My ‘melancholia of loss and decline’

As I rang the doorbell, the first thing I heard was a dog's bark, followed by a stern 'Come here, Casper!' A 40-something-year-old woman, Vera, opened the door, and hastily asked 'Hello, how can I help you?' Her attention was split between the dog, the children and me. 'My name is Mohamed. I'm from a charity. We spoke on the phone last week.' Now she welcomed me in with a polite 'Sorry, the house is in a bit of a state.' Entering the living room, there was a bed to my left, a sofa in front of the TV, and piles of children's things everywhere. Vera self-consciously explained, 'The kids have the rooms upstairs, and we sleep in the living room. It's easier that way.' I responded with 'It's fine, we were all messy kids once'. After almost every question, Vera would feel the need to explain one thing or the other, as if she was personally responsible for things outside her control. From bullying at school, to the spilt water on the carpet, Vera had an explanation. 

Working for a charity in Birmingham that supports young people who either use substances, or are affected by others who do, I regularly encountered these self-conscious explanatory statements. While it may just seem like a form of naturalised conversational ethic between a service user and provider, to me the constant recurrence pointed to something sinister.

For me, underneath these polite engagements are abstract representations of our roles within structures beyond our control. I had to complete my questionnaire, with questions encompassing everything from Sexually Transmitted Infections to the amount of pocket money received weekly. This can only be experienced as a form of surveillance and judgement, and Vera's self-conscious explanatory statements are natural responses to the intrusion. 

Due to the young person in question being under 12, Vera needed to be present. To the service user, these questions determine many things – the type of assistance they can receive, number of sessions, and fundamentally, the severity of their case. There is a balancing act that occurs. On the one hand, the response from the service user should not trigger an escalation process due to negligence; on the other hand, the response needs to be sufficiently urgent to receive assistance. Even the acknowledgement of the pedantic nature of data collection does not inoculate against the ethic underlying our interaction and this balance.

I finished my questionnaire, and set up a day to come and talk to one of the children. They were a family of seven. It was uncomfortable for the children to share rooms, meaning that the oldest siblings wandered outside with their mates, and sometimes alone. With one modest income, lack of engaging public spaces, and a packed house, the young person looked forward to our weekly sessions. So did I. A group of us would go to the wildlife conservation, paint shirts, talk endlessly about the epic drama of failed friendships, rivalries and the latest fascination in the animal kingdom. But the clock was ticking…

Towards 'efficiency protocols'

The hour-long assessments that are required of us as drug workers – what we colloquially called ourselves – is just the beginning of the long 'efficiency' processes that cements our identity as surveyors, limiting our freedom to engage with people in meaningful ways. We always knew that our jobs would not bring about any structural change, or reverse the decline in living standards, substance use or otherwise. 

While theoretically my main responsibility was to educate and provide material on substance use, practically, this was the least meaningful way for young people to tackle and/or understand substance use. In fact, many of the cases I received from schools were filed by teachers as a disciplinary measure. The substances in question were mostly vapes. Young people may not know the harms of vapes – neither do we, fully – but virtually no young person has stopped using substances because of the literature and knowledge we provide. (With the exception of one young person who did not know a popular drink contained alcohol – they stopped because it was haram, forbidden by Islamic law. Even this exception shows how important other social factors are with regards to substance use.) My job, then, was to deny a social totality and insist that socially linked factors are in fact separate. 

When I first started at the charity, I had the space to make someone's day a bit more pleasant, or to help out those who need it, or just to leave a positive lasting impression. I would dedicate time to activities with young people that are not essential to the remit of the funding contracts. Gardening, playing football, building small structures with loose bricks, etc. This did not last long. The efficiency protocol was not just a form of surveillance into the lives of service users, but us as staff too. We had to meticulously record how we spent our time and what benefit this had on the young people, in order to present an efficient picture to potential future funders. Even if one were to creatively report that sandcastle building somehow helped in understanding substance use, the dreaded report we had to write afterwards turned an altruistic act of play into an opportunistic funding advertisement.

What's more is, if funders were moved by the sandcastle building and believed it was helpful for understanding substance use, then the charity will make it obligatory for workers. The inescapable loop is that, because charities and organisations need to compete for funding, they need to demonstrate their efficiency, this can only be done by surveilling service users and providers. Where once the relationship between the two could be somewhat freely, creatively, democratically and consensually constructed – the rewarding aspect of the job – today it must conform to a certain quantitative calculus. 

The job became 70 per cent administrative work and an emphasis on turnaround speed. The more cases I had the less dynamic I could be with the service users. I found this fundamentally undemocratic – it cements an identity for both service users and providers, and the relationship we find ourselves in.

Disaster nationalism

Towards the end of my time at the job, I increasingly identified with the thoughts of Richard Seymour on 'disaster nationalism'. What he would call a 'melancholia of loss and decline' set in. When I first started in the care sector, one term constantly associated with such jobs was 'rewarding'. Not in any material sense of the word – the roles were always emotionally draining, physically exhausting, consisting of long hours and low wages. But it was something more meaningful. To see that our actions could affect positive change in another's life was 'reward' enough. With those pockets of meaningful engagement and positive change increasingly hard to find, the job became like any other, a way to sustain myself. In an environment of increased precarity, and the lack of public investment, value is increasingly dependent on wages.     

And this shift is seductive, dangerous. For many working in the care sector, we have naturalised the conversion of care work, like other types of work, along efficiency lines. With relationships now dictated by funding requests and digitalised efficiency, our 'rewarding' motivation turns to indignancy. Not, as it should be, directed at the wider political ideologies, structures and projects – but towards the service users' 'choices'.

As Richard Seymour writes:

'The danger is that as faith in the possibility in democracy erodes from within and frays at the edges, a pessimistic fascist metaphysics will find its purchase, offering supremacy as a solution to the melancholia of loss and decline.'

In our world, disaster nationalism is finding fertile ground. The misery of being surveilled day-to-day, the humiliation of being micromanaged by the abstract forces of funding request, and the insecurity caused by low-wages, undemocratically beyond the control of workers, leads to an indignant impulse to blame set 'naturalised hierarchies'. A potential hierarchy between service user and provider may, and perhaps has started to, develop.

According to disaster nationalism, what comes next is a form of 'cleansing and cathartic violence'. The longer I stayed at my job, the less rewarding it became, and the more punitive I was incentivised to be. Perhaps Vera sensed this, and our seemingly polite interactions masked an underlying plea: 'I am not inferior!' 

Where does disaster nationalism lead? Seymour writes: 'What comes next will depend on reinvigorating democracy in other ways and by other means than simply shoring up faith in a failing system.' I can only hope that it's not already too late.

- Mohamed Khougali
"I used to work in the British care sector, but that has essentially been privatised and defunded to smithereens. Coming to the realisation that change can only be structural, I turned to political organising, reading and writing. However, my wife and I were forced out of the country due to the increase in the minimum income requirement for spouse visas. We now reside in Germany, where we are politically active, and try to organise to affect structural change - though with the result of the recent elections, who knows how long this will last."