shocking cancellation of the future
Railway worker Morgan Rosser poured himself into his position as secretary of his union branch and even more so into the railway workers’ sympathy strike with coal miners, believing deeply in both the moral rightness of the workers’ cause and their collective power. The strike ended badly for Morgan - a negotiated settlement on terms that were a mixed bag at best - and he took it hard. “You could talk about creating the future, but in practice, look, people ran for shelter, manoeuvered for personal convenience, accepted the facts of existing power. To see this happening was a deep loss of faith, a slow and shocking cancellation of the future. You could live only by what you could find, now.” Morgan came away feeling a terrible “restlessness from the disillusion.” This is fictional, it’s from Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country, but there’s a truth to it - the strike was a real one, the UK general strike in 1926 - and I think this is a real thing that happens in the aftermath of political defeats. And in important respects capitalism is on the one hand, constant political defeat (because class itself is a relationship of domination; the working class is, as a subordinated group, a defeated class - for now!) and, on the other hand, that defeat takes unexpected new forms on an ongoing basis because, as Simon Clarke has put it, capitalism is characterized by “the permanent instability of social existence” because the system’s violent dynamism. People expect a future, reasonably so, and capitalism continues to veer off course in new directions, confounding those expectations. (I’ve written a bit about this as an engine of sometimes intense but fundamentally defensive struggles, though I didn’t have quite the same grasp of these patterns at the time, in my chapter on what EP Thompson called a moral economy. If that’s any interest, it’s here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l75jg35iqi199zmoxkeb2/NH-Elgar-chapter-uncorrected-proofs.pdf?rlkey=npy80mg8argi6mjfqsbx2iqe6&dl=0)
The phrase ‘slow and shocking cancellation of the future’ jumped out at me as I’m a big fan of Mark Fisher’s writing where he talked about what he called the slow cancellation of the future. I don’t recall if he got the phrase from Williams or not. In Fisher’s usage, the term referred to the downward slide that happened in quality of life in the UK from roughly 1980 until the 2010s (Fisher died in 2017 unfortunately and this slide has not abated; the Labour Party under Keir Starmer looks likely to win the next election and also looks likely to be the most right-wing Labour government in a very long time, so the downward slide is likely to continue). Readers of my little blog will know I bang on all the time about social murder, meaning capitalism’s tendency to generate situations that kill working class people, and about how the capitalist state tends to play accomplice to that tendency, especially when social murder is very widespread and intense - it becomes too big to fail, so to speak. The pandemic is a major example and the main one on my mind these days, but the brutality of austerity in the UK (and the US as well of course) is lousy with other examples.
Fisher argues - maybe asserts is the better word to be honest; I say this as a fan - that part of the downward slide is a loss of the futures people used to believe in. It’s not only that quality of life was better for some people, it’s also that people expected to be on an upward sloping line from there. So there’s both a worsening of life and also a loss of the even better future that people expected. Fisher reads various artistic works (that’s his main thing really, smart readings of cultural objects) through this framework, asserting that we in the present feel a kind of broken promise and what’s more we expect a worse future than we used to expect, and a lot of art works are about this. Furthermore, those lost futures weigh on us in a way he calls haunting, and he calls the art works that deal with this ‘hauntology’ or ‘hauntological’ - works that have a kind of wistful nostalgia for how the future used to be imagined. One of Fisher’s go-to examples is the music of the artist Burial, who I’m a huge fan of and I like Fisher’s writings on Burial a lot (this is in his book Ghosts of My Life, if I remember correctly, which I like a lot) - Burial’s got a lot of references to 90s rave culture with lots of record crackle in the sound despite being made on a computer and largely distributed online, and a kind of distance to the sound, like you’re standing just outside the club or party hearing the music come through the wall, rather than being in the heart of things. I also think of the show and book Tales From The Loop, set in what seems to be an alternate 1980s, where there’s intensely powerful technology, so much so that it might as well be magic, in a setting where people still use cassette tapes and TVs with antennas and rotary dial phones and old desktop computers with the clunky green and black monitors, and a lot of the powerful quasi-magical technology has a beat up look like old farm machinery: it’s a better more advanced future yet simultaneously rundown, battered, and a little quaint.
I find the Fisher convincing and it’s a useful framework for reading the cultural objects he reads, and for getting at the losses - and the resulting malaise - that came from the imposition of austerity in the UK under Callaghan’s Labour government and then continued under both the Tories and new Labour. That said, I was struck reading the Williams that this isn’t the first era of canceled futures - Williams points to the aftermath of the 1926 general strike as an instance, as I said - and then I started to think about the Simon Clarke and EP Thompson bits I mentioned, and the thought occurred to me that capitalism is always burning someone’s future. That’s baked in to the social murder analysis. There are huge variations, of course, in how this happens and to whom, and the scale, and the degree to which there is or isn’t a shared framework within which to understand what happened.
