Hey there, happy new year to all who deserve it! (From my stupid blog to God’s ears, eh?)

A couple three preliminaries. First off, go read this great article by Robert Knox and Mary Robertson on the role of race in capitalism in general and in the 2008 financial crisis in particular.

Second off, I have a blog post up recently at the JHI Blog (JHI stands for Journal of Intellectual History) where I talk about some of what I try to do in my own work. It’s in a forum on political economy as an approach for intellectual history. I hope it’s not too much academic historian inside baseball. In bits of I get into some of what I’ve blahgged (get it? blog and blah blah blah and also ‘blah’ as judgement...? is this thing on...?) about here regarding the social/institutional production of not-knowing ugly things. Piece is here if you like to suffer: https://www.jhiblog.org/2025/12/29/three-meanings-of-political-economy-reflections-on-intellectual-history-marxism-and-capitalisms-unthought/

Third off, I just need to vent a sec. I wrote most of this post earlier (wow gang I feel like haven’t blogged since last y- you know what never mind) then finished the ending today and wrote this opening. I spent a long fucking time today fixing a broken set of blinds in one of my kids rooms, a set that was here when we got here and was never installed correctly. This is far from the first time something like this has happened. We live in a fixerupper house because that’s what we could buy. (“This isn’t what we want, this isn’t what we need, this is what we can afford.”) Fixing shit is kinda expensive and it’s also a massive time and stress cost when I already spend too much time and stress at my stupid job and I’ve been sick of all of it for a long time, and it won’t change because I’m not slotted into a part of the economy to make a genuinely living wage. Working in a white collar setting full of middle class people from well to do backgrounds and with all the cultural trappings that goes with that, including the pretending that it’s all fine actually and we’re paid fine - after all, we all get support from our parents, right? - gets to be a lot sometimes as well, kinda like putting on a sweater on a hot day. Small potatoes really - we have enough to eat, we have health insurance, I’m reasonably sure I’ll get to retire in my early 70s - but, well, they’re my potatoes. Just makes me very angry, especially in the workplace culture I’m in, with all the forced pretending. (This video by David Mitchell - he of Peep Show and Mitchell and Webb fame - is very good about some of it, in the decision-making or decision-avoidance side, and Mitchell’s funny. I think the other facet is sometimes called toxic positivity.)

Three thoughts on this beyond me just being sick of bullshit. One, the consignment of people like my family to mediocre housing and other people to homelessness and other people to mansions and shit, all of that is political, but it’s often enacted through ostensibly depoliticized forms (Tony Smith’s book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, a regular recommendation here at Open Mode, is good on this, and on much else). Two, it also means, and this relates to the agnotology stuff, that the decisions makers often get to treat the consequences of their actions as out of sight, out of mind, through a mix of institutional organization and cultures adapted to that organization. (I once burst into tears at a large work meeting trying to articulate to senior management how hard it was to live on how little we’re paid and the effects of that on those of us with kids; that sucked and I remain mortified by it, and from the stricken looks my emotional state was clearly really far outside the norm, which is understandable but also speaks volumes: cry on your own time, in the shower, like a grown up, man!) This too is a facet of social coldness, I think: it has an element of immediate callousness, in the sense of being able to shrug off hard stuff, and it has an element of ignorance, in the sense of really not having a serious grasp of the ramifications of one’s effects on others.

Three, the ways this shit effects my kids and the ways it makes me feel like I come up short as a parent is especially hard to take, as are other ways that I feel like I come up short in my job. I wrote about one element of this a while back at the AAUP’s blog with a focus on moral distress. My sense is that for healthcare workers that distress rises to such an intensity that it can lead to PTSD, tied to what’s sometimes called moral injury. This is something I want a better handle on and might try to write about at some point, being as I am an academic specialist in injury and suffering (good buddy Edwad once called me a social mutilation theorist). My hunch is that all societies involve multiple sets of values - we might say a plurality of normative orders - to some degree, tied to how people get socialized and that people get pulled between at times but that this is especially intense in capitalist societies. I think the basic categories of exchange value and use value in Marx are bound up with this, in that some use values serve relatively charged purposes - meaning, people care about them such that it hurts to have them fall short (like my fucking house being all fucking janky, which especially upsets me when it affects my kids as I said) and it can hurt to be a worker in the position of having to navigate the tensions around serving use value production or not. I’m definitely not saying all use values are morally charged or that all people experience this, but I am saying some are and some people do, and this too is part of the polyvalent misery of this society.

