched in to help save the poor, disadvantaged children that have flitted across the TV screen.
Through the rather constant stream of tears, you gaze in awe at the ever increasing money pot on the screen: £20 million, then 25, then 30, then 40! That’s last year’s record broken. Then, suddenly it’s 10pm and it’s off to bed. The children that elicited such emotion are gone as quickly as they appeared, mum returns to her corporate job in the city, a proud Thatcherite, and you’re bundled into the family 4-by-4 on your way to school.
Although maybe more of an embarrassing expose of my own family, many like mine (unfortunately) exist. Whether it be Children in Need or Red Nose Day, families gather around the TV every year in a collective ritual of conscience cleansing for the British middle classes. Self-reflection is not necessary, instead throwing copious amounts of money at deprived children we will never meet, nor understand is enough to placate our guilty consciences.
This cognitive dissonance, donating money to children you feel sympathy for, while being actively complicit in the systems which oppress them, is not simply limited to nights like these, rather it is an endemic feature of the British middle class, a way of navigating our guilt without questioning our privilege.
The culture of activism and the aesthetics of principled left-wing politics is, similarly, an enthralling prospect for the student, offering community and hope which, in the context of a despairing world, is a sanctuary oft so hard to come by.
Many care about Palestine, they post about it, they talk about it, they might even attend the odd protest. They care about working class people, they talk about how awful Keir Starmer’s cuts are and talk about how capitalism is destroying our world.
However, after a night out, they’ll go to 24 hours McDonald’s for some drunk scran, they’ll forget to buy their friend a birthday present and so order some last minute tat off Amazon, they’ll do internships for private equity firms so, to look the part, they go to Primark and buy a cheap suit and, in their breaks, will buy a Starbucks, and when they go home after another hard days graft, they’ll boot up Disney + or Amazon Prime, they might even book a holiday on Airbnb to reward themselves for all their hard work.
Without principled action and sacrifice, slogans and appeals are nothing but words. Herein lies the contradiction, the reality of being deprived of your weekly big mac is too much to bear, so you would rather continue, while spouting jargon from the Communist Manifesto, to indulge on the spoils of war, and fund a genocide.
Students, and I myself have been guilty of this, so often perform in ways that give us comfort rather than engaging in genuine solidarity, there must come a time when we rip off the plaster and confront our own messy inconsistencies, only then can we reasonably claim to be fighting for a better future.
“A proletarian motto and soviet symbol under the roof of an old bulgarian communist monument at Buzludzha” by Nedko is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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