by Owen Harrington
I
I’m bringing the class war to Nantucket. Not even my grandma knows it yet, and I tell her everything. But I’m doing it tomorrow. Or at least my plan is that tomorrow will be the first day of protracted struggle. I’m taking the ferry out in the morning and I’m going to stay with my Uncle, my grandma's son, who lives out there. He doesn’t know about my plan either. He made a lot of money, in chemicals — fertilizer?— and became a class traitor. He bought a big house not right on the ocean but very close to it. You can hear the waves on the ground floor, but you need to look out the window upstairs to see them. (They make varnishes, not fertilizers, actually. I just remembered that my dad said that all the telephone poles in our town were treated with varnish from his brother’s company, made with the black fossil water you squeeze out of Pennsylvania coal.) He might have to die once me and The Masses start struggling. I don’t think my grandma would like that, she’s not very political. I don’t think she votes. Right now she’s eating a greying piece of cod dressed in a sickly tartar sauce, we’re at a restaurant in New Bedford, Massachusetts (I would never cook like that at home) and that’s what she ordered. The worst item on the menu at the worst restaurant in New Bedford. I couldn’t believe it. The brown-green broccoli that came as a side infuriated me. Why? I ordered their chowder—good, hearty, working class food. The potatoes are slightly undercooked, but I like a little chew.
II
It strikes me as significant that my mission (i.e. class war) and Moby-Dick (The greatest American novel) both involve a trip from New Bedford to Nantucket. Ishmael ate chowder, too, just like me. I suspect that in this way and many others, my trip will be a lot like Moby-Dick. But while Ahab’s quest was just to kill a giant white whale, mine is to destroy American capitalism. The only white whales I’ll be killing are fat white American families on vacation. Me and the Masses will do it together.
III
Ill-behaved dogs whimper and snap at each other between the tight-packed seats. I almost trip over the one calm golden retriever on the boat, laying with hip-dysplased legs akimbo in the aisle. The ferry is buzzing with taut-faced mothers and their rectangular sons, swarms of blonde children and chattering marketing majors. Where do you summer? That’s so New England! Sometimes you need the flexibility to make more money. I want to throw a little boy named Chauncey to the sharks and then beat his father with the golf clubs jabbing into my side. I’ll snap that fucker. Golf is counterrevolutionary. I stopped playing in high school after I read The Communist Manifesto for the first time and started smoking weed. I had also developed a persistent slice in my swing which made it hard to keep my drives on the fairway. Bonfire tonight on the beach. Pick me up in your Range Rover. Half the boat is wearing collegiate merchandise, signaling their Alma Maters in hopes of finding jobs for their half-wit children. The dour looking boy in front of me with the fat neck and the skinny legs went to Bucknell. His squat sister with the square teeth went to Skidmore. They are looking for love on the island. I’ve realized this is how class reproduction works. My insights would be more coherent and far-reaching, but all this noise is making it hard to theorize. Lake house broccoli hair.
IV
The question of repossession is an interesting one. Certainly the masses will have the right to claim all the wealth on Nantucket that’s been stolen from them, like my Uncle’s Ford Bronco (he has one of the tasteless new ones unfortunately, a 2023). But is the wealth on Nantucket, concentrated as it is in such vulgar forms, molded to bourgeois interests, not a hindrance to the further development of the class consciousness of the proletariat? What would the masses do with a Telfar bag? Will a proletarian G-Wagon allow for the masses to experience themselves as the substance-subject of history, or will it be just another fetter on their consciousness? I am considering trying my hand at designing a truly proletarian, non-alienating automobile. My buddy Josh, who's studying electrical engineering at UMass, could help me after he undergoes a struggle session.
V
I have decided that the class war will have to wait, at least a couple days. My sociological observations on the ferry suggest that locating the key contradictions I can take advantage of and heighten (and perhaps sublate—aufheben) on Nantucket will necessitate several days, at least, of careful study. I intend to spend the better part of the next week passing from the abstract to the concrete so that I can better lay the groundwork for dual power.
