Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. (1)

It is autumn now in the midwest, the season that Tom Robbins described in Still Life With Woodpecker as the “springtime of death.” Specifically, it is October, and while others may disagree with me, I maintain that this is the month that makes the other eleven remotely worthwhile (arguable, really; we had a ninety-degree day near the start of it, so I’m looking at the weather in other parts of the world and thinking.)

Autumn is the season of the transient and changeable. A time to think about change. Oftentimes, however, when we think about change, we get trapped in thinking about the initial state ending or the new state beginning, and ignoring the transitional period between. I’ve been doing my best to focus on this in-between period and give it the appropriate degree of thought.

What I have come to understand is that transience – that is, the state of being transient – is a problem. For the past decade or so, I have been transient to one degree or another. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, performing as I do a certain middle-class identity in my dress, speech, and profession, but that is what I am. This is what it means to be part of the so-called “precariat” (as I describe myself here.)

Blame it on the ascendant popularity of the *HGTV* network and similar.

Consider: apartment residents are not given full political representation because, first and foremost, it is thought that they only temporarily present. Renters are assumed to be passing through – which is laughable, because a renter might settle into one location for ten years if the conditions are right, while the same conditions that force them out might bring a cadre of house-flippers into a neighborhood, each of them the owner of the property upon which they work and have no intention of remaining in.

Likewise, Adjuncts – so-called “contingent faculty” – are thought to be, at best, a temporary measure, to fill in a gap between the ability of full-time or tenure-track faculty to teach and the demands of an ever-growing student body. Never mind that – according to the America n Assoc iation of University Professors – more than half of instructors are part time adjuncts: if we were temporary or passing through then we would be unable to meet the demands of the profession.

It’s not even just people in my position: Edgar, my partner who writes book reviews often and well, published a fairly well-received article in Eidolon and was subsequently asked by a coworker “so what do you really want to do with your life?” Understand, dear readers, that Edgar is a full-time worker at a world-class art museum and greatly enjoys their work.

It’s important to keep in mind that these transient jobs, by and large, are not bullshit jobs — they tend to be jobs in the other category.

There is an assumption, especially regarding people like us – working low-status but necessary jobs, living in rented housing – that we are just passing through on our way to somewhere else. Never mind that I would gladly sign a lifetime contract at my job if I was offered appropriate pay and benefits, or that I might be happy with a more permanent living situation if I could find and afford one.

In the realm of consumer choice – the only realm in which people are allowed to have any degree of expression – transience is brutally enforced. The various tchotchkes, widgets, gadgets, and kipple that form the background of our lives are endlessly disposable, and must be replaced constantly: our clothes, our phones, our computers, our cars (talk to anyone leasing a car if you don’t believe me; they get the hard sell whenever the lease is nearly up.) Our things, which are always-already a reflection of who we are, must be constantly replaced, even though there’s no actual difference between one year’s models and the next.

There is an assumption, when we speak to others that we are not in a situation demanding transience of us, but that we are transient people, even though I strongly doubt that anyone would say such a thing to our face.

This isn’t simply our situation, it is assumed to be a desired situation, especially among those of our age group (2), consider how many think pieces have some variation on “Millennials want flexibility” stated somewhere in them (oh, he re a r e a fe w.) Another word for flexibility is transience. Another term for it is lack of security. Also, note how many of those think pieces say that flexibility is prized over salary – this is simply corporate media agencies finding a way to tell business owners what they want to hear: that workers don’t want to be paid. Which is the line being taken in this recent article, entitled, tellingly “Stop Expecting to Get Paid for Yo ur Time”.

Neoliberalism was invented in the Chicago School, but the first neoliberal state was Agosto Pinochet’s Chile. Call the developments under Reagan and Thatcher “Neoliberalism with Anglo characteristics.”

