I have been thinking about Turgot’s entry on the Foire in the Encyclopedie ever since I read Rosanvallon’s analysis of it in his book on the idea of the market, The Capitalist Utopia.
The Turgot text is treated under the heading of the new geography envisioned by the classic economists – a geography defined by prices. This geography does not lend itself to a map listing nation states – with their different colors – but rather to a map of interconnected hubs, which Adam Smith called the ‘extension of the market.”
Rosanvallon locates this historic moment otherwise than, say, Harold Innis, who was similarly fascinated by the penetration of the price system.
“With the great discoveries, the occidental world is exteriorized. The establishment of colonies was one of the principle forms taken by this exteriorization. In the 18th century, liberalism was translated principally, in contrast, by a sort of return to the interior. Stewart is the economist who best understood how to philosophically express this.” And Rosanvallon lists the three stage theory of Stewart: 1., the birth of commerce, in response to local needs – such as food; 2., foreign commerce, in which the nation is exteriorized, which is characteristic of the occident from the 13th to 18th centuries; and finally 3, domestic commerce. “The nation pulls itself together from the point of its exteriorization in the world in order to return into itself. This return can’t be effected except at the cost of a internal differentiation; thus, there is a parallel operation of differentiation and cohesion that comes about. The nation has to discover an organic form in the bodies of the state and the professions.” (95)
It is within this framework that Rosanvallon wants to put the essay by Turgot on fairs. Myself, I translate what Rosanvallon is driving at here into an old thematic in LI and in the Human Limit – that what happened, so to speak, on the frontier of the Occident – in the colonies, particularly in the Trans-Atlantic world – mirrored processes happening in the internal culture of the Occident. The equivalent of the savage and the peasant allowed for this mirroring – although one should, perhaps, remember that mirrors do not always aim at exact representation – they deform, and one mirror, in telescopy, must correct the other. While the priests in small towns in the Pyrenees region where Lahontan came from were persecuting booksellers who sold forbidden science books, Jesuits on the other side of the world, in Quebec, were impressing the Hurons with the science of Christendom – notably, Galileo.
TBC.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
AMIE
This is the worst thing I'll have to write on this blog...
I’ve been debating with myself this week about this post. In the end, I need to say something.
Amie, who contributed to LI and whose friendship over the last four years has been one of the important things in my life – Amie died in September.
I learned this at the beginning of the week, and I am still in shock. Supposedly you can tell the weather of centuries ago by sawing down a tree and examining the tree rings – they register all the disasters. I feel like some similar organic disturbance has happened in me since I received word of her death. If you saw me in half fifty years from now and examined the innards, surely some mark, some trace – Amie would love the word trace – will make it obvious that something happened Christmas week, 2010.
I can’t accept her death. Not when, after all the storms she had passed through, she was finally entering into the sweetness of life. I can’t accept this flaw in the structure of the universe. There’s a moment in The Man Who Was Thursday when the hero, Syme, describes the strange sensation of being in a world where everything is not quite right – where the tree seems, somehow, like the back of a tree, and the sky like the back of the sky – when we see that the world really is seen through a glass, darkly. Some people never experience these moments, I think – and some forget them quickly. Amie’s death has opened up that world to me this week, because I think that it is impossible that this could be the world in which Amie died. I do recognize this world. But I don’t accept it – I want to chew it up and spit it out of my mouth.
My friendship with her was impossible. I think we started writing to each other in 2006. I have perhaps 200 emails from her of varying lengths, all written with her mixture of elegance and utter intensity – Amie always pressed as hard as she could against life, like she was trying to force a jammed door. For me, she was an almost perfect email partner – I felt that we were collaborators on a vast intellectual enterprise, for which I really do not have a name. Perhaps it is merely the enterprise to tear down all the blinders between the simple act of putting on a sock and poetry. And we both felt strongly that we were struggling in an evident wreck of a culture that has tried to purge poetry from every pore of its being in preference not to the sock, for that would be simply one of the masks of poetry – but to making it on the cheap and selling it at a profit and skipping the whole experience of putting on a sock. In the infinite web of badly made socks and the human drain of 10 hour days, the world is clearly damned unless of course there are crazy corner souls to save it.
I came to Paris to live with A., in September of this year. I came for A. alone - whether Paris or Nome, I didn't care. However, I fully expected to meet Amie at last. I was so close to her, and yet I don’t even know what Amie looked like – I never asked her for a photograph. I liked our ‘blind’ friendship, I liked being compagnon de route in the night, so to speak. She did too, I think. And when she ceased emailing me, I didn’t know what to think. Amie was never afraid of the large things – but could she have been afraid of meeting me at last in the flesh? That is what I thought.
It never occurred to me to think that she was dead. How could I ever think that?
Two quotes for Amie. One is from a letter she wrote to me. In it, she quoted a favorite passage in Cixous and added a comment:
”’L'orange est un instant. Ne pas oublier l'orange est une chose. Rappeler l'orange est une autre chose. La rejoindre en est une autre. Il faut au moins trois temps pour commencer à comprendre l'immensité infinie de l'instant.”
