Missing Days — Locust Review

The following editorial was published in Locust Review #7 and written in the late fall and winter of 2021.

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” – Soren Kierkegaard

NONE OF us need to be told what this feels like. At some point over the past two years we have all woken up asking, Dude-like, “is this a… what day is this?”

More and more the days bleed together, even weekends and holidays dilute into the morass of being “always on” or “always off.”

Employment, unemployment, work-from-home, gig-work; all come to resemble each other as our news-feeds numb us to the reality of a dying planet.

Meme from *The Acid Left*. Adam Ray Adkins

Capitalism steals time. It does this by appropriating our labor, through its attendant oppressions, in crises, wars, and disasters.

Capital steals time in prisons and schools. It steals time via police murder. It steals time by wounding our bodies and our minds, branding the former with injury, traumatizing the latter with constant stress.

These thefts are justified in ideological apologia; for murder, kidnapping, ecocide, genocide. But class struggle and the rebellion against oppression can reclaim our time and our lives.

Despite what cruel cynics might tell us, it is not an indulgence to say that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It is not immature or childish to cry for what we were raised to believe we’re owed.

Because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were owed a living and a future worthy of the word. We still are owed that future.

In absence of that future, we cringe as our days slip away. We are left standing agog and bewildered by the rapidity of our fading dreams, and the ineffable feeling that we are nothing but should be everything.

CAPITALISM HAS always stolen our time, saddled us with monotonous tasks day after day until days blur into each other.

The “empty time” identified by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and others is an apt description of this experience, because it points to how hollow our lives are made by this mode of living. If every day is the same, every moment occupying only a certain range of possibilities — and if the possibilities of “time off” are similarly limited by the need to inevitably return to the same narrow scope — can any of us say we are living a full and rewarding life?

This editorial appeared in Locust Review 7 (Winter 2022) and was written in the late fall. Social media splash image by Labani Jangi: *Exodus*.

There are other insidious ways in which our days are stolen. It is now clear that there will be no “post-COVID” world. Over the past year, they have acclimated us to the disease being woven into daily life. The losses surround us. Hundreds of thousands of dead in the US alone. Millions globally. Suck it up. Go to work.

Capitalism’s ideological apparatchiks have published data on the impact of mourning and grief on labor productivity. They do not ask what can be done to heal the wounds of pandemic trauma — let alone stop the plague — but how to maximize “creativity” in the face of constant existential crisis.

In a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the authors note previous research showed prolonged exposure to death undermined creativity. They are relieved pandemic labor has remained “creative” as it solved new problems with fewer resources.

This is the model of “lean production”— creating crises among groups of workers, reducing resources and forcing labor to exceed past production.

“The bottom line is that COVID now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life,” writes David Leonhardt in The New York Times. “And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to headlines proclaiming that COVID is defeated. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived.”

This is exterminism.

Less mercenary psychiatrists have placed a new illness in the DSM: “prolonged grief disorder” (PGD). PGD is meant to describe a situation in which the normal grieving process is interrupted. But this is not a disorder in the individual. Capitalism, by preventing an end to the plague — and therefore permanently interrupting a “normal grieving process” — is the disorder.

Who died and who is still dying? It is mostly the sick, the disabled, the elderly, working-class people, and people of color.

*Elephant in the Room* (2022). Adam Turl.

As of March, “deaths per 100,000 people by race or ethnicity” in the US were 178 for African American or Black persons, 172 for American Indian and Alaskan Natives, 154 for Hispanic or Latinx persons, 144 for Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders, and 123 for white persons.

While middle and ruling-class white people were as insulated as possible from the virus — aside from the fascists who begged for infection — this wasn’t possible for most workers (of any race).

A study of deaths in Santiago, Chile by neighborhoods — weighted by social class indicators — showed class is central to pandemic death.

One wealthy neighborhood had 22.6 weekly cases per 100,000 individuals. A poorer, working-class neighborhood had 76.4. Lockdowns were less effective in working-class neighborhoods for obvious reasons — workers have to go to work regardless of epidemiological concerns. Human mobility was reduced in wealthier neighborhoods thirty to forty percent more than in poor/working-class neighborhoods.

A study in New York City showed similar results.

Globally, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 80,000 to 180,000 health-care workers died in the first year of the pandemic.

