Fun for the whole family

Ah, things LI loves! There’s nothing like the smell of the laissez faire lollipalooza collapsing in the morning!

Here’s an advertisement for a service that is roiling the business blogs. Here’s an interview with some people who are walking away. Of course, the interview, from 60 minutes, is all this is so immoral. Not a story they would ever run about a company that fired a mass of workers for no other reason than that the company wasn’t making a profit. Or a big enough profit. That, of course, is good clean fun!

All the style sections of papers and mags have had so much fun for the past decade with how we can now all act like millionaires that people are starting to act like millionaires – is that cool or what? Act like a bank and ‘write down’ your debt. Write it down on a piece of paper, scotch tape the key to the house you can no longer afford, and send it to the bank that holds the mortgage with best wishes on selling the sucker.

Last night, CBS' "60 Minutes" took a look at the "subprime loan crisis." You can find the full transcript here, but the following exchange between "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft and homeowner Stephanie Valdez is a highlight worth examining a bit closer; it's significant both from an economic and, more importantly, a socionomic point of view.

STEPHANIE VALDEZ: Why pay a $3,200 payment on a 1200-square-foot home? It makes no sense.

STEVE KROFT: That's what you agreed to do when you bought the house.

STEPHANIE VALDEZ: Fine. If the value is going up. But we're not going anywhere. The price or the value is going down. It makes no sense because we will never be able to refinance and get a lower payment. There's no way.

STEVE KROFT: You're saying, essentially, that you're going to stop making payments on it? You're just gonna let it go into foreclosure?

STEPHANIE VALDEZ: You know, that's the only advice we've gotten so far is walk away from the home. We don't want to do that to our credit. Why can't our mortgage company work with us?

Kevin Depew:

The issue Kroft is alluding to here is what one might call "the morality of contractual obligation." Without saying it explicitly, Kroft implies ("That's what you agreed to do when you bought the house,") that Valdez and her husband, by walking away from the house, are engaging in some vaguely immoral behavior. It's a promise. They are breaking their promise. Left dangling for the viewer to arrive at is the conclusion that people who break promises are immoral.

the aristocrats, the plutocrats, and other rats

From the perspective of the nineteenth century worker, there is something mocking, something a little satanic about freedom, as it was presented in the establishment discourse. Freedom, of course, comes with contracts – but what contracts! On the one side, the employer was in the position of seemingly having no limit to the things he could require of the laborer. On the other side, the laborer was blamed for not adhering to every tittle and jot of the employer’s dictate. From the perspective of the intellectual, society was making a Faustian pact with technology and industry. From the perspective of the worker, it wasn’t Faustian at all, but reeked of sulfur in the old, old way: the devil required infinite pain in this life, on penalty of losing life altogether without him. In the Position of the Working Class, Engels indicts the order of life required of the laborer in the factory by giving examples of the rules he or she had to follow, under threat of fine or dismissal:

“What a time the worker has of it, too, inside the factory! Here the employer is absolute law-giver; he makes regulations at will, changes and adds to his codex at pleasure, and even, if he inserts the craziest stuff, the courts say to the working-man:
"You were your own master, no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by it."
And so the working-man only gets into the bargain the mockery of the Justice of the Peace who is a bourgeois himself, and of the law which is made by the bourgeoisie. Such decisions have been given often enough. In October, 1844, the operatives of Kennedy’s mill, in Manchester, struck. Kennedy prosecuted them on the strength of a regulation placarded in the mill, that at no time more than two operatives in one room may quit work at once. And the court decided in his favour, giving the working-men the explanation cited above. And such rules as these usually are! For instance: 1. The doors are closed ten minutes after work begins, and thereafter no one is admitted until the breakfast hour; whoever is absent during this time forfeits 3d. per loom. 2. Every power-loom weaver detected absenting himself at another time, while the machinery is in motion, forfeits for each hour and each loom, 3d. Every person who leaves the room during working- hours, without obtaining permission from the overlooker, forfeits 3d. 5. Weavers who fail to supply themselves with scissors forfeit, per day, 1d. 4. All broken shuttles, brushes, oil-cans, wheels, window-panes, etc., must be paid for by the weaver. 5. No weaver to stop work without giving a week’s notice. The manufacturer may dismiss any employee without notice for bad work or improper behaviour. 6. Every operative detected speaking to another, singing or whistling, will be fined 6d.; for leaving his place during working-hours, 6d.”

