Lars Iyer's Blog

W. has Liverpool, I, Manchester. W. his northwestern city, where he lived during the bad years of the 80s, and I my northwestern city, where I lived through the years of regeneration in the 90s. He saw the destruction of the economy … and I the ostensible remaking of an economy; he the end of a period of decline, I the ostensible beginning of a period of rebirth.

Haven't we seen it all? Haven't we experience it all between us? We need to pool our resources, W. says. We need to remember. I need to remember. That's his aim on our trip to Manchester: that I recall what happened to the city and to me, who lived in the city.

I'm to be a test case, W. says. A symptom. He wants to awaken my tremendous, free-flying pathos, he says. He wants to poke me with metaphorical sticks until I send up my great cry of desolation. And isn't this why he keeps me beside him? Isn't it to hear the great cries of an ape driven unhinged by captivity? Isn't that why he assented to be my keeper and my ringmaster?

What was the first sign, the first sign of regeneration?, W. asks. When did you know it was coming, the great change? I was living in Hulme, wasn't I – in Old Hulme? I had a room in one of the maisonettes on the top deck of one of the high-rises.

That was my Bohemian phase, W. says. It was my living-like-a-hippie-phase. Only I could never live like a hippie, could I? I couldn't live like the crusties and ravers around me; could live like a rasta, although I wanted to live like a rastra. I couldn't so much as inhale the smoke from a joint without coughing and spluttering.

I was what I still am: an impatient man, a frantic man, a man who wants to get on with things, even though he has no idea what he wants to get on with. I was then as now, essentially an administrator. I was essentially suited to administrative tasks, but I didn't know it at the time, of course.

I was unemployed like everyone else. I was squatting like everyone around me, I had my room, I had my cave painting pictures on the wall. And I had time – time above all. No one understands that now, W. says, the depth of time. Haven't I spoken at length, and very movingly about just that: the depth of time? Yes, that's what I learnt in Hulme Free State, as the graffiti called it. That as I wondered among the condemned buildings, passed the piles of rusting white goods and shattered TVs.

There were fires burning on the walkways, I'd told him that, he remembers, W. says. It gives the whole thing a Tarkovskian air. Fires on the walkways, fire on concrete, in the Manchester rain …

The maisonettes were always drenched through, of course, I told him that. They were damp throughout most of the year, all the way through to high summer, really, or what we thought of as high summer. The concrete was once white, a futural white, but it had long since faded to grey under the grey northern skies.

Once there'd been families living here, once it seemed like the future itself, in the crescents of maisonette flats linked by walkways. They went up very quickly in the 60s, of course, the Crescents. They were system built, concrete panels locked together like a house of cards.

But the council tenants fled. The flats were too damp and too expensive to heat. They were too bleak! And so the council gave anyone who wanted one a flat. And so they came from every direction – hippies and ravers and bikers, travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours. And now the bunker-like pubs built by the Crescents were full again and a bunker-like nightclub played lover's rock.

And so I found myself there like the others, barely touching solid ground for weeks. I scraped the pigeon shit from my boxroom on the back balcony, and dragged up a mattress and the complete works of Kierkegaard. And at night, after the pubs closed, I sat with the other squatters of the greens, looking up at the belly of the police helicopter.

I sat and listened to the others talked as they sat round me smoking and waiting for the Kitchen to open. I listened to the Rastas reason about Babylon and the Babylon system. Listened them to speak about the Almighty, and about the god-king Messiah. I listened to the anarchists speak of direct democracy and the Paris Commune.

I listen to a junky speak about the religiousness of getting high. Of the tingling on the surface of her skin, as though it were being brushed by a shoal of fish; of a kind of lifting or lightness, accompanied by a sense of the heaviness of her arms and legs. Her blood felt warm, she had said. The Most High: that's what they call God, she said. And laughed: the Most High: higher than all highs, and all highs pointing up to him like aretes. She saw them in her mind's eye, she said, riding up ever higher, flashing the light back along their keen edges and converging on a single point: God, God.

And what were you doing?, W. said. He knows the answer: I was sober, desperately sober. I was thinking about Kierkegaard as ravers, bug-eyed, danced in tiny circles. I was thinking about the Moment as packs of ownerless dogs, tongues lolling from their mouths, loped along in the distance.

