In Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why, the protagonist soliloquizes:
I want you to go out and buy yourself a lighter or a good box of matches. If they are matches, it is nice for them to be strike-anywhere matches. Those are the best kind. The lighter does not have to be a very nice one. In fact, it should be fairly nondescript, if possible. You will keep it in your pocket as a sort of token. Stick your hand in there now and then as you go around and remember: all the buildings that exist, all the grand structures of wealth and power, they remain standing because you permit them to remain. With this little lick of flame in your pocket, with this little gift of Prometheus, you can reduce everyone to a sort of grim equality. All those who ride on the high horse may be made to walk. Therefore, when you are at the bank and the bank manager speaks roughly to you, when you are denied entrance to a restaurant or other place of business, when you are made to work longer than you should need to, when you are driven out of your own little dwelling and made to live in the street, reach into your pocket, caress your own little vehicle of flame, and feel the comfort there. We shall set fires — and when we set them, we shall know why.
This passage has become a source of comfort for me. As I walk around the city with my lighter amid towering monuments to capitalist excess, I can’t help but contemplate how beautiful and satisfying it would be to cast it all into the inferno. The problem is that, as the British poet Kae Tempest puts it in “Europe is Lost,”
Riots are tiny, though
Systems are huge
Traffic keeps moving
Proving there’s nothing to do
‘Cause it’s big business, baby
And its smile is hideous
Top-down violence
It’s structural viciousness
In other words, reducing only one building to ashes isn’t enough. Petty acts of arson here and there are insufficient to bring the oligarchs to their knees. Even acts as dramatic and symbolically potent as self-immolation ultimately come to naught. The system grinds on, and as long as it does, the edifices can simply be rebuilt, and the charred corpses can be safely interred and forgotten.
I’m thinking, obviously, of Mohamed Bouazizi, Aaron Bushnell, and Wynn Alan Bruce. The Middle East and North Africa largely remain in thrall to brutal Western satraps, Gaza is still rubble, and global ecocide marches on apace. As poetic and meaningful as their deaths were, the status quo is impervious to poetry and meaning.
So it goes, ad infinitum.
The path to liberation first requires a sense of collectivity outside of capitalist marketing silos, one that transcends national boundaries and identity categories.
Nevertheless, this form of solidarity, one that eschews narrow or discrete conceptualizations of comradeship, does not appear to be anywhere on the horizon. Shrewd marketing tactics have convinced most of us that the content we choose to consume is what makes us unique, rather than what we choose to do.
The obvious objective is to lull us into a false sense of security. The goal is to keep us trapped in our apartments with our curtains drawn over our permanently sealed, suicide-proof windows to prevent glare on our screens. Their hope is that the scope of political activity stays confined to the realm of consumer choices, which, of course, only serves to further line the pockets of the capitalist leeches. It’s more convenient for the bourgeoisie to keep us locked in our gilded cages than for us to seek justice, freedom, and equality through revolution.
Those with the audacity to publicly break the mold are often doxxed and blacklisted; in extreme cases, sometimes assassinated. The empire cannot afford to hesitate; its rulers know that a well-timed spark can set their Malibu mansions ablaze. “It’s best to douse it now,” they say. “When the carrot fails to entice, fetch the stick.”
There is no tidy denouement to this story. Humanity finds itself faced with a choice. We can choose either to burn the system to the ground together and build something new and better in its ashes, or, through collective inaction, to allow that system to consign the whole planet to the flames as a consecrated offering to Mammon.
As I type this into the digital ether on a computer built by wage slaves, I traffic in gross hypocrisy, implicitly buying into the conceit that my freedom to create can be somehow divorced from the abject suffering that makes it possible. Still, the core challenge remains: burn or be burned.
proletarian grammarian 