In the US, more than 3,600 health-care workers died. This theft of life was, again, distributed unequally. Two-thirds were people of color. Lower-paid workers — nurses, nursing home workers, support staff — were more likely to die than doctors. Immigrant workers — particularly from the Philippines — were even more likely to die.

The willingness to simply toss millions of poor and working-class people into the abyss literally robs us of our days.

There is a reason the working-class flag is red.

AS MICHAEL Rosenow writes in Death and Dying in the Working Class, “estimates of industrial fatalities across the United States” during the industrial revolution “ranged between 25,000 to 80,000” workers per year.

The death rates during the earlier industrial revolution in England were even higher, as famously observed by Frederick Engels in The Condition of the Working-Class in England.

The death rates amongst enslaved Black laborers were higher still. In some of the more extractive plantation regimes the death rates were total. Slaves were simply worked to death and replaced by the newly kidnapped.

Industrialization in the US can be seen, in part, as enclosure. After the theft of most Native-American land in the west, there was a diminished escape valve to “go west” (to settle stolen land). Those without land were increasingly trapped in industrial labor.

This, combined with immigration, shifted the population from holding agricultural property (around 56 percent in 1870) toward increasingly proletarian labor. By the dawn of the 20th century, less than 20 percent of the (censused) population owned a house (let alone a farm).

Workers, regardless of where they came from, found death in America’s dark Satanic mills.

In another sense, where workers came from remained central. At different times, Irish workers, southern and eastern European workers, Chinese laborers, and, of course Black, native, and Latinx workers were given the worst and most dangerous jobs.

As “social darwinist” ideas took hold, industrialists, academics, and politicians agreed that “the poor were the least valuable members of society and candidates for elimination in the great struggle for survival.”

It was assumed that those who died in workplace calamities were destined to die because they were inferior. Because certain people were considered inferior, they were given the jobs in which they were more likely to die.

The danger of the workplace, Rosenow notes, was given a masculine gloss. Men who went into the factory and survived were “real men.”

Of course many of these backwards ideas infected the working-class.

But there were also steps toward class-consciousness and rebellion. Workers responded to the constant increase in production with a sort of proto-”work to rule.”

They tried to steal their own time back — to find a moment’s peace and mitigate the threat. “Oh, they can’t kill you with work,” one miner said, “if you have enough sense to go slow.”

Workers struck and organized unions. They organized socialist societies and political parties.

They fought for the eight-hour workday. And while we eventually won — and later lost — that fight, the comrades who stood at its forefront—the Haymarket martyrs — were executed in 1886.

As industrial mills mushroomed across US cities, so too did undertakers’ shops, often across the street from factories.

Death stalked working-class districts. As Rosenow recalls, one survey “found that white hearses hauled babies through the streets of the stockyards district [in Chicago] seven times more frequently than they did just a mile to the west.”

Early in US history, graveyards were chaotic tumbles in the middle of cities. In the late 19th century, however, there was a suburbanization of death. Large new cemeteries were built in the farmlands and woods outside town.

Jannat, water color and ink on Nepali handmade paper pasted on paper (2020). Mitali Das

The ramshackle graves in the cities were sometimes a health hazard but also a site of ideological discomfort for the bourgeoisie. In Chicago, the silty earth near Lake Michigan would sometimes belch up a buried corpse.

Ruling-class cosmopolitans increasingly envisioned grassy fields with trees housing family mausoleums like estate mansions. Such stately accommodations were out of the reach for the working-class. For the poor there was a potter’s field.

In Chicago the working-class that could afford burial — especially immigrant German workers — found rest in Waldheim Cemetery. This included the Haymarket martyrs. The rich found gilded rot in Graceland Cemetery.

Somewhere on the astral plane, the residents of Graceland fight the ghosts of Waldheim.

“...the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.” – Coriolanus, Act I, Scene I

AS OF writing, the US is experiencing a small wave of labor unrest.

Line workers at Nabisco struck and won a better contract. Their siblings at Kellogg’s followed suit, though there are worrisome components in the new agreement. Coal miners in Alabama have been on strike against Warrior Met Coal. So have 24,000 health-care workers at Kaiser Permanente in Oregon and California.

Floating around the edges of this unrest is the “Great Resignation.” Millions are quitting their jobs. It’s taking place across sectors, but seems particularly pronounced in retail, restaurants and food service. Text exchanges with shitty bosses ending in “I quit, motherfucker” have become memes. The “antiwork” Reddit at one point had more than a million followers.

