Paper short abstract:

This study of English former mining and milling towns extends Gramsci’s observation that industry is “a specific mode of….thinking and feeling life”. In post-industrial times older people’s conceptualisations of the future remain conditioned by the forms of production experienced in working life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reports on the latest stage in a long-term comparative ethnographic study of the affective traces, or ‘afterlives’ of different forms of the social organisation of production in the lives of older people in post-industrial England. Early research considered the impacts of the group-based and person-centred forms of production in mining and milling respectively on conceptualisations of care and of death and dying. Later research considered their impacts on conceptualisations of a series of political phenomena, especially Brexit and the Red Wall, within which the older populations of post-industrial England have been key agents. This presentation explores relationships between the afterlives of different forms of the social organisation of production and the hopes (or the lack of them) that older people have for local communities and local younger people. I observe a marked contrast between mining and milling areas in older people’s conceptualisations of the effects of the increasing normalcy of precarious forms of employment. Crudely, while in the former it is presented as an existential threat to community life, in the latter it is presented as an opportunity for the resurgence of a latent local entrepreneurialism. The paper’s conclusions echo Gramsci’s celebrated observation that industry is “a specific mode….of thinking and feeling life”. I argue that this still stands in times of post-industry. However, and by way of de-essentializing, I argue also that the ways in which older people envisage the future are conditioned significantly by the specific forms of production they experienced in their working lives.