Everyone dies, but not me - I will live forever

 He was a young old man.  He is a young old man.  In his 70s, getting to his 80s.  

When we started our placement at the nursing home, we didn't see much of him.  He was confined to his room, stuck on his bed.  He was meant to be stuck on his bed.  He was a roller, you see.  He'd roll out of his bed, and land on the crash mat.  

On our second day, we finally got to see him.  We were doing wound rounds - a common fixture of our 6 weeks at the facility.  He had, and has, a wound on his left heel.  A large scab, the size of a small colossal squid's eye just sat there.  His left foot, by the by, was little more than a club - his right leg amputated.  He was diabetic.

When we first met him, he howled in pain as we cleaned his wound and redressed it.  He yelled at us to stop - we had to keep going.

We saw him almost daily.  Greet him.  Maybe get a response.  Take off his old dressing.  Take a photo of the wound.  Clean it with saline.  Apply new dressing.  Say goodbye.  No response.

He didn't yell out, really, during our visits.

In the mornings, 6:30 am, the nurses talked about getting him out of bed, out into a wheelchair, out for a shower.  He needed to have it done.  I'm not sure if we ever saw it get done.  At least, by the time we had whisked ourselves out of his room, wound trolley clankering down to another resident, we didn't see anything.

As I'm writing this, we've been there for 3 weeks.

We've been to his room daily.  He appears to be in a state of permanence.  He is just there.

We've yet to see anybody visit him.  On the table by his bed, he has photos of his granddaughter.  On the wall opposite to his bed, there's a picture of him and another man.  He in his wheelchair, the other man squatting, flipping the bird at the camera and smiling.

Someone visited him once.  We didn't see her.  We have yet to see him smile.

***

The modern state requires a myth of permanence.  It must subsume all of history leading up to its point to justify its existence, to proclaim that it - its spirit, its essence has always existed.  The French state, despite being constructed fairly recently, must extend itself such that even the Gauls represented an inkling of modern France.  Likewise, Germany chooses to define itself all the way back to the Teutoburg Forest, and must represent all historical occurrences in the constructed world of Germany as being stepping stones along Germany's inevitable formation.

Settler colonial countries do so as well - Australia, despite having committed genocide against its indigenous peoples and denying them personhood for the majority of its existence, despite excluding non-white peoples (among which, if you go back far enough, included non-Anglo Saxon white people), portrays itself as a multicultural nation priding itself on the continuity of its indigenous peoples and history.  In this, Indigenous Australian are retroactively added to the eternal history of Australia.  In this, the Italians, the Baltic peoples, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese are retroactively added to the history of Australia.

The state demands this mythologising.  It needs to be seen as foundational to our reality, as unquestionably permanent as entropy or some fundamental force.

This false permanence is key to our understanding of the world as it is.  The same logic that underpins capitalist realism underpins the realism of the state.  It acts even more pervasively than that - progressive and regressive movements borrow the same language.  For the liberal, human progress moves forward, and the state is rectified.  For the conservative, the state must be returned to a mythologised past, but all the same, the state must exist.

Regardless of mainstream political orientation, the state cannot be questioned.  Rather, the state becomes the centre of discourse - it is not a matter of if the state is necessary, but rather if changing features of the state technocratically is necessary.

It is for this reason the state aligns itself with capital.  Or rather, capital and capitalism is entrenched within the state.  For this reason, the state must self-perpetuate alongside capital, and for this reason, the state will never simply cease to be.  The state must be opposed from the outset, for the state, as a social creature, will do all it can to survive.

***

6:30-6:45 am is a hell of a time in the nursing home.  Morning handovers took place then - lists of insomniacs, wanderers, "k" being "k" - delivered to a half awake bunch of a dozen or so people.

Every now and then, you'd hear a faint "heeeelp meee" yelled out from down the corridor - the same old lady, fairly frail, spoke little English.  Of course, by then you'd be deadened to it.  The same old pains, osteoarthritis in her knees, pressure injury on her bottom, feeling cold, feeling lonely, feeling depressed.  The sort.

You get used to it after a while.  I used to change the dressings of another lady whose room was next to hers.  Her yells became routine for us - an alarm clock of sorts.  

This isn't to say that the staff were heartless or that they didn't care for them.  They were busy folk - you'd be lucky if you had one staff member to 4 residents.  And so when they had to take care of another resident, and she started yelling out again, they couldn't do much.  

Management, upper management, visited one day.  They weren't pleased.  They complained about the cleanliness of the facility, how some staff took breaks, the lot.

The following morning, the nurse, the team leader, dressed everyone down.  They were implementing a new system then.  The nurse would tell you to do something, and if they had to tell you to do it again, it'd be a strike on your record.  Get another strike and they might fire you.

We stood there, myself and another student, listening glumly to this.  It didn't affect us of course - we couldn't get fired, but we still stood there listening in.  

One of the care staff spoke up after a while.  Told the nurse about the staffing issue.

It didn't change anything.  She was told to raise her concern to higher management.  And of course, we didn't see any new staff over the following weeks.

***

There is an argument that goes like this:

The moral economy is an act of rebellion by the urban poor against capitalism.  That is to say - illicit economies, for example, the drug trade, are situated outside of the formal economy and thus are acts of rebellion against the pervasiveness of capital.

This act of rebellion comes about because we live in urbanised environments.  This sort of struggle endures because there is no viable means of physical escape from capital and the state.  The moral economy is a self-perpetuating alternative to running away from a city and dying, starving in the middle of nowhere.

If people could run, then perhaps they would act in ways similar to those described in "The Art of Not Being Governed" by James C. Scott.

What then, of those who are stuck in the formal economy, who have neither the escape of the moral economy nor a physical escape?

In these situations, the acts of shirking on the job, of acting against management's wishes, of conserving oneself is no different a form of class warfare than the moral economy.

Where we had a placement for a while, we were essentially given unpaid part time jobs.  Our higher ups were chronically overworked- they could not supervise us at every turn.  This goes against management's wishes, where we as students were meant to be supervised throughout all we did.

This act of rebellion, this refusal to overwork themselves more than they already were, is the same as the moral economy.

It is a refusal to be managed, to be subsumed into the constant state of surveillance demanded by capital.  

In this, the petty criminal is not an enemy of the working class.  In this, the petty criminal is doing all they can to eke out an existence in spite of capital.  In this, the petty criminal is no different from any worker in the formal economy.

The state, capital and management will never let up.  Their simple logic is that they must replicate themselves across all strata of society.  They must not be questioned.  They must be eternal.

And so if the criminal is to be jailed, the worker is to be burnt out, then are we not fundamentally the same?