Anyhow. Home repair on new year’s day feels apt (“this is our year for sure”) but at least that’s all it is. (“It is true: I work for a living/ But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing/ That I do gives me the right to eat my fill. / By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold, / I am lost.)”)

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I recently read Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Men in Love. The novel’s another work in the Trainspotting universe, which I’m a big fan of but is not everyone’s cup of tea and I think reasonably so given how unpleasant a fair bit of it is. I thought it’d be rewarding to read a bit of scholarship on Welsh so I’m now reading Aaron Kelly’s book on Irvine Welsh, appropriately titled Irvine Welsh. (Shout out to the mighty Sarah Brouillette, wicked smart in her own right and consistently a source of great advice on what to read.) This reading comes after I’ve finally, recently started to make some actual headway in the effort to read Raymond Williams seriously. I dunno for sure but I feel like I’m getting more from the Kelly by virtue of the Williams that I’ve now read. With time and good fortune I may yet become a literature understander - toss a penny into a wishing well for me if you can, dear friends!

Anyway, a few notes/some thinking out loud about bits of this. Kelly borrows what is basically a dad joke from the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, Buck-Morss suggesting that the dominant aesthetics of capitalist society are more aptly called “anaesthetics” because rather than “being a cognitive mode of being in touch with reality” they instead serve “as a means of blocking out reality.” (p40; the quotes are Kelly paraphrasing Buck-Morss. Mental note: chase up the Buck-Morss text that Kelly is drawing from.) This distinction between art as way of thinking and reflecting vs art as way of not even not even noticing, that really speaks to me. One thing it reminds me of is this Propagandhi bit “Music’s power to describe, compel renew -- it's all a distant second to the offers you can't refuse. Remember when we used to believe that music was a sacred place, not some fucking bank machine? Not something you just bought and sold. How could we have been so naive? I think when all is said and done, just cuz we were young, it don't mean we were wrong.”

Another thing it reminds me of is EP Thompson’s use of philistinism as a term for some of the forces he opposed (such as here) the gist being in part a matter of canaries in coal mines - a society or a political outlook dismissive of art will tend to dismiss a great deal else that means a great deal to people - and in part that having art in our individual and collective lives is itself a real need. (As the old song goes, “Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.” Apparently Mamdani had this sung at his inauguration. Despite my views on the low ceiling of electoralism, especially in its municipal variety - a dear friend calls it ‘socialism in one sewer’ - I do like that use of that song and hope it introduced more people to it.) The end of the Propagandhi song gets at a similar theme, emphasizing that the philistinism involved in reducing music’s genuine worth to just a matter of selling and profiting is closely linked to the threat of an impending “scorched and lifeless earth” to which those who are “accountable to their shareholders first” are essentially indifferent. That indifference is, I think, what Kelly via Buck-Morss calls “anaestethics,” art used as resource for blocking all that out, reducing cognitive dissonance, etc. (I should say, my sense is that Kelly and Buck-Morss mean ‘aesthetic’ in an expansive sense as well, not only identifiable art practices and works, but also broad habits of (non)perception and (in)attention cultivated in part but only in part by art works, and subject to only partially effective criticism by better art.)

Having typed that out, it occurs to me that indifference or what Werner Bonefeld calls ‘social coldness’ might be treated as a static condition or a disposition that’s present generally in people in capitalist societies, and rightly so, but it might also, simultaneously, be understood as something actively practiced concretely in varying ways in specific circumstances. I don’t like this way of putting it but can’t think of a better one: indifference is on the one hand a pre-existing factor that explains ‘demand’ for anesthetizing art, thought-stopping cliches, etc, and on the other hand it’s something that always exists in the form of the active production and consumption of a ‘supply’ of such indifference-fostering “goods.” Social coldness is an active, ongoing doing, so to speak. At the same time, while it’s aided by cultural resources like art and apologetic theories and so on, the capacity of better cultural product/of politicking within cultural arenas to break through social coldness is limited. Very simply, songs don’t change the world, though songs can certainly form part of the processes of changing the world, in the right contexts. (And in a lot of wrong contexts, they’re a nontrivial part of surviving the world, in my opinion.)