There's no more time, W. and I agree, not here in Manchester. There's no long term, not for the worker, nor the consumer. All fixed, frozen relationships dissolve into the air …  Uncertainty everywhere. Barely any succession between events in time. Barely any sense of the accumulation of experience.

And no one understands, not really, we agree. We lack the power to interpret our lives. We lack the strength to draw on our experience. The network replaced the pyramid, and the join between its nodes are getting looser. And always the gutting and abandonment of viable firms on the orders of consultants. Always the setting adrift of employees to impress the investors. This is the new city. This is unreal Manchester …

There's no more time, we agree. No more long term, no predictability … We're disoriented, we agree. Nothing connects. Nothing accumulates. But wasn't that what they wanted, back in the 60s? Wasn't that's what they were looking for: freedom from old conformities, from the nine-to-five? Freedom from the old work ethic, and from the old forms of state constraints?

But who could see what weas to come? Who the dissolution of the old solidarities, who the new individualism, who the degeneration of the idea of freedom into free enterprise? Who the deregulation of the financial sector, the new markets based on derivatives and futures trading? Who the new concentration of corporate power in the media and retailing, in retailing and pharmaceuticals?

They remade the economy. They remade culture. A new world appeared while we were napping. And here it is, all around us. Here, as they sold off the public space of the city to Business Improvement Districts. Here, as the streets became a trading environment, as the city was treated as a private business, accountable to investors rather than its elctors. Here as local government became enterpreneurial rather than social democratic?

They formed Marketing Manchester and the Manchester Investment and Development Agency. They pursued World Heritage Site status and the accolade of European City of Culture. They ran an International Urban Design Competition to remake the city. They formed the Piccadilly Regeneration Partnership, and opened up the retail space of the Millennium Quarter. They marketed the Northern Quarter directly at employees of cultural industry, and revived the old Corn Exchange as the boutique-filled Triangle.

That was the rebranding of Manchester in the 1990s. That was the remaking of the city as a space for consumption, for the libertarianism of consumer choice. That was its reconstruction as a space of transactions rather than relationships. So the conversion of previously industrial buildings, especially warehouses, for commercial and residential use. So the new refurbishments with new glass and steel.

We read about the attempt to make Manchester visually important. We read about community architecture and the the repopulation of the city centre. We read about the importance of creative industries to Manchester, the pop music industry, sport and leisure.

The pop music industry, the pop music industry!, W. says. Do you think Morrissey had anything to do with the pop music industry? Do you think Mark E. Smith had anything to do with the pop music industry? Do you think Joy Division were ever part of the pop music industry? It's an obscene phrase: the pop music industry, W. says. Actually, creative industry is an obscene phrase. Community architecture is an obscene phrase.

They're destroying the past, even as they try and conserve it, we agree. They're destroying the future! The Crescents, Old Hulme …. they should have left those as they were. They should have left old Castlefield crumbling. Who needed the Hulme Partnership and Eastside Regeneration? Who the Beacons for a Brighter Future and the Stockport Road Corridor Initiative? Who the New Islington Project? Who the Knowledge Capital Project?

They should have left it filthy, Manchester, W. says. They never should have cleaned it up. The Town Hall, covered in grime. St Peter's Square, covered in grime. Piccadilly Gardens, covered in grime. Princess Parkway as desolate as Warsaw …

Because there's no more time, W. says. Because nowadays, in the eternal now, there are only discontinuity, moments without succession. No one understands. None of us understand. There's only the non-time of uncertainty and anxious malaise. Only a frenzy and chaos without linearity. Only the continual destruction of experience.

The Rochdale Canal, Manchester. This was where raw cotton was shipped to local mills, W. explains. Coal too – they needed it for the boilers that fed the mill steam engines. 

Few things interest W. more than industrial history. Military history, perhaps; Jewish messianic thought – that too. But the history of industry; the history of the industrial city and the history of what happens after industry: W. says we can discover in such accounts great truths about our age.

We admire the row of warehouses, each from a different period. That's Murray's Mill, W. says, reading from our guidebook. We admire the four multi-story blocks. It was a cotton spinning mill. Actually, they're all cotton spinning mills on the Rochdale Canal, each from a different period.

Before the 1790s, the mills were water-powered or horse driven, W. reads. Murray Mill, like its neighbour, New Mill, was steam powered. The use of steam-power in the cotton industry meant it remained profitable for Mancunion merchants to import cotton, spin it, and then transport it for sale to the London market. 