I remember leaving a hospital in Paris, sitting in a park and eating an orange, the joy.”
The second is from The Man who was Thursday:
“Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? … So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.”
I’ve been debating with myself this week about this post. In the end, I need to say something.
Amie, who contributed to LI and whose friendship over the last four years has been one of the important things in my life – Amie died in September.
I learned this at the beginning of the week, and I am still in shock. Supposedly you can tell the weather of centuries ago by sawing down a tree and examining the tree rings – they register all the disasters. I feel like some similar organic disturbance has happened in me since I received word of her death. If you saw me in half fifty years from now and examined the innards, surely some mark, some trace – Amie would love the word trace – will make it obvious that something happened Christmas week, 2010.
I can’t accept her death. Not when, after all the storms she had passed through, she was finally entering into the sweetness of life. I can’t accept this flaw in the structure of the universe. There’s a moment in The Man Who Was Thursday when the hero, Syme, describes the strange sensation of being in a world where everything is not quite right – where the tree seems, somehow, like the back of a tree, and the sky like the back of the sky – when we see that the world really is seen through a glass, darkly. Some people never experience these moments, I think – and some forget them quickly. Amie’s death has opened up that world to me this week, because I think that it is impossible that this could be the world in which Amie died. I do recognize this world. But I don’t accept it – I want to chew it up and spit it out of my mouth.
My friendship with her was impossible. I think we started writing to each other in 2006. I have perhaps 200 emails from her of varying lengths, all written with her mixture of elegance and utter intensity – Amie always pressed as hard as she could against life, like she was trying to force a jammed door. For me, she was an almost perfect email partner – I felt that we were collaborators on a vast intellectual enterprise, for which I really do not have a name. Perhaps it is merely the enterprise to tear down all the blinders between the simple act of putting on a sock and poetry. And we both felt strongly that we were struggling in an evident wreck of a culture that has tried to purge poetry from every pore of its being in preference not to the sock, for that would be simply one of the masks of poetry – but to making it on the cheap and selling it at a profit and skipping the whole experience of putting on a sock. In the infinite web of badly made socks and the human drain of 10 hour days, the world is clearly damned unless of course there are crazy corner souls to save it.
I came to Paris to live with A., in September of this year. I came for A. alone - whether Paris or Nome, I didn't care. However, I fully expected to meet Amie at last. I was so close to her, and yet I don’t even know what Amie looked like – I never asked her for a photograph. I liked our ‘blind’ friendship, I liked being compagnon de route in the night, so to speak. She did too, I think. And when she ceased emailing me, I didn’t know what to think. Amie was never afraid of the large things – but could she have been afraid of meeting me at last in the flesh? That is what I thought.
It never occurred to me to think that she was dead. How could I ever think that?
Two quotes for Amie. One is from a letter she wrote to me. In it, she quoted a favorite passage in Cixous and added a comment:
”’L'orange est un instant. Ne pas oublier l'orange est une chose. Rappeler l'orange est une autre chose. La rejoindre en est une autre. Il faut au moins trois temps pour commencer à comprendre l'immensité infinie de l'instant.”
I remember leaving a hospital in Paris, sitting in a park and eating an orange, the joy.”
The second is from The Man who was Thursday:
“Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? … So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.”
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Too many notes - on the edge of crankitood
Rewriting and expanding the last post:
How does a heuristic fiction to become, at last, a policy norm? What are the existential consequences of an economic system based on the eventually substitutability of all things, relations and people? These are the questions that guide me with the uncertain light of a flickering torch as I go down into the undergrounds of history.
I am taking as a point d’appui the idea that something happened at the beginning of the modern era – something described, felicitously, by Adam Smith as a revolution of public happiness – and yet it is a revolution that happened, so to speak, behind the back of the revolutionaries, and indeed, of all actors:
“A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.” WoN, Book 3, Chapter IV)
This citation comes from Smith’s chapter concerning the relations of the city to the country – another twist in the contrast between the great and little traditions with which we are setting out. Smith is describing this from a post-revolutionary position, in which the ridiculous – vanity – is contrasted with the much less ridiculous (acting merely from a view to their own interest). We have not yet reached the point at which the pedlar principle has become the basis of human rationality. We have certainly reached the point at which the system contains something above and beyond the intentions and views of its agents. This is an important and paradoxical point – for try as the classical economist will to reduce society to the individual, something doesn’t reduce here – call it progress, call it the market, there is an emergent, here, which is only honorifically attributed to ‘individuals’. This is in Marx’s mind when he writes:
“The secret of the commodity form thus consists simply in the fact that it projects back to Man the social character of his own work as the objective character of the product of labor itself, as a social natural property of this thing, and derivatively the social relationships of the producers to the collective labor as an social relationship of objects existing externally to them.”