This is fundamentally an outgrowth of neoliberalism. Now, I’m not writing a piece on neoliberalism here, but allow me to summarize a bit of commonsense and labor practice that’s wrapped up in it. During the Fordist period of Capitalism – from the interwar period through the 1970s – there emerged a certain bargain between labor and capital: workers would go to a factory in the morning, they would leave in the evening, and in between they would be bored and miserable, but they would also work to produce valuable commodities and they would even get enough pay to buy some of those commodities, raise children and own a house. This wasn’t a great deal, but it was better than the former deal, where you were immisterated much more directly and might get burned alive or shot by a Pinkerton.

This is the crucible in which modern American masculinity was cast: the father would be the breadwinner of the family. He would sacrifice himself to give his children a childhood and his wife a home. Again, it was not a great deal, and produced a lot of emotionally stunted men.

However, once this had become naturalized – about thirty years on, when the proportion of those born after the war came in – it was challenged. Workers didn’t want to be stuck in a factory all day, they wanted to be free. After all, the Keynesian promise of a shrunken work week didn’t appear: they agitated for that, but they didn’t get it.

Neoliberalism is sort of the monkey’s paw wish that grants this. No longer would workers be bound to the same work situations, they would have flexibility and easy credit. Any remaining industrial work would be shipped overseas, and any remaining industrial work would just be a relic of the past. A preserve of the old Fordist days.

As far as I’m concerned, while the neoliberal project may have begun as a twinkle in Milton Friedman’s eye back in the fifties, and they didn’t get on to raping the Southern Cone of South America until the seventies, with the coup against Allende in Chile, the Anglo-American Neoliberal period didn’t get started until the joint leadership of Reagan and Thatcher – and while the latter is justly hated in her home country, Americans love Ronald Reagan. Specifically, I would point to August 5, 1981 for the mask to come off of it in America, when the Air Traffic Controller strike ended with nearly twelve thousand workers being fired out of hand.

Without organized labor to functionally push back against capital – and, fundamentally, the agitation of the 1970s was largely about dissatisfaction with the entente that had been reached between the leadership of organized labor and capital – there was no stopping the emergence of anti-labor legislation or the uncoupling of compensation from productivity (see this graph. Note where the lines diverge.)

This mindset is Capitalist Realism at its finest; at its briefest, just imagine the statement that the sitting president made in his campaign that “nothing will fundamentally change.”

Fordism was identified by Antonio Gramsci in 19 34, and it can be dated to much earlier, but what I’m calling the “Fordist Period” properly lasts from the New Deal until the Reagan Presidency. 1933 to 1981: a full forty-eight years. Properly speaking, the era of financialized capital should have ended in 2008 with the housing crisis, only twenty-seven years. Unfortunately, those in power are far too invested in the current situation, and we all know that Americans never learn from history, largely because we refuse to learn it. Now we’re forty years on from Reagan firing the air traffic controllers and we can’t envision anything changing ( 3).

This Post-Fordist period that we find ourselves in is the era of Neoliberalism, the era described by Naomi Klein in the Pages of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. In the former, she described how American corporations largely divested themselves of their material infrastructure, farming the actual productive work that they did off to firms abroad. Fundamentally, they all become advertising organs for international capital: Nike, after all, has never made a shoe. What this translates to is seen in the latter, in which her description of the problem with the “Reconstruction” after the Iraq War. That is to say, the contractors who were meant to rebuild the country were almost completely Americans – meaning that all of the benefits of the economic activity were siphoned off into the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., taking the wrecked shell of Iraq and capitaliforming it, but leaving the native Iraqis outcast and starving in the middle of a corrupt system.

The Post-Fordist model is to shrink the boundaries of who counts in the market, and render everyone else as an externality. In the reconstruction of Iraq, economic activity was confined to the contractors rebuilding the country, cutting out the native Iraqis. This, obviously, failed to actually improve things, a fact that apparently surprised the occupying forces. Exactly parallel to this is the current recovery from the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic: the service industry was decimated by the pandemic (line cooks experiencing a staggering 60% increase in mor tality, for example,) and there is a cultural resistance to using sick days in that industry, even when they are available (which, it may shock you, they largely aren’t.)