VI
Nantucket is proof the Nazis won. The martial thumping of bean bags on cornhole boards recapitulates the 2/2 march of a Nuremberg Oompah band in every trim green lawn. The young scions, children of magnates who conduct TikTok dances behind 8ft privacy hedges are just waiting for blood. Riding to my Uncle’s house, I feel like Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut on his trip out to the mansion, whirring past long, gated driveways leading back miles into the scrubby pines where the vampire elite conduct their sadistic rituals. I’ll need to factor the landscaping into my plans for the class war. Me and the Masses will need to be coordinated if we want to eliminate as many of these capitalists as possible before the forces of reaction arrive. Perhaps we can commandeer some of the hundreds of G-Wagons and Land Cruisers these pigs have shipped out here for the summer. The bourgeois taste for military vehicles on this island indexes their unstated awareness of the class war. They know we’re at war, but choose to display it most clearly among themselves, demonstrating “the practical freemasonry of the capitalist class,” ready to ride together, perpetually, against the workers of the world. That’s what makes Nantucket such a ripe place to foment class war. They’re so comfortable here, they’d never expect it. Plus my Uncle’s Ford Bronco would make a good raiding vehicle. What remains is to find the Masses.
VII
The down blanket irritates my skin, but it’s a welcome remedy for the frigid air conditioning my Aunt has blowing at all times, keeping me up at night— which admittedly has given me more time to theorize. I didn’t have much time to think this evening, my Aunt and Uncle took me to a natural wine bar then a small plates restaurant to celebrate my arrival. No chowder on the menu, so I got the fluke crudo and a seaweed salad. They couldn’t have anticipated the bitter invectives I’d direct at the rest of the clientele under my breath. Wretched WASP-y old men in Air Force Ones and gold chains on vacation from their vacations. Look at that fascist, I rasped as a blonde woman walked in, she had teeth like a Nazi propaganda poster. I was subtle though, I don’t think they suspect the wave of violence I’m about to unleash. They mustn’t have been paying close attention, either, they usually avoided eye contact after my bon-mots. They were probably searching for the waiter, desperate for someone to boss around. That’s what the bourgeois do best. They’ve been craving the opportunity to command someone since their maid was unable to join them on the island for the summer. I don’t blame her for staying on the mainland—fuck these people—but I do wish there was a working class person in the house I could talk to. I’m sure she’d understand the importance of overthrowing all of this. Hell, she can feel the necessity of it in her rough, proletarian hands everyday. She’d know better than anyone how it’s all gonna go, how we’re gonna tear down all these houses, throw their trash in the streets and burn it. She’s probably beautiful, in an earthy, peasantish sort of way, too, and she’d love my bon-mots. She might have even been a peasant once, given the rapid, ongoing processes of depeasantization in the peripheries of the world-system. Fuck Primitive Accumulation, but I’d like to date a woman from one of the oppressed nations of the global south, as long as she wasn’t a comprador. She’s strong, but she’d still cling to me, and she’d have normal teeth, yellowed slightly due to years of smoking to cope with the tedium of abstract labor. I would stroke her coarse, black hair as we made ecstatic love on the barricades, the first world collapsing around us. I could help her theorize the plight of her people.
VIII
I fell asleep quickly after theorizing last night. My mind was racing with ideas that came to a fever pitch at the thought of revolution. I felt drained yet satisfied. My body aches for a revolution of the senses. Should I convert to Islam?
IX
Last night I stepped on a dead cormorant, its desiccated bones sticking out of a clump of black seaweed at the tideline. It was dark so I didn’t notice until I was standing on top of it. I turned on my phonelight to look closer, which I think annoyed some of the other people on the beach who were also there to watch the fireworks—for it was the Fourth of July (fascist)— and I saw that there were actually at least six more in various states of interment in the sand. There was some sort of mass death event. My other Uncle (Mom’s brother) warned me about this. He lives on the other side of Nantucket Sound, on the mainland, and he is working class. Or, to be more specific, he is part of the labor aristocracy because he works in a trade and owns a big pickup truck and a house. He told me the wind turbines the liberals put up were killing machines for seabirds. Whales, too (Moby-Dick?). He said the noise the turbines make underwater interferes with whale calls, causing them to crash into boats. Thousands, he said, had washed up this year in Cape Cod alone. I like the environment so I think the wind turbines, which are owned by capitalists and kill whales, are bad. But also, many bourgeois pigs are complaining about the turbines ruining their views, which is arguably good. I wonder what the proletariat of the oppressed nations of the global south would make of the wind turbines?