Profit! Free trade! And so Manchester became a new kind of city, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. Das Manchestertum: that was the word the Germans coined for this new kind of economic individualism. And wasn't it because the city was turned almost entirely to profit and free trade that Marx looked to it for the chance of revolution? Wasn't it because of the terrible poverty and unemployment that it saw mass movements of protest?

But Mancunion industry saw off the rebellion of workers, we read. By the 1850s, corporations became stable, and employment increased. It was all due to new models of internal organisation, we learn, which the Manchester men, the new merchants, borrowed from the military. Bureaucracy: that's what they discovered. The chain of command. Each worker was assigned a place, and hence a function in the institutional whole.

In the end, it was all about time, W. says. The worker was encouraged to take the long term view – to understand his life in terms of his service to a firm. Time was predictable, certain. Deferred gratification … Long-term goals … Self-discipline, in view of future rewards: that's how the men of Manchester saved the city from revolution. The prestige of work.

They've converted the mills now, of course, W. says. They've become shopping outlets and museums. They're part of the new heritage tourism. My God, who would have believed it: that tourists would come here, to Manchester? Who are these tourists, anyway?

Tourism, leisure, that's what the city's all about. Leisure! Who has any time for leisure! There isn't any time, not anymore. There isn't any steadiness of purpose. Oh for the unemployed, there's time. For the sick, the early-retired, plenty of time! But for the rest of them, working in the creative industries? For the others, in their business start-ups?

Ah, there's no long-term, not now. No deferred gratification. For the new elite, it's all about contacts, about their network, not about the firm. Self-discipline without dependency: that's what they show, the editors of the new media, the advertising creatives, living in converted warehouses. Free wheeling initiative: that's what they exhibit, the floor traders in brokerage firms, the internet entrepreneurs who buy apartments redeveloped byUrban Splash.

And for the rest of them, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing? For those for whom work means constant insecurity, the constant re-engineering and restructuring of their workplaces, constant delayering and outsourcing, constant downsizing and networkisation? Labour has become almost entirely casualised. That's what the consultants recommend. It's what the market wants, they tell their clients: labour flexibility impresses the investors.

Where now the prestige of work? Where the long-term? But there is no long term. Work tasks have become fragmentary and ill defined. There is no solidarity; the team with whom I work this week will be different from the one with whom I work the next. And I might be let go at any moment, I might become one of the sick or the unemployed …

We stop to read some graffiti. Happy hour is now enforced by law. And then, Just Blag It, the first two words in black, the middle one in orange. And then, I hate Lorraine Kelly and underneath it, in different writing, Davina McCall. W. reminds me of his favourite piece of graffiti, which he saw in the Northern Quarter: The rich and powerful piss on us and the media tell us it's raining.

Our jobs are solely concerned with making the case for our jobs, W. and I agree. Nearly our entire activity at work, occupying almost all our working hours, is the attempt to stay employed, to keep going. But to keep going at what? To stay employed doing what? To keep going at keeping going, to stay employed at being employed: that's the strange vortex in which we are caught.

But at least W. does some real work. At least, before heading into his office, there is still his reading and writing, still the reality of the texts of Christian Marazzi and Hermann Cohen, though W. understands so little of what he reads. What do I do, outside panic about my job?

I only intensify my administrative labours. I only spend more time over the documents I assemble to defend myself: my spreadsheets and databases, my rationales and ten point plans. Where do I think it's going to get me? Does anyone actually reply to my lengthy emails, studded with attachments? They ignore them, as they ignore me. As they ignore W., too, for all that he impresses them with his preparation for meetings.

Because they, too, are busy writing lengthy emails. They too are preparing spreadsheets and filling in vast and complex forms. They too are compiling reports and action plans as they worry whether they too will be sacked.

I need to read, W. says. And I write. I should think of our collaboration, our joint venture, as a way of saving myself. Of our friendship, which is a friendship by way of the texts of Christian Marazzi and Hermann Cohen.

Of course, W. knows we need to prepare for our meetings. Meetings are a serious business!

When they were trying to sack him – just after they placed his job at risk – he was called before a senior manager to justify his job. This was a new manager, specially appointed to axe staff. They brought him in from industry, W. says, because the others didn't have the nerve. They wanted to hide behind him, the axeman. They wanted him to do their work, and to leave them with clean hands.

