3 / Anxious Narratives

For us, the Canadian writer Jacob Wren’s recently published Rich and Poor (2016) is another way of mapping the elusive contours of capitalist anxiety across two apparently opposing figures—one rich, one poor—who constitute the schizo-protagonists of the novel. Oscillating between the narrative justifications offered by a sociopathic CEO of “the world’s largest company,” and the revenge-crazed dishwasher committed only to the “symbolic” murder of his incomprehensibly wealthy foil, Rich and Poor braids various strands of thought and reflection on precarity and insecurity into an anxious but compelling plot.

The CEO begins the novel by describing his own ambition, charm, and the possibilities afforded him by his fortunate place in history.

We can say that some people are rich because others are poor but it changes nothing.
The roulette wheel spins and the numbers that come up are the ones that win. […].
And yet it’s important to believe there is something you can do, to lie to yourself a little, because then at least you have ashot.¹⁰
While he remains agnostic about the consequences of such historical contingencies, he is nevertheless certain that his own merit within the maelstrom of economic forces remains irreproachable. The CEO has, in his self-estimation, earned his security; and, although this security has come at the expense of a seemingly endless precarization of workers, communities, and ecologies, he is sure that if the tables were by chance turned, the poor would be no less ruthless in securing their lot against him.

The “poor” figure, a dishwasher-assassin, begins from a rather different perspective.

I will kill him. It will solve nothing and help no one, but for me at least, it will bring something to an end. The poor must kill the rich, one at a time, at every opportunity. One man kills another and the message is clear, your wealth is cruel and unnatural. You can put fences, guards and dogs around your home, so you are like a prisoner in your own life, but if you are rich you will live in fear. You will fear your servants. You will look out the window of your limousine and, at every traffic light, wonder if each and every passerby has a gun and a bullet with your name on it. It is only that the killing must be completely random. The victims having nothing in common other than their wealth, the killers nothing in common other than poverty. The message should be clear: if you are rich, you can be killed at anytime. […] We would only have to kill ten to start, to strike fear in the hearts of every billionaire in the world.¹¹ Whereas, for the CEO, the contingent distribution of wealth acts as a means to psychologically securitize his affluence and thereby justify his cruelty (i.e. “they would do the same to me if they had the chance”), for the dishwasher-assassin, a redistribution of anxiety by way of random acts of violence—namely, murders of the extremely wealthy—would set in motion a wave of panic capable of destabilizing the psychosocial immunity constructed by the rich. In both cases, the diagram of violence is drawn simultaneously by the desire for a security gained by way of precarization (with the more traditional way of describing such a situation being class war).

Following the theoretical work of Lorey and Lyon and these literary provocations by Wren, we might conclude with the statement that class war isn’t quite what it used to be. Precarization frustrates many of the so-called “organic associations” which once helped organized labor get organized; meanwhile, surveillance makes “possible criminals” of us all while enhancing the speculative capacities of those governments and corporations intending to do us further harm. We hope with these remarks we’ve added some voices, precarious but in constant struggle, from geographies that have so far remained on the margin of the discussion, and from local instantiations of precarization that require further co-research and solidarity. It is alongside, inside, and among these localized struggles that we believe intolerable globalized precarization can be disputed and disrupted, as Lorey says, “to no longer be governed and no longer govern oneself in this way, at this price.”¹²