X
A wasted day. Little theorizing occurred. Like the Bolsheviks who, upon storming the Winter Palace, went straight to the wine cellar, getting a taste of luxuries that had never before been available to people of their stations, I decided to sample my Uncle’s liquor cabinet at around 11AM. I started with a 40-year Macallan Red, had half of it for breakfast. Intoxicating, like revolution. My Uncle could never appreciate it like I can, my palette starved of any liquor finer than Steel Reserve and Everclear. You cannot cultivate an appreciation for these sorts of things by immersing yourself in them, by continually sampling the finest. You need to deprive yourself, living continually on the barest, meanest dregs of enjoyment, such that you are completely overwhelmed by things of this pedigree. That’s the secret strength of the proletariat, that by subsisting on threadbare bourgeois “freedoms,” the experience of real communist freedom is truly revelatory. A bourgeois wouldn’t recognize utopia, even if they were living in it. That’s why I couldn’t help myself this morning when I saw my Uncle’s unlocked liquor cabinet—I sought to experience a concrete freedom, the kind that can only be experienced in the expropriation of the expropriators.
XI
Another portent: during last night’s high tide, three dogfish washed up on the beach. I found them in the morning when I went down to the shore with my Uncle for a morning swim and they were there, in our spot already, rough leathery skin drying out in the sun, eyes gone grey. I rubbed my finger along their rows of little razor teeth. They were on the wrong side of the island to be wind turbine related. They stunk, so my Uncle threw them into the dune grass. I’m a dialectical thinker, I try not to attribute natural causes to human relations, but I’m also a Maoist, so I'm partial to auspices. The ocean’s ceaseless churn is the continual undercurrent of class struggle in bourgeois society. The dead sharks are like miniature, bloated leviathans washed ashore, signaling the coming end of the alienated bourgeois state-form. But what to make of their triplicity? The three branches of the state? Leviathan was also a whale (Moby-Dick?). The whole set-up reminded me of the final scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where Marcello, the semi-contemplative faux-intellectual, stumbles onto the beach after a night of drunken revelry and finds a team of fishermen hauling in a great dead fish. It didn’t seem like any particular identifiable species, and it had big grey eyes on top of its head looking straight up to heaven. One of the fishermen remarks that it had been dead for three days. In this case, fish=Christ (hence the three days). Further down the beach, Marcello is beckoned to by a young blonde woman who tries to yell something at him across a sort of small tidal river which he cannot hear. He turns away and the film ends on her cryptic smile. I remember this part pretty well because I just watched it in my cinema class last semester. Roughly speaking, in this scenario, I am Marcello, though instead of being a decadent bourgeois hanger-on, I am a Maoist. Last night was also not that crazy—I just drank some Bordeaux on my Uncle’s patio. The dead sharks are the dead Christ-fish signaling the end of the capitalist political order, which my (bourgeois) Uncle would have thrown into the dune grass because he couldn’t bear the smell of rank injustice it was premised upon. The girl I think would symbolize The Masses in this scenario. She’d have coarse black hair and I would definitely hear her words. They would be: “Ignite the class struggle. Seize the means of production. Kill your Uncle, steal his Ford Bronco, drive it into a small plates restaurant.” Obviously, such a woman is not here this morning, I think this is a private beach. But I’m waiting for her, I wait for her, I wait for those words and that enigmatic smile. I’m waiting and listening.
XII
The backyard patio has become our ideological battleground. It’s where I talked to my Aunt about class war. She doesn’t know I’m going to do one, of course, we spoke in a more general sense. The homeless were causing hygiene problems in Los Angeles, she said, something must be done. I said that the homeless had a right to steal her house and she cried. But I really think that. I’m excited to see what the masses do with their house. She yelled at me to stop smoking because she had had long COVID, an experience which made her more spiritual (or so she says) and less tolerant of disturbances to her environment.
XIII
The class structure of the island continues to confound me, in part because I haven’t yet had the chance to talk to the Masses. I know they’re here, though. The continual churn of building and remodeling homes, driven by mouse clicks in distant real-estate speculators’ offices, tells me there’s a large population of construction workers here, at least for the summer season. In Scionset there was a whole street of brand-new house frames draped with Tyvek sheets respiring in the sea breeze. I need to submerge myself in the proletarian substrata of the island more fully, but family obligations have kept me preoccupied.