And so there W. was, before the axeman. There he was, shuffling his papers … 'I want to make a moral case, and a financial case for my position', he said. A moral case: surely no one would want to hear that? But he did want to hear it, the axeman. He said, take as much time as you need.

W. knew something was up. He knew this wasn't how an axeman was supposed to behave. And so he made his case, his moral case. He spoke of the ethics of employment, of the duties of the institution. He spoke of the rights of the employee and of the educational duty to the students, who, after all, W. taught more than anyone.

That was the moral case, he said. Then, shuffling his papers, he began outlining his financial case. Here, he was particularly impressive, although he says so himself, W. says. Everyone said so, afterwards. He spoke with great thoroughness of the two lava streams of income. Of funding being known years in advance, so that no sudden cuts to staff numbers need be made, so long as they were covering their own salaries in FTEs.

But this was only the frame of his argument. It's horizon, W. says. He spoke of staff-student ratios and the reputation of the institution. He nearly got carried away and spoke of managerial nihilism and managerial incompetence, but he kept that to himself.

And when he finished? W. asked the panel why he was being sacked. And the axeman turned to the others, and said, 'Yes, why is he being sacked?' Because even he couldn't understand, the axeman. Even he was baffled, he who was brought in to make cuts. 'As far as I can see, he's doing all the teaching', he said, the axeman, and the other managers trembled.

W. felt exhilarated: so there was justice after all! And he'd thought the axeman was just that: an axeman, who would masturate over little pictures of sacked people in his office. He thought he was a man you couldn't reason with, when in fact, the man from industry was eminently reasonable. 

The rumour was that he wanted to sack senior management, the whole lot. That he wanted to replace one of them at least with the junior member of staff who had such a firm grasp of the financial predicament, and even the moral predicament. He was said to have chewed out the particular manager who put W. on the list to be sacked, and that she fled in tears and locked herself in her office.

A change is going to come, said the union representative who had accompanied W. to the meeting. The times they are-a changing. It was going to be like '68 again they thought, the union representative and him. The authorities were crumbling! There would be no redundancies! And now the workers - the real workers – were free to play with the Law like a child his hoop …

Of course, they sacked him, too, the axeman. The very next day, the senior management met in secret, and put him on gardening leave. And W. was told his job was still under threat, after all.

Meetings, ceaseless meetings – I've no time for anything!, I tell W. What do you talk about at these meetings?, W. says. What do they talk to you about? I tell him. There are even meetings about meetings, I tell him. Pre-meetings and post-meetings.

And sometimes senior management come and talk to me informally in my office. Sometimes junior management stop me in the corridor for a chat. And my colleagues – bottom feeders, like me – are constantly knocking on my door.

If he called a meeting, W. says, it would only have one thing on the agenda: me, my existence. He can't understand why would anyone want to talk to me about anything but me, W. says. About the horrific fact that I exist.

Once, for W., there was something good and true. Once, there was something right, a sense of what was right, and the path towards it. And now? The path petered out; W. was lost in the desert. And there I was, the idiot in the desert.

What path should we take? But there are no paths; every direction is equivalent. And what of the good and the true? What of the right? We should set out regardless. March, even though there's no destination.

The melancholic punishes what he has lost in effigy, yet it is his own self which has become this effigy, W. says, paraphrasing a famous psychoanalyst. Their own self – because the melancholic identifies completely with what they have lost. They punish it because they were once dependent upon it; they remain in grief because they have entombed its effigy inside themselves, until their lives, their very existence, are indistinguishable from this secret tomb.

I cannot live. I cannot exist: so the melancholic. While I live, there is no hope: so the one who cannot leave behind his grief. In W.'s case, it's different he says. – 'While you live, there is no hope',W.  says. No hope for him, at any rate. 'While you live, I can't exist'. I've entombed his despairs inside me, W. says. And his hopes, too. Haven't they suffocated to death in the airless room of my life?

The melancholic identifies himself with what he has lost, that's what Freud says, according to W. The shadow of the object falls over him – the shadow of what caused his self-revilings and self-reproach.

My shadow – isn't that the origin of the lowering of W.'s self-regard and his delusional expectation of punishment? The shadow of my life upon his life – isn't that why he feels so unworthy, so wrong?

