My sense of apocalypse is skewed. Yes my ancestors were poor and forced to fight in wars they didn’t start but their whiteness afforded them invitations into robust social housing schemes for economic ‘betterment’, or got them small business loans for a grocery store and a mortgage in a rural village.
One of the reasons I study precarity is because I was fascinated by the aftermath of the financial crisis as a form of economic apocalypse for the expectations of people like me. Well maybe not me personally (personal expectations v low), but middle-class beneficiaries of Keynesianism in the UK more generally. The crash and its horrifying political aftermath - a decade of austerity, the ‘hostile environment’, a bunch more terrible shit - precipitated a decade of flailing and grasping for any firm clump of dirt to keep people from the rocks below. There on the rocks were the people that the British media and state machinery had pilloried and abused for decades: the benefit claimants, the migrants, the disabled.
What did it cost us to scramble back up to the top of the cliff? Who threw us the rope and what does it look like up there? Well, we cheapened our labour and practiced gratitude to our bosses - we were just ‘lucky to have a job’, we were ‘lucky to have a roof over our heads’, never mind the cost, so lucky to not be down there, with the suffering people (but they kind of deserved it, right?).
We’re running out of signifiers to distance ourselves from the discarded. The cards have expired. We’re really in the queue now. The last thing separating us is an owned home in an origin-family, but you’d best believe they’re coming for that too - we’ve all seen the upswing in ads for ‘equity release’, we're all aware of the price-tag on care for our elders.
They were never going to let us have our shot at party political change. Not here. Still, we piled in: 2016, 2017, 2019. All that time the beige kept snarling and fixing, trying to keep their jobs as the ‘opposition’. Shadow indeed. Now what do we have? ‘Constructive’ conversation with the most right-wing government in British history. Holding a genocidal government to account on the most important issue: when can we all get back to work and resume blaming ourselves for our own impoverishment (while keeping the plague in a healthy circulation among disposables, of course)?
It’s time to peer over the edge of the cliff. Past the small clump of safety dirt. It’s not a pretty sight, there is a lot of death. But surely now people have a sense of how little they matter to the architects of this system. And if we winch ourselves down there we will find people who for many centuries have been trying to inform us on how to survive.