In another bit, Kelly writes that due to de-industrialization and neoliberalism there arose “a historical moment in which working-class communities are not working - both in the sense of being characterised by mass unemployment and of ceasing to function as networks of collective experience and tradition.” (This is also on p40.) This is a bit that really rings differently for me after the Williams I’ve now read. I’d gloss the point this way: to some extent we interpret our experiences while having them, as an intrinsic element of what it means to experience something, and we also interpret them after the fact. (Arguably, the ongoing interpretation of especially important experiences in our lives means that there is no ‘after the fact’. Many experiences reverberate, and some to such a degree that amounts to something akin to feedback. This also reminds me that Abby Cartus had a great post a while back on lack of shared meaning and lack of capacity to make such shared meaning regarding the pandemic. That remains relevant in my opinion. I assume everyone subscribing to my lil blog also follows Cartus’s, but in case not -- https://buttondown.com/abbycartus/)

What I said about social coldness applies here too: the character of experience as intrinsically interpreted on an ongoing basis can be understood as a static quality - experience is always interpretation-laden - and can be understood as an active doing - we understand and important respects live our experiences via concretely existing (even if intangible) products of human activity like stories, concepts, images, etc, some of them embedded in or derived from formal works of art and identifiable cultural tropes, and some of them more a matter of sensibilities. Those products are made and taken up (“consumed”) individually and also collectively, which is part of the significance of working-class communities “ceasing to function as networks of collective experience and tradition.” That cessation shouldn’t be overstated - it’s not absolute - but it shouldn’t be understated either - something real has happened that this refers to.

That partial cessation has, I think, two kinds of effects, at least. One is a sense of fragmentation, as people draw on different social products, and work through their experiences with those products in different ways, in relative isolation and relatively siloed from each other. (That different specific events happen to different people matters as well - there are different social fates accorded, as well as important differences in the processes of making sense of those fates.) Another is a relative blocking or slowing of the process of interpreting experiences: people have fewer resources to hand with which to do the interpreting of experience. Having said all of that, I’d also stress that the breaking up of old conditions does also open up some space that was previously relatively closed off by those old conditions, which isn’t so much as to assert that there’s silver lining as to just note that the reality is not entirely one big step backward even if we might (I would!) want to say that if we must draw a balance sheet then the balance sheet on these kinds of historical transformation sums up to a negative assessment over all. I think that matters because nostalgia for past arrangements, while fairly justified in my opinion, often ends up itself being a kind of obstacle to life in the present and the move into the future.

The other day I mentioned a paper I’m excited about by the philosopher Jacob Blumenfeld called “Class as Moral Injury” (https://uplopen.com/reader/chapters/pdf/10.1515/9783839400050-004). One of the concepts it touches on is ‘epistemic injustice’, which is also the title of a book. I’d feel like this is above my paygrade even I’d read it and I’ve not yet so I feel especially out on a limb here, but anyway, it seems to me that the following is true. People make sense of their lives in part using actual materials created by society - ie, sense-making happens in part via stuff we’re equipped with by our societies. Bad things happen when people lack adequate capacity to make sense of important experiences; lack of stuff that facilitates sense-making makes such lacks more likely. People also experience distress sometimes when they differ from others in charged ways regarding how to make sense of important experiences, and the feeling of isolation when it seems like no one else understands an experience the way one does is an important example. That all means that social processes that impede the making and uptake of stuff for sense-making, of which the break up of existing networks is one type, is a source of distress and arguably a form of epistemic injustice. (That’s all basically a note for when I get around to reading that book.)

The other thing I thought about while reading Kelly on Welsh is a line from Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country, referring to a “shocking cancellation of the future.” I’m going to quote the whole passage at the end of this post. The gist is that a true believer left wing union official, Morgan Rosser, thought the general strike of 1926 was going to help usher in a much brighter world and when it didn’t something gave way for him, including his sense of workers’ struggles as bearers of better worlds. So it’s Morgan individually who experiences a canceled future in that instance. As he tries to live with that, he engages in the same activities of carting food to hungry people but with a changed meaning and after while the activity changes, with him going into business for himself. There’s a clear resonance here with Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout, about the aftermath of political defeats, and of course it made me think about the covid pandemic.

