[...] To my mind one of the parts of For Common Things that holds up best is a reporting-based chapter on the coalfields and the ecological and social violence that secures cheap energy. That chapter described West Virginia’s landscape as the remnant that persists after destruction, that which has not been eroded or excavated. It showed the class conflict that brought militant miners into gun battle with the National Guard in the 1920s, and gave glimpses of the quite unpastoral realities that left so many of my high school friends looking to get out and never come back. Simply by stating facts, it achieved a realism that exposed neoliberalism’s realist trump card as an ideology and, at the same time, showed up the distortions in my own recollection of a “stable, certain, solid” reality to throw against neoliberal irony.

But there were few grips to get hold of that world in that way. There was, for one thing, an implicit prohibition: a seemingly unanswerable sense that the left, the left of political economy and universal emancipation from bad work, economic hierarchy, and political oligarchy, was done, fruitless—if not, worse, guilty. The no-longer-new radicalisms of the 1960s and 1970s, doubts about infinite growth, and calls to reconsider the human place on the planet as part of the general realignment of political economy were also implicitly shut down as nonsense, assumed to have been refuted, so that whoever raised them would put himself outside “serious” conversation. This limit on the substance of serious argument reinforced the reduction of political seriousness to a rhetorical style: one could point out, in all seriousness, that questions about how to shape an economy were inescapable, and inescapably political; but when all the “serious” answers are variations on one neoliberal theme, seriousness easily becomes a sonorous way of posing an almost trivial question. Realism was the watchword of the time—solving problems, wrangling facts, accepting “reality”—and although that realism was always limited and normative and seems now to have played us false, it made a great many alternatives seem fake or “improbable” along the way.