An uncomical prosepoem by Nick Moss
1. Thousands of them. Flags draped around their shoulders like rain-soused superhero capes. But not real DC or Marvel comic superheroes. These look like staggering home 2am half-cut from a fancy dress party, and the costumes don’t fit. Thousands of wannabee Captain Britains in too-big boots and bodies too small to fill out the stretch-tight costumes. Line after line of Brian and Betsy Braddocks[i] in superhero capes heading for Trafalgar Square, to Unite the Kingdom. Lions led by cheating, perma-tanned turkey-toothed wankers. Your donations paid for SYL’s teeth. And his holidays. His court fees. His libel damages.
2. The superhero capes don’t say what we pretend they say. They’re not swastika capes. They’re capes made from the flags of the countries the marchers live in/ freeze in/ rot in the damp in/ watch the walls and windows turn to mould in/ work in supermarkets/ GP surgeries/ drive vans/ work all the fuckin hours there are and more in/ never sleep cause there’s no money for the meter and you’re already on the emergency and you need petrol money for work as well and the kids are havin Weetabix with foodbank peanut butter on them and you dont have any milk or tea or coffee/ and why shouldn’t you be proud of this fuckin country when everyone else is proud of theirs and your dad and grandad both fought in the war and your uncle lost two fingers workin in the pit and if you built the fuckin country why shouldnt you be proud of it /it’s yours after all. And there are black and Asian faces here, wearing the same superhero capes and marching in the same direction.
3. For the speakers on the platform though it’s not the same. The flags are a means to an end. The flags are the bait. Come and join everyone else and stand here till your legs ache and push and shove the coppers and get your head cracked and be proud. While the grifters get to work. Looking for new angles to get the Captain Britains to put their hands in their pockets. Pay for more holidays. More turkey teeth. Look – on the big screen! Surprise special guest. Hamster-faced South African-Canadian-American tech baron calls for “revolutionary government change” in your country. At a demonstration pitched as being about national sovereignty. “Violence is coming. You either fight back or die.” The South African-Canadian-American tech soon-to-be a trillionaire says that we should make sure that we “actually have a government that is for the people, by the people.” By which he means for people like him, supported by “the people” who have turned out to cheer at his pouch-faced oil-slick contemptuosity. This all starts to feel a little like a trial run. To see how big the stage army might be if called upon. How militant it might become if necessary. Whether the techno Uber-bro might posture as a new Richard II telling the 21st century peasants he was their one true leader should a John Ball emerge and start mutterings amongst the rabble about taxing the wealth of the tech bros who get rich from the rent they earn from colonising our daily scrolling.
4. And somewhere along the line didn’t the Captain Britain Corp get turned into a team of bailiffs? That’s what we’re seeing here. The working class trained to be a class against itself. And wasn’t there something called The Fury in Captain Britain? If I’d kept the spoiling yellowed heap of comics that were bein chewed up in my old man’s garage I could check, but that’s what we have now – “The Fury” – an inchoate mizzling rage that slow but steady goes through your clothes to form cold shivering dampness on your skin, hangs in your hair, doesn’t cohere into anything much beyond a resenting disenchantment that knows life is a dire trudge underpinned by comprehensive dread and a lack of any security until you fall over dead and get tipped into the pauper pit. The Fury. It’s here. It shouts. But it peters out and everyone takes their carrier bags of warm Stella and eventually makes their way home to Saturday night TV and a few chips and fish fingers and “Did you see Tommy?” the man from social media who’s so close to fame he could end up in the jungle but keeps ending up in Belmarsh for defending free speech and it’s the only thing about Tommy that ever will be free and even then you can pay to subscribe to see him tell you again about the rape gangs and the men of fighting age who keep coming on the flotillas of small boats but he’ll never stretch free speech to also tell you that between 2018 and 2024, citizens of six countries – Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria, and Eritrea – have made up 70% of people crossing in small boats. Or that between 2018 and 2024, the asylum grant rate for people who arrived by small boat was 68%, higher than the grant rate for asylum applicants overall. Free speech and the truth don’t always overlap. Free speech is a commodity you can monetise on TikTok and YouTube and X.
5. What if we strip away all our lefty moralising and accept for now that in a time of stagflation immigrant labour can serve a purpose for Capital because it’s cheap? What if it’s cheap because it receives less pay but also has to rely on its own resources to reproduce itself? (Rather than sponging off the state and clogging up the health service like we’re told it does.) What if illegal labour is a necessary part of this and that as much as Capital will always deny it, it will always create the conditions for it? What if “A 21st century Capital and a 19th century proletariat – such is the dream of monopoly Capital in order to overcome its crisis”?[ii] What if, following the tech-bro pogrom logic of “fight back or die” you burn them all out? If, like Hutus in ‘94, you stamp all the “cockroaches” to death…… what will happen? Will Capital rush to reward you for your endeavours –pick your prize from the Genocide Game conveyor belt tonight – or will your life change not a fuckin jot? Try and think of a time when the rich who own the land you claim as yours ever gave you anything that made your life better even for a second. If you cannot pogrom your way to a better life, might equalizing the conditions of those who are less equal than you not be a better option? 21st century Capital forced then to face a 21st century proletariat? In the glow from the pogrom fires, the tech bros laugh and sip their Luxe diamond-filtered juice blends and dream of never ageing and warm their bleach-scrubbed hands.
6. And here’s the thing. If we have a Left that has to rely on police protection to protest a nascent fascism, we’re fucked. If we have a fascism that has roots, however shallow-but-running-deeper-than-ours, in the most vulnerable, insecure, zero-hours, angry as fuck, life-is-a-clock-running-backwards-from-hope-to-early-death part of our class and all we can do is cower from them, we’re fucked. If someone says they have a party but really, it’s our party and we ask, what does it stand for and they reply “You’ll just have to be patient” we’re fucked. Tommy Turkey-teeth already has 443k YouTube subscribers and 32M views. We are offering the test card as an alternative. Closer now to Cable Street in reverse.
NOTES
[i] Brian and Betsy Braddock were the real names of the Marvel character Captain Britain.
[ii] Quote from Manuel Castells: The Castells Reader pps 92-93 (Blackwell Publishers 2002)
