Tomorrow it was May: but it's hard to believe it, we agree as we sit hungover at Stoke station. We're heading our separate ways: W. to the south, to his hometown of Plymouth, and I to the north, to my hometown of Newcastle.
What might happen if we lived in the same city?, W. wonders. What, if we and our friends lived in Plymouth, or in Newcastle, and we saw each other every day, meeting in cafes and pubs?
We might start a new political party, W. says. A new collective! Oh, he knows how foolish it sounds … A new vanguard – can I imagine that?
The times are against us. History is against us. He understands that, W. says. It’s inexorable. Life is against us! The cosmos is against us! I’m against him, for God’s sake, W. says. He’s against me!
W. would demonstrate against me if he could, he says. I’m against Lars, his placard would read. Kill the Tosser!, written across a picture of me.
Ah, but we are only signs, W. says. Symptoms. We’re the way something is wrong, not the disease itself.
These are not political times, that’s the truth of it. There’s no working class struggle, no party, no organisation, and therefore no politics, according to Tronti, W. says. Capitalism has conquered the external world, Tronti says; now it’s going to conquer the internal one, too.
What remains to us is only to chart our despair, to fathom it, according to Tronti. Because that’s all that will be left of us, our despair. That’ll be the last incorruptible part of us. We should read Kierkegaard alongside Marx, if we are to understand the contemporary disaster, according to Tronti, W. says. We must turn through the pages of the philosopher of despair.
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