actually existing
“Perhaps it never was our welfare state?”
- The London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, In and Against the State (1979)
Gavin Matts, a stand-up comedian originally from Vancouver, has a bit about being grateful for having been born after “all the bridges were finished” that absolutely slays me. It’s a normal enough human instinct, I’d imagine, to take the social contexts within which one initially comes to know the world as its natural state of being, to imagine history as something that stopped moving right around the moment you were born. It’s easy to assume that the infrastructures holding up the society we live in - the social and economic as well as the physical ones – came to us fully formed, gifted by a previous generation, and so, as we now watch them decay and crumble, it’s easy to see such decline as unique or exceptional, a reversal of the direction in which the human project is meant to develop and evolve.
But as I’ve ruminated on before, one of the uniquely awesome and terrifying things about being a student of history is having to reckon with the overwhelming contingency of just about everything, the realization that nothing is ever fully complete nor completely stable, always carrying traces of what preceded it and always in the process of transition to whatever comes next. What we experience as given social structures are at once impossibly complex and entrenched, and incurably temporary and malleable; and what we take to be geopolitical facts are often better understood as the provisional byproducts of conflict between different historical movements. What we know as “capitalism,” for example, has never been purely capitalism as such, but always the result of one ideological force among many vying for primacy on stages both world-historical and intimately human.
Karl Polanyi’s great thesis of the “double movement” is particularly helpful in conceptualizing this, of course: the story of modern society, he claimed, follows the conflict between ongoing attempts to impose the strictures of free-market logic – that is, to ultimately dis-embed the workings of “the economy” from broader social contexts that might condition or restrict its free movement – and the efforts of said society to protect itself from the ultimate disintegration to which such a logic would lead if allowed to advance unchallenged. And though Polanyi wasn’t an avowed Marxist, his formulation contains strong echoes of the basic insight of historical materialism, according to which the “double movement” appears, simply put, as class struggle.
Whichever theoretical framework you adopt, this is how we get things like social assistance and unemployment insurance, healthcare, anti-discrimination and labour laws, and so on: they’re what the state once determined were enough to quell such a level of social chaos as would impede the workings of the market and the accumulation of capital; and their maintenance into our time depends on the same kinds of calculation. And as thee Stuart Hall wrote, some decades ago now, what appear as secure, agreed-upon “rights” are also, in fact, the outcome of such struggles, though you might not know it from the ways we talk about them: “The language of ‘rights,’” he observed, “is frequently deployed to obscure and mystify this fundamental basis which rights have in the struggle between contending social forces. It constantly abstracts rights from their real historical and social context, ascribes them a timeless universality, speaks of them as if they were ‘given’ rather than won, and as if they were given once-and-for-all, rather than having to be constantly secured.”
So when we think about the current disintegration of the welfare state – one aspect of which, I’ll throw out there, can be seen in the rolling back of healthcare benefits for refugee claimants, per my article which they just took out from behind the paywall at Maisonneuve – or the continuing efforts to curtail civil liberties in this country, or the global resurgence of fascism, we’ve got to remember that the rights and freedoms and opportunities to which we thought we were entitled are not, in fact, timeless and eternal, but the products of ongoing political conflict – something we've got to fight for.
Take housing. Obviously, the notion that some individual people ought to privately own other people’s homes is savage and absurd. But because the owners would have us believe that housing is a commodity like any other which, as such, should be subject to the laws of motion of the market, we’ve got these halfway solutions through which the state affirms the sanctity of private property while trying to curb its most disastrous consequences. We might view the fact that we’re now in a “housing crisis” as the result of a balance of forces that’s greatly biased towards capital. Indeed, we might recognize that, as Ricardo Tranjan insists, “There is no ‘housing crisis,’ just good old landlords squeezing high rents from tenants.” The classification of the situation as a crisis, he states, actively depoliticizes what's better understood as an ongoing political struggle, rather than a technical problem in search of the right bureaucratic fix. Although, when it comes to prescriptions for action, even so staunch a critic as Tranjan falters when faced with the question of state intervention, as Cole Webber and Philip Zigman argue in their review of his The Tenant Class. For their part, Webber and Zigman criticize the tendency to fight evictions via appeals to tenant protection law, rather than building autonomous working class power via direct struggle against landlords. “Centring the legal aspects [of resistance to eviction] obscures the class-conflicted reality of eviction and reinforces a false dichotomy between so-called ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ evictions,” they write in Renoviction and Resistance in the Capitalist City. Following such strategies in the context of anti-eviction struggles they document, “Tenants and their (self-appointed) representatives in the non-profit sector were incorporated into the policy-making process. Instead of organizing with neighbours to fight evictions, tenants attended meetings with city staff and prepared presentations.”
As Webber and Zigman point out, though, we still use rights-based discourse even if what we’re gesturing towards far exceeds the limits of “rights” in their given legal sense, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It needn't be a discursive surrender to the logic of the market so long as it's a strategic choice we're making to try and shift what constitutes our collective "common sense" – there's just a vanishingly fine line between one and the other. We're so often scolded into pretending we're part of processes of negotiation carried out in good faith, hectored into capitulation disguised as "compromise," into accepting a status quo premised on egregious violence and injustice because to do otherwise would run afoul of some supposed "realism."
