Wednesday, May 14, 2008
politics, class, and me nowhere
How much of a Marxist am I? Like any true educated intellectual I read as many schools of thought as possible into sociological issues, and then I make my opinion on them. I believe that the bourgeois wife or yesterday's version of the tai-tai is the private prostitute Marx says she is. She hires tutors for her children and maids for the house, so what else should she do but provide sex on tap? Work? All right, but only to provide some brain-sex for her husband, or else she would go mad with paranoia at home.In Singapore we have a middle class. Like most urban Asian societies do now. The Singaporean middle class wife works because she has to earn some, and then hires maids and tutors and mothers-in-law. Meanwhile because she is comfortable (instead of working till death like the working class women do), she goes mad with her free time. Usually used to make children the centre of her tiny universe, clean the house where the helper cannot catch up, nags her husband so as to take the place of his mother, fishes for gossip fodder or is fed some. Oh yes, and spend time with the extended family.
As Marx would say, in my words no less, some day, the poor old working class folks will wise up, learn fast, overthrow the elitist minority. So much passion in that goal! But what happens to the middle class...? Marx dear, your pyramid is now a fucking apple-shape. Think thick-waisted women like me.
Actually, I fit in nowhere. I am neither materialistic nor have I a survival instinct, yet shopping makes me happy, and so do yuppie activities and elitist interests like art and film and literature. I want to save the world, yet I see very little salvation in my own life. I am neither a Romantic nor a logician. I am well-read and somewhat educated, yet I fit in nowhere societally. I hate civil servants and see them as bureaucratic numbskulls, but I think capitalistic business-like thinking rules the economy well. George Orwell says writers write because they have a political viewpoint; mine is this, that I don't fit in anywhere.
Maybe this kind of alienation from the rest of the world, is what makes us depressives disenchanted (thank you Sociology for the terminology). Yet I don't think I really want to belong anywhere; I want to remain an alien. I don't want to subscribe to any one ideology except maybe just my own concoction of ideas. The kingdom of God is not about eating or drinking, but about far more unseen concepts that differ experientially for people. Hence they say, do not judge by what people eat drink wear do or say, and so on. Well, I don't think I do things the same way as you, you or you do. I am E, and I have my own ideology.
I am neither bourgeois, proletariat, nor middle-apple-shaped-class. I dream because I love, not because of economics. I like the arts not because it is trendy to, but because it speaks of life. I read for power, but also for romance. I am better than many men, yet I still would like to have one (especially to change the light-bulbs and fix the computers). And I hope one day I find a man my equal, yet would love it when I do the laundry and iron his shirts.