What Harold Innis called –from the standpoint of neo-classical economics – the “penetrative power of the price system” was at its work of ‘eating’ the older system of status, to use Henry Maine’s terminology. The revolution in public happiness, of course, has its victims – how to separate the washerwoman’s enjoyment of tea in her sugar from the tortures of the slaves who grew and milled it is one of those finer moral questions that will haunt the West – but that revolution there was was certainly a fact that swam within the awareness of the Enlightenment philosophes. August Ludwig Schlözer, an eighteenth century German historian, celebrated Erfindung – invention – in his Weltgeschichte over war or monarchy. Erfindung, for Schlözer, reaches into the very nature of man, who is “by nature nothing” and becomes everything through ‘conjunctions”. “If he comes into the wilderness and grows up among sheep, he will become a sheep, eat the herbs sheep eat, and bleat like a sheep. If he comes into situations in which he meets the image of his creator, that is, where his reason is awakened, he will move away from the step on which he has up till now stood near the beasts and will either climb outwards and ennoble himself or will sink down and abase himself.” (58) For Schlözer, telling the true story of history – a story that is, indeed, the story of the Wealth of Nations – is itself a matter of awakening the public “out of a slumber in which our education has rocked us’ – “since we regard coldly a piece of bread, a printed page of paper, a pocket watch, a correspondence, a map of the globe, and a thousand other things whose current perfection demanded an uninterrupted progress of the human spirit from discovery to discovery over many centuries, and whose sum contains the ground of the actual culture of European human history, simply because we have seen it from childhood on, and enjoy its daily consequences.” That awakening is to the power of the revolution of public happiness that is immanent in history – a history that is officially written as if it were about kings and battles, the ‘death games’ of humans, when in actuality these are merely the “hooks” to which we hang history’s chronology. For Schlözer, true history would trace the advent of, for instance, ‘brandy [and] the potato in our part of the world”; these commodities – and others like tea, chocolate, coffee and sugar – made a tremendous difference between the man as sheep of savage times and modernity.
I will quote an earlier post at this point:
"Addiction is an illness of exposure. By and large, those who have access to junk become addicts." - William Burroughs, With William Burroughs: a report from the bunker [109]
In Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz tracks sugar from the cane plantations in Sicily and Egypt in the fourteenth century to the Canary and Azores islands (where the Spanish and Portugese developed the prototype of intensive sugar production with a mix of slave and free labor) to the Caribbean. Sugar cane was brought by Columbus, that divine, diabolical harbinger, to the Caribbean on his second voyage. The Spanish attempts to grow and process the sugar cane were not very successful, especially compared to what the Portugese did in Brazil. But the suggestion was, as it were, in the air; it was taken up by the Dutch and the English in the mid seventeenth century, long after the Caribs had vanished, the way blood, bones and skin massively vanishes – pushed into the vanishing act by the European magicians with their white magic.
It was after the mass cultivation of sugar cane on Barbados and Jamaica and – by the French – on St. Domingue that sugar became more than a medicine or a luxury good in Europe. As Mintz puts it, it became the first “exotic necessity” “… by 1750, the poorest English farm labourer’s wife took sugar in her tea,” as R.J. Davis wrote [quoted in Mintz, 45]
David Courtwright, in Forces of Habit, includes sugar with tea, tobacco, coffee and chocolate as the commodities that produced what he calls the ‘psychoactive revolution” of the eighteenth century. All operated, in one way or another, to alter moods. These exotics were intermingled with each other as well – as for instance, tea and chocolate with sugar. For Europeans, they produced, over a hundred and fifty year period, a radically altered physiological environment. Courtwright surveys the impressive statistics of sugar use in England, always the main consumer: “The demand for sugar was phenomenal. During the eighteenth century, the annual growth rate rose to 7 percent, and during the nineteenth century, when beet sugar roduction also became a factor, to 20 percent. The British possessed Europe’s sweetest tooth – and perhaps the continent’s worst teeth. Their per cappita consumption rose from 4 pounds in 1700 to 18 pounds in 1800 to about 90 pounds in the decade before 1900.” [28]
I like to think, here, about De Quincey. The incident that led De Quincey to opium was a tooth ache. He calls it a rheumatic tooth ache, which I think is De Quincey laying it on thick. But could it be the tooth ache of a boy of privilege, who, indeed, enjoyed that new environment of sugar products? De Quincey’s father was a merchant, and once, in a bout of virtue (for he seems to have been a good man), he forbade sugar at the table, in sympathy with the Evangelical crusade against slavery. This was in the 1780s – but man is as grass, as we all know, and bends with the wind, and the De Quincey’s did live in high style, and Thomas’s father did, after all, do a lot of trading with the West Indies.
Mintz, in his analysis of the double triangle of the trade in sweetness (slave labor to sugar to England back with goods sent back to Jamaica, and commodities from England to Africa for slaves to the West Indies for sugar production), argued that we should look to the sugar plantations, rather than to Europe, for the development of the first factories. This, of course, contradicts an old account, by the Marxists and Weberians, that free labor was a condition for the development of the factory. According to Mintz, the sugar plantations worked under extreme time constraints, and divided the labor into a sort of assembly line, with the slaves cutting the cane and other slaves assigned semi-skilled tasks boiling the cane and refining the sugar. This required a certain number of skilled supervisors. It was horrendously hard labor, and proved to be a man-eater: “From 1710 to 1810, Barbados, a mere 166 miles in area, received 252,000 African slaves. Jamaica, which in 1655 had been invaded by the British, followed the same pattern of ‘economic development’; in the same 109 years, it received 662,00 slaves.”
