I’m sending another email this month to share the following recently released essay which was written for my friends in the band Bad Breeding. They worked with the Aleph Press and Sentiero Futuro to create a screen-printed A1 poster featuring it and other writing from Alex Birch. There are a couple of the limited print run still available here and all proceeds go to People for People Stevenage. If you enjoy reading the essay please consider sharing No Dead Time with a friend or donating to PFP via their Patreon here.
“He told MPs it was "highly likely" some people now being infected in the UK have no connection to overseas cases.” - BBC News, 5th of March 2020
I cracked my skull open on a concrete playground when I was 12. The sound more than the pain has stuck with me - meat on an unforgiving surface, the uncanniness of skin producing that sound. The way the world stopped when it did put me in mind of that slip; heavy, sickening and concussive. I kept hearing the sound in my head, unbidden, inescapable throughout late February and early March and I had no idea why.
The time shortly before the stop, before the thud, though, was quiet in a way that I’m not sure we will be able to believe in years to come. We will doubt our memories of how prosaic those days and weeks were. Staid select committee testimony that effectively announced the end of an economic system as we understood it and an attendant swathe of societal agony beyond the scope of our collective imagination.
We celebrated my mum’s birthday shortly before the lockdown was imposed in the repressed but certain knowledge that it was coming. There was so much joy in the time we spent together but I also remember a slightly fevered, skittish energy that could well have been an apt reflection of the news but that could also now be a conveniently retconned figment of my imagination.
In the early part of the surreality that followed (the interminable press conferences, the flags, the all-channel broadcasts, the nationwide text messages, the fear)I was, barring a tense two-week period where it wasn’t entirely clear that the charity I work for would be there beyond the end of the month, largely insulated from the worst of what was happening; the instantaneous job losses, the housing precarity staved off only by temporary and weak government measures, the existing medical conditions turned from manageable parts of life to possible death sentences.
Either through survivor’s guilt or some kind of emotional psychosis I was convinced I could feel it; the dread in the air, the transmuting of suffering into a pressure that pounded in my skull. The longevity of it all seemed untenable. A detached media class wittered on about catching up on their reading list or baking bread. Old people were locked in their houses, staring like animals at grandchildren through windowpanes - taking part in a necessary national sacrifice that of course didn’t apply to everyone.
During the third month I started hearing a hum that I thought was coming from the walls of my flat. I went down hundreds of internet rabbit holes searching for the cause; faulty fridges, tinnitus, a strange sound called, ominously and rendered as a proper-noun like the name of a river, “The Hum” that had been reported by people from Basildon to Buenos Aires. The easiest explanation is the most likely - that it was in my head, a stress-induced phantom that prevented me sleeping for about a week.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the suffering and I felt pathetic in the face of my survivor’s guilt. But it was constantly there. It wasn’t the images of disease-tinged dystopia that I couldn’t get out of my head. There were images of people being treated in car parks in Bergamo on the news, but not in my skull. What I couldn’t stop thinking about instead were all of the possibilities for fulfilment snuffed out by the virus, the ghosts of futures never realised, those foreclosed upon by disease.
I entered a rigid holding pattern. Fitful sleep, plan the trip to the supermarket, queue and rush around as though the virus was everywhere, emails, Zoom meetings, over and over and over. Bouts of syrupy, horrendous lethargy where I felt as heavy as stone were intermingled with a three-week period of, retrospectively unsustainable, intense and damaging routines of almost furious exercise and addicted self-discipline.
All to stop contending with the things I had lost that were never realised, grief for opportunities, experiences and security that were unattainable shadows of the future. I thought of them multiplied for everyone, a bespoke haunting for every individual and draped across society as a whole.
The feeling hung around despite a few hesitant trips to sit on picnic benches outside pubs and sweaty, masked train journeys to see family, bolted like an anxious breakfast on sleepy weekend mornings.
The second lockdown hit even harder. A depressive low on a national scale.
Look closely enough and you can see the painful, mournful echoes of the security that could have been obtained, the precariousness that has instead been inflicted and the hesitance to demand better in the face of economic and general uncertainty that will dominate the coming years.
Thousands starved over Christmas and will do throughout the New Year. Food banks will continue their brisk business.
I can only imagine the number of young or vulnerable people that will bite their lip when a cunt boss abuses them or will think twice before demanding compensation for unpaid overtime. The fear of getting consigned to the jobless millions will be too great. Photo negatives of possible futures have been erased and a belittling present has been transposed onto our reality where once again the worker will take the kick in teeth, the concrete to the forehead.
Things were hard enough as they were. Dignity was in short supply everywhere from urban centres (where children live in dangerously overcrowded and poorly maintained flats if they are lucky and dismal, ever-changing hotels if they are not) to rural towns (where the only work for miles around might be in a delivery warehouse where effort is quantified by the minute and the relentless drumbeat of productivity never stops).
And it will get harder. The flow of capital required in a consumer and services based economy is not safe or plausible under any framework that values human life, let alone during pandemic conditions which look set to continue unabated for months to come. We have already seen ludicrous demands from the government to artificially keep elements of that economy afloat as they plead with people to return to their offices so that the attendant lunchtime and evening economies in town and city centres do not crumble. The calculus we are being asked to accept, as young people, is clear - get on a crowded train, risk catching a virus you could unknowingly transmit to your parents so that feckless, belligerent employers don’t lose any shareholder value.
