magnus mills - how to deal with the masses

since the days of George Orwell, a sizeable bulk of british literature, television and film has felt compelled to deal with the unhappy lot of the working classes, their exploitation, (as well as their chirpy, rough diamond like ability, natch). quite a bit of this stuff is written by wavering middle class graduates, giving it the inevitable patronising air (even sadder that so many of these made it into the labour party and sold it out).

the writer magnus mills is something different, a working class writer with an inside out view of the worlds he writes about, and an all encompassing perspective.

most of his books look, one way or another, at the same problem - how do the people in charge of a system keep it going? how do you deal with the bulk of the population, whose demands and desires (for comfort and security, leisure and pleasure, a sense of life) can only be met if they are willing to undergo the discomfort and insecurity necessary to create the conditions for prosperity? Who must sacrifice leisure and pleasure in order to make the money necessary for leisure and pleasure? Who gives up their freedom, in order to create the conditions necessary for freedom?

This explains the cyclical nature of his novels, the feeling of inertia, of running on a treadmill that leads to disaster.

the problem for socialism, i think the film maker krystof kieslowski said, is that eveyone wants to be more equal. the problem for capitalism is that it only runs in one direction, and eventually, the centre fails to hold.

a supermarket worker from sheffield will rarely be willing to take the place of a peasant on a pakistani hilltop, just to make the world a better place.

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