XIV
I talked to a worker today. Finally! One from the Global south, no less. Unfortunately, he’s not cadre material. His name was Youssouf and he’s from Cote d’Ivoire. He works in the kitchen at one of the New American Bistros downtown and drives for Lyft on the side. I found him smoking out behind the restaurant while I was walking through the alleys looking for workers to talk to. I offered him a cigarette from the carton I brought to the island (I originally took up smoking for precisely this purpose—building solidarity—but I’ve come to really like it) and began to sus out his allegiances. He was an engineering student back home, and excited to spend a summer in the US. I asked how disgusted he felt by the decadent excesses of The West; he didn’t quite know what to say, but he felt that Americans overcooked their meat. He wanted something with a little more chew, but Americans cooked it til it was soft like baby food. Was there something wrong with our teeth? I said yes but couldn’t articulate why. He was missing the point. Could engineering (an almost exclusively reactionary discipline–hence Josh’s need for thorough self-criticism. He still hasn’t responded to my text) be clouding the development of his revolutionary consciousness? Was he a comprador? What do your parents do? I asked. His father was a civil servant, and he’d wanted him to come to America for the summer to improve his English. I told him that was a waste of time and he should learn Mandarin instead. He had been, he said, but his father had been burned on a business venture with a Chinese infrastructure firm back home and urged him to branch out. Just as I feared, a national elite. His class consciousness was nowhere near developed enough for him to be anywhere near decision-making power, his place in global value chains made him next to unorganizable. I zoned out when he started talking about how much he hated driving for Lyft. Time is running out.
XV
I found a comrade—he might be a proletariat, maybe lumpen, not sure. His clothes were certainly filthy enough to be lumpen. I found him behind the Stop and Shop drinking a bottle of Evan Williams. I was planning to avoid drinking until after 2PM since I don’t get much theorizing done when I start early, but I did end up asking for some. Mostly for research purposes, but also because I don’t subscribe to bourgeois ethics that discipline our behavior within the dictates of the working day. I can work drunk, I just need to be more disciplined. Like Mao. He graciously shared. I hardly needed to question him to figure out his political beliefs: as soon as I mentioned how disgusted I was by the obscene wealth on the island, he jumped in with more vitriol than I could have hoped. He hates the blonde youths “blowing off steam” on their boats. He likes to spread broken glass on the yacht club docks at night and he has violent dreams about the politicians he sees on TV. Basically, we’re on the same page. His name is Preston and he’s agreed to join my cadre.
XVII
The whole island is overrun with MILFs (MILVEs?) flashing their razor sharp veneers at me, snarling. There are too many white babies. My Aunt and Uncle wanted today to be their day in town, to look at the stores. Rain kept them in. Good. I hate them. I hate every phone call he makes pitching oil assets to the state of Connecticut. I want chowder. Flagpoles in front of every women’s apparel boutique fly alarming heraldry. Little boys on leashes drag their fathers along. Nantucket Sleighride (Moby-Dick). Why are they looking at me? I need to get out of the rain. Into the home goods shop. I’ll snap any fucker. Is this the kind of thing people like? Filling their barren lives with ewers and decanters? Don’t want me here? Too bad. Don’t like the red streaks my hands leave on your decorative plates? I don’t care. Have things always looked so cheap?
XVIII
Around the corner again. Their bourgeois minds can’t handle the eccentricity of my path. They think too linearly. Eternal Return. I need to stay in the rain, I deserve it; I’m the only one who can really feel it and they don’t even know. They’re wondering why I’m getting so soaked. They’re wondering why I won’t go inside, what happened to my hand. I could explain my method but they wouldn’t understand it. I learned on the ferry and from my aunt that their minds think in journeys. Weight loss journey self-love journey real estate journey private equity journey. Barbaric wisdom from throw-pillows, quoted like scripture. My aunt would say, “You just need to find your journey, that’s how I discovered Tae Bo. You need to be open to the possibilities that are out there.” No shut up, there’s nothing. This isn’t a journey, we’re not going anywhere. You’re all going backwards and I’m going in circles. I’ve seen this boutique before. Let’s see who comes out. Give me your teeth. Let me roll them in my palms. This garbage belongs in the street. Step in it. Every over-white smile and genuine act of kindness on Nantucket is the being in-and-for itself of capital. Put your teeth away. If my buddy was here. My friends from Worcester would ruin this place. They’d leave their mark. Don’t bark at me. I’ll snap any fucker. There’s a ten percent chance any one of these white babies in their white strollers is going to be the next White Hitler. The next White Christ. I’d be doing the world a favor if I kicked them onto the cobblestones to get flattened by a Jeep. My Aunt’s beautiful maid would thank me. She’d watch me kick. I can hear her now. “Kick! Kick! Faster!” I’ve been listening. And I’m starting to hear. I’ve got an idea. Put those teeth away. I don’t care if I’m bleeding on your dog. Let him bite me. Zap–there it is again. Stiff as a board. I’ll limp in circles I don’t care. The fascists are in control. This can’t go on much longer. My Uncle has no idea that I’ve found the perfect restaurant.
