A quote from Charlotte Bronte

A while back I was reading the Guardian tabloid bit in the loo, the best place for the light confectionary that normally appears in G2. There was an article about Charlotte Bronte being a 'bad girl', called "Reader, I shagged him", which although I've never read any Bronte was vaguely interesting. One quote in it did catch my eye. When describing the sheer tedium of her life as a schoolteacher, she wrote:

"Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?"

And my immediate thought was: yeah, sister, I know exactly what you mean. So often I sit in front of my blasted computer at work staring out of the window, or torturing myself by displaying scenic webcams (such as the Oban Bay cam, a favourite of mine), and pine at the sheer loss of time that will never be recovered, time in which I could be stomping the hills, climbing mountains, swimming in the sea, or trudging across t'moors. It's worse during the Spring, when the light has that just-washed freshness, the budding leaves on the trees have that lime green colour that only lasts for a few weeks, and sharp showers bring rainbows of dazzling brightness and vividness, but I'm observing it from an office window instead of feeling the wind and the rain and the sun on my face. There's just no subsitute for the sheer sensuality of the direct experience.

And all because, like all other workers, I have to be a wage-slave to survive. If I didn't have to be a wage-slave, or if I could even just work 8 hours a week, I could a) enjoy life whilst still capable of enjoyment, and b) live a hell of a lot longer. Yet I've got a 'professional' job of some social utility on half-decent wages, and compared to the lot of most workers (and to some of the crap jobs I've worked at, such as Betting Office Manager) I'm living the life of Riley [sic!]. Most workers are even worse off, working at jobs with little if any social use, for little reward, and put under life-shortening stress.

This is what I hate most about capitalism - the sheer waste of human lives, lives that can never be relived, and the destruction of human potential. Individuals, communities, and society could be so, so much greater than they are under capitalism, by orders of magnitude. We literally cannot imagine what humans would become in a free society, because we are so unfree, so unaware of our own potential, that we just don't have the conceptual apparatus for such imagination. Science fiction writers have come closest (see Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy for a brave attempt, or Iain M Banks Culture novels) but even the most prodigiously imaginative struggle to conceive of freedom because we are so accustomed to slavery that it's an integral part of our mindset.

What we think of as 'freedom' is little more than 'freedom from', rather than 'freedom to'. More 'mustn't grumble' than 'Woo-hoo!'. We consider ourselves well off if we don't live in grinding poverty and have food and a roof over our heads and a TV by which we can be enthralled into passivity by the Spectacle. Instead of chafing at our confinement, we shrug our shoulders and say that there's always someone worse off than we are, which of course plays into the hands of those who rule us who would rather we feared how much worse off we could be than imagined how much better off we could be, because fear leads to cowed obedience but desire leads to revolt.

In the meantime, as we drudge away at jobs, 90% of which, at least, are completely socially useless, and so many of which could be performed by machines, the idle rich, the Ruperts and Annabelles, get to enjoy the Spring sunshine. Many on the Right accuse us 'idealists' of the 'politics of envy', of wanting to deny the select few their fun to drag them down to our mundane level, and a few ascetic self-denying bread-and-water Trots play right into that Robespierrian stereotype, but the rest of us don't want to deny the idle rich their pleasures. On the contrary, we want everyone to be idle rich, to be able to enjoy our short lives to the full, only limited by our imaginations.