The plantation owners fretted about their kidnapped and abused stock, always dying on them. Unlike the less work intensive tobacco estates in the Southern U.S., this slave population never fully reproduced itself. It would fail to until the slaves were liberated, in fact. Thus the giant trade in human blood and flesh, those white lips and sharp fangs on Africa’s throat. As one model of work is developed for Europe, another model of transport and labor is developed for Africa – which will, in its time, be emplaced in Europe. Hypnogogy on the periphery, creeping in.
The sweetness, the drugs – oh, we don’t have to dig deep to find, under the surface of the artificial paradise, the piles of bones. But it is important to see that the paradise a-building in the sugar stats is not only what comes to surround us, but what we come to be. The Mordspiel is at work deep in the interior. And, as in a cartoon of a robber hiding in a cartoon cave, the cops are soon to follow. The commodities are now in motion. What only the Gods could once pluck is now cut, harvested, tapped, boiled and barged across the entire face of the godless globe.
Which only goes to show that hophead history is not merely a suburb of universal history. Hopheads have witnessed, with all the sorrows of young Werther and every suicidal lover, that their accept no substitutes passion was doomed in the accept all substitutes world.
New pains, new pleasures, new worlds, new cravings. The catchers of men are learning about the bodies of men.
How does a heuristic fiction to become, at last, a policy norm? What are the existential consequences of an economic system based on the eventually substitutability of all things, relations and people? These are the questions that guide me with the uncertain light of a flickering torch as I go down into the undergrounds of history.
I am taking as a point d’appui the idea that something happened at the beginning of the modern era – something described, felicitously, by Adam Smith as a revolution of public happiness – and yet it is a revolution that happened, so to speak, behind the back of the revolutionaries, and indeed, of all actors:
“A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.” WoN, Book 3, Chapter IV)
This citation comes from Smith’s chapter concerning the relations of the city to the country – another twist in the contrast between the great and little traditions with which we are setting out. Smith is describing this from a post-revolutionary position, in which the ridiculous – vanity – is contrasted with the much less ridiculous (acting merely from a view to their own interest). We have not yet reached the point at which the pedlar principle has become the basis of human rationality. We have certainly reached the point at which the system contains something above and beyond the intentions and views of its agents. This is an important and paradoxical point – for try as the classical economist will to reduce society to the individual, something doesn’t reduce here – call it progress, call it the market, there is an emergent, here, which is only honorifically attributed to ‘individuals’. This is in Marx’s mind when he writes:
“The secret of the commodity form thus consists simply in the fact that it projects back to Man the social character of his own work as the objective character of the product of labor itself, as a social natural property of this thing, and derivatively the social relationships of the producers to the collective labor as an social relationship of objects existing externally to them.”
What Harold Innis called –from the standpoint of neo-classical economics – the “penetrative power of the price system” was at its work of ‘eating’ the older system of status, to use Henry Maine’s terminology. The revolution in public happiness, of course, has its victims – how to separate the washerwoman’s enjoyment of tea in her sugar from the tortures of the slaves who grew and milled it is one of those finer moral questions that will haunt the West – but that revolution there was was certainly a fact that swam within the awareness of the Enlightenment philosophes. August Ludwig Schlözer, an eighteenth century German historian, celebrated Erfindung – invention – in his Weltgeschichte over war or monarchy. Erfindung, for Schlözer, reaches into the very nature of man, who is “by nature nothing” and becomes everything through ‘conjunctions”. “If he comes into the wilderness and grows up among sheep, he will become a sheep, eat the herbs sheep eat, and bleat like a sheep. If he comes into situations in which he meets the image of his creator, that is, where his reason is awakened, he will move away from the step on which he has up till now stood near the beasts and will either climb outwards and ennoble himself or will sink down and abase himself.” (58) For Schlözer, telling the true story of history – a story that is, indeed, the story of the Wealth of Nations – is itself a matter of awakening the public “out of a slumber in which our education has rocked us’ – “since we regard coldly a piece of bread, a printed page of paper, a pocket watch, a correspondence, a map of the globe, and a thousand other things whose current perfection demanded an uninterrupted progress of the human spirit from discovery to discovery over many centuries, and whose sum contains the ground of the actual culture of European human history, simply because we have seen it from childhood on, and enjoy its daily consequences.” That awakening is to the power of the revolution of public happiness that is immanent in history – a history that is officially written as if it were about kings and battles, the ‘death games’ of humans, when in actuality these are merely the “hooks” to which we hang history’s chronology. For Schlözer, true history would trace the advent of, for instance, ‘brandy [and] the potato in our part of the world”; these commodities – and others like tea, chocolate, coffee and sugar – made a tremendous difference between the man as sheep of savage times and modernity.