If you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know I try to keep circling back to thinking about the pandemic - being, as I am, a covid zero zealot marxist! - even if I range away from it at times. I think the pandemic can be understood, maybe, as a process of repeatedly losing different futures mixed with repeatedly positing different futures - many of those then lost as well. Having just typed that I think similar might be said of September 11th, 2001, which I remember, very generally, this way: it felt to me as a young leftist like we in the antiglobalization movement were winning - that may have been naive and the future I and others had in mind may have been vague, but we did have something at least vaguely in mind - and then the attacks punctured that. Then there was what I remember being about 3 weeks of holding our breath, waiting to see what the US government would do. I remember someone, maybe George Caffentzis, arguing that it mattered tremendously that the event be called a crime and not an act of war and that this meant not merely something rhetorical but that the push for a response should be routed through multilateral institutions of world governance, not a unilateral and military response by the US. (Again, maybe naive and maybe vague, but nonetheless something of a vision of some possible future.) Meanwhile some others on the left took it as foregone that the US government would soon be bombing civilians SOMEwhere, which is what happened (and so another future lost, many really, individually and collectively).
Anyhow, the initial outbreak of covid made it clear that stuff was gonna get bad one way or another. (I was late to realize this, personally, thinking at first that this was all overhyped - not proud of that, just being honest.) Then there was the process of working out different responses, a process with tensions and reversals and so on but certainly once Biden was elected the trend was toward both some degree of newly imposed social common sense - not quite a consensus, at least not at first, so much as getting people onboard practically: live like normal, guys!, paired with gradually removing sources of concern reminding people that the old normal was in fact a bad idea under these new conditions - and a gradual giving up on any of the solidaristic elements of the early days of the pandemic and any of the aspirations for more rather than less mitigation. Like I said, multiple futures posited and even more futures canceled. None of that’s over (as I’ve written about on here before, I think, I remain convinced that my fellow covid zero zealot marxists and I represent a future consensus on lots of things, covid included, and that conviction’s unchanged, though I continue to feel sad and angry at how fucking far off that future seems to be - sucks to be an early adopter, god damn), nor is the pandemic going to be the last kind of defeat like this that happens before capitalism ends (hell, it’s not the only such defeat happening right fucking now - there’s the genocide in Gaza, there’s a large number of catastrophes from climate change, there’s emergency of opioids and police murder and the intensification of deaths at national borders and and and and and).
I’m unsure if we’re haunted by the lost futures in the pandemic. I am, sometimes, though as I’ve sort of said (https://notesfromasummer.blogspot.com/2024/05/ffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuu.html) I’m less haunted than I’m having attacks of vertigo, writer’s block but not for writing words on a page so much as making sense of anything at all in the world. Related to this, as I’ve mentioned on here before, I find myself very drawn to agitated electronic dance music (all blessings upon the mighty Rinse FM!), skittering beats and broken bass lines and distorted synth stabs expressing things I feel strongly and (and, in part, because I) lack words for.
Maybe we are haunted this way but it’s not playing out in art much yet because the dominant way to live now is in re-enacting the old normal and its futures, in a mix of denial and ignorance of the depth of the loss? (And as part of that, those of us out of step with that re-enacting have another layer of loss, that of being out of step, which I wrote about in my “broken sociality” essay.) I do want to underscore and I don’t think there’s a positive consensus in the sense of consent to the present direction of the pandemic - I don’t think the Biden administration talked people into finding this way of life (and death) acceptable, so much as it got people to start to live that way again, gradually removed distressing signs and information, and if there is something of a consensus and consent now that has emerged from living this way. Social consciousness generally follows from social life, not vice versa - this is a common sense view among a lot of us marxists, and apparently the ghouls in the Biden administration stumbled onto this as well. I still think that the consensus (to the degree there is one - a degree I’m unsure of) isn’t a strongly asserted explicit one (like the relative consensus on bombing the shit out of people after 9/11) is a good thing and is part of why I think those of early adopters of the future common sense can optimistic - though as I said unfortunately that’s looking like a pretty fucking long term optimism, which is grim as shit right now.
Final thing for now: I’ve not finished the novel yet and no spoilers (it’s a great book, I recommend it!) but basically Morgan Rosser gets spun by the cancellation of the future he expected, it’s shocking as Williams said and that leaves Rosser restless as he casts about for a new direction and sense of meaning. Lost futures spin people, the ones who survive anyway, and this is part of why what I quoted from Clarke - that social life is permanently unstable - is part of capitalism’s longevity: the system doesn’t destabilize itself, no more than tidal waves destabilize the ocean or earthquakes destabilize the planet; rather the system destabilize the lives of all of us trapped in it, and that destabilizing makes us scramble for short term solutions - which mean system-compatible solutions - and also undermine the bases for longer term resistance to the system. We can, and eventually will, overcome that, in the distressingly long term, but there’s going to be a lot more loss and life haunted by loss between now and then. And in the meantime ghouls like Biden and his courtiers are going to be focused on reducing the shock of our losses, not actually slowing the rate or mitigating the scale of those losses - singing soothing lullabies to us frogs to keep us in the pot while they boil the water.