At the union hall, there’s a palpable tension in the air. “We’ll have them right where they need to be,” says one of Rose’s colleagues from the popular front, a man named Kim Dae-Jung. “Perhaps,” says Rose, “but we still have much work to do.” It’s later now, and the small contingent from the popular front have completed their subterfuge, Murray having left the room to inform the crowd on their agreement. But Rose and Kim are only one contingent, others making contact with unionists, students, and parishioners, the same agreement reached a hundred times over. Although the rebels in the popular front will not take part in the demonstration, it’s critical that all involved believe they will. To this end, Rose and Kim leave the union hall that evening having made a firm commitment neither have any intention of making good on.
Along the streets never come relief from the constant terror and the lawlessness that pervade life for the working man, the threat of his livelihood being taken, the threat of eviction from his home, as those tall, thin, glass and steel monstrosities replace the short, square blocks once built for men like him and in so replacing transform the character of his city beyond recognition. The streets are in crisis, in a state of never ending crisis as the forces of the wealthy class muscle their way across the city, not with the truncheon but with the fountain pen, taping notices to the fronts of doors, erecting chain-link fences around closed and darkened apartment blocks, before bringing the working man in to tear it all down and put up in its place something meant for someone else. It’s one of the cruel ironies of our time, that the working man should be made to become the instrument of his own demise. As he works for the profit of another, his body is like a machine, his mind reciting a routine from memory, his body executing its routine in a series of smooth, well-rehearsed motions, his muscles expanding and contracting like the pistons of an engine firing in rapid succession.
But it’s not their fault. The streets never lie idle under the hot summer’s sun, nor do they meekly consent to the trundling of a thousand footsteps along their black surface, instead fighting as it only knows how. Even in these times of immense hardship and deprivation, there are little moments of warmth and happiness, when the working man comes home to see his children at the end of a long, hard day. It’s never easy. The working man watches, feeling stationary in a world advancing by leaps and bounds every day, feeling as though it’s leaving him behind, trapping him in a little cone of his own silence. Crossing the end of the world would but leave him further in a little box of his own malfeasance, as he makes home at the end of the day his life having changed little, as he climbs the stairs to his little cube of an apartment his time having yielded only more sweat, blood, and tears. He looks out the window and into the half-darkness of the alley behind his home, and for a moment he wonders if the night might conceal within its expanse the very force which could deliver him from evil and into his own personal salvation. Not in those words, of course. The working man doesn’t think in these terms. Instead, he thinks in terms of his own future’s end, that he must work towards this end each day, with every foot brought down on the ground in front of him, every breath drawn in and pushed out, every heartbeat pushing blood through his veins bringing him closer to his own victory.
After ending its last shift ever, this factory is to be shut down, like the factory on the other side of the street to fall dark, some of the workers to return tomorrow to put up the fences and the razor wire that’ll guard the factory’s empty shell. It’s a final indignity, that these workers should be put to work one last time caging in the remains of his livelihood, at the behest of his former paymaster ensuring that no one will ever return to work here again. The working man will find something to do, somewhere to go during the days to earn some modest wage; resourcefulness and resiliency are the values of his class. Still, he knows this to be a seminal moment in his life, as history runs its course all around him the aggrieved injustice of it all striking him in a way instinctive, almost guttural. Should he be so inclined, this would make for a perfect moment to fight back; at the moment, though, he’s not so inclined, thinking as he is of ways to feed himself. He returns home to his small, hollow apartment, sparsely furnished, with dishes piled in the kitchen sink and clothes in a laundry basket square in the middle of the living room’s floor. Though he’s tired, the working man sleeps little that night, in a hundred other such apartments the same scenario playing itself out a hundred times, the working man’s little apartment never a real place but instead a place imagined, unreal, even esoteric in its unreality, the war against the working man having visited upon him hopelessness and poverty. With the world wallowing in crisis and with conditions there to breed a smouldering discontent, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be governed wholly by the passions of the moment. Our struggle, you see, demands of us a focus on an ultimate end, one which can only be reached should each of us conserve our strength for decisive action. The working man, tired, can only yield to the banalities of life, to the hard work for little pay, to the small, run-down box of an apartment, to the small but widening holes in his jeans and to the ever-present threat of losing that which is the envy of no man but which is better than having none at all. In this state of mind he is trapped, needing as he does his own to take on the burden of shaping these vague impulses and these subversive urges into something more. In the world at large, there’s trouble afoot, working men like Valeri in the other empires agitating for their own future. While the screens fill with news of foreign armies moving this way and that, never fighting but posturing for a fight, it may yet take only the slightest provocation for all of these troubled empires, filled with restlessness and agitation, to set themselves on one another in a bid to relieve themselves of their own troubles.
At night, it’s still too hot out for the working man to bear, these heady summer days concealing a frustration and an antipathy from within which there can be drawn the steely determination and the straight-faced strength needed to win through this most difficult time, this tentative early stage where nothing seems certain but continuous defeat. At night, the streets become shrouded in darkness, the sickly, pale orange light of the streetlamps casting an eerie glow on the road. Though we’re in the midst of a mounting crisis, I hope you’ll join me in admiring the beauty of these streets, these rivers of amber and golden light coursing through the dark, its life-giving brightness an anaemic imitation, a caricature of the brilliant radiance of the sun’s natural light. It’s in these troubled times that we learn to find that kind of small beauty wherever it can be found, for without it we might be tricked into thinking the world we live in to be black as the night itself. If we don’t take advantage of these last opportunities to savour what few pleasures are reserved for the working man, then our history’s future may yet take them away from us forever. But as the fires of history burn, the working man still lives his life, working in the day, tossing and turning at night, all the while recalling the sight of so many columns of smoke rising from the city’s streets, imagining himself drawn to the fight for history’s future.