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  P aul Quinio's editorial in Liberation about the collapse of the debate on the "deform" of the social insurance system in France revolves around a reference to an apocryphal phrase of Churchill's: that democracy is the worst system of government, except any other. That quip has always been a conditional surrender of an essentially reactionary stance, according Capital and the established power the lion's share of the discursive wealth of the nation - as well as the real wealth - and calling it democracy. France has never submitted to this kind of thing. The strike, the demonstration, all are not dead in France. Macron viewed his larger task one of "normalizing" France - a nice little Thatcherization with some euphemism liberalism thrown in, like "apologizing" for colonialsm (while of course keeping French troops in Africa whenever the cause arises). The "reform"/deform of the social insurance system was key to Macron's larger c

  I was reading Madame de Stael’s Considerations on the principle Events of the French Revolution – as one does – and found this perfectly formed sentence that rang my chimes. De Stael is explaining the predominance of a Richelieu or a Mazarin, who though foreigners came to possess such absolute power in France, and she produces this perfectly balanced sentence: « Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. » « Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. » Translation: The individuals of this nation are too lively to submit to t

  When Marx overlays the transformations of money into commodity and commodity into money with the parodic language of alchemy, he is following a theme that goes back not only to Faust, but to the beginning of the theory of the political economy. About which, Carl Wennerlind has written an essay entitled “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” Wennerlind’s essay    proposes that the 17th century natural philosophers took the alchemical proposal of creating wealth out of nothingness – or base metal – quite seriously. And, vice versa, "when the Bank of England showed in 1694 how credit-money could function, there was a rapid falloff in the patronage of alchemists…” Curious phrase, credit-money. We would now simply say money, since it wouldn’t occur to any possessor of same to assume that the material ot of which the money was made was equal in value to the money. You won’t get much for a strip of green paper that d