I will quote an earlier post at this point:
"Addiction is an illness of exposure. By and large, those who have access to junk become addicts." - William Burroughs, With William Burroughs: a report from the bunker [109]
In Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz tracks sugar from the cane plantations in Sicily and Egypt in the fourteenth century to the Canary and Azores islands (where the Spanish and Portugese developed the prototype of intensive sugar production with a mix of slave and free labor) to the Caribbean. Sugar cane was brought by Columbus, that divine, diabolical harbinger, to the Caribbean on his second voyage. The Spanish attempts to grow and process the sugar cane were not very successful, especially compared to what the Portugese did in Brazil. But the suggestion was, as it were, in the air; it was taken up by the Dutch and the English in the mid seventeenth century, long after the Caribs had vanished, the way blood, bones and skin massively vanishes – pushed into the vanishing act by the European magicians with their white magic.
It was after the mass cultivation of sugar cane on Barbados and Jamaica and – by the French – on St. Domingue that sugar became more than a medicine or a luxury good in Europe. As Mintz puts it, it became the first “exotic necessity” “… by 1750, the poorest English farm labourer’s wife took sugar in her tea,” as R.J. Davis wrote [quoted in Mintz, 45]
David Courtwright, in Forces of Habit, includes sugar with tea, tobacco, coffee and chocolate as the commodities that produced what he calls the ‘psychoactive revolution” of the eighteenth century. All operated, in one way or another, to alter moods. These exotics were intermingled with each other as well – as for instance, tea and chocolate with sugar. For Europeans, they produced, over a hundred and fifty year period, a radically altered physiological environment. Courtwright surveys the impressive statistics of sugar use in England, always the main consumer: “The demand for sugar was phenomenal. During the eighteenth century, the annual growth rate rose to 7 percent, and during the nineteenth century, when beet sugar roduction also became a factor, to 20 percent. The British possessed Europe’s sweetest tooth – and perhaps the continent’s worst teeth. Their per cappita consumption rose from 4 pounds in 1700 to 18 pounds in 1800 to about 90 pounds in the decade before 1900.” [28]
I like to think, here, about De Quincey. The incident that led De Quincey to opium was a tooth ache. He calls it a rheumatic tooth ache, which I think is De Quincey laying it on thick. But could it be the tooth ache of a boy of privilege, who, indeed, enjoyed that new environment of sugar products? De Quincey’s father was a merchant, and once, in a bout of virtue (for he seems to have been a good man), he forbade sugar at the table, in sympathy with the Evangelical crusade against slavery. This was in the 1780s – but man is as grass, as we all know, and bends with the wind, and the De Quincey’s did live in high style, and Thomas’s father did, after all, do a lot of trading with the West Indies.
Mintz, in his analysis of the double triangle of the trade in sweetness (slave labor to sugar to England back with goods sent back to Jamaica, and commodities from England to Africa for slaves to the West Indies for sugar production), argued that we should look to the sugar plantations, rather than to Europe, for the development of the first factories. This, of course, contradicts an old account, by the Marxists and Weberians, that free labor was a condition for the development of the factory. According to Mintz, the sugar plantations worked under extreme time constraints, and divided the labor into a sort of assembly line, with the slaves cutting the cane and other slaves assigned semi-skilled tasks boiling the cane and refining the sugar. This required a certain number of skilled supervisors. It was horrendously hard labor, and proved to be a man-eater: “From 1710 to 1810, Barbados, a mere 166 miles in area, received 252,000 African slaves. Jamaica, which in 1655 had been invaded by the British, followed the same pattern of ‘economic development’; in the same 109 years, it received 662,00 slaves.”
The plantation owners fretted about their kidnapped and abused stock, always dying on them. Unlike the less work intensive tobacco estates in the Southern U.S., this slave population never fully reproduced itself. It would fail to until the slaves were liberated, in fact. Thus the giant trade in human blood and flesh, those white lips and sharp fangs on Africa’s throat. As one model of work is developed for Europe, another model of transport and labor is developed for Africa – which will, in its time, be emplaced in Europe. Hypnogogy on the periphery, creeping in.
The sweetness, the drugs – oh, we don’t have to dig deep to find, under the surface of the artificial paradise, the piles of bones. But it is important to see that the paradise a-building in the sugar stats is not only what comes to surround us, but what we come to be. The Mordspiel is at work deep in the interior. And, as in a cartoon of a robber hiding in a cartoon cave, the cops are soon to follow. The commodities are now in motion. What only the Gods could once pluck is now cut, harvested, tapped, boiled and barged across the entire face of the godless globe.
Which only goes to show that hophead history is not merely a suburb of universal history. Hopheads have witnessed, with all the sorrows of young Werther and every suicidal lover, that their accept no substitutes passion was doomed in the accept all substitutes world.
New pains, new pleasures, new worlds, new cravings. The catchers of men are learning about the bodies of men.