The notion that the owner has complete freedom to put anything in a contract he feels like putting in – that in fact, this is the alpha and omega of freedom, the unmediated power relationship between owner and worker - is still a powerful one in the U.S. Some states, notably Texas, have a fire at will clause that allows abusive leeway to the owners which is close to that allowed to the owners of serfs. As Engels notes about the lives of the working class – “these laborers are condemned, from their ninth year until their death, to live under the mental and corporal rod, they are more utterly slaves than Blacks in America, because they are more closely supervised – and then it is demanded, that they live like human beings, think like human beings, and feel like human beings!”

I am fascinated, myself, by the prohibition on singing – which I want to get back to, as I am interested in tracing a history of alienation in the evanescent fabric of song culture. One should point out that the Manchester factories represented, at the time, a classical liberal ideal – elsewhere, for instance in the U.S., custom weighed on the extent to which you could limit freedom on the laborer’s side by contract. Jack Beatty’s excellent but, for some reason, little noticed book on the Gilded Age last year, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, is all about the triumph of the libertarian freedom of the owner, at the expense of the worker.

Beatty’s chapter of the Homestead strike is well worth reading for those who want to understand how slowly the attitude took hold that one’s place of work was not at all one’s own – that ownership was strictly limited by the contract one freely signed, thus conveniently carving out a domain of serfdom in the free society. This serfdom has now, of course, been so assimilated that we naturally segregate our work space from other spaces, and in fact obey the rules that now organize any public space – so much for the existential dimension of freedom. The contract still has this marvelous, magical property, operating to emancipate the contractor and enslave the contractee. There’s an interview with Beatty at the Atlantic site about the book. Beatty points to a turning point after the Civil War in which the Republican party converged with the business elite and turned its back on the ideal of ‘free labor’, in essence betraying its very reason for being:

“Even when Lincoln was advocating free labor, it was a nostalgic idea. As early as 1866, 60 percent of people worked for other people. Now, it’s 90-something percent. Then, of course, they worked in small units; it wasn’t the full-blown factory. But sure, Lincoln’s vision was at variance with the imperatives of the economy and with the necessities of the industrializing elites who came to power after the war. And then there was the railroad—and that changed everything….
…
Still, the free-labor ideal survives in farming as propaganda. Preserving the tiny number of "family farms" is a justification put forward by the farm lobby. The Homestead Act was put forth by the Republicans as a supposed cure for the class structure congealed by industrialism. The idea was that the eastern factory laborer would leave the factory behind for free land in the west. But that’s not the way it worked out. Why? Because the land was not free—$1,500 was the minimum needed to set up a farm as early as the 1840s. And that was three years pay for the skilled factory worker of 1900! Small farms weren't economically viable. So it wasn’t the factory laborer who went to the farm, but the factory itself. Women’s labor, child labor, seasonal labor—all the aspects of wage labor that the farm was supposed to cure became a part of farm life. That was a bitter social turn. There was no escape from industrial capitalism.”

Legends have grown up around the Homestead strike. John Commons, in 1918, wrote:

“In the Homestead strike, the labor movement faced for the first time a really modern manufacturing corporation with its practically boundless resources of war. The Amalgamated Association of Iran and Steel Workers in 1891 … was the strongest trade union in the entire history of the American labour movement.”

In 1892, the Carnegie Corporation, under the management of a well known opponent of Unions, H.C. Frick, decided to take on the Amalgamated Association by proposing a lowering of the wage for skilled labor in the steel mills and a new date for renewing contracts, January 1. The latter would make any future refusal of contract fall in the winter, when it would be harder to strike. The Union refused the terms – Frick sent a contingent of 300 Pinkerton men guarding a number of strikebreakers on barges down the Monongahela River. In response, the union barricaded the factory. Somebody fired a shot. A pitched battled ensued, in which the Pinkertons raked the crowd with rifle fire. Seven men died, but then the crowd returned fire until the Pinkertons had to go below deck. Certain of the guards lost heart, and the Pinkertons finally surrendered and were marched through a crowd that mauled them, and then sent back to Pittsburgh. Using the violence as an excuse and, of course, recognizing unlimited freedom of property only on the side of Carnegie, the state government sent in the militia, and to the Carnegie company sent in more Pinkertons. The strikebreakers gained access to the mills, and though the strike lasted until October, the power of the Union was broken.