What has he lost?, W. wonders. He has an overwhelming sense of loss. Why does he grieve? He is saturated with grief. Somehow, he blames me, the idiot wandering beside him. It must be his fault, the idiot!, he thinks to myself, as I eat my ice cream. He wants to shake me, to grab me by the lapels and bellow, it's all your fault! Because it is my fault, it must be, W.'s sure of it.

We've gone missing, W. says. Well, he has. They should send out search parties. There should be men with loudhailers calling his name. He's been swept out to sea, W. says – my sea. He's lost in the wilderness, W. says – my wilderness. And who will come to rescue him?

Melancholy, melancholy: sometimes W. feels half-drowned in its great waves. And don't I feel it, too, wandering with him to the Hoe? The mourner, Freud tells us, learns to detach himself from the loved one he has lost. He leaves grief behind! He leaves loss!

But us? The melancholic cannot leave it behind. Indeed, he hardly knows what he has lost, having only a vague sense of deprivation, a vague sense of something that has gone missing.

He needs to localise his loss, W. says. To find its source! And he needn't look far. It's all my fault, he says. He's not sure why, he's not sure how, but somehow I am the cause of his melancholy.

Anxiety is the moment: that's the phrase from Kierkegaard W. copied into his notebook. Anxiety is the Oeiblikket, the eyeblink, the moment: We have to understand what this means!

The key,  of course, lies in the way we exist in time. Everything is about time!, W. says. There is the time that passes – this moment, then that – which we merely endure, which merely carries us along. Then there is that time touched by eternity, according to Kierkegaard, in which past, present and future assume their true role as phases in our development.

In the moment, in time touched by eternity, our relation to time deepens. We must learn to deepen and grow in time, W. says. We must learn not merely to persist in time, but to exist temporally, living towards a future that we earn by our deepening, earned by our growth.

That's what W.'s trying to achieve, he says. That's what he's been searching for, as he works each morning, before dawn. To be carried along by the propitiousness of work! To be borne along by a sacred task … No, by sacredness as a task, like a waterwheel turning in glinting water … What idea do we have of that? What of sustained and patient labour, without thought of reward?

We need fear anxiety only when we fail our humility; when we have yet to achieve self-realisation. But when we discover, through our patience, the ability to determine ourselves, to liberate our possibilities – when we separate petty concerns from profound ones?

Then our anxiety will no longer be called anxiety. Then the eternal bows down from the sky to kiss our forehead. Grace: is that the name for what anxiety becomes? God: is that a name for the eternal?

'All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable to me, I myself most of all'. Kierkegaard, from a draft of The Concept of Anxiety.

Are we anxious enough?, W. asks. Have we ever been anxious? Sometimes W. suspects that, despite everything, we are entirely too comfortable. To the man of anxiety, everything is uncertain, everything insecure. The desk at which he is sitting will be there tomorrow – but will he be there? His notebook and his pen will be present, also - but will he have been dragged off to a mental asylum? Will he have stuck his head in a gas oven?

Work, real work: what do we know of that? Not our ceaseless administration, not our ceaseless attempt to defend our jobs, which has, in essence, become the entirety of our jobs, but the patient labours of a monk tilling a field?

W. dreams of the scholar who has no thought of writing in his own name, who writes only to expand his soul, to spread it like a great sail that would catch the wind of other scholars, of the great tradition of scholars…. He dreams of a thinker – a man of ideas, who thinks without concern for himself, for what he might write, for what he might achieve in his own name….

W. dreams of a thinker who exhibits a great, impersonal seriousness; who thinks because there is something to be thought, and because he, for entirely contingent and, to him, uninteresting reasons, has been held out into thought…. A thinker, in the end, whose inwardness – the real content of his life – is also an outwardness, for his life, the contingencies that have shaped him – matter nothing compared to the idea that burns ahead of him, the idea that is least of all his own, least of all something he would possess.

Impersonal thought, the thought of the outside: it is this which comes towards him in the days that open each morning at his desk. It is the future that does not cease to arrive in those propitious days when he is turned in humility and patience toward the labour of thinking.

W.'s been reading so much Tronti, he's not sure which are his own thoughts, and which the Italian philosopher's. The development of capitalism is the truth of capitalism, he writes in an email to me. The more that capital develops, the more it reveals the secret of capitalism.

