kevin cadwallender: The Proletariad Cantos 1

The Proletariad

(For Andy Willoughby my poetry brother)

How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.
-Adolf Hitler

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

-Mao Tse Tung

Remember the working class?

The ones who gave you your privilege?

with the sweat of our bodies on your coalface

filling your coffers

on your factory floors

filling your coffers

in your shipyards and building sites

filling your coffers

we had community and you took it from us

we had our own language and you wiped it out

you have made us a caricature, a whipped body

as you rolled out your reforms of privatization,

of cctv, of asbos of the myth of an underclass

tagging our ankles with chav and ned labels

with your patronizing reality shows where you take

the tragic and turn it into more money to fill your coffers

and we had family before it was hijacked

for the lifestyle- bullshit- propaganda you push

pimping out your garden centre, barbecue, consumer

garden centre, barbecue, consumer,

and your millionaires who push in print the drugs and

the scandal of the oppressed and call a society broken

after they have broken it! like a petulant child

scared of imagined revolutions, imagined fears

imagined freedom, scared of imagination.

But I will tell you now life is not a tabloid

Life is not your banal mediocrity

You create a world that is opium for the masses

And then stand back in horror as your children

Die in ghettoes by any other name from the

seeds of a nurtured poppy.

You dumb down the dumbfounded

You trounce in the name of the greater good

The very people who gave you that greater good

Who died in wars and who still do ,

who died not for illusory man made

Concepts like country and flag

But for the right to live in peace.

Do you remember peace?

Do you remember what peace is?

Yes I know you will dismiss this as polemic

Whilst forgetting conveniently that polemic

is the art of dispute, that’s right, the art, not the boot

which grinds your own polemic into our faces

not the boot but the word, the painting, the beauty

the human right of dignity and free speech even if that

speech contradicts your own.

And this is not even propaganda

I gave up the axes of left and right years ago

Gave up the pretence that barricades mean anything

Other than a green light for oppressive knee jerk reactions.

I am working class and I know

what it means to be working class

Before it was made the butt of jokes

and locked in the stocks

And the short sharp shocks led us to this utter crock

I am old enough to remember all the lies, the u turns

The back stabbings, the criminal activity of your insidious

Class war, waged for centuries by you, not by us.

We never had the power . we never had anything but

The slop you dished out and maybe we never will.

On another reality television programme

You reinforce the stereotypes you have created

When you were bored or looking for a way

To assuage guilt by mocking those

you decree to be inferior

as if leading authentic lives

is somehow funny or perhaps enables

you to justify inequality, as if poverty

is a choice and not a condition imposed.

In third world countries children starve

But you don’t assign blame.

You don’t do anything meaningful with your power

You encourage charitable benevolence

Money thrown at an injustice but never

Enough money. There can never be enough money.

Our semi detached semi elected leaders

return from holidays

To deal with rioters on the streets of major cities

Oh poor you , Boo bloody hoo,

having to return from holidays

You can easily afford, to deal with what you call rabble

And what I call the discontented.

Oh poor you! how inconvenient.

Maybe you should have thought of the consequences

Of economic cuts on the poorest of your citizens,

You remember them? The ones who you call

Scroungers and benefit cheats to justify

Your treatment of them as you all cheated and

Scrounged your expenses left and right.

Hypocrites!

With your moral high ground delusions

And your politico-babble,

The rhetoric of warped Machiavellians.

Politics have no relation to morals.

Dark triads moving mountains

By wrecking molehills.

governments are far more dangerous

than other elements within society.

Guess who said that.

But then you only read,

A prince never lacks legitimate

reasons to break his promise.

And you think we don’t see you for what you are?

You think we don’t see your charade?

You think we don’t recognise your duplicity?

The hourglass becomes clearer as time sifts through.

I don’t hate you, hate would require passion.

That’s the trouble with us working class

Hopeless, naïve idealists