Much has been made of the claim that humanity has ascended to the status of a terrestrial force and inaugurated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. While attention has been paid to the contestable nature of the epoch and its disputed histories, insufficient attention has been paid to the significance of the Anthropocene for political praxis. Contrary to much Anthropocenic discourse that articulates a renewed sense of mastery over nature through assertions of humanity's complete subsumption of the environment, recent work in both science and technology studies and human geography suggests an alternate reading of the Anthropocene as an epoch without mastery, one where humanity exists in a permanent state of vulnerability. The political significance of this state of vulnerability is explored through a reading of popular TV show The Walking Dead, a post-collapse narrative of a world in ruins and overrun by zombies. On a ruined earth, political praxis is orientated not towards a return of the earth to its previous productive state, but rather as an unending labour of survival and salvage. Survival is not a life reduced to bare life, but rather a state of tension between a life reduced to necessity, and the refusal to separate the question of how to live from the work of securing life itself. Left unresolved, this tension animates the politics of the Anthropocene, suggesting that in place of the teleology of progress social life is organised within it through unceasing care and repair time.

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This article will explore the ways mothers and carers use the term ‘emotional labor’ to describe the exhaustion and burnout associated with socially reproductive tasks, rather than the performance of affective labor in the workplace. Scholars of social reproduction theory claim that emotion is key to understanding the specificities of gendered alienation, yet it remains under‐theorised. This article seeks to understand how the emotional lives of carers have been transformed by neoliberal processes that have intensified labor both within and beyond the home. Drawing on interviews with participants from the 2019 ‘My Mum is on Strike’ stay and play event, alongside ethnographic insights from online mothering blogs, sometimes referred to as the ‘mamasphere’ (Wilson et al., 2017), this article seeks to contextualize the experiences of carers who narrate their reproductive labor as emotional ‘work’. Given the conditions of neoliberal rationality and the marketization of society, where every ‘field of activity… and entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is understood as a market and governed as a firm’ (Brown, 2015), emotional labor and the associated gendered expectations may begin to ‘feel like’ work, and we argue that this is felt in a specific way by those carrying out mothering labor, warranting further academic investigation.

In the UK, the recent flourishing of organised resistance against austerity and the dominance of the free market over all aspects of life has done little to buck an overall trend of decreasing membership in political parties and similar organisations. Few informal organisational forms on the Left have faired better. However, these diminishing structures have certain key characteristics in common and there are suggestions of alternative political forms emerging in their stead. This article argues that such periods of decomposition, far from being an indication of failure, are an important and desirable element of social movement that can and should be deliberately factored in to political organising. Building from the notion that the basis of social change is the ability to move out of existing institutions, the article explores three methodologies of decomposition that bridge the divides between mythology, poetry, and political theory: Negative Capability, Eeriness, and the surrealist game.