In some respects the Great Resignation is an expression of weakness. Were unions stronger, workers might be doing more than quitting. Regardless, an incipient class-consciousness that “work sucks” is growing.

After two years of pandemic, people have reassessed priorities. Dying or subjecting oneself to a debilitating disease is too much to ask — particularly when combined with low pay, no benefits, horrible bosses and crappy customers.

Most labor statisticians refer to days on strike as “days lost.” To us, these are days reclaimed, days in which we force the events of our lives to take a new and different turn. This is not to romanticize strikes, which can often be arduous. It is to say that each strike contains the hydra or embryo of emancipation, the return of our time.

It is worth remembering that, per EP Thompson, the first labor struggles weren’t over compensation, but control over time.

The tightening labor market — feeding labor action and the Great Resignation alike — is a double-edged sword.

*Don’t Look Back, B-Cum Salt,* slow-meme from *Born Again Labor Museum* (2021), Adam Turl + Tish Turl

As a comrade and Locust supporter — who works as a sorter at a major non-union package company — puts it, the tight labor market gives workers negotiating leverage — pushing some wages up, and enabling strikes. But it also feeds a massive speed-up on the shop floor.

This speed up is breaking bodies and minds. And it comes after decades of previous accelerations in the exploitation of the working-class.

In the strike at Kellogg’s, workers were pushed to the brink with forced overtime. In the two-tiered wage system “legacy workers” got more pay, time-off, and benefits, while newer workers had to wait nine years to even apply for that status.

The tiering of labor is deferred life. One generation of workers is allowed some benefits of past labor struggles while others are denied. As rank-and-file Kellogg’s strike leaders put it, “we’re sick of giving away our future.”

The strike at John Deere was also in large part about tiering — including management’s attempt to introduce a third tier with even worse pay, working conditions, and benefits.

The speed-up extends to all aspects of working-class life, including education and “natural” disasters.

Labor Notes reports that in Lawrence, Massachusetts — famous for the 1912 Bread and Roses strike — the school district started the school year down 42 teachers.

As of the first of December, 3,393 schools in the US had been “disrupted due to mental health concerns,” – “meaning they were temporarily closed” in 2021 “because of issues like ‘teacher burnout’ and ‘stress on students.’”

In the intermix of corporate greed and climate chaos, Amazon laborers were killed by a tornado in Edwardsville, Illinois — even though management knew a tornado was coming. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos was celebrating another vanity space flight. The storms on Earth do not concern him.

*Exodus*, graphite, oil pastel, water color on paper (2020). Labani Jangi

In that same Earth-bound storm, workers at the Mayfield Candle Factory were also killed. According to some reports, workers were threatened with termination if they left the plant as the tornado approached. The factory was clamoring to meet the Christmas candle rush.

Employees — including prisoners on work release — were making a paltry eight dollars an hour before many disappeared into the storm. As reported in The Guardian, Autumn Kirks huddled in a hallway with her boyfriend Lannis Ward. “Suddenly, she saw sky and lightning where a wall had been, and Ward had vanished.”

One of the reasons workers were laboring in the middle of a deadly tornado is the aforementioned “lean production.” Lean production calls for “just in time” production and delivery in order to reduce costs.

Lean production means that we must always be on call through flexible scheduling, forced overtime, etc. And when we are not needed we are denied the wages we need to survive.

Just-in-time delivery is also partly responsible for the supply chain crisis, as Kim Moody argues. For example, big rail freight companies cut the number of workers by a third between 2017 and 2020 while increasing freight by 40 percent from 2010 and 2019.

This speed-up produced upsurges in profits and extracted surplus value. It also left logistics systems without any redundancies. When consumer spending shifted from services to durable goods as the pandemic hit, the stripped down logistics system sputtered.

Similarly, one of the less told stories of the “labor shortage” is that it is almost impossible to work for low wages and afford child-care. The labor shortage is, in large part, a crisis of social reproduction.

They have cut us to the bone, and there is nothing left to bleed.

At the same time there is an absurdity to the capitalist response to a long “Striketober.”

*Aging Tuber Pondering the Metabolic Rift* (2021), Laura Fair-Schulz

Starbucks is known, among other things, for flexible staffing that denies its employees any sense of predictable time. As comrades may know, several stores in New York state and elsewhere have organized with Starbucks Workers United.