Monday, December 20, 2010
NOTES ON HOMO OECONOMICUS
My next section, in my intro, should focus on the question of the relation of what was developed, at first, as a heuristic fiction to become, at last, a policy norm. That is, there is a historical moment, here, that is described, felicitously, by Adam Smith as a revolution of public happiness – and yet it is a revolution that happened, so to speak, behind the back of the revolutionaries, and indeed, of all actors:
“A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.” WoN, Book 3, Chapter IV)
This citation comes from Smith’s chapter concerning the relations of the city to the country – another twist in the contrast between the great and little traditions with which we are setting out. Smith is describing this from a post-revolutionary position, in which the ridiculous – vanity – is contrasted with the much less ridiculous (acting merely from a view to their own interest). We have not yet reached the point at which the pedlar principle has become the basis of human rationality. We have certainly reached the point at which the system contains something above and beyond the intentions and views of its agents. This is an important and paradoxical point – for try as the classical economist will to reduce society to the individual, something doesn’t reduce here – call it progress, call it the market, there is an emergent, here, which is only honorifically attributed to ‘individuals’. This is in Marx’s mind when he writes:
“The secret of the commodity form thus consists simply in the fact that it projects back to Man the social character of his own work as the objective character of the product of labor itself, as a social natural property of this thing, and derivatively the social relationships of the producers to the collective labor as an social relationship of objects existing externally to them.”
What Harold Innis called –from the standpoint of neo-classical economics – the “penetrative power of the price system” is ‘eating’ the older system of status. The revolution in public happiness, of course, has its victims – how to separate the washerwoman’s enjoyment of tea in her sugar from the tortures of the slaves who grew and milled it is one of those finer moral questions that will haunt the West – but that revolution there was was certainly in the awareness of the Enlightenment philosophes.
TBC
“A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of turning a penny wherever a penny was to be got. Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.” WoN, Book 3, Chapter IV)
This citation comes from Smith’s chapter concerning the relations of the city to the country – another twist in the contrast between the great and little traditions with which we are setting out. Smith is describing this from a post-revolutionary position, in which the ridiculous – vanity – is contrasted with the much less ridiculous (acting merely from a view to their own interest). We have not yet reached the point at which the pedlar principle has become the basis of human rationality. We have certainly reached the point at which the system contains something above and beyond the intentions and views of its agents. This is an important and paradoxical point – for try as the classical economist will to reduce society to the individual, something doesn’t reduce here – call it progress, call it the market, there is an emergent, here, which is only honorifically attributed to ‘individuals’. This is in Marx’s mind when he writes:
“The secret of the commodity form thus consists simply in the fact that it projects back to Man the social character of his own work as the objective character of the product of labor itself, as a social natural property of this thing, and derivatively the social relationships of the producers to the collective labor as an social relationship of objects existing externally to them.”
What Harold Innis called –from the standpoint of neo-classical economics – the “penetrative power of the price system” is ‘eating’ the older system of status. The revolution in public happiness, of course, has its victims – how to separate the washerwoman’s enjoyment of tea in her sugar from the tortures of the slaves who grew and milled it is one of those finer moral questions that will haunt the West – but that revolution there was was certainly in the awareness of the Enlightenment philosophes.
TBC
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Costs of the bank bailout
Japan was the first of the industrial economies to emerge from the Great Depression. This was due to many factors: getting off the Gold standard, Keynesian-like government policies to drive up private demand, and of course the expansion of the Japanese Imperial Military, which combined with the industrial cartels – the zaibatsu – to revamp Japan’s industrial base.
Of course, these Japanese policies had a cost: war in China, millions dead, the war in the Pacific, the bombing of Japan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.
But the technocrat and his followers simply bracket the paltry negative externalities.
I thought about those externalities reading John Cassidy’s assessment of Lawrence Summers stint as Obama’s economic guru in the New Yorker. Now, I like John Cassidy, but here he gives vent to the sort of praise for ‘saving the system’ that, of course, takes it as unquestioned that the system should be saved. More, that is blind to the consequences of saving the system.
You can tell the apologetics are going to start when we are told – as the liberal venders of Obama’s dog food love to tell us – that TARP will make a profit. This, of course, is like saying I can make a profit by lending you, with one hand, a thousand dollars at five percent interest, and with the other hand, lending you one hundred thousand dollars at zero percent interest. We know why TARP was repaid – basically, the Fed took 3 to 6 trillion dollars and injected it at superlow interest rates into the financial system.
John Cassidy himself knows this. But he doesn’t know how much it cost the system – the system of democratic governance – to operate in the highhanded, semi-legal, and plutocratic way that “saved’ us from Depression. In fact, he doesn’t consider it. This is the way he defends Summers – long quote:
We can start with a sentence in the last paragraph to find the error in this analysis – “in extending cash to virtually anybody and everybody…” No, that should read – “in extending cash exclusively to the biggest banks and the heart of the financial casino industry…’ For the government somehow missed extending loans at 0.07 percent to, say, 80 percent of the American public. In reality, doing so would have allowed them to exchange their old debts – at whacked out interest – for new ones at such low interest that they could breath, maybe save the house, maybe stay in college, etc.