First as tragedy, then as farce, then as the spasmodic jerking of a dying economic system.

The current recovery is hamstrung by the refusal of most business owners to increase wages, despite that being agreed by ex perts to be the only path for them to escape their current situation. Of course, much as with the previously-mentioned issue of “flexibility”, there is pushback on this narrative, at least on social media. There is, of course, also some evidence that the labor shortage is a my th, best exemplified by the story of the Flo rid a man who got one interview after filling out sixty applications. I can attest from personal experience (and I know that this is mere anecdote), that there are far fewer call backs to applications than one might think.

Which is fundamentally a different solution to the same problem that leads to the same dumb result: by convincing the public that “no one wants to work” and running a skeleton crew in the restaurant, you lower costs without significantly lowering revenue – after all, people still want their treats, whether it’s a venti whatever or hot french fries at midnight. They’ll wait, and they’ll blame the lazy people still collecting unemployment, despite many states having ended the extra benefits already. Meanwhile, those same workers whose unemployment has been cut are trying to reenter the work force, but the incentives are set up so that the business owners can continue scamming the public into accepting subpar service.

This is frankly the most baffling part of the whole business to me: individuals are expected to embrace transience, but nothing about the broader political situation is allowed to be transient. We are meant to be interchangeable parts that fit into the broader, inflexible system.

In various hermetic and esoteric systems of thought, this has long been recognized. Symbolized here by the Wheel of Fortune from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck.

I would venture that transience, itself is not the problem – indeed, it is unavoidable. Sometimes shirts rip, computers break, jobs end, and people die. The problem comes from the fact that it feels as if there is a quota for the amount of change which must happen in a given stretch of time and it is always forced off on to the individual.

Margaret Thatcher once said that “there is no such thing as society” and this is definitely the dominant interpretation when it comes to the matter of transience. You can hear this in the discourse around the naturalized parts of social life – whenever someone incorrectly declares that “capitalism has been around forever”, for example, or tries to claim that the political system practiced in Classical Athens is meaningfully like a contemporary democracy – these things are permanent, but we are supposed to accept contingent – flexible, disposable – work, housing, and lives.

That is because personal change produces value for the market. Whenever you change jobs, homes, or any part of the regalia of day to day life, your money – the value you generate with your work – can be extracted from you in greater share than in the slow bleed of stability. This extraction doesn’t halt the slow bleed, it may merely temporarily interrupt it (you stop paying rent when you move, though you know they’re trying to figure out how to change that,) and more money is fed into the market, and this is perceived as value-producing activity.

The ambient health of this market institution is increased by these infusions, and so – on the balance – it’s good for everyone in the extractive class.

Going by *Alaric the Goth*, you might not even notice.

Transience at the level of institutions, though, is perceived as bad: if we allowed a bank to expire, or an insurance company, or a circuit court, or a country, this is perceived as something that would be catastrophic. There are good chances, though, that if this were to happen your life would not be materially effected, not until some other institution forced you into the gap left by the absent institution.

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit proposes a very interesting theory: some – in fact many – people thrive in the shadow of disaster because everyday life is already a crisis. We are constantly forced on to shifting ground, and in the wake of fire and strife that chaos vanishes, leaving us standing amidst our friends and neighbors, able to act as we always wished that we could. Far from what the Purge movies would have you think, this means that people would begin to cooperate, to form real communities. The artificial lines between classes and races would vanish as the pressures of staving off danger take precedent.

This is, of course, a romantic view of collapse, but consider that everything you were convinced happened in New Orleans after Katrina was largely manufactured, and it was even acknowledged at the time that this was the case.

So what does this tell us about the transient nature of our existence?

Very little. Transience is, of course, an essential and unavoidable part of living in the world: the seasons pass – plants coming to flower and growing heavy with fruit, leaves growing green and turning particolored and brittle before passing; the tides rising and falling under the influence of the ever-changing moon. The important part of the world is not substance but process.

