notes from the ice age

In the Postulates of the Political Economy, William Bagehot writes:

'In the Athenian laws,' says Demosthenes, 'are many well-devised securities for the protection of the creditor; for commerce proceeds not from the borrowers, but from the lenders, without whom no vessel, no navigator, no traveller could depart from port.' Even in these days we could hardly put the value of discounts and trade loans higher. But though the loan fund begins so early in civilisation, and is prized so soon, it grows very slowly; the full development, modern banking such as we are familiar with in England, stops where the English language ceases to be spoken. The peculiarity of that system is that it utilises all the petty cash of private persons down nearly to the end of the middle class. This is lodged with bankers on running account, and though incessantly changing in distribution, the quantity is nearly fixed on the whole, for most of what one person pays out others almost directly pay in; and therefore it is so much added to the loan fund which bankers have to use, though, as credit is always precarious, they can, of course, only use it with caution. Besides this, English bankers have most of the permanent savings of little persons deposited with them, and so have an unexampled power of ready lending. But ages of diffused confidence are necessary to establish such a system…

That diffused confidence reflects, among other things the power relationships within a society that have been imposed on the distribution of assets. So what has the ice age of the neo-liberal society established? We have been living on an unproven supposition, from which is derived a practical aporia. The supposition is that only by ensuring that the businessman can achieve the greatest possible real compensation can we motivate the capitalist system beyond its tendency to crisis. And the aporia is that the money made by that businessman will depend on the demand of a population which will otherwise have their own compensations squeezed, the natural consequence of guaranteeing the businessman the greatest compensation possible for his activity. Crushing the bargaining power of labor is always the first and greatest of the tasks of conservative government. So thoroughly was this accomplished during the last thirty years – the years of the Reagan economy – that we rarely see anybody write, anymore, about the bargaining power of labor. We have, bizarrely, decided that the power of to compensate should lie solely with those in management. Hence, the general shape of the new economy is indistinguishable from the drivers to increasing economic inequality. This should be distinguished from immiseration – it is possible for the working class in general to gain purchasing power over time in an economy in which their economic power vis a vis the top income tier diminishes. However, there are limits to how far this movement can take place. That’s the simple alpha and omega of the ‘new economy’.

Business Week has an interesting article that gently asks if we are at a reckoning point, or as the author, Michael Mandel, puts it, How real was the prosperity?


Here are some highlights:

“Personal Spending. The rule for a prudent individual is simple: Don't spend more than you make. For a long time, the U.S. economy obeyed that rule. As far back as the 1960s, personal spending, adjusted for inflation, has basically tracked the overall growth of the economy, as measured by gross domestic product. Sometimes consumers would get ahead of the economy for a few years, and sometimes fall behind, but never for very long.
That pattern changed in the 1990s. As of the third quarter of 2007, the 10-year growth rate for consumption was 3.6%, vs. GDP growth for the same period of 2.9%. This difference represents an enormous gap. If consumer spending had tracked the overall economy over the past decade as it has in the past, Americans today would be spending about $600 billion less a year. The extra spending has amounted to a total of about $3 trillion since 2001.
…
Consumer Lending. The past 10 years will go down as one of the greatest consumer-lending sprees ever. Adjusted for inflation, consumer debt—including mortgages—rose an average 7.5% per year since 1997, far faster than the 4.2% rate of the previous 10 years. The last time debt rose so fast was the 1960s, as the postwar generation bought homes and autos. If Americans had kept borrowing at their pre-1997 pace, they would have had about $3 trillion less in debt.

The extra debt also represents a formidable obstacle for banks and other financial institutions that might want to lend more to consumers. "Going forward, we're not going to see this credit-driven growth," says Alistair Milne, a professor and banking expert at City University in London. "Banks are saying, 'we have to be more careful here.'"
…
Corporate Earnings. Yes, there's been a profit boom in recent years. Corporate earnings, as measured by government statisticians, have averaged 8% of GDP over the past decade, up from a low of 6.5% in the early '90s. That has helped propel stocks upward.

