Ballardian

At the risk of incurring another bogey in the comments box, Dr John emails to inform me of a piece in the Guardian entitled ‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future’.

John writes: ‘It might just be because I’ve been getting ready for a conference on J. G. Ballard, but this article on the Ministry of Defence’s vision of the future certainly caught my eye’.

He goes on to highlight the most Ballardian passage, concluding ‘Shades of Millennium People, perhaps…’

Marxism

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.

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‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future.’
Richard Norton-Taylor. 9/4/07.
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