A lot has happened in the last ten years. Charity shops are an archive of what were once considered urgent critiques of society and politics, evidencing how quickly our enrapture with the new becomes staid.

A significant factor in Ivor Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia remaining pertinent a decade on from its publication is the fact that it is little focussed on the churn of the cultural, technological, or political immediate. Instead, Southwood’s book explored the numbed experiences of utter stasis that lie beneath the outwardly frenetic demands and dynamics of contemporary capitalism. It describes a modern condition of a depressive inevitability, where little possibility of substantive collective change is imaginable, in hand with an anxious state of incrementally worsening levels of insecurity. Non-Stop Inertia is very much a complementary sibling to Mark Fisher’s similarly slim Capitalist Realism, but Southwood’s polemic is focussed more in the texture of the everyday.

Released in 2011, Non-Stop Inertia was finished in the first months of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, but grounded in the last years of New Labour. Combining his experiences of life, work, and unemployment with the theories of thinkers like Arlie Russell Hochschild and Herbert Marcuse, Southwood moves easily from the personal to the structural, from the everyday to the theoretical. In doing so, he managed to identify many of the key ideas and sites of conflict that would animate British politics over the next decade.

When asked to reflect on the book and any absences in his thinking, Southwood draws attention his role now as a father. ‘Currently the work of being a parent dominates my time and energy and has obliterated most of my employment opportunities. I suppose because it was outside my personal experience at the time of writing the book,’ he says. ‘I don’t think the impact of childcare on employment or “jobseeking” gets much of a look-in.’ This is a fact which the pandemic has critically underscored for parents across the country.

Reading the book for the first time in 2016 shortly after graduating, I recognised the crises and injustices that had driven Corbyn’s leadership victory the previous summer. In-work poverty, the punitive benefit system, stagnant wages, precarious and outsourced labour, socio-economic atomisation, growing mental and physical distress—they’re all spotlighted and connected by Southwood into a coherent whole. But as the book is able to demonstrate, particularly by drawing on twentieth-century theory, these forces long predate the coalition government and our present age, and are instead embedded in the logics and relations of capitalism. Our present crises aren’t bugs in the system, Southwood shows; they are the system.

What we have witnessed and experienced in the ten years since the publication of Non-Stop Inertia is instead an intensification of the forces that the book simply and sharply articulates. With this painful exacerbation, many of the issues centred by Southwood have entered into the mainstream of thought. Now there are many books that detail the crises of work pointed to in Non-Stop Inertia with facts and charts and trends and many, many more pages. Few, though, attempt or have been able to articulate the distinct feeling of these times as Southwood effectively does with those three words, which collect as much as they distil.

There are many factors needed to explain the intensification of these crises over the past decade. Obviously, there has been a politics of punishment pursued by the Tories; likewise an economy geared towards asset inflation and business models centred on ever-smaller profit margins. Also of importance have been the developments in digital technologies and platform capitalism, which have produced a system requiring us to be always on, always be tracked and measured, and always a source of profit. The experience of these trends can be utterly mundane and numbing—endlessly scrolling hours away in a bullshit job on social media feeds, for instance. But for a growing proportion, they result in poverty and fuel the country’s mental health crisis, which presently sees around six million people prescribed antidepressants.

‘Non-stop inertia’ is also an equally instructive means of understanding much contemporary popular culture. On television, we can set the calendar to series of Love Island, an array of competitive cookery shows, or the latest identikit gripping crime drama; in the movies, the blockbuster schedule is dominated by unfathomable iterations of superhero movies—The Suicide Squad, released in 2021, followed another Suicide Squad five years earlier—designed to be enjoyed by child and adult viewers alike in the comfort of their own homes. The result is an anaesthetising culture. Where we would hope criticism would probe and excoriate this cultural repetition, we instead largely find it similarly hollow.

Politically, a near-total stasis is observable. Non-stop Inertia was born from New Labour’s Thatcherite continuity and capitalist realism writ large following the financial crisis, but the years since its publication have only further evidenced this inertia and cemented the feeling of inevitability whatever the eventuality. The tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire and the limbo of tenants and owners whose flats remain clad in highly-combustible materials is a painful example of this, as is the pandemic, which appears likely will result in no substantial change, despite the unprecedented levels of devastation and state failure. The ineffectual care package funded by a squeeze on workers is evidence of this. Instead, as in the case of the recent cut to Universal Credit, the pandemic beckons more and more austerity wrought on the most disadvantaged.

For many on the left, Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party shattered this numbness towards much politics, offering a new hope of radical change—but that feeling has returned as Starmer brings the party back to the tired and conservative logics of New Labour and a feeling of parliamentary hopelessness.

While the power of Corbynism within the Labour Party may have receded, there continues to be examples of radical politics winning against the capitalist forces of increasing precarity that Non-Stop Inertia charted, such as the Uber drivers’ victory in the Supreme Court or the daily efforts of the London Renters Union.

These examples offer some hope for a way out of this stasis, but Southwood warns that such victories may offer a false impression of the current predicament. ‘In my experience most low-paid outsourced workers have been deeply depoliticised and decollectivised, and their approach, understandably, is not to confront the boss or join a union, but to keep their head down and try to escape by getting promoted or moving on to somewhere else.’

Indeed, reflecting on his experience of the most recent elections, he found that little there ‘wasn’t much support for Corbyn among my co-workers during that time, even though his policies would have been hugely beneficial for a lot of them.’ This Southwood puts down ‘largely to a general lack of interest in politics, and the skewed media portrayals which people just took on uncritically, just as they did the cartoon antics of “Boris”.’

How, then, do we, as Southwood asked a decade ago, ‘short-circuit the flow of indifference’ and bring about the change so obviously needed, but deemed, both from above and from below, unfeasible? Put broadly, ‘we have to resist the pressure to go with the flow.’ That’s easier said than done—particularly when we take into account capitalism’s power to subsume criticism and defang resistance.

Take the mental health crisis, for instance—a key focus of Southwood’s in Non-Stop Inertia and his writing since. Parallel to the growth of the grave figures and societal shifts in acknowledgement has been the embedding of an apolitical and dematerialised understanding of mental health and the present crisis, which is divorced from any structural understanding and ground down to the individual.

Reflecting on this, Southwood wonders now whether ‘we should encourage a critical negativity about positive thinking, and reject the discourse of “awareness raising” in favour of consciousness raising.’ A politics of refusal and critical negativity was similarly promoted in Non-Stop Inertia through the rejection of emotional labour in the workplace and corporate wellness, for instance. The approach, though, is equally applicable to our cultural and technological sources of inertia and precarity.

And while awareness and consciousness raising are clearly connected, we can identify a fault of the Corbyn’s years leading the Labour Party was the far greater emphasis on the former over collective and horizontal discussion and education. What underpins the two tactics against the systems of non-stop inertia is the collective and creating and resisting together, whether that is in the workplace, the community centre, the playing field and the club, along the street or up the block of flats.