Anyways, let's use all means at our disposal, including routes that might run through the state, needs be. But let’s also remember what tends to actually get the goods. It's not about being the most radical one in the room, it's about having a realistic understand of how change happens over time. As Tranjan righteously puts it (Webber and Zigman's critique notwithstanding): “In class struggle, there are no half measures. There are no win-win solutions. You have to pick a side.”
I've gone a little outside of my normal comfort zone for the mix this time, which starts off with a bunch of cumbia- and reggaeton-descended tunes, before ending with some more bass and techno-adjacent stuff. Now, these are musics I engage with at something of a remove, culturally speaking, and in which I’m not nearly as literate as I’d like to be. But, though of course I strongly believe in paying close attention to the history and social context of any art object's production, and in being reflexive in terms of the ways one is able to access it, I do also believe that sometimes it's okay to simply like what you like. So with that in mind, here are some songs I really like.
First it's Colombian, Mexico city-based producer and curator Rosa Pistola, with "Flauta Nahua," from her LP Incorregible, which came out this spring. Pistola has in recent years been working to document and promote what's being called Mexican Tribal music, mixing together rhythmic patterns and instrumentation from Mexican folk and popular music with club-ready beats and production. She curated the absolutely thrilling Dioces Tribales compilation, released in June, from which the second track included here – "Rumbea" by DJ Tetris ft. Giovanni Rios – is drawn. After that it's thee Lido Pimienta, with the lead single from her latest LP, Caribenya, which released in July. "Tóxica" both rails against and painfully empathizes with the kind of hurt that hurt people can cause: "Quién te engañó? Quién te manipuló?" she asks, atop the steady bounce of a cumbia beat.
Next, it's RaiNao, who seems poised to become the next big superstar out of Puerto Rico, using reggaeton as an entry point to explore the island's expansive musical heritage (if you don't already know her work in its own right, you'll likely recognize her voice from her guest appearance on "PERFuMITO NUEVO," a highlight from Bad Bunny's DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS LP). Though she just released her latest album, and it's excellent – that's Marcriá, which came out in May – what I've included here comes from her previous full-length, 2024's CAPICÚ (brace yourselves, kids: "pero" is a sexy one). That's followed up by LA's inimitable Cain Culto, with "colita de rana," a haunted nursery rhyme from his 2025 EP occulto 001. In keeping with his stated mission to offer "a riposte to mass-produced, milquetoast culture," Culto's music is queer as fuck, all high camp and dead seriousness, mashing up the glitter with the dirt. Next it's "POPPER!", a gritty reggaeton-hyperpop hybrid from Santiago-based rapper AKRIILA's 2024 LP epistolares, which features guest vocals from Argentine reggaeton rising star Taichu.
Then, detouring for a moment closer to home, it's "Scenes Of," from Montreal's Quinton Barnes. This is an older one from the prolific MC, producer, and autodidact philosopher – yes, that is indeed a reference to Saidiya Hartman's essential Scenes of Subjection – drawn from 2022's For the Love of Drugs, though I'll say once again that if you haven't yet dived into their more recent output, like their incredible 2025 opus Black Noise, now's definitely the time. Next it's another oldie, this one British producer Jai Paul's 2013 classic "Jasmine." Paul hasn't had an easy go of it – first shooting to fame with with early demos before suffering severe mental health challenges after an unmastered album leaked onto the internet – but it seems as though he may have found footing again over the last few years, and I cannot wait to see what comes of it. After that it's "Aset," a highlight from multilingual French-Cuban R&B duo Ibeyi's June LP Offering, followed by French-Mauritian producer GЯEG with "Aun Do," pulled from his July EP Kas Frekans and featuring vocals from Mumbia/LA MC Naisha.
From there out it's all instrumentals, starting with "Lluvia Negra," from Latencia, a collaborative LP from Microhm & Imaabs, released in July. Under her Microhm alias, Mexico-city based producer Leslie Garcia has been putting out some of my favourite music of the last few years, a kind of post-industrial ambient reggaeton, and this album – commissioned by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture and making extensive use of sound samples from the Fonoteca Nacional – is perhaps her best work yet. Next it's Quito-based producer Entrañas, purveyor of driving techno bangers that mobilize dancehall and reggaeton rhythmic idioms; "Perdón El Retraso, Es Que No Quería Venir" features on his El Que Pida Picante, Que Se Lo Aguante LP, released in April. And finally, we're taken out by London's Tristan Arp with "Spiral’s Leap," a sparkly, liquid, bass-adjacent single he put out last October.
• Mixcloud: a vanishingly thin line (aug 2026)
One last thing: in the latest issue of Musicworks they've published my profile of Montreal-based drummer and percussionist Mili Hong. Mili has been busy blowing minds around town over the past few years in a variety of ensembles – notably including avant-jazz collective Bellbird, whose latest LP The Call came out in February and is easily one of my favourites of the year – and we had some great conversations about non-verbal languages, moving across countries and continents, video games, and dogs we have loved. The article isn't available online, but if you can't spring for a copy of the magazine and still want to read it, just reach out.
Okay that's it. Thanks as always for reading, and to Fred and Dave for editorial consulting. It can be a weird and alienating thing, sending things like this out into the void, and I really appreciate every bit of feedback I get from you all in return. Much additional gratitude, of course, to those of you who've signed up as paid subscribers – it means a lot, really.
xo, graham