What first motivated you politically?

[Spearmint Rhino]

What first motivated you politically?

Good question. We should be told.

[Kowalski]

What first motivated you politically?

I believe that it's parliamentary etiquette to shove bribes up your arse.

This is one of the perks of the job and done to avoid declaring them to the standards commission.

[Fatter Hipper]

What first motivated you politically?

It is, but it tends not to remain so once completed.

And that's why revolution must never be completed.

[DCI Harry Batt]

What first motivated you politically?

But must instead remain permanent - I like the way you think.

[Kowalski]

What first motivated you politically?

Permanent and unstinting.

[Spearmint Rhino]

What first motivated you politically?

What do you actually mean by "the revolution must never be completed" and "the revolution must be permanent" though? It's a cool-sounding motto but how does that work in practice? How do you make sure grannies get enough heating in winter?

[Fatter Hipper]

What first motivated you politically?

It is a bit of a slogan, but any revolution that posits its final point as the end of history is invariably going to require no end of repression once it reaches that end. Look at the suppression of free thought in the USSR- right from the beginning. We cannot know enough about the world to design a system that will work for the freedom of all.

Bascially, the revolution must not set itself up as the final revolution. We need a revolution to sweep away the excesses of power and oppression in the current world, but a revolution followed by continual evolution (which is what I take the slogan to mean) and self-evaluation. Not a permanent state of bloody terror, but- to quote Heraclitus (the first poststructuralist?)- a state of eternal flux.

Freedom for the individual- for me- is the ultimate political aim. I'm not Ayn Rand- I don't think capitalism can bring about that freedom (nor an anarcho-capitalism). But any system which restricts freedom (either through soft totalitarianism of capitalism or the hard totalitarianism of fascism/state communism) needs overthrowing.

I love modernism, I think it's a failure but it's a beautiful beautiful failure. Le Corbusier's buildings are stunning; Kraftwerk make great music; monorails are a great idea, brutalist car parks give me the shivers. But it's all-encompassing, it leaves no room for alternative aesthetics. Politically too (especially)- its rationalism is almost autistic. These are the norms, the rules for a good life, for a productive life, for a healthy life: this is how we must live to make the world a better place.

I have no time for this kind of bollocks: I see poststructuralism as a tinkering with the enlightenment aims, as a continuation of a project that- with modernism- had reached the bottom of a cul-de-sac. Not as something that says "we can't know the world so there's no point trying to change it", but as something that exercises due caution and anchors its change in the present and not in the future (though I wouldn't do away with the utopian imagination totally- far from it).

Phew.

[DCI Harry Batt]

What first motivated you politically?

I was kinda joking, meself. Can't speak for the other fella.

[Edit: seems he wasn't, my bad. Thanks for that explanation, Fatter.

"Permanent revolution" where I come from means something different, relating to a rejection of the idea that Russia in particular, and backward states in general, would have to go through a separate bourgeois-democratic revolution first, before a socialist revolution could be contemplated.]

I don't think we'd have all these thousands of grannies living alone, for starters. I would imagine a very different way of life, in the fullness of time. Something that's much less about a privatised family, for one thing.

Some of the most important long-term improvements for people who suffer in winter at the moment and those who are likely to suffer even more in future will be in housing and in combat(t?)ing climate change.

But I don't see any reason why people who need heating shouldn't have heating. I'd be in favour of their turning the heating on. To each according to his or her needs, as it were.