But here's an unfortunate truth—the profit surge has been mainly in one area, financial services. Financial institutions have benefited from the consumer credit boom, the proliferation of new financial instruments, and relatively low rates. By contrast, the earnings of nonfinancial companies over the past decade have averaged about 5.3% of GDP, about the same since the mid-1980s. There are few signs of any acceleration, even after years of restructuring. “

Mandel’s figures speak for themselves. However, in an economy shot through with an ideology tailor made for the wealthy, but requiring an ever increasing level of demand from the not-wealthy, these are figures that dare not speak their name. So the job of weaving lies is left to political reporters and the like. Take this analysis of the Bush economy by Sheryl Stolberg, one of NYT’s Washington reporters (a pool from which we have gotten Judith Miller and Elizabeth Bumiller, whose very names echo all the freighted servilities and stupidities of the decade): “Echo of First Bush: Good Economy Turns Sour.”


“Mr. Bush has spent years presiding over an economic climate of growth that would be the envy of most presidents. Yet much to the consternation of his political advisers, he has had trouble getting credit for it, in large part because Americans were consumed by the war in Iraq.”

Notice how neatly the wisdom of 2004 is turned around, when the word from the governing class was that it was the popularity of Mr. Mission Accomplished that covered up the dissatisfactions with the economy. But now we have that ‘climate of growth’. In order to put the nail in, Stolberg quotes, of all people, Bruce Bartlett:

“From a strictly economic perspective, it is difficult to blame Mr. Bush for the current crisis. Even some economists who have been critical of the president, like Bruce Bartlett, who worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, say he cannot be held liable for the burst of the housing bubble or problems in credit markets.”

Well, is that precious or what? Why choose this particular economist who is critical of the president – why not, say, Paul Krugman? Because the first rule in political reporting is that a Republican who has criticized a Republican has been washed in the blood of the lamb – thus, anything that Republican says is as precious gold. The same rule applies to Democrats only to the extent that the Democrat doing the criticizing is Senator Lieberman. This is the code of the pack.

Anybody who looks at Mandel’s figures will note that the three trillion dollar lag is close to the two trillion dollar surplus, which came about due to the payroll tax increase put in by Reagan and the extremely mild increase on the marginal income of the wealthy by Clinton. They will further note that the swag was distributed by Bush to his wealthy buds. End of story.

Except it isn’t even the beginning of the story for birds like Stolberg, whose heart belongs to daddy.

“Once the stimulus package is passed, the president plans to turn his attention to making his tax cuts permanent, an approach that Joel Kaplan, the deputy White House chief of staff, said would provide “the foundation for continued economic growth.”
“And I think the historical record will reflect that,” Mr. Kaplan said.
Still, for the White House, there are obstacles ahead. Democrats are unlikely to agree to extending the tax cuts and, despite the seeming bipartisan enthusiasm for the stimulus package, it could run into trouble on Capitol Hill. Even if the package does pass, some economists — Mr. Bartlett among them — believe it will do little to improve the nation’s economic health, leaving Mr. Bush vulnerable to accusations that he did too little, too late.

Mr. Bush has roughly 51 weeks left in office. He had hoped to spend the time focused on creating peace in the Middle East and stability in Iraq. Now he has a new battle on the home front. And here in Washington, where finger-pointing is practically a pastime, the economic blame game has only just begun.”

The tears of things cry out for the President. We wonder what conservative shithead Stolberg is going to do her Plutarchian life with – Bumiller chose Condy Rice.