This is getting too heady. Perhaps that’s inherent in phrasing the issue as the “transient nature of our existence” – let’s rephrase. What can we say about the condition of the precariat?

In Debt, David Graeber constructs a lens for examining the long-term oscillations of economies between credit-based and specie-based economies. Up until 800 BCE, economies operated on informal credit: your neighbor gave you a pair of shoes, and then later, when he needed eggs or a knife sharpened you provided that. This is, obviously, similar to the myth of barter, but taking into account that most economic activity takes place with people you already know.

During what he calls the “Axial Age” (800 BCE – 600 CE), the use of coinage began: prices became fixed and widespread commerce became possible. However, he did not tie this to commerce but warfare: minting coins became a way of distributing plunder and turning the function of society to supporting armies (see prior discussions of chartalism.)

Following the fall of the Roman and Mauryan Empires, as well as the start of the Chinese Warring State period, things oscillated back to credit. With the emergence of later capitalist empires in the Far West (Spain and Portugal, England, France, and the Dutch,) there was a move back towards coinage (as well as slavery – Graeber traces a very interesting parallel between slavery and the use of hard currency.)

However, Graeber also points to the emergence of fiat currency as a turning point, as a kind of specie-credit hybrid. This happened in 1971, shortly before the end of the Fordist period, during a tumultuous decade that really needs deeper examination. However, I want to look at an aspect of the Elizabethan period that Graeber mentions:

As I’ve already pointed out, in the poorer neighborhoods of cities or large towns, shopkeepers would issue their own lead, leather, or wooden token money; in the sixteenth century this became something of a fad, with artisans and even poor widows producing their own currency as a way to make ends meet. Elsewhere, those frequenting the local butcher, baker, or shoemaker would simply put things on the tab. The same was true of those attending weekly markets, or selling neighbors milk or cheese or candle-wax. In a typical village, the only people likely to pay cash were passing travelers, and those considered riff-raff: paupers and ne’er-do-wells so notoriously down on their luck that no one would extend credit to them. Since everyone was involved in selling something, however just about everyone was both creditor and debtor; most family income took the form of promises from other families; everyone knew and kept count of what their neighbors owed one another; and every six months or year or so, communities would held a general public “reckoning,” cancelling debts out against each other in a great circle, with only those differences then remaining when all was done being settled by use of coin or goods.

Consider, now, the fact that most wealthy people don’t really seem to know how much everyday goods cost (I’m reminded of this old Cracked.com piece by Robert Evans, currently of Bellingcat and Cool Zone Media, who I have previously mentioned almost as often as Graeber and Fisher – look, specifically, at the third item). There is a complete unwillingness on the part of people who operate at that economic stratum to understand the minutiae of economic activity. They understand that they have more, but there’s very little conception of actual quantities: it’s sort of like the distinction between a countable number of grains of sand and a dune – at some point actual numbers stop actually mattering.

In my mind, this suggests that the wealthy operate on rules like those Elizabethan peasants: they don’t think of finite quantities, and everything just sort of balances out in the end. To them, money is just something that they have, like a particular hair or eye color, not something that they have to actively go out and collect, and this is just what life is like for them. They might see those who work for a living as being like those adolescents that dye their hair a different color every week: sure, you can, but why? To them, it seems frivolous.

Of course, what I’m getting at is that this is a step in the process of criminalizing the non-wealthy, of shaving the bottom strata of society out. Workers can live by specie, citizens – or “taxpayers”, more likely, despite the fact that they don’t pay all that much tax – live by credit, in a bizarre inversion of the Elizabethan peasant system (I am reminded, here, of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch where Eddie Murphy put on white face to see what life was like for Caucasians, only to discover that white people never paid for anything unless a black person was watching.)