In Buffalo, Starbucks’ ex-CEO Howard Schultz gave workers a bizarre anti-union speech in which he compared the Starbucks company to Jewish prisoners being transported to Auschwitz sharing blankets.

Other corporate representatives hung around Buffalo for weeks and months.

In one instance, a barista was brought to a mandatory meeting with executives in a nearby hotel. The barista, the only employee in attendance, was harangued by six managers for an hour.

While Starbucks also engaged in other union-busting tactics — closing stores, transferring workers, and in one case remodeling a store for the third time in eight months — their weirdly overwrought approach seems to telegraph a kind of frenetic weakness.

It is not guaranteed that a boss’s panic equals victory. It is true, however, that when a boss fears for their extravagant future — their life of infinite open doors — it is often because our horizons are expanding.

“They love what we make but not us.” – Candyman

THE CULTURE industry has not gone untouched by unrest.

Hundreds of workers at Blizzard — the video games company — have been on strike against sexism and precarious labor conditions. One recent strike started as a solidarity action against layoffs for contracted employees.

Trans workers and their allies at Netflix have staged walkouts in protest of the streaming giant’s defense of Dave Chappelle’s transphobia and the company’s targeting of trans employees.

Artists and workers at Image Comics have unionized with the Communication Workers of America (CWA). Image — publishers of Spawn and The Walking Dead — refused to recognize the union. In January, the company relented. The union is the first of its kind in US comics.

Of these culture-industry class conflicts, the biggest example is cast in amber: The would-be strike of 60,000 stagehands, camera operators, makeup artists, prop workers and other members of IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees).

In the IATSE negotiations — and in the proto-rebellion of the rank-and-file against IATSE leaders — time and loss were central. For example, as Left Voice reports in an interview with a rank-and-file union member — in early semi-retirement due to workplace injury — editors were placed “on-call” with no turnaround time.

If IATSE would have struck, it would have been the first nationwide strike in the union’s history.

Not only would a strike have halted the streaming glut, it would have given the world a chance to reckon with just how much work, how much labor — sweaty, exhausting, and often bloody —goes into the art we consume and (presumably) enjoy.

It wasn’t to be. The leadership of IATSE caved on a contract that can at best be described as contradictory. Most key issues were left untouched or only slightly adjusted.

The public was deprived of a larger conversation about what a meat grinder the entertainment industry can be and is.

But we were soon provided with a glimpse of that meat grinder. A week after the IATSE strike was called off, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed after being shot by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie Rust.

Baldwin may not be culpable as the actor who (may have) pulled the trigger, but he is culpable as the producer who created an unsafe, exhausting, and cutthroat set.

*Where is She?,* mixed-media on paper (2019). Mitali Das

*Confused Boot Lickers*, ink and acrylic on bristol (2021). Adam Turl

Other union crew members had spoken up about conditions, delays in pay, outright wage theft, and an unreasonably fast pace of work, for weeks. They were rebuffed and threatened. Non-union replacements — brought in with producer Baldwin’s okay — handled the gun that killed Hutchins.

Hutchins was herself an immensely talented cinematographer. She had guided the cameras on several pictures already, and her work had been praised. Most of her films had been genre projects: horror, fantasy, thrillers. Though the quality of these films varied, her work was acclaimed across the board.

Hutchins was also, as an IATSE member, ready to strike. Like most union militants, the key issue for her was safety on set. Now she’s dead. The work she would have made goes unmade. This is to say nothing of the husband and son she leaves behind.

This is an industry that claims to love art but shows artists and workers nothing but disdain.

Lost futures are at once ineffable and oppressively weighty and real. They are made of countless lives cut short.

AS LABOR Notes observes, it is very difficult to assess just how many strike actions — let alone labor protests and union organizing efforts — are underway at any given time.

Until 1982 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) kept data for any work stoppage of six or more workers. After Reagan-administration budget cuts, the BLS stopped collecting data for any strike involving less than 1,000 workers. This is a problem as most workers are employed in smaller units and workplaces.

According to the BLS, the largest strike years since 1989 were 2018 and 2019, with 485,000 and 425,000 workers striking respectively. In 2018, there were 2,815,400 “work days lost” and in 2019 that number rose to 3,244,300.

In 2020, strikes waned with the waxing of the pandemic. Strikes returned in 2021, but the BLS won’t publish data until February.