Come out of the cupboards, ye boys and girls…

Ultras

In Engel’s introduction to his The Situation of Labor in England, he gives a brief history of the displacement of the old, ‘detached’ rural farming and artisan system brought about by the new system of industrial production:

“The felt comfortable in their quiet plant life, and would never, save for the Industrial revolution, have been taken out of this clearly very romantic-cosy, but yet, for humans, unworthy existence. They were not humans, but simply working machines in the service of the few aristocrats, which up until now have lead history. The Industrial Revolution has thus only carried through the consequence of this when it made the laborers completely into a mere machines and took away the last remnant of independent activity from under their hands; but in doing so drove them to thinking and to the claims of a human situation. What politics effected in France, in England was effected by industry and the movement of bourgeois society overall; it pulled the last classes to be mired in the apathy against universal human interests into the vortex of history.”

Engels had already explained to his readers in the foreword what he means by the bourgeois:

“…I always used the word Middle Class in the sense of the English middle-class (or as it is almost always said, middle classes) where it means the same as with the French bourgeoisie the possessing class – the class, which in France and England directly, and in Germany as “public opinion” indirectly is in possession of state power.”

That is a pretty fascinating definition of class, linking it both to economic power and the power of the state even if – in backwards Germany – that power is possessed not by representatives, but by ‘public opinion’. The latter – the power of public opinion – is what fascinates me about the conflicts between ‘freedom’ and ‘the emancipation of the working class’. What, after all, does it mean for the workers to be uprooted from shameful apathy and thrown into the ‘vortex of history’ where they could think about the claims of the human situation except that the working class would have, among other things, an opinion?

This is the question that became very real to the generation of 1848 after the revolution failed. Herzen’s whole life has often been seen from the perspective of a before and after 1848 – he himself often wrote in those terms. Isaiah Berlin has noted that Herzen’s skepticism – about the people, and especially about progress – preceded the events of 1848. It is a shame that Berlin never really grappled with Lenin’s essay on Herzen, because Lenin makes an acute historical point:

Herzen's spiritual shipwreck, the profound scepticism and pessimism to which he fell prey after 1848, was the shipwreck of the bourgeois illusions of socialism. Herzen's spiritual drama was a product and reflection of that epoch in world history when the revolutionariness of the bourgeois democracy was already passing away (in Europe), and the revolutionariness of the socialist proletariat had not yet ripened. This is something the Russian liberal knights of verbal incontinence, who are now trying to cover up their own counter-revolutionariness by florid phrases about Herzen's scepticism, have not understood and cannot understand. With these knights, who betrayed the Russian Revolution of 1905, and have even forgotten to think of the great calling of a revolutionary, scepticism is a form of transition from democracy to liberalism to that servile, vile, infamous and brutal liberalism which shot down the workers in 1848, restored shattered thrones, applauded Napoleon III and which Herzen cursed, unable to understand its class nature.

Lenin’s notion was that bourgeois skepticism targeted the supposed incapacity of the working class to enjoy the cultural gains of progress. Ripped from their apathy, as Engels puts it, their minds were concentrated by their conditions on the material facts of life, making them great sniffers out of the web of self interest that underlies the industrial system, but contemptuous of the culture of the rentiers of that system. In Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia, this is exactly how Herzen is portrayed:

“Being proved wrong has made them [the revolutionaries] cocky. They’re more certain than ever that the people are natural republicans waiting to be lead out of bondage. But the people are more interested in potatoes than freedom. The people think equality means everyone should be oppressed equally. They love authority. They’re suspicious of talent. They want a government to govern for them and not against them. To govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads. We thought we could educate the people like a horse doctor blowing a pill into a horse. We thought we could set the pace for social change. The emperors did more than keep their thrones, they pushed our faces into the wreck of our belief in the revolutionary instincts of the people.”

The luster and luxury of disillusionment – it has a standing, in the cold war mythology, with the metanoia of Saul in sacred history, except that it is conversion to the God that failed. There is an impulse in Herzen, embodied especially in the middle dialog in From the other shore, between a doctor and his lady companion before the house in which Rousseau wrote... something, which is full of phrases about the precarious civilization of people such as him and her, in the face of the inscrutable masses. But, as I pointed out in an earlier post, Herzen wrote dialog not because he wanted to represent himself in one speaker who cleverly undoes another, but because he felt the clash in himself of views. This, actually, is the liberal intellectual’s highest form of skepticism – the refusal to pretend that the clash has an easy resolution. Like Engels and Marx, Herzen was definitely one of the Ultras in 1848 – and like those two, he wasn’t stupid about it. But he didn’t quite have Marx’s moderation – for Marx was strongly of the opinion that the task at hand was democratic government, at least in Germany and Austria.