The phrase has also been picked up by the theorist Mark Fisher, if memory serves it’s in both his books Capitalist Realism and Ghosts Of My Life (I like the second one better), where for Fisher it’s a shorthand for the loss of a once-shared vision of a better future, as part of the rise of neoliberalism from the late 70s onward. (On THAT, by the way, let me make a plug for Elizabeth Humphrys’s superb book How Labour Built Neoliberalism. Its most granular analysis is on Australia, which is very clarifying - briefly, the transition to neoliberalism there came largely from a successful soft/institutional left, not from the right - and there’s good comparative and theoretical discussion as well.) I think Fisher’s usage is valuable, naming a sort of medium-large period of time. I also think using the term in relation to Proctor is useful as well, political defeats at smaller scales of time and space, and that usage is truer to the immediate section in the Williams that the quote comes from. It also seems to me pretty obvious that the large scale defeat and loss of futures from 1970 to present has been made up of many, many defeated struggles and additional lost futures. Russian nesting dolls of suffering and grief, kinda thing. Also occurs to me that as someone in my late 40s who has been on the left in some capacity for around 30 years, and as someone from a working class background who grew up in the US in the late 20th century, I feel like there’s been a shocking cancelation of the future every 2-4 years my entire adult life. Shit’s bleak sometimes, eh? That’s part of why we gotta stay angry, I think. Anyway, the Williams line also clearly resonates with Welsh’s Trainspotting world, which starts thematically with the defeat of the miners strike in 1984, detailed in the beginning of Skagboys, escalates with deindustrialization and the rise of heroin, the focus of Trainspotting, with all the subsequent novels in the series focused on various aftermaths.

I think a little more generally, the production and break up of possible futures is arguably present in many societies, certainly class societies, but it occurs in particularly patterned ways in capitalism due to the system’s dynamics of crisis and struggle. Simon Clarke has a bit in his book Marx’s Theory of Crisis, if I remember correctly, stressing that capitalism’s patterns of crisis and conflict mean that a life lived in a capitalist society just is fundamentally insecure. That insecurity also takes on novel forms of expression over time, which makes it more unsettling and surprising. I think of it as a matter of getting on and then being knocked off of certain trajectories, over and over again, continually in surprising ways. (Søren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion is good on this and cites to the relevant Clarke bit.)
Sometimes a future is lost and gives way to an alt-future, so to speak, by which I mean an intensification of elements of the previous trajectory. In a sense that’s what’s going on with what can advisedly be called the current crisis of hegemonic masculinity, and which is a big theme in Welch’s novels as well, particularly in Men In Love. There’s a certain type of guy that I think of as ‘chess club jocks,’ meaning dudes who aren’t/weren’t very good at living up to existing standards of masculinity and got mistreated as a result and responded by looking for different locations and practices where they could live out a version of that masculinity. My impression is that there’s more of that these days, and arguably in more brutal forms.

Alright, well that’s it. (“It’s not a lot, but it’s what I got.”) I’ll paste the Border Country quote below. It’s from the beginning of chapter 6. I don’t have my paper copy at hand just now so I can’t give a page number. Keeping on trucking, dear friends and gentle hearts! I hope your new year has started as well as possible and that your old year got shelved as peacefully as possible. We’ll get to the Big Rock Candy Mountain one day, and I truly mean that.

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“The end of the strike had changed Morgan (...) there was no satisfaction. A struggle had been lost; a common effort had failed. And it was not only the failure that broke him, but the insight this gave, or seemed to give, into the real nature of society. His life had been centred on an idea of common improvement. The strike had raised this to an extraordinary practical vividness. Then, suddenly, a dif­ferent reality had closed in. The brave show was displaced, in an hour, by a grey, solid world of power and compromise. It was not only that the compromise angered him: not only that he was sickened by the collapse into mutual blame. It was that suddenly the world of power and compromise seemed real, the world of hope and ideas no more than a gloss, a mark in the margin. He had lived on his ideas of the future, while these had seemed in any way probable, and they had seemed probable until now. And a man could bear to lose, but the sudden conviction that there was nothing to win – that the talk of winning was no more than talk, and collapsed when the real world asserted itself – this, deeply, was a loss of his bearings, a change in the whole structure of his life. The change was slow to clarify, in all its implications, but the restlessness was there from the disillusion of the last days of the strike. Left virtually alone, in this close pre­occupied valley, he could feel the hardening. You could talk about creating the future, but in practice, look, people ran for shelter, manoeuvred 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.”