XIX
As a little boy, Preston dreamt of being on the news. As a broadcaster. He had a play anchor desk in the basement of the family house in Westport, Connecticut. Contrary to my initial conjecture, he comes from a bourgeois family, though he has tried, wholeheartedly, to reject everything that they stand for, which is good. Revolutionary parties need class traitors. Television never worked out, though. He’s ugly and he’s got problems. (I’ve always found you could recognize a bourgeois by their face, the moral ugliness of capital always leaves its stain on their person. The opposite is true of proletarians. Their suffering makes them alluringly beautiful.) I found this out during our “revolutionary therapy” session. It’s a sort of pedagogy I invented. Before you carry out insurrectionary violence, you need to dereify your mind. This process is especially important for the erstwhile bourgeois. I really got into his head during our session, I made sure he was ready. I figured out everybody who ever hurt him, I made him confront his failures, I restaged his childhood traumas. He blames his parents for neglecting him (the anchor desk was a gift from his Uncle), but I helped him realize that was because they were acting as mere avatars of capital, they could see he wasn’t going to help them realize any surplus value. He was, as I’ve noted, an ugly child, with mediocre marks. Over the course of a couple hours, I helped him realize how far he had internalized bourgeois morality, how he had always been opaque to himself, and how all his contemplative attempts at overcoming his internal frustrations were only further obscuring his weakness from himself. I showed him how impotent his attempts at self-criticism had been. He cried a lot. You need to change your life. There’s no way to un-try Oxycontin. You’ll always want it. You need to live in a different world. We can reinvent beauty. The point is to change it, Preston.
XX
Preston and I have a plan–really, I came up with it, but he enthusiastically agreed. Things cannot go on like this. Thankfully, Preston feels the masses of Nantucket are ready to explode into insurrection at any given moment: he’s spent much more time on the island than me, so he has a better sense of these things. He’s been summering here since he was 8. I didn’t realize the situation was already so volatile, but he made some compelling points. He said we had to execute the plan NOW. His commitment to insurrection ever since our revolutionary therapy session has been wonderful. He has no desire to go on living in this wretched bourgeois state of affairs. I was relieved because I feared I had missed the window, but he told me everything I was hoping to hear. More importantly, everything I said he agreed with. He said that his parents needed to suffer. I said we could burn their house down. He said things couldn’t go on like this. I said we could sink all the ferries. He said he was scared. I told him that his fear would melt away in the heat of the moment. He said he needed a drink. I said I’ve got pills. He said all we needed was a spark. I said I’ve got a spark for you.
XXI
Preston crashes into the tapas bar. Gunfire. One shot too many. I run. The Masses do not show.
XXII
The ferry ride back to New Bedford has offered me a new vantage point on things. After Preston’s murder-suicide, I’ve come to realize the state of class consciousness on Nantucket is far lower than I’d initially hoped. The situation is not yet ripe for revolution. At least he finally got on the news. I will return next year to take stock of how much progress they’ve made and perhaps try again. I’m hopeful my Uncle will invite me back. Thankfully, he has no idea how close I came to killing him and redistributing his stuff. Plus, Preston shot himself before he could have possibly told the authorities about my involvement. I never even told him my real name. This is why having a good organizational security culture is so important. No one suspects a thing. In the meantime, I’ve developed a whole new revolutionary strategy: I’m going to take it all down from the inside. Quick: where’s the one place a bourgeois would never expect a proletarian revolution to start? Private Equity. So, that’s where I’m going. I was wearing a Swarthmore tee on the Ferry and started talking to an older man who had also matriculated there, though back in the ‘80s. He disgusted me, but I hid my radical inclinations from him so that I could conduct more probing research into his psyche. He didn’t suspect a thing, and by the end of the conversation he’d even offered me an internship at his hedge fund. It’d probably be better than working at the Corner Grille, I thought. None of my coworkers have any class consciousness. Then it hit me: I can blow it all up from the inside. I’d have unparalleled access to the inner workings of capital itself. I could bring it all crashing down. I’ll send the signal. The Masses won’t be able to miss it this time. And nobody else knows. Not even my Grandma. I feel like I’m the only Maoist on this boat.
***
Ahab or Ishmael?
______
Owen Harrington lives in Chicago in reality, in Pennsylvania on paper, and in the hills of central Massachusetts in his dreams. His work is forthcoming in Energy Research & Social Science.
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