The zine, We Are All Very Anxious: Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It, was published by The Institute for Precarious Consciousness and CrimethInc in 2014. (Anarchist Library, Zine PDF). I decided to read it again recently because it felt relevant to the current political moment in the US. It is as prescient as ever.
The current fascist takeover of the US government and public institutions is marked primarily by the overwhelming feeling of anxiety — that is, precarity. The ruling class manufactures and perpetuates anxiety and precarity through chaos, misinformation, disinformation, the surreptitious dismantling of the public safety net, and disorderly reversals of established precedents and norms. We can observe this happening each week.
Unfortunately, a large contingent of the working class has been hoodwinked into thinking that the source of their anxiety and precarity is from within their own cohort, rather than deliberately imposed and maintained by the counterfeit populists of the fascist ruling class. As long as we remain anxious, under the oppressive thumb of unelected, extractive billionaires and seedy politicians, resistance against state repression will remain difficult, if not impossible.
I wish I had answers. Until we’re able to effectively counteract our precariousness, let’s hope our peers in the working class wake up soon and realize that immigrants and trans kids are not the problem — and never were.
I highly recommend reading the full zine, it is not very long. Here are my highlights.
“Each phase of capitalism has a particular affect which holds it together. This is not a static situation. The prevalence of a particular dominant affect is sustainable only until strategies of resistance able to break down this particular affect and/or its social sources are formulated. Hence, capitalism constantly comes into crisis and recomposes around newly dominant affects.”
[…]
“Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes.”
* * *
“In the modern era (until the post-war settlement), the dominant affect was misery. In the nineteenth century, the dominant narrative was that capitalism leads to general enrichment. The public secret of this narrative was the misery of the working class.”
* * *
“When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living — which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education — was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s — a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery.”
* * *
“Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination.”
* * *
“The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally.”
“Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release. Growing proportions of young people are living at home. Substantial portions of the population — over 10% in the UK — are taking antidepressants. The birth rate is declining, as insecurity makes people reluctant to start families.”
* * *
“Anxiety is personalised in a number of ways — from New Right discourses blaming the poor for poverty, to contemporary therapies which treat anxiety as a neurological imbalance or a dysfunctional thinking style. A hundred varieties of “management” discourse — time management, anger management, parental management, self-branding, gamification — offer anxious subjects an illusion of control in return for ever-greater conformity to the capitalist model of subjectivity.”
* * *
“Then there’s the self-esteem industry, the massive outpouring of media telling people how to achieve success through positive thinking — as if the sources of anxiety and frustration are simply illusory. These are indicative of the tendency to privatise problems, both those relating to work, and those relating to psychology.”
“Earlier we argued that people have to be socially isolated in order for a public secret to work. This is true of the current situation, in which authentic communication is increasingly rare. Communication is more pervasive than ever, but increasingly, communication happens only through paths mediated by the system. Hence, in many ways, people are prevented from actually communicating, even while the system demands that everyone be connected and communicable. People both conform to the demand to communicate rather than expressing themselves, and self-censor within mediated spaces.”
* * *
“If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety — and this is something we do not yet have.”
* * *
“Structurally, the system is vulnerable. The reliance on anxiety is a desperate measure, used in the absence of stronger forms of conformity. The system’s attempt to keep running by keeping people feeling powerless leaves it open to sudden ruptures, outbreaks of revolt. So how do we get to the point where we stop feeling powerless?”