Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he…

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i

Serres adored music. But as he aged it began to annoy him, because he felt the function of music had changed. It had become our territory, our way of being in the world. For Serres, the politics of our time removed most of the actual physical gains to ordinary people, and…/2

…replaced them with cheap, insubstantial substitutes, like music. While all living things tend to use sound to mark territory (bird song the most obvious), and this includes human music, Serres felt that process had been used to its extreme, leaving most of us with music as…/3

…our sole territorial purchase on the Earth. And the rise of ‘popular music’, and thus his reference to The Beatles, marked this political shift. (Beetles of course eat shit, thus his allusion.) He thought ordinary people were now being forced to eat shit and accept it as…/4

…a substitute for actual material wealth and power. And you can see that shift in the 2960s, how progressive politics increasingly moved into popular music, into protest music. How adolescents mobilised around their favourite acts, and still do. /5

How their very identity is forged by that association. Now politics came to be seen as making grand statements, to music, the birth of ‘virtue signalling’, a term invented by conservatives who by the way do it more than anybody else. It’s just that they already own everything. /6

We lost the idea of the actual material organisation of power, of winning and holding onto real gains in our lives. What unions in the era before this had fought so hard to do. Conservatives looked on with amusement as our music and art became more and more strident, while…/7

…they casually stripped away all of those material gains from the previous era. They were very happy to let us feel that singing protest songs was politics, that switching basic organisation of power and wealth for ‘raising awareness’ was our way forward. /8

You can see where that ended today. We sit here being infected with a lethal virus en masse, while the world’s climate incinerates us, and still think that raising awareness of these problems will somehow fix them. That powerful songs and speeches and ‘mobilising the people’…/9

…will save us. We act as if the entire 19th century and early 20th never happened, beginning again from Ground Zero every day. Hoping to mobilise the masses to rise up. We already did that, in those earlier times. We built institutions to cement that mobilisation. /10 https://t.co/KgCvRqfpoJ

Now we won’t use them, thinking that politics should be starting all of that all over again, writing more sings, making more speeches, making more grand gestures, to try to mobilise everybody. Just join a union, get your credit card it and join. It’s all you need to do. /11

Just having members and therefore also revenue is all that’s needed to shift the balance of power back. You don’t even have to participate or even believe in unions, just join. I can assure you the bastards who have hijacked our society fear that above all else. /end

(should of course say 1960s)

and ‘songs’, not sings.