And then, in another email: As soon a capitalism has conquered everything extrnally, the force of domination must become internal – capitalism has to be internalised, capitalism is now a matter of subjectivity. Brilliant!, I write back.

It is only by seeing ourselves as part of capital, immanent to capital, that we can possibly struggle against it, W. writes. Exactly!, I write back.

W.'s on a roll, we agree. But whose roll is it, W.'s or Tronti's?

I tell W. about the polemical heights to which I've risen at recent meetings. I showed them!, I tell him. – 'What did you do show them?' I explained my plan, I tell W. – 'And what plan was that? Did it involve spaceships?' All great plans should involve spaceships, W. says.

W.'s sceptical about the new office block in Piccadilly Gardens. My God, it's so boring!, he says. Look at it! One Piccadilly Gardens was originally intended to be built in Birmingham, we read in our guide book. Its cladding was changed to reflect the brick-built Mancunion warehouse buildings. We look along the oblong block. It's a poor imitation, we agree.

The Bank of New York – that's what occupies it now, One Piccadilly Gardens. Manchester's become a city of immaterial labour, W. says. It was a city of material labour, of the import and working of cotton, of the oil trade, of engineering, but now it's a node of the network, one of many trading floors in the unified global capital market. Manchester is noplace, anyplace. Manchester is anywhere-at-all. And it's true, you can hardly tell where you are, we agree. The same shops, the same high street – of course! The same sterility …

The city centre is run privately, we read in our guidebook. Cityco, as it's called, is focused on the production of revenue and the promotion of commerce. The public space of wandering, of the happening of nothing in particular is now a private space of enforced consumption. No loitering (but there's nowhere to wander). No sitting down (but there are no benches on which to sit down).

The city is a business! There's money to be made! And so uniformed private security guards keep out non-consumers. So the homeless are kept out of the centre. The Big Issue sellers are kept out of the new imperium. Because public space, which has become private space, has to to be kept clean and safe for consumption. It has to secure the ease of transport and access. The marketing and branding of the centre is all. The creation of memorable experiences for the consumer. And so the CCTV watches everything. And so private security guards police everyone.

It's the end of the world!, W. says. Or really, it's the beginning of a new one. This is the world of the end of the world, says W. This is non-world after the world has ended.

Ah, what happened? What did they do to old Manchester? This was the home of old Labour. It was home of municipal socialism. And then what happened? Deindustrialisation, of course. Which meant deunionisation. Which meant the destruction of the labour movement. Which meant the demolition of every leftist hope and dream …

The Tories sold off the housing stock quickly, to make sure it was irreversible. They broke the miners, the steel workers, the shipbuilders. They destroyed the car industry. They opened the markets to foreign competition and foreign investment. Production became transnational, spreading across the world, plugging into and plugging out of this or that territory … 

The financial sector was deregulated. New financial markets appeared with new kinds of futures trading. The financialisation of everything, that's what it's led to, W. says. The monetarisation of everything.

'Economics are the method', said Thatcher, 'but the object is to change the soul'. They changed the soul, says W. They changed our souls, and what did we become? Flexible workers, one man or woman entrepreneurs selling their labour to Capital, selling all of themselves. And consumer-enterpreneurs, for whom commodities have been diversified and differentiated. Enterpreneur-consumers looking to buy their souls from Capital …

This is the new Manchester, the rebranded Manchester! This is a Knowledge Capital Manchester, the Manchester of the multinationals, of diversified conglomerates. The Manchester of Cityco. This is the repopulated city centre, full of knowledge workers, which is to say, knowing-nothing-about-fuck-all–workers. This is the home of creative industries, which is to say the-opposite-of-creative industries, W. says. The city is a shopping centre which is to say the-buying-and-selling-of-shit centre.

But wasn't Manchester always about free enterprise? Wasn't it, in the nineteenth century, the pre-eminent city of free trade? That's when they built the great warehouses, and extended the Royal Exchange. That's when Manchester was the leading financial centre outside London – when there were Manchester banks and Manchester newspapers, and the Manchester man, the merchant-entrepreneur, buying and selling shares in Cottonpolis. Ah, but that was before the completion of globalisation. That was before the end of history.

Administration, ceaseless administration. When I come back from a meeting, the only way I can cheer myself up is by listening to Klaus Nomi, I tell W. I sit back with my headphones on and, for a time, like the singer, I am a simple man.