Stark examples such as these highlight the desperate contradictions of the economic system we live under. A global pandemic was never utterly inevitable but always distinctly possible - epidemiologists had warned of it for years, the government ranked it as the the most harmful thing that could happen on a macro level to British society in their national risk register and there was even a Hollywood film made by Steven Soderbergh in 2011 that predicted with eerie prescience what a virus like COVID-19 could do to societies the world over. This didn’t come entirely out of the blue. But for all the planning and the Exercise Cygnus and books and scientific papers and dire warnings there has only been a pathetically weak response.
This is not because there wasn’t enough time or the people working on the response aren’t creative enough (although they are in almost all cases, especially in the UK, irredeemably thick people elevated to positions of power by the fortune of their class) or they did not have adequate legislative or fiscal resources to combat the problem. The response has been weak because the system by definition cannot and does not want to respond. To do so would be to undermine the basic, and false, tenets of neoliberal dogma on which all of the gross inequities in our society rest; that your misfortune is your fault, that the strong prosper over the weak and that there is nothing the government can or should do about it.
We are watching in real time the ideological and moral bankruptcy of late capitalism as currently constituted, even in the more moderate social democracies of Central Europe and Scandinavia, and the clear sense that it has no answer to the basic problem of how it can continue to function in the circumstances we find ourselves in. None.
I keep running into the logical brick wall that is implicit in everything that has happened since COVID-19 hit and the complete absence of any discussion of what should change now it has. Two things are true. One: our economic systems are profoundly and mortally affected by pandemics in a way that causes substantial harm to the most vulnerable in society and intense misery worldwide. Two: pandemics can and will happen.
How then can we blithely allow those economic systems to remain in place, and to become so deeply entrenched, when, as acutely evidenced since the pandemic began, said economic system literally cannot and does not work in scenarios and under stressors that could reasonably occur and affect that system at any time. To put it differently; if your car blew up every time it hit a pothole, even if that might only happen on one in every one hundred journeys, would you ever go for a drive?
Capitalist realism is so entrenched that these mad, (hopefully) once in a lifetime circumstances have not really prompted a concerted and serious conversation about fundamentally altering the cruel and capricious economic system we live under - a system that has hoarded wealth for older generations so that generations of young people now effectively have no stake. That should really be a basic requirement if we are to move forward.
But if the absence of that difficult but necessary conversation is, depressingly, understandable given the vested interests that require the world we live in to stay exactly the same, the tepid response to the virus politically is neither understandable or excusable.
Our government instituted the absolute bare minimum required when the economy stopped for three months and then patted themselves on the back for their non-existent radicalism. The furlough scheme was not good enough; open to abuse by unscrupulous bosses (who made their employees keep working even when they were being paid by the government not to), cowardly in its refusal to make companies top up their workers’ pay and curtailed too soon. It was then grudgingly reanimated when the inevitable second wave and second lockdown came. It didn’t take Nostradamus level powers to see that it was required. Even in Germany their centre-right government had the furlough equivalent pencilled in for months beyond even our extended period to prevent job losses.
Self-employed people were, and are, left to rot by a policy on paying their wages that left millions to slip through the cracks. Low-paid workers are being provided with a derisory sum if they are required to stay at home and self-isolate. The weakness and indecisiveness they have displayed on matters relating to working people is in contrast to the steps they have taken to preserve the assets and ambitions of the upper and middle classes.
The stamp duty cut for houses is the most ludicrous example. It artificially stimulates an already pumped-up housing market and preserves capital for those already fortunate enough to have substantial assets - and long-term assets at that. So what if house prices, already at record all time highs, drop slightly? Who cares if the prosperity of the buy-to-let landlord is affected? Those are the risks of owning property if you are fortunate enough to do so (and fortune, not hard work or ability, is the main determinant now of an individual’s ability to acquire and maintain assets in this pale crony-orientated and rigged system).
Assets will recover over time. Any penny spent on projects to maintain the asset value of the professional and managerial class are a waste of money and show the warped priorities of a government, and ruling class of people, completely detached from the hardship experienced by millions of their constituents. The money should be spent supporting the vulnerable not cushioning the impact of the virus on the already well off. But it seems the government has quickly forgotten how integral the labour of key workers was to keeping the skeleton economy ticking during the lockdowns - saccharine, empty gestures are much easier to instigate than legislation that would provide them with dignity and security in the face of anxiety and disease.
It could be said that these decisions are strong political and psychological signals to a battered populace; it’s business as usual. The government’s choices suggest that the assumptions and foundations on which our system and way of life is based will continue to be left entirely unexamined even in the face of the unthinkable event we are living through. The message is clear - change is not possible. Shut up and get on with it.
Though it can sometimes feel impossible these assertions must be challenged. A new future is possible. The old possible futures that we could see in front of us have been extinguished - they might have been somewhat better than the nightmarish scenarios now facing millions but they were ultimately flawed by the same deep and unjust logic that governs the world that we live in. The futures we anticipated, though comforting in their familiarity and containing things that we as working people had supposedly sought for a long time, (a stable but underpaid and undignified job, an education with an accompanying crippling debt, starting a family only under incredible economic duress) were never good enough. They were just what we were allowed to imagine.
The only conceivably positive thing about the situation we find ourselves in is that whilst those possibilities are gone, and whilst substantially worse ones are currently in the offing, there is also a third, and now more urgently required, possibility. That of an entirely changed and new future. One based on community, dignity and the power of the working class. Solidarity building must be undertaken wherever possible, on the basis of class and shared economic experience. We can use the unprecedented nature of COVID-19 to show not that everything should stay the same but that anything can happen and change.
There is the chance to create a new future, to exorcise the ghosts that dogged the world as it was in the before time. Although so many possible futures have been snuffed out there is only limited time to grieve their passing; the next step is to fight for and to author a new future free from the ghosts of our past.
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