September the 9th so it is, and autumn’s chill prowls uncomfortably near,
For it’s the two-hundred and fifty second day of a rapidly dwindling year,
As old as I am, not quite an ancient mariner, the years are starting to fly
Wasting breathless time tying shoelaces, a ninth month passes me by,
My pen should be flowing for change in a dangerously intransigent world
Mental trousers remain round my ankles until the brain is slowly unfurled,
An era of breaking obituaries has become a morbid smartphone tsunami,
A roster of lost friends, lovers and heroes that’s almost the size of an army,
Yet so much to do and so little time becomes a highly applicable adage,
And words that spur this old warrior, on to sustain this orb that we savage,
To nurse a disorderly world back into green shoots before society crumbles
September 9th, I’ll hold back the years, until the old capitalist order tumbles.
A. McTiernan
The Temptation of St Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch [painted at a major pivot-point in history when according to Marx and Engels, was a period when the foundations of feudalism were being undermined by capitalism.
“From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
“The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
“The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.” (The Communist Manifesto, Bourgeois and Proletarians)