Manchester is a city of warehouses, that's the key, we decide, walking through the city centre. A city of warehouses, and what warehouses! The ones closest to the centre were built in the style of palazzi of Renaissance Italy, the new merchant princes of Manchester seeing themselves as descendants of the Italian princes of the city-states.

The Florence of the nineteeth century: that's what they called Manchester back then, W. reads in our guidebook. And you can see it, just about, even after the destruction of the Blitz. The money that was once here! The confidence!

Cottonpolis, that's what they called Victorian Manchester. The city of cotton, the city of banking, the city of the vast Royal Exchange, in which 10,000 traders could buy and sell stocks and shares on the foreign market. The city of the department stores, of the new retail chains.

It was the model of a new kind of city, Manchester. Self-made manufacturing families, the banking dynasties displaced the old aristocracy. The libraries and learned institutions of new Manchester devoted themselves to the discussion of science and technology, rather than religion and politics, celebrating the 'natural knowledge', that might be applied in this greatest of trading cities created by the industrial revolution. That might make money, more money for these self-made men!

The 'Manchester school of economics', Disraeli called it: the confidence in the free exchange of goods and labour, in economic individualism. 'From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows' … that was de Tocqueville, W. reads in his guidebook. And it was filthy. It was squalid, along the old Medlock where the casual workers lived: the car men and porters, the builders and decorators, the messengers and warehousemen. The old Medlock, where the Irish came to live.

W. reads from our notebook:

The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys…

That's Engels, of course. He brought Marx north on a visit in 1845. Was it in Manchester that the revolution would begin? Was it in the double rows of the back-to-backs that the secret of capitalism would reveal itself – the reality of capitalism, as it appeared in all its degradation to their inhabitants and as it hid itself as ideology in the middle classes who lived out in the suburbs? Was it here the grime and squalor of the low-lying alleys where cattles and pigs were slaughtered would be destroyed for the sake of what was not yet?

In Little Ireland, tucked into a river bend, Engels saw 'a horde of ragged women and children swarm about as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles'. He saw the cellars in which the Irish immigrants slept ten to a dark, damp room on beds of straw, scarcely above the level of the water flowing in the river. Tuberculosis spread through the overcrowded homes. Typhus and typhoid. Cholera, spread by standpipes fed by a river into which the midden privies and the cess pits drained.  

Was it here it would begin, in this new kind of city, the looked-for turning of the world upside down? For a time, Manchester had been a radical town, a town of mass protests, we read in our guidebook. 'That all Governments, not immediately derived from and strictly accountable to the People, are usurpations and ought to be resisted and destroyed': that was the Declaration the reformers who gathered at St Peter's Field sent to the Prince Regent in 1819. They demanded universal suffrage. Annual elections. And that's where they were shot, the reformers, at St Peter's Field. That's where they were trampled to death in the panic the police started. The Peterloo Massacre.

After that, Manchester became a garrison town. And by Marx's visit, the politics of mass protest had ebbed away. Chartism withered. The workers sought reform rather than revolution. When mass unemployment came, there was no disorder. When famine came, no mass protest. The working classes joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Tory party. And when the Jews arrived from the Eastern Europe of the pogroms, the workers railed against the 'Yids' and the 'sheeneymen' …

The low chug of the shredding machines, and the higher whine of the chainsaws. I want to put my hands over my ears, I tell W. I want to stop up my ears. Because it will be us next, I tell him. They're going to line us up, and lead us to the machines.

Oh God, the regeneration, the eternal rebuilding. The noise, I tell W. The machines with their maws. The machines which will have blood on their maws.

They'll have machines for tearing up trees and for tearing up concrete. Machines to shred the streets and houses. And in the end, a great machine on the blackened earth. A great machine with a great flashing maw, reflecting light back to the stars.

They're shredding the trees outside the office, I tell W. on the phone. They're cutting off their boughs with chainsaws, and then feeding them into shredding machines. Leaves fly up … The smell of shredded leaves … My God! …

This is how it begins, the end of the world, I tell W. They'll do it to us next. They'll cut off our limbs and feed us to the machines. Blood spattering up into the air … Cries … But still the men with their helmets feeding us in. Still the men with their chainsaws, cutting off our limbs and feeding them in.