Literally Nothing: Sick in the Heart of Working-Class Life

This piece appears in print in Salvage 13: Give Dust a Tongue. Issue 13 is available to buy individually here. Our poetry, fiction and art remains exclusive to the print edition, and our subscribers have exclusive access to some online content, including all audio content. New subscriptions can be taken out here, and start with the next issue. Or you can support our work with a digital subscription, and get instant access to all published issues, including the latest issue.

I.
Start with the unspeakable. There is, as Simon Charlesworth puts it in his phenomenology of working-class experience, a ‘vulnerability-bound inarticulateness’ in class life. Andrew Sayer, writing on the moral significance of class, describes a mute, ‘low-level shame’, just below the threshold of articulacy. Diane Reay, in her study of working-class schoolgirls, finds a dread of amounting – in the words of one student – to ‘literally nothing’. Working-class women, Beverley Skeggs finds, often reject the identification with class, fearing that it labels them as vulgar, and socially unacceptable. In their studies of class identification, Michael Savage and his colleagues at the London School of Economics found persistent patterns of evasion, of an unwillingness to identify with a class – most strongly among those who are most disempowered. But the middle class, too, is wary, liable to qualify class identifications with stories of personal overcoming, effort, and upward mobility.

It is not that people are unaware of the gigantic inequalities that determine life, but that the language of class often doesn’t hit home, viscerally, as an explanation. Adam Ashforth, in his study of witchcraft in post-apartheid South Africa, describes a ‘structure of plausibility’ within which the sleights and difficulties of life might be experienced as a ‘spiritual injustice’ inflicted by envious, wicked others in the community. And what it means when class is a less structurally plausible explanation than spiritual predation, when patient class hate is less resonant than the reactive emotions borne of helplessness – the cosmopolitan elites, the immigrants, the bossy do-gooders, the selfish unions, the Muslims, the trans women, they’re the ones that are doing this to me – is that the institutions of class consciousness have withered to a few fine, pale stems. 

In his essay, ‘Old Gods, New Enigmas: Notes on Revolutionary Agency’, Mike Davis describes the complex processes of class formation in the fin-de-siècle socialist movement: the mass literature, from L’Humanité, Avanti!, New York Call, Wahre Jakob, and El Socialista to Pravda. The Workers’ Palaces, Mechanics Institutes, reading rooms, libraries and public lecture halls. The sports clubs, the institutions of self-help, the effortful civilising process aimed at producing workers who were capable of self-government, thus of freedom. As unattractively puritanical as all this frequently was, as unrealistic was its tendency to calibrate personal conduct in relation to the historical criteria of the class struggle, it sought to create workers who were fit, confident, knowledgeable, dignified, capable of long, fruitful lives, and equal to the intimidation, violence and setbacks of prolonged struggle to achieve self-rule. And, being founded on a ‘scientific’ socialism, a Marxist method that analysed the power of capitalist imperatives – the power of violent abstractions to run people’s lives – it undercut personalised resentment, the allure of witchcraft.

II.
What we are left with, in the absence of this, is class shame. But it cannot be acknowledged as such, because we’re ashamed of being ashamed. One form of repression is to detach thought from the affect it produces. So, you have the thought, but dismiss it. And the feeling, the mute sense of shame, lingers. You mitigate your existence around class superiors with exaggerated, apologetic niceness. You come over uneasy, with a prickly hot sweat, in a ‘fancy’ shop. You assume it’s a personal inadequacy because it’s felt as a personal inadequacy. You try to move on, be optimistic, find hope. But, says Charlesworth, the future is inaccessible to those under forty. He was writing in 2000, over two decades ago. ‘The world they inhabit’, he finds, ‘is fractured, no longer supported by a steady stream of habitual associations, and their personal, affective world is pre-constituted as chaotic: absurd.’ Hope is found, not in the fabric of an ever-more-precarious life-building, but in commodity form. From self-help to palingenetic nationalism.

Class life is work, and work doesn’t start or stop at the workplace. Work is the locus of life-building – what we call our dreams – and of the shattering existential experiences of class.

Allow me to represent, to you, myself at the age of twenty five. I had graduated, at that stage, from zero hours call-centre work to a regular, nine-to-five-thirty job, in a market research office. The work itself, though relentlessly tedious, wasn’t the exhausting thing. Far worse were prolonged periods of having nothing to do, and having to invent tasks to avoid being assigned something even more demeaning and hateful. Then worse still, the office politics. The colleagues you can’t stand or who you like but can’t stand you. The junior managers who become a pain in the arse because you haven’t flattered them, or have tried too hard, or in some way gave the impression of being a smartarse, or uppity, or of thinking you’re too good for the job. The email exchanges with other departments, who want to blame you for their problems, or get you to do their work, or offload their misery, in the spirit of existential revenge. The productivity meetings with department heads or managers where, if you’re as sophisticated and worldly as I was – slightly less so than Babbitt of Zenith, USA – you’re amazed to find that it’s the bosses who seemed most down to earth and human who single you out for particular humiliation over the most trivial of complaints. Those same managers, to your further astonishment, flirt with you in after-work socials.