This is what Carnegie’s latest biographer, David Nasaw, said, in 2006, in an interview with a Pittsburgh paper:

Q: Now that the mills are gone, do you think Carnegie has a lasting local influence other than the libraries and museums?

A: I did not get into a cab or have a conversation at a hotel when I didn't get a response -- a lively response -- after telling people why I was in town. Everybody had a story about Carnegie, and very few stories put him in a good light. He moved to New York in the 1870s and died in 1919. But his presence still seems to haunt the city.
Is that because of the famous 1892 Homestead Strike? Carnegie blamed that on his business partner, H.C. Frick.

Well, reading the local papers on microfilm, I discovered that while the rest of the world might have been surprised by Homestead, Pittsburghers weren't. This wasn't the first time he'd brought in the Pinkertons -- he'd done the same damn thing at [Braddock's] Edgar Thomson works. Homestead followed a script he'd already written.
Still, Carnegie had written articles about respecting the working man. And previously, he'd been way out in front negotiating with unions. So workers weren't just angry when he brought in the Pinkertons: They felt betrayed.”

Beatty’s account of the strike draws upon the sociological study of the Pittsburgh area financed by the Russell Sage foundation in 1912. One of the sociologists, Margaret Frances Byington (about whom there is an astonishing paucity of information) wrote the book about Homestead. I’m going to quote from her in the next post.

Take your hypnopaedia like a good robot

A post about Utopia at Culturemonkey, that does a nice rundown of some late nineteenth century utopias and the thread prompted by the post has made me think a bit about utopias. Obviously, the intersection between my project - tracking the triumph of happiness – and utopia is inevitable, but I have not mapped that out by any means.

I’ve been thinking about this all the more as I have been looking at Brave New World, lately. In fact, the review I just did of Comfortably Numb, a book that does a nice job of muckraking in the druggy ventricles of the Prozac Nation, begins with a Brave New World quote about soma.

Flipping through Brave New World again, it is funny how certain things startle the innocent, 2008 reader. For instance, this marvelous prediction of our computer game culture:

“The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught

"Strange," mused the Director, as they turned away [from some children playing a game], "strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games."

And, of course, there is the hypnopaedia, the sentences that are infinitely repeated by the inhabitants of the World Society that have taken the place of truth – which is pretty much the way elections are now conducted. It is a hypnopaedic orgy, with the winner condemned to smilingly utter hypnopaedia until the moment comes when they haul him – or, perhaps, this time, her – away to the Presidential library.

Happiness as a social criteria is naturally utopic. What Maurice Halbwachs wrote, in the Working Class and the Level of Life (1912), about class consciousness points to why, on each class level of the capitalist societies that arose in the nineteenth century, there was a corresponding utopic moment:

… by definition, there are classes only in a society that is hierarchized to some degree, and under whatever form that takes. To be conscious of itself, for a class, means to recognize at what social level it finds itself, and consequently to represent itself by relation to what kind of privileges, what rights, what advantages are measured out to these levels and that hierarchy is determined. Every representation of class implies a double judgment of value: the estimation of the most important good or goods and the most appreciated in the society considered – the estimation of the degree to which it is permitted to the members of the class to satisfy the needs that relate to them….

Now lets seek what are common to all these references [to different supreme goods in different societies], and if it is possible to express that whole set of judgment on the value of diverse activities and goods by means of one general formula. Whatever the type of society that we consider, the ideal, the supreme good, is without doubt a specific form of social life, but it is, at the same time, the most intense social life that one can imagine (se représenter). »

Halbwachs, here, is still operating in what Lukacs would call the bourgeois domain of sociology – that is, he assumes that all classes throughout history, no matter what the forms of production, have an equal chance of being conscious. There’s a strong Marxist tendency to claim that pre-capitalist societies were, for the most part, sunk in apathy – the idiocy of rural life. After all, this is why capitalism has a double aspect – both as a system of exploitation and as a system of emancipation.

However, the most intense social life that one can imagine is certainly the portal to utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares, depending of course on how you turn in the dream.

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.