Stoppard’s picture of Herzen the sceptic is, as has been mentioned in many reviews, a bit too reliant on Berlin's picture of Herzen as the disenchanted liberal, kin to John Stuart Mill. Herzen doesn't see some elite, some cultured margin, as separate from and higher than the people and their potatoes. In reality, he was shrewder than this. In his letters to an old comrade [Bakunin] which have been used to make the case that Herzen turned to the right at the end - they were written in the late 1860s - he writes this:

“It is this pattern that the past, which we want now to leave behind, has followed. The forms, aspects, and rites have changed but the essence has remained the same. He who bowed his head before a Capuchin friar bearing a cross is no different from the man who bows his head to a court decision no matter how absurd it is.”

The man who bows his head to the court decision is, of course, the establishment liberal par excellence. He is bowing his head to his own system. It is only in seeing Herzen’s criticisms as total, directed not just at the people but at European society in general, that one understands how the sceptic and the revolutionary were joined.

the elementary particles and general society

Those who have read one or two of Houellebecq’s novels will immediately see that Jérôme Kerviel sprang out of the brain of Michel Houellebecq. His problem is that he is fictional. It must have bothered him:

“He failed in a bid for town council in his 20s; he never rose higher than a green belt, a midlevel rank, after years of judo training — because of his bad knees; and he attended an average college where he earned respectable but unremarkable grades.
“People who want to be golden boys or clever in the market don’t come here,” said Valérie Buthion, the director of the University of Lyon’s economic and financial engineering department, where Mr. Kerviel earned a master’s degree in market finance. “The showoffs don’t come.”

“. . . his hedonistic worldview and the forces that shaped his consciousness were common to an entire generation. Just as determining the apparatus for an experiment and choosing one or more observables made it possible to assign a specific behavior to an atomic system-now particle, now wave-so could Bruno be seen as an individual or, from another point of view, as passively caught up in the sweep of history. His motives, values, and desires did not distinguish him from his contemporaries in any way.”

“In the French media, former colleagues and even agents in a neighborhood real estate office near his apartment remembered him for his understated sartorial elegance and a boyish resemblance to Tom Cruise.”

“Moments after they climbed down from the Jeep, Bruno realized he had made a mistake. The estate sloped gently toward the south, scattered with shrubs and flowers. A waterfall tumbled into a clear green pool; nearby, a woman lay naked, sunning herself on a flat rock while another soaped herself before diving in. Closer to them, on a rug, a bearded man was meditating or sleeping; against his tanned skin, his long blond hair was striking--he looked a little like Kris Kristofferson. Bruno felt depressed.”

“Mr. Kerviel remained hidden from public view Friday. A handwritten note posted in his apartment building in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine urged swarms of journalists to leave residents alone because the former trader had taken shelter elsewhere.
“Kerviel,” the note read. “Is not known in the building.”

"There remains some humans of the old species, particularly in areas long dominated by religious doctrine. Their reproductive levels fall year by year, however, and at present their extinction seems inevitable. Contrary to the doomsayers, this extinction is taking place peaceably, despite occasional acts of violence, which also continue to decline."

There will be mud...