The desolating rituals of ‘fun’: cake Tuesday, pub Wednesday, dress-down Friday, because Friday is funday – capitalism, having monopolised the best of the day, the glorious daylight hours, insists that you have fun. The dead zone of zombie labour, a separate time-stream, a slow, agonising current that registers change only by the occasional awareness that it’s getting darker outside, and the best of the day is slipping away. The bleeding of the dead zone into free time. ‘Flexibility’, as though your willingness to do extra work is a fun fact about your personality. The commute in crowded trains and buses, the time it takes to unwind, to let go of whatever it was that had you crying in the toilet. The strange guilt you feel when you’re ill and take a day off. And no one to stick up for you. Strikes are about as fashionable as shoulder pads. When you naively ask if there’s a union they stiffly reply: ‘we have no interest in a union’. They could hardly be more provoked if you gave them a stiff finger up the Celtic end.

The worst is the dawning interminability of it: it will never stop. It will only pause for holidays. It’s what you have been destined for by an accident of birth, a chance swerve of the atom. And there’s nothing to build with. The money is better than minimum wage, but not enough to rent more than a single room in a London house. Where is all this going anyway: what was the dream? And though you wore a suit the first week at work, you’re now constantly late, resisting passively. A depression you barely perceive, let alone understand, is consoled with McDonald’s breakfast food in the morning and booze at night. You’re growing blotchy-skinned, pudgy and unfit, and you reek of unhappiness.

Every now and then, something reminds you of how little the world thinks of you, or how little you secretly think of yourself. Your bank abruptly cancels your overdraft, just a day before your money was coming in. They claim they’ve tried to contact you. They take it all. Your student loans company takes a payment. They claim they sent you the deferment forms. They take a third of your disposable income for the month. Or a bill comes that you weren’t expecting. And it’s worse because you should have known. It’s all your own stupid fault. Now you have nothing to play with, nothing to have fun with, for the rest of the month. And when you try to negotiate with the bank, or the student loans company, they scold you. Their instant class evaluations, which are moral evaluations, permit them to humiliate you. Or, what if you’re wrong? The problem with injustice is that you develop a highly sensitised apparatus for picking up on sleights, an unconscious apparatus that registers in others your own obscure feelings about yourself and your body.

And you should manage your money better. But money can be fleeting. Save, they say. For what? If you saved your whole life, you might get a mortgage for a dump in Plumstead, no offence. Defer gratification, they say. But you’ve been doing that the whole month until pay day; your whole life is an exercise in perpetually deferred gratification. There’s nothing coming, except more work, more debt, and more of those fight-or-flight shocks. There is no future. You may as well enjoy it now.

Besides. You’re a young working-class man. You have no idea how to take care of yourself. You wear shit, cheap shit that falls apart in a couple of months and needs to be replaced with more cheap shit. You don’t understand fashion and its obscure sexual charisma, and you resent those who do, and anyway it’s too expensive. You eat shit, because you don’t know how to cook. You live in shit, because tidying a small rented room hardly seems worth the effort.

You eat shit, you wear shit, you live in shit, you’re drinking your body to shit, you’re treated like shit: you are shit.

Failure in the neoliberal culture, whose axioms of competition in conditions of optimal stupidity are ‘they’re all out to get me’ and ‘nothing makes sense’, is toxic. And, in conditions in which the means of life are increasingly black-boxed to increase dependency and suggestibility, we are increasingly deprived of even a fine margin of control over whether we succeed or fail. Hence the pervasive fear of ‘adulting’ among Millennials and Generation Z, laughed at in the newspapers as evidence of snowflake fragility, but actually evidence of disempowerment and the resulting dysphoria and apathy. Hence ‘blackpilling’, that whirlpool of reactive emotions that culminates in a desire for suicide-revenge on the world.

III.
This is one story of one point in one working life, characterised by absurdity, cluelessness, disorientation, in which the only predictability is more work. I mean to show something like the density of experience in which, as I say, work doesn’t start or stop at the workplace.

