Spring Is Coming
It's a cold day in early February, a gloomy, overcast afternoon in south-east England. The sort of late winter afternoon on which it's easy to slump into despair at the situation of the world and the apparent hopelessness of our human condition. News has been passed to me that wealthy local landowners are selling off more farmland to property developers, that more local woodland is being torn down, that more houses are going to be built over the ruins.
In England, now, we have a planning system that essentially gives the go-ahead to almost any new building, even on greenfield sites, without much if any consideration for environmental impact. The voices of protest, if they are not simply ignored, are carefully channelled into largely harmless and ineffectual routes such as petitions and letter-writing.
Today is a little after Imbolc. As a friend of mine expressed it recently, this is “the time of the head count”, when we see who made it through the hard winter months. A few people close to me have passed into the Summerlands, in the course of this winter. Old age has taken a couple of them, cancer has taken others. I drove past the newly felled trees earlier today, and reflected on my own head count. It's been a hard winter, in that respect. It's easy to feel despair.
Yet, when I returned home from the routine of grocery shopping, there were the first snowdrops pushing their heads up in my garden, emerging in the space of the few hours I'd been away. And I'd seen the first lambs of the year in the nearby fields, too. The evenings are growing lighter, the days lengthening steadily. Even amid despair, there is hope.
There is hope, because nature has enormous powers of renewal. Because resistance, too, renews itself over and over again, in spite of defeat upon defeat.
After the Second World War, capitalism experienced twenty years of expansion and apparently limitless growth. It appeared to many, even on the political Left, that class struggle was a thing of the past. The philosopher Andre Gorz, one of the most prominent intellectuals on the Left in France, wrote in a January 1968 article that, “in the foreseeable future, there will be no crisis of European capitalism so dramatic as to drive the mass of workers to revolutionary general strikes or armed insurrections in support of their vital interests”. A mere four months later, in May that year, the largest general strike in history (up to that point), exploded across France.
In 1985, the year-long Miners' Strike in Britain went down to defeat. It was a devastating blow that effectively broke the confidence and militancy of the British trade unions. Union activism, in Britain at least, has largely felt like a dead end for almost forty years. Yet today, as I am writing this, workers in the health services are staging their biggest walkouts ever, demanding significant improvements in their pay and working conditions. Workers across a swathe of industries and occupations, from nurses to rail workers, from firefighters to civil servants, are either embroiled in strikes or preparing to take action. The British working class, and British trade unionism, appear to be renewing themselves.
Despair is in itself a form of energy, but it's an energy that turns inward and becomes destructive of the will, of confidence, of life force. Despair saps our power. Hope, on the other hand, leads us outward. Hope, in essence, is a revolutionary energy. It's the energy that inspires, that keeps us fighting against apparently insurmountable odds, that enables us to see the potential for another kind of world, another kind of society; organised for need and for environmental, spiritual balance rather than for corporate profits and the power of a few.
But where to find hope in the midst of despair? I can find it in the snowdrops raising their pale heads, like placards defying the sharp frosts of early February. I can find it in the first buds showing on the branches of trees in the nearby parks. I can find it in my young grand-children's excitement and aspiration for their own futures.
The spring is coming. And when spring breaks through, the summer is not far behind.
Philip Kane
By Grace Sanchez
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).