Last night, LI went and saw There will be blood. An infrastructure film – what great timing! A shot from the past, when capitalism had its hooks in nature, instead of like it is today, when the real money is made in the supernatural, capital flows marked in nice digits on screens that have as much meaning as messages left on Ouija boards from old Aunt Marge’s avatar in the Beyond. Anyway, I loved the oil derrick. I loved the finding of the oil I loved the gloves on the pipemen, the long johns, the big, thick greasy ropes. I loved the moment the gusher came up. Giant has nothing on this film. Of course, even being a transplant to Texas, certain of the stories of the tribe have penetrated my skull, and I, even I, am stirred primally by an oil strike, vaguely remembering Spindletop and a thousand tents springing up all at once, oil rush towns and gushers that took weeks to cap, wildcatters suddenly rich and then squandering that money and dying on the down in a Houston backalley, of exposure – yeah, we revel in that shit. Hey, at one point in my life I was friends with the chauffeur of one of H.L. Hunt’s mistresses, at that time already long in the tooth, the mistress that is, and now no doubt lying peacefully underground. So I, too, have seen a little bit of the mystery and the glory.

The star of There will be blood is undoubtedly not the blood, but the dirt. Dirt as petroleum residue. Dirt as silt. Dirt as clay. Dirt as sludge. The blood at the end is not half as impressive as the pools of oil in the middle. There’s the scum that dries on the face of the minister who is dragged into a rivulet of oil by Daniel Plainview, and that he wears to the dinner table, a mask of his humiliation. There’s the puddles everywhere, black on that salt barren land – which Plainview promises to irrigate, which, of course, will eventually harvest its own lithic disasters as the mineral salts come to the surface. There’s the dried crust on the boots of the oilfield workers. There’s, picturesquely, oil on Plainview’s face as he watches the flames catch hold of the derrick – his demonic face. And oil on the child’s face. One never forgets that oil is gritty.

As has been remarked, ain’t a lot of women in this flick. In fact, for the first time in my memory, a film about man and primary product extraction goes to the brothel and shows – men! Not a female form to be found, dressed or undressed. A most, an irritating female laughter off camera, in the background.

LI, truth be told, is rather finicky, especially about grease. We do despise grease. But in this film, dirt is heroic. That’s the true sex in the film: man and mud. And just as we liked the grease here, the shine of it, we liked the capitalist at the center of it, the toad with the jewel in his forehead – he is an I.W.W. caricature kapitalist sprung to life, except that we only see him buying land, not chiseling his workers or breaking strikes. Nowadays, of course, those are considered virtues. To create an effect, best cheat people out of the unearned wealth they deserve from the minerals upon which they’ve planted their dwellings – that is a thing we all know is wicked. It is like robbing a man’s winning lottery ticker. But even here, in truth, by the standards of wildcatters in Texas, he pays pretty well for the land – enough to sicken your orthodox Randian.

brother, can you spare a trillion?

They used to tell me I was building a dream ...

LI had to swallow a little sob of pride, yesterday, as the Bush administration, in the form of the Fed, did what it does best – made sure that our billionaire class is all tucked in and shit. Are they being fed well? Have their diapers been changed? Since last August’s cuts (which, we’ve been assured over and over by financial journalists, were ‘brilliant’), the Fed has shown that it takes its mission (“drinks on the house!”) seriously.

Many might be thinking, gee, if trillions of dollars can be lost in the blink of an eye, perhaps the state should have captured that money and used it for something useful. Such thinking is vicious, criminal, and should be outlawed. As libertarians would point out, such thinking would hamper all our freedom – freedom – freedom. Soon we’d be demanding free health care and who knows what other kinds of shit. It would be the Soviet Union all over again.

But carpers are always a problem. Econospeak has a nice post referencing an article in the dear old New York Times of last July. Remember last July? It was the gilded age, last July. We were all so happy. Things were turnin’ around in Iraq. The towers of Babel were being built in the heart of many a gentrified area – such as in Austin – and everybody was getting rich, mining the potential in their up and up houses by tapping the mortgage money, here and there, for the new kitchen, the boat, and how about a six pack of 25 dollar wines? It was then that we heard the words of one of the captains of our industry and fate as though it were a blast from the Whore of Babylon herself, speaking at the ‘Anti-Christ welcome home’ party:


"Kenneth C. Griffin, who received more than $1 billion last year as chairman of a hedge fund, the Citadel Investment Group, declared: "The money is a byproduct of a passionate endeavor." Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money -- and there is always a get-rich crowd -- "soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome." His own team at Citadel, he said, "loves the problems they work on and the challenges inherent to their business." Mr. Griffin maintained that he has created wealth not just for himself but for many others. "We have helped to create real social value in the U.S. economy," he said. "We have invested money in countless companies over the years and they have helped countless people"."