Not simply because of our free after-hours labour, but because of the work, in the Freudian sense, that it has us doing. The work on our instinctual excitations, to use an antiquated idiom, which must be suitably sublimated and organised around the working day and keeping things going interminably. The belabouring of the self which often appears as a decoy, as compassionate guidance, tough love, self-help. When Freud wrote on Civilization and Its Discontents – that is, on the burdens that civilization imposed on drive-satisfactions – he didn’t really have much to say about work. But it is probably the single major source of mental distress in the world today.

And when we talk of ‘workplace stress’, we are talking in part of psychosocial stress.

One of the Barthesian mythologies of workplace stress is that it particularly afflicts busy executives. The imagery: man in expensive suit, at an office desk, in front of a PC, pinching his nose, lowering his face into his hands, wiping his brow; doing anything with his hands but working; so unproductive. The Whitehall Studies showed us the exact opposite. The lower in the chain of authority you are, the less assertive you are, the less you take control of conversations, the less clearly you articulate, the higher your rate of stress, cardiovascular disease and mortality. The fight-or-flight responses triggered by petty injustices are cumulatively deadly, weakening your immune system, enlarging your adrenal gland, cutting your life expectancy.

Then there is the damage done by self-medicating for those class injuries, barely understood as such, often perceived more as a fatal form of moral non-recognition, which result in the famous ‘deaths of despair’. You are not just stressed, anxious, suffocating, drowning, losing your hair, losing or gaining weight, suffering with heartburn, unable to orient yourself, unaware of where to put your feet: you are an orphan of history. And that’s why mental illness is being politicised far more efficaciously by the Right, even as it’s depoliticised by McMindfulness, CBT and other assorted panaceas.

The resentment bred by class experience can be dangerous. It can be a demoralising, self-destructive emotion. It has been said that resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other chap to die. As Max Scheler wrote in Ressentiment, this sort of resentment doesn’t seek restitution precisely because it is enthralled by its powerlessness, and the ‘growing pleasure afforded by invective and negation’. It can also lead to explosions of violence, what Lacanians would call a ‘passage to the act’. The ‘lone wolf’ contagion began, you might recall, with a spate of workplace shootings: it was called ‘going postal’. The most miserably oppressed members of the workforce got a gun and went on the rampage, often singling out managers responsible for their petty humiliations. They received, from surviving co-workers, a surprising amount of sympathy.

It can also be profoundly reactionary. 

Think of the ‘shopkeepers’ talk’ described by Karen Wells and Sophie Watson, the idle pleasure taken in berating asylum seekers, minorities and big corporations, the consolation of moaning without solution. Think of the resentment for ‘metropolitan elites’ and the middle classes in far off London. Thomas Gorman’s fieldwork on class resentment mainly finds working-class resentment directed at members of the middle class, by whom they feel patronised or belittled, or at an unfair disadvantage. Because while the mechanisms of class injury are abstract, and the ruling class remote from daily life, the middle class is experienced as a super-visory professional or managerial layer wielding authority.

This tendency to experience working class resentment through the more proximal, felt relationship with middle-class professionals might help explain why the rich can be so resented, as a recent analysis of class attitudes by Spencer Piston of Boston University suggests they are, yet reactionaries find it laughably easy to instead stimulate resentment against liberal professionals and left-wing students aspiring to be liberal professionals as if they were ‘the metropolitan elite’.

Yet, we can’t bypass these emotions, since they are engendered by the existential structures of life, by powers rendered obscure and unaccountable by their remoteness and abstraction, by worlds rendered incomprehensible to the point of absurdity. The strategic question is how to selectively provoke resentment, bring it to consciousness, or rather bring shame to consciousness and transform it into resentment, and educate it in the direction of a more sober, slow-burning, impersonal class hate; one that is patient, rigorous, humane, pluralist, anti-Manichaean and constructive. I think, on a modest scale, of how Bernie Sanders campaigns in the United States, linking resentment toward billionaires and the rich with demands like a fifteen dollar minimum wage, and contrast it ruefully with the priestly pieties of ‘the politics of kindness’ and ‘they go low, we go high’.

Not that kindness and the high road are undesirable, not that this hasn’t been a desideratum of the socialist movement since its inception, and not that we could or should imitate the Right’s relentless nihilistic war on decency and truth. But we must start with the dark materials, the labour of the negative, if we are to get there.

Richard Seymour is a writer and a founding editor of Salvage. He is the author of The Disenchanted Earth (Indigo Press, 2022), The Twittering Machine (Indigo Press, 2019) and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016), among other books. He is one of the co-authors of The Tragedy of the Worker (Verso/Salvage Editions, 2021). His writing can be found in the Guardian, the New York Times, the New Statesman and his own Patreon.