This did not happen. And the system that was ‘saved’ is the system as Bushonomics created it, circa 2007 – poorly regulated, one of the most ghastly inefficient ways to transfer capital to socially valuable investment ever created, a monster that only a rentseeker could love. Politically, these moves set back ‘progressive’ politics – the kind of hopy-changyness that seem to hover like tinkerbell over Obama’s rhetoric – for a generation. Instead of a gamechanging moment in which we could reverse the vicious corruption of politics and the dynamic of income and wealth inequality that is squeezing the American public to death, we … had the Summers sit on our face.
The inability to see the larger damage of the government’s urge, in 2008-2009, to save the very richest people in the world is the inability to see beyond the economic order, such as it was, in 2007. Japan’s policies that got them out of the depression gave them a good ten years – which were harsh on millions of Chinese, of course. But eventually these policies had other negative effects – the death of millions of Japanese and the destruction of all Japanese cities. Sometimes, cleverly saving the system so that the numbers are shiny – look at that commercial paper unfreezing! – is not really clever at all.
I’m not sure where the bottom on housing prices is leading us, incidentally. Surely Cassidy is being a tad optimistic. Summers presided over an economic policy that has resulted in a once in a generation loss of wealth to most American families, which Edward Wolff estimates at 36 percent – meanwhile, the upper one percent income bracket dropped 11 percent. In other words, Summersian policy was more than 3 times beneficial to the wealthiest than to the rest of the country.
But the numbers only indicate a great cultural disaster. The dropping of all pretences about who is worthy and who is unworthy in the U.S. can’t simply be wished away by those looking at how the place is governed, how everyday life goes on, the amount of real liberty people have. At these qualitative costs will eventually tell.
Of course, these Japanese policies had a cost: war in China, millions dead, the war in the Pacific, the bombing of Japan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc.
But the technocrat and his followers simply bracket the paltry negative externalities.
I thought about those externalities reading John Cassidy’s assessment of Lawrence Summers stint as Obama’s economic guru in the New Yorker. Now, I like John Cassidy, but here he gives vent to the sort of praise for ‘saving the system’ that, of course, takes it as unquestioned that the system should be saved. More, that is blind to the consequences of saving the system.
You can tell the apologetics are going to start when we are told – as the liberal venders of Obama’s dog food love to tell us – that TARP will make a profit. This, of course, is like saying I can make a profit by lending you, with one hand, a thousand dollars at five percent interest, and with the other hand, lending you one hundred thousand dollars at zero percent interest. We know why TARP was repaid – basically, the Fed took 3 to 6 trillion dollars and injected it at superlow interest rates into the financial system.
John Cassidy himself knows this. But he doesn’t know how much it cost the system – the system of democratic governance – to operate in the highhanded, semi-legal, and plutocratic way that “saved’ us from Depression. In fact, he doesn’t consider it. This is the way he defends Summers – long quote:
“Let’s be honest, though. Back in late 2008, President Obama didn’t bring in Summers for his television face or his ability to make nice with David Brooks and George Will. With the credit markets frozen and the economy in free-fall, the President-elect ignored the counsel of some of his campaign advisers and hired the controversial professor to guide him in the right policy direction. Did Larry do that? Ultimately, this is the criterion on which he deserved to be judged.
With the unemployment rate still close to ten per cent, the consensus view, as reflected in the results of the midterms, is that President Obama’s economic policies have failed. But think back to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and what could have happened. Between September, 2008, and April, 2009, the stock market fell more sharply than in the six months after Black Tuesday in 1929. Global trade declined more rapidly than in the first year of the Great Depression. Companies were shedding jobs at a rate of seven hundred thousand a month.
Summers, to his eternal credit, was one of the first mainstream economists to understand what was happening. The carnage on Wall Street had unleashed a series of vicious cycles, which were wreaking havoc throughout the economy. In the financial markets, falling asset prices were leading to margin calls and more forced selling. In the housing market, the rush of foreclosures meant there were more unsold homes on the market, which was putting more downward pressure on prices. And on Main Street, ordinary Americans, shocked at the sight of Wall Street imploding, were spending less and saving more, which, in turn, was prompting firms to lay off more workers.
To anybody running a business or managing a Wall Street trading desk (or anybody who knew their Keynes), the downward spiral was glaringly obvious. But many academic economists couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. They remained committed to the view of the economy as a self-equilibrating mechanism that would rebound of its own accord. Some economists criticized the Fed and the Treasury Department for doing too much to help Wall Street. Others argued against an aggressive stimulus program, saying it was unnecessary. In his column in the Financial Times, and later, in internal Administration debates, Summers vigorously supported both of these policies, which did, eventually, halt the downward spiral.
“Had it not been for President Obama’s willingness to support a sufficiently aggressive response—from the late stage of the presidential campaign to his first days and months in office—I have little doubt that we would be looking at a vastly different world today,” Summers said in his remarks to the Economic Policy Institute. “His stalwart advocacy of efforts to support the economy through the Recovery Act, to rescue the financial system, to ensure the health of key industries, and to maintain stability in the global system halted the vicious cycles in less time and at less cost than virtually anyone thought possible.”