However, as a byproduct of their wealth, each of these individuals is encased in a kind of faux-tomated cybernetic enhancement: a vast bureaucracy whose purpose is to extract value from their surroundings and feed it into the person at the core and support their whims. Some of them become conscious of this and will harness the wealth that they’ve collected to support charitable causes. However, at no time does it occur to them to stop their accumulation of wealth, which necessitates further charitable giving – because of course it wouldn’t: charity is another means of extraction, this time not of wealth but of gratitude and prestige.

In contrast to this situation are those who have nothing, or close to it. In all honesty, very few people occupy this position. It exists almost solely as a bogeyman – quit spending frivolously, or you’ll be starving like a dog in the street. Of course, if no one spends frivolously, as we now know, we’ll all be starving like dogs in the street, and it’s as impossible to save your way out of poverty as it is to fast your way out of starvation.

Between these two poles oscillates the precariat: temporarily stable one moment (though if it’s temporary, it’s not stable,) looking to find a quick buck the next. Living in rented housing, working multiple jobs that are wrecking their bodies, minds, or souls, if not all, and dreaming not of having the panoply of goods the wealthy have access to (despite many of them having embraced minimalism, an aesthetic that is incredible expensive to maintain,) but of simply not having debt – of being able to rest and take ownership of their time.

Turns out it wasn’t peak oil but peak soil we had to worry about.

Being in the precariat is to be ridden by debt and forced into constant activity, which leads – inevitably – to burnout. This condition can be thought of as the psychological equivalent of the topsoil dep letion that has plagued agriculture for years, and has been an area of concern since the 1970s, and is first and foremost a result of having to surrender more and more of ourselves to the apparatus of extraction – having the things that make life worth living sucked from us like oil from a well – which has taken our mental energies below some hypothetical threshold of replenishment. Largely, this is due to flexibility, which often means crunch: mandatory overtime and the like.

Just as we are destroying the physical environment, transforming it into a desert world – as the greatest empire in the history of the world must – the practices imposed on us are causing a desertification of the mind and soul. What is inside of us is coming to resemble what is outside of us: overburdened by extraction, suffering from a cascade of problems as a result.

A thing is what it does, and it really seems as if the immiseration and death of many people is the end result of this process: the infrastructure that makes our lives possible is expensive, and it’s just not possible for the state to pay for it, because the state is sclerotic and suffering from dementia, unable to do anything but offer tax breaks and inflict death.

Here’s the real secret: Generation is a proxy for social change. The precariat are those millennials who would have been middle class under the Fordist model. Unfortunately, the middle class only really exists as a legacy and for those millennials who manage to get in the right position in relation to the apparatus of extraction. We have been conditioned in the skinner box of post-Fordism to behave and think in particular ways, but there’s a weird condition for the precariat: we are neither properly present nor absent in any read of the class struggle. We’re not economically privileged (except, possibly, though family tries), but many of us have no proletarian roots.

The wealthy have decided to pull up the ladder behind them, and many of them will retreat to Alaska or New Zealand when things get really bad, abandoning us in the desert – actual or metaphorical. There is evidence that the 1972 report The Limits to Growth may have been optimistic by almost thirty years, placing its far horizon a hundred years from its publication. There are good chances that everything may turn sour in the next twenty years unless something drastic happens to change our course – and while twenty years is a long time, taking the eldest millennials up to age sixty, it is far too short a period for the amount of work we have to do.

But as Deleuze tells us in “Postscript on Socie ties of Control”: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

When our feet hit the ground, stable in that empty desert, the answer will be what it always is in such situations: to constitute a war machine and resist the definitions that are imposed on us.

Until then, it falls to us to take care of one another as best we can.

1. Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly Walk Through This April Day”, text from the Poetry Foundation.

2. Okay, I admit it, I’m back on that generation bullshit, despite what I’ve said in the past. While there may not be an essential generational character, generation is often a proxy for social change and it’s becoming abundantly clear that these cohort divisions matter a great deal.

3. If you’re unfamiliar with Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, go and look it up. This aside is too long as it stands.

Theorizing the Transient