"The income distribution has to stand," Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, "you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard."

Can you imagine how we would all suffer if Mr. Griffin did not work so hard? I imagine that he would get out of his seat slower. Or, when some suited scumbag came in with another computer simulation showing how to fleece suckers ever more creatively, he’d airily wave them away. He’d be on strike, our maestro. Imagine that creativity taken away from the common good to which he so richly contributes! He’d lie down on his office sofa more. It would be so sad. Similar sentiments were uttered by Russian serfholders in 1850 – take away the ability to own a serf and you simply destroy the incentive structure that had made Russia great!

Sganarelle, 1848

O er hat nicht unrecht, jener populäre Philosoph, wenn er sagt, daß das Sein, nur ein Begriffsaggregat mit markierten elektro-magnetisch-psychologisch-galvanoplastischen Momenten ist. – Nestroy, Freiheit in Krähwinkel

It is strange that Nestroy’s Freedom in Kraehwinkel (Martin Swales once suggested that the title should be Englished as ‘Freedom comes to Chickentown’), which combined songs and music with farce, was never transposed into some equivalent of the Magic Flute of 1848. It is a political farce that takes revolution as another route to the improbable junction of two hearts; it makes a light operetta of revolution and reaction. Those with an interest in opera and Marx – ahem, Chabert? - would, I think, love Nestroy’s play – if this ain’t achin’ for a dialectical-materialist-allegorical reading, I don’t know my Benjamites! That someone like myself, not exactly an expert in real music, especially after the lifetime I’ve spent under the dulling influence of pop, that even I can hear the ghost of the opera it could be in the play, must count for something.

Okay, to come clean, people. Yes, there is one Nestroy play all Americans know. Except they don’t know that it came from Nestroy, via Thornton Wilder. I mean, of course, Hello Dolly. This can’t be helped - and hey, I love the Louis Armstrong version of this, so go fuck yourself if you have a problem with that! So there, my full confession has been made. The Nestroy play was also recast by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle.

Freedom comes to Chickentown was revived in 1980 in Schwechat, a suburb of Vienna that contains the Schloß Rothmühle. This was the castle where Mesmer produced some of his first cures. It is now the center of the international Nestroy society. The history of revivals is pretty bizarre. The play was revived after the Anschluss, and – ah, the abysses that open up! – the word “Führer” was substituted for the word “Freiheit”.

The most interesting character in the play is Eberhardt Ultra, a journalist, and thus by trade a troublemaker. He appears in numerous disguises in the place – now as a Russian general (the Russians were called in by Franz Joseph to help crush the revolution), now as a priest, and once, crucially, as Metternich himself.

This play fits so well with the metaphoric of ghosts that Derrida explores in Specters of Marx that it is … ghostly. Except here the ghost is not communism, but just the opposite:

“Ultra: Also, wie's im großen war, so haben wir's hier im kleinen g'habt, die Reaktion ist ein Gespenst, aber G'spenster gibt es bekanntlich nur für den Furchtsamen; drum sich nicht fürchten davor, dann gibt's gar keine Reaktion!”

(Thus, as in the great world, so in the small, reaction is a ghost, but a ghost, as is well known, only exists for the timorous. thus, stop being afraid and reaction will just cease to exist!)

As we will see when I get to those Herzen posts, the ghost metaphoric is written all over Herzen’s 1848 writings. I think I will postpone, however, making the Derridean connections until then.

