John Berger on 'the great Russian writer, Andrei Platonov (1899-1951)':
He wrote about the poverty which occurred during the civil war and later during the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s. What made this poverty unlike more ancient poverties was the fact that its desolation contained shattered hopes. It fell to the ground exhausted, it got to its feet, it staggered, it marched on amongst shards of betrayed promises and smashed words. Platonov often used the term dushevny bednyak, which means literally poor souls. It referred to those from whom everything had been taken so that the emptiness within them was immense and in that immensity only their soul was left – that’s to say their ability to feel and suffer. His stories do not add to the grief being lived, they save something. “Out of our ugliness will grow the world’s heart”, he wrote in the early 1920s.'
The world today is suffering another form of modern poverty. No need to quote the figures; they are widely known and repeating them again only makes another wall of statistics. Perhaps as much as a third of the world’s population live with less than $2 a day. Local cultures with their partial remedies – both physical and spiritual – for some of life’s afflictions are being systematically destroyed or attacked. The new technology and means of communication, the free market economy, productive abundance, parliamentary democracy, are failing, so far as the poor are concerned, to keep any of their promises beyond that of the supply of certain cheap consumerist goods, which the poor can buy when they steal.
In the realm of opinion, certain things are thought to peculiarly affect 'The West' and to force it 'to ask questions about itself'. The obvious example is September 11th. Or the new 'threat of terrorism' . 'The West' must re-examine itself, reconfigure its priorities. But why is it that, for example, the fact that millions are living in utterly preventable poverty, that the accumulation of wealth at one ('Western') pole coexists with preventable immiseration and mass premature death at the other pole; why do these things not similarly throw the West into a crisis of self-reflection, why do these things not demand that we rethink 'our idenitity'. Why does the fact (random but symptomatic) that a Western celebrity will receive for advertising a product - say Nike trainers - more than the thousands of workers manufacturing that product receive collectively in a year not provoke rigorous self-questioning?
It may be because, in part, a whole section of the world system in which we live appears weither invisible or simply disconnected. For instance, men more knowledgeable than I have written:
''If one lives in a First World country the "working class" may indeed APPEAR to have diminished. Marx, however, would have us go beyond the (ideological) appearance. The pseudo-theorists in the West can afford to babble about the "disappearing working class" only because of the very "invisibility" of millions of anonymous workers sweating in Third World factories (take a look at your designer labels - the traces are readily discernible). The USA is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing and so on, while its "disappearing working class" is reappearing in places like China, where a large proportion of US products is manufactured in conditions that are ideal for capitalist exploitation. Marx would have understood only too well both this international division of labour AND its ideological masking. If you want to understand (really understand, not just pragmatically from the inside) the dominant economic and political system, then Marx's Capital is simply - and one does not use the word lightly - indispensable'.
Nihilism, in its contemporary sense, is the refusal to believe in any scale of priorities beyond the pursuit of profit, considered as the end-all of social activity, so that, precisely: everything has its price. Nihilism is resignation before the contention that Price is all