In the meantime a group of activists and academics have created the Labor Action Tracker (LAT) to collect strike and labor protest data for all workplaces of more than six workers.

As of December 13, according to LAT there had been 346 strikes in 2021, and 989 strikes and labor protests (counted together).

This is not comparable to the great labor battles of the 1970s. This does, however, indicate that the class struggle is more pronounced and constant than the ideological apparatuses of capital let on.

It also indicates that class struggle is more expansive, reaching well beyond the traditional boundaries of “the workplace.” One of the problems we have with wooden iterations of Marxism is a dismissive attitude toward capital’s reproduction and overall dominance.

Just as an assembly line needs workers to run, a precarious rental market needs renters to populate small overpriced apartments. Just as a fulfillment center requires workers to meet quota, our over-policed city streets require compliance to maintain the geographies of capitalism, racism, and imperialism.

Wherever there is a motor to capital, there is also the possibility of grinding it to a halt.

One intermittent commentary during the course of the pandemic has focused on the pressure it has placed on the domestic sphere. This falls predominantly on the shoulders of women.

Social Reproduction Theory is central to understanding the current fight over in-person instruction in public schools. If children stay home, working-class parents will be less available for labor outside the home, begging further questions about why so much social reproduction is wageless.

Hosannas about education ring hollow as schools full of sick teachers and students collapse into dysfunctional chaos.

Consider the ways in which capital’s compliances are forced along valences of race, nation, and ethnicity.

Eighteen months after the police murders of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor put millions on the streets, momentum has largely been diverted. But a neoliberal “intersectionality” is not only incapable of holding violent racism at bay, its political stalwarts have consistently increased funding to racist police departments.

The liberal-wing of the capitalist death cult coerces our participation in a vicious racial regime even as it telegraphs “support” for the more innocuous aspects of multiculturalism.

Some of the workers at Mayfield Candle Factory were prisoners on work release. Like many other prisoners in the US — working-class and disproportionately Black and brown — they had the “opportunity” to work for poverty wages. In this case, making banal scented candles for the banal American middle-class.

After the tornado tore through the factory, the prisoners rescued fellow workers from the rubble. One prisoner, Francisco Starks, was taken to a local hospital and released. After surviving the catastrophe, and having been locked up for “crimes” that are all too familiar to workers hustling in a broken world, Mr. Starks decided to check on his family before returning to prison.

Before he turned himself in two days later, a manhunt was conducted to catch the perilous candle-maker, conducted in the midst of widespread destruction, carried out even while rescuers combed factory rubble for survivors.

Mr. Starks is not a killer. And yet he is sent back to prison. He did not shoot Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz, anti-racist protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. That was Kyle Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse, a quasi-fascist murderer, walks free. He will do no time in prison. While Francisco Starks’ days will be stolen from him, Rittenhouse’s life will continue in his parents’ well-appointed gated community.

THE CHALLENGE — for the class —is how to generalize the kind of negation we see in the actions of Francisco Starks, of the IATSE members on the set of Rust, of Starbucks baristas and Alabama coal miners. How to spin this spirit of reclaimed time into a new model for living?

How do we transform a potential future into an actual future, bolstered by the pillars of solidarity?

As Locust goes to press, we see glimmers of that future and solidarity outside the US (where most of us live).

In India, farmers forced the repeal of laws that would have thrown most of the country’s rural population into destitution. The farmers’ rebellion — unfolding over the course of a year and including militant blockades and a general strike — gave a black eye to the far-right Hindutva government of Narendra Modi.

In Latin America, predictions that the “Pink Tide” was on the wane must be revised. Not only is the proto-fascist Bolsonaro tanking in Brazilian polls, but leftists are again winning national elections, often riding waves of social discontent and protest.

This is, viewed in a long-historical view, a rejection of the long and bloody history of US imperialism that — as Eduardo Galleano shows in Open Veins of Latin America — smothered countless lives and futures.

Twelve years ago, the leftist government of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was overthrown by a US-backed coup that put the kleptocratic National Party regime in power. Today, Xiomara Castro, the leader of the anti-coup movement (and Zelaya’s spouse) is to be sworn in as the country’s president. She was elected on the ticket of the socialist Libre Party.

There is, understandably, an air of redemption in Castro’s victory. Redemption in the Benjaminian sense; in which those defeated in past struggles avenge their defeat through the provision of a future. In Honduras, as in so much of Latin America, there has been no shortage of defeat.

