Peter Fleming - The Worst Is Yet to Come : A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide

THE WORST IS YET TO COME:
A POST-CAPITALIST SURVIVAL GUIDE

THE WORST IS YET TO COME: A POST-CAPITALIST SURVIVAL GUIDE

PETER FLEMING

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CIRCLING THE DRAIN

Twenty or so people were waiting outside a grey little apartment. London was cold tonight. It was a rental viewing and the agents were late. Even so, given the shortage of accommodation in the city nobody was going anywhere. Including myself. Each of us needed somewhere to live. And fast.

A black BMW pulled up and two suited men stepped out. Mmmm. Men? Both looked about eighteen, more like boys. The British rental market is deregulated and anything goes, so this wasnt surprising.

Hi guys, the two agents beamed, unlocking the front door as the throng clambered to get out of the cold.

As I entered my worst fears were confirmed. A complete shithole but one that would still suck up nearly half my monthly salary.

I asked one of the boys if the apartment had central heating. Have no idea, the youngster replied. He was darting from room to room, seemingly without purpose, high on some fashionable amphetamine no doubt.

The other bug-eyed youth demanded to see everyones passports. He started to photograph them on his phone. The governments new Hostile Environment policy concerning illegal immigration meant rental firms had to check everyones papers.

I pulled out my New Zealand passport and bug-boy froze. You better have a valid visa buddy, he hyperventilated. I did as it happened, which he scrutinised with suspicion. Bit funny looking, isnt it? he commented. New Zealand passports have a black jacket.

I continued to wander through this glorified cave.

In the bathroom it hadnt been cleaned since the previous occupants had left, in a hurry apparently I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The person before me was pale and exhausted. My eyes darkened as I surveyed the damage.

The suited boys were still bullshitting next door. I looked down at my hands. They were tight white balls. Here I was, a forty-four-year-old man, betoken to those two coked-up little shits, begging for an apartment that wouldnt look out of place in Midnight Cowboy. Jesus, was I a contemporary manifestation of Ratso Rizzo?

When I arrived in England in 2003, it was so much easier to take the brutality. Conditions were rough back then too, of course. The rent was outlandish and the city resembled a rubbish tip as today; but Londons possible overthrow was a unique part of its internal narrative, a radical vitality that reached its darkest corners, breathing life into its wasted infrastructure. The dialectic was in full swing, with cracks of hope opening from nowhere as the city unremittingly turned.

Today the atmosphere was different.

A decade of austerity had drained London of money and existential colour. A new ethno-nationalism was in the air, pitting neighbourhood against neighbourhood, with kid-like bureaucrats subbing as border guards.

The mood reflected a more basic change in the system. An awful balkanisation had crept across the Western world. Espionage was now a legitimate method for managing the populace and governments loved it. The dialectic proceeded only on its bad-side. London typified that lopsidedness, becoming uninhabitable as the fog descended. And yet its citizens endured like some Beckettian parable.

The grubby sinkhole was black as night and dominated the bathroom. Looking up, I noticed a Power Shower.

My god, I whispered.

Id never seen one of these before arriving in the UK. Now I hated them. They consisted of a modular closet (making them cheaper to install), with plastic buttons (COLD-MEDIUM-HOT) and water pressure that was no stronger than a small childs piddle.

I thought about ripping it off the wall. But the wiring and piping would have made this a challenge. What about scratching the plastic control-unit instead, I asked myself, before realising how pathetic I was.

That awful apartment told me something.

Neoliberal capitalism had probably run its course, spawning progeny it could no longer protect itself from. The constellation of possibilities that once flourished in cities like London had vanished. There were no antibodies left. Capitalism was undoing itself at nearly every turn. A kind of neo-Feudalism was on the march. Perhaps we were witnessing the birth of post-capitalism after all, not a clean and better alternative to the system, but (rather paradoxically) a much worse version of it, one that will make the Trump Years look like a tiptoe through the tulips.

**********

Living in Los Angeles, London, or any other large, aggressive city, you have to put up with a lot of crap. Your physiology adapts to the unadaptable and you start to change. The angry people. The smog. The cost of living. It is only after getting away for a few months that you begin to see the anthropological absurdity of it.

The work ethic, for instance.

So much incessant activity. People labouring as if they were about to be shot on the spot if they stopped. Neoliberalisms mandatory individualism shrinks collective experience and the communal solicitude it engenders, keeping us hurried, alone and always on edge.

Analysts suggest the new economy blurs the boundary between work and personal life. With the help of smartphones, you can never turn off.

But thats not quite how I saw it.

A suicidal work ethic needs an external domain (e.g., the home, family life, friends, etc.), untouched by the formal workplace in order to absorb its shocks. A lot of unpaid labour has to occur to shore up the official workplace. The separation is attractive to capitalism because the boss can work you into the ground and have someone else deal with the aftermath. Thats why the crisis of work is also a crisis of the household.

As overwork transforms the home into a living nightmare (bickering about bills, unhappy children, Sky News), many react by escaping into work, embracing the very thing that caused the trouble to start with. The vicious cycle escalates, of course. It can go on like that for years. Now life merely consists of passing between Hell One (the home) and Hell Two (the workplace) and not much more.

My Hell One turned out to be in Stoke Newington, an overpriced slum in North-East London. A spate of random acid attacks and murders had made this an interesting place to live. The areas youths had been abandoned by civilisation and roamed the streets looking for trouble. Ever see an eleven-year-old drinking a can of Stella Artois, cursing like a trooper? Like most large cities tethered to the sinking ship of late capitalism, London hates its children. So they hate it back.

The texture of the city has been ravaged by money. Whether hoarded by rich bankers or desperately sought by everyone else as wages stagnate, the British establishment had successfully installed money as our new idol, a sacred object to be feared, coveted and respected.

Consequently, nothing got done if a financial incentive wasnt involved. But thats not the only way money makes people mean. Social psychologists have shown how just being exposed to cash can erode your civic goodwill.

In one experiment individuals are randomly divided into two groups. The first is asked to use their left hand to count small pieces of paper. There is no incentive. Its a study of hand-eye coordination theyre told. The second group is asked to do the same, only this time with real cash. Again, incentives play no role. After finishing the experiment, the participants file out of the room and encounter a woman in distress (staged by the experimenters). She is struggling with an armful of files, which spill to the floor.