The plot of Freedom comes to Chickentown is your usual farcical fare. The established power – reaction – in Krähwinkel is represented by the mayor and his chief official, Klaus. Klaus has a marriageable daughter, Cecilie, who Klaus wants to marry to Jesus Christ – highing the obedient Cecelie to a nunnery, in short. But Cecilie is secretly smitten with Siegmund – who Klaus believes is in love with the Night watchman’s daughter. This belief is essential to the trick that brings Cecilia and Siegmund together, which I won’t reveal – I mean, one day you all might see this play! On the side of ‘freedom’ are the mid level Kraehwinklers – there’s little reference to labor. Thus, the Nightwatchman and his friends, Pemperl and Schabenfeller, among others, represent freedom and revolt. Pemperl is in it mainly for the sensation – as he says, he “just wants to see a little revolution”. The true liberals, here, are members of the ‘new class,’ relatively speaking. There’s Ultra, the journalist. And there is the vaguely upper middle class widow, Frau von Frankenfrey, with whom Ultra is smitten. Ultra’s disguises are not only in the service of the revolution – they are primarily designed to free Frau von Frankenfrey from the manipulations of the Burgermeister, who is manipulating the terms of her late husband’s will to force her to marry him.

Such is the genius of farce that the path of love and the expulsion of the villain create a perfect vehicle for freedom - freedom - freedom. Although by the time the play was performed, on July 1, 1848, reaction was on the verge of coming back. Ultra’s exorcism was uttered just as the specters were changing.

LI is interested in how, exactly, it came about that after 1848, an attitude arose, shared among the intellectuals of the three sites I’ve already referred to – the pessimists, the liberals, the radicals – that “freedom” was a secondary value for the ‘people’ – whereas, pre-1848, freedom was considered to be a subversive shibboleth that bonded together the dangerous class. On the one hand, there was the visible betrayal of the cause of the people by the liberals to the cause of legitimacy. On the other hand, there was the adoption of a narrower political notion of freedom – I would label this, provisionally, as the defeat of existential political freedom, the freedom to disturb the social order, and the rise of liberal freedom, which named a specific order. Ultra represents this split – he is visibly, in his changing costumes and his tricks, a Lord of Misrule, a visitor from the older notion of freedom – but at the end, with the Burgermeister expelled by fake students, Klaus’ rule over Cecilia overturned, and Ultra’s suit accepted by Frau von Frankenfrey, nothing really changes the order in Chickentown. The exorcism of the ghost of reaction at the end point is truly a surface phenomenon, the end of the rule of pigtails, or Zopf, representing the pseudo ancien regime of Metternich. The restricted order of freedom, the compromise with reaction that, in fact, became the norm, had the effect of demystifying freedom – taking away its former, chthonic power, and in essence removing it, in the perspective of the intellectuals, from the interest of the people.

A little note: that Ultra of Ultras, Karl Marx, was in Vienna on August 28, 1848, where he analyzed the struggle for democracy in terms of the struggle between the workers and the bourgeoisie, comparing it to what was happening in France. After he ended his talk, a man arose and said that no, the Viennese workers weren’t conscious, like the French ones were – they simply wanted 5 more Kreuzer a week. (G. Herman, Karl Marx in Wien, in Der Kampf, 268)

Our poor Pres

In some ways, LI feels sorry for Bush. The man’s plan, after 2004, was clearly to set another bubble in motion by clearing out the middle class’ retirement accounts. Plug Social Security into the stock market, watch the shenanigans make his friends rich, and the looting of that retirement wealth would have stretched the bubble well into 2009, when its fall, and the consequent decimation of the middle class ability to retire for the next generation, would fall on somebody else’s head. Oh, ownership society! a swindler’s wet dream, now even farther off! although the thugs in D.C. will still lustily call out for Social Security Reeeform, by which they mean finding that last trillion or two dollars Americans hid in the cabinet. Where’d that bitch hide my drinkin’ money! That is the question good Republicans want answered.