Yes, these remarks were self-serving. As far as I can see, though, they are an accurate statement of the historical record. The blanket government guarantee to the financial sector stemmed the panic selling on Wall Street. Rock-bottom mortgage rates and various anti-foreclosure programs put something of a bottom on house prices. And the $787 billion federal stimulus program helped offset falls in spending on the part of consumers, corporations, and state and local governments. Yes, we can argue about the precise impact of the stimulus on spending and jobs, but it defies the laws of arithmetic to argue, as some prominent conservative economists do, that it had no effect at all. (As for the critique from the left—that the stimulus program was too small—in retrospect, it may well be correct. But I doubt a few hundred billion dollars of extra spending over three years would have made much difference to the economy’s overall path.)
And what was the cost of these policies? The hated TARP bailout will almost certainly turn a small profit for the taxpayer. The stimulus program raised the deficit, but not by as much as many people think. The recession caused most of the increase: spending on unemployment benefits and other social programs increased, and tax revenues plummeted. (Perhaps the biggest cost of the monetary and fiscal rescue packages is a largely invisible one related to the Fed’s emergency lending programs. In extending cash to to virtually anybody and everybody at near-zero interest rates during the height of the financial crisis, the Fed has created the expectation that it will do the same thing next time around—an expectation that is sure to influence behavior in the years ahead.)”
We can start with a sentence in the last paragraph to find the error in this analysis – “in extending cash to virtually anybody and everybody…” No, that should read – “in extending cash exclusively to the biggest banks and the heart of the financial casino industry…’ For the government somehow missed extending loans at 0.07 percent to, say, 80 percent of the American public. In reality, doing so would have allowed them to exchange their old debts – at whacked out interest – for new ones at such low interest that they could breath, maybe save the house, maybe stay in college, etc.
This did not happen. And the system that was ‘saved’ is the system as Bushonomics created it, circa 2007 – poorly regulated, one of the most ghastly inefficient ways to transfer capital to socially valuable investment ever created, a monster that only a rentseeker could love. Politically, these moves set back ‘progressive’ politics – the kind of hopy-changyness that seem to hover like tinkerbell over Obama’s rhetoric – for a generation. Instead of a gamechanging moment in which we could reverse the vicious corruption of politics and the dynamic of income and wealth inequality that is squeezing the American public to death, we … had the Summers sit on our face.
The inability to see the larger damage of the government’s urge, in 2008-2009, to save the very richest people in the world is the inability to see beyond the economic order, such as it was, in 2007. Japan’s policies that got them out of the depression gave them a good ten years – which were harsh on millions of Chinese, of course. But eventually these policies had other negative effects – the death of millions of Japanese and the destruction of all Japanese cities. Sometimes, cleverly saving the system so that the numbers are shiny – look at that commercial paper unfreezing! – is not really clever at all.
I’m not sure where the bottom on housing prices is leading us, incidentally. Surely Cassidy is being a tad optimistic. Summers presided over an economic policy that has resulted in a once in a generation loss of wealth to most American families, which Edward Wolff estimates at 36 percent – meanwhile, the upper one percent income bracket dropped 11 percent. In other words, Summersian policy was more than 3 times beneficial to the wealthiest than to the rest of the country.
But the numbers only indicate a great cultural disaster. The dropping of all pretences about who is worthy and who is unworthy in the U.S. can’t simply be wished away by those looking at how the place is governed, how everyday life goes on, the amount of real liberty people have. At these qualitative costs will eventually tell.
Monday, December 13, 2010
suffering's gonna come
The sufferin’s gonna come – to everyone—some day
I have no time to write today or probably tomorrow, as I’ve been sick and now must edit for my meat.
But I did want to refer readers to Frédéric Lordon’s article, don’t destroy the banks, seize them in Le Monde.
I’m going to translate this paragraph:
To the question of how all of this is going to finish, the response is thus: badly. And this all the more so since the social bodies are beginning to rail seriously. Without doubt, the enchainment of facts is complicated to follow in its technical detail, but the picture of the whole is more clear to them, and all the world now sees perfectly well its disgusting colors.: 1) private finance is the author of the most gigantic crisis in the history of capitalism; 2) the banks only are able to force the public powers to support them by the fact that they occupy that neurological place in the structure of the whole of capitalism which permits them to enchain the social body as a whole entirely to their particular interests; 3) this situation which has all the elements of a perfect hostage taking should have guided the salvage operation of 2008, not only to closing more largely the game of market finance, but to recommunalizing the banking system in as much as precisely it is the fact of the deposit of vital common goods, to wit, the security of the public’s monetary accounts and the general conditions of the real economy: 4) infested by the representatives of the power of money, the states did nothing like that and gave their support for nothing, or rather for a double arm of honor, which firstly took the form of the maintaining of exorbitant remunerations and chiefly and more gravely, the application of the ruler of the markets to public finance, bled be it because they had directly saved the banks, be it to make up for the costs of the recession; 5) the splendid mechanisms of the capital market concur with a rare elegance in the organization of the wordst in rendering insoluble a crises of