As Supaya Portillo writes in Jacobin:

Castro’s Libre party’s win was in significant part a protest vote against the [conservative] National Party and a vote for the dead: those protesters who perished during the coup and later during the fraudulent 2017 elections; those who were killed in defense of Honduras’s rivers and ancestral lands; those who protested the Hernández administration’s many crimes, including promises of mobile hospitals to treat COVID-19 that never materialized; those who lost their lives to Hurricanes Iota and Eta during the pandemic, which rendered entire families homeless, living on the side of roads or in makeshift shelters on the Caribbean coast without aid from the government.

In Chile, the election of former student protest leader Gabriel Boric as president — in a country that many call the original laboratory of neoliberalism — seems almost earth-shattering.

“Neoliberalism was born in Chile,” the slogan of the movement goes, “and it will die in Chile.” The potential rift this opens, this slipstream between the possible and impossible, points simultaneously to what was lost and what can still be recovered.

*Shiny*, ink and acrylic on bristol (2021). Adam Turl

Lost: not just Salvador Allende and the democratic experiment he helmed, but countless militant workers whose own experiments in revolutionary democracy were cut short in favor of internment and Pinochet’s stadium firing squads.

Recovered: the boldness to take to the streets in the millions, to demand that education be free, that neighborhoods abandoned to a pandemic receive the care they need and deserve, that life beyond commodity and deprivation can be made a reality. That work, labor, creation, might be controlled by who actually perform them. That days stolen might be, in some way, returned.

LOCUST REVIEW doesn’t insist on misery. But we do insist that we look at the dire state of things before we indulge in anything like optimism.

The news from Chile and Honduras certainly doesn’t guarantee revolution. The experience of SYRIZA’s capitulation in Greece — not to mention “socialists” voting to increase police funding in US cities — cautions that socialism cannot simply be voted into existence.

There is also every reason to believe a wounded and bitter Yankee imperialism is sharpening its knives.

We may feel emboldened and fulfilled after a strike victory, but that feeling itself won’t protect us from the long-term vicissitudes of job loss and eviction.

The point is that frameworks are shifting.

As artists we must weave this understanding into our work.

We have spent two years faced with the depravity of a system boldly announcing that our lives and deaths don’t matter. That the menial tasks we are compelled to do can just as easily be done by someone else. That the best we can hope for is a long corridor of boredom and empty time.

We have also, through that same warped looking-glass, glimpsed different futures, alternative ways of being and experiencing our days.

We are learning how to grasp both truths as mutually constituent. It is not easy to embrace the linkage between dystopian reality and utopian longing. But solidarity and self-preservation compels us to do so.

As our horizons shift in this projection of solidarity, so does our sense of self, of who we are and what we believe ourselves capable of.

*Ride*, water color and ink on Nepali handmade paper pasted on handmade paper (2021). Mitali Das

In Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the rejection of utilitarian (or capitalist) rationality and labor is central to resisting death and salvaging time. Shelley tells the story of a pandemic that wipes out the human race except for the titular character, Lionel Verney. After the plague, Verney moves to Rome, hoping he will run into other survivors.

At first, as Konstantinos Pooukidis writes, Verney busies himself with “productive” and rational labor, trying to maintain a fragment of the civilization that has collapsed on itself. He keeps a diary of his life, which is later discovered by an unknown woman/narrator.

“The fantasy motivating Lionel’s arduous labor,” Pooukidis writes, “is that the depopulated earth will eventually ‘be re-peopled,’ and his narrative will then become useful to the future human race.”

But Lionel remains alone. Eventually he abandons this futile utilitarian labor. He decides “to labor without purpose until the time of his death,” thereby finding a kind of liberation.

The constant displacement of the present in terms of utilitarian labor defers freedom to a never-realized point. Labor, in a free society, is itself a reward and pleasure, a world-making that has its own human and cultural significance. That this seems strange to us in 2022 highlights how degraded and alienated work has become.

When Shelley wrote The Last Man in 1826, she had recently lost her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley as well as her friend Lord Byron. She was no stranger to grief. And as a Romantic par excellence she connected her criticisms of empty utility to individual feeling.

We might do the same. The bosses tell us to labor for a future. It is a lie.

To borrow from Public Enemy and Mary Shelley, that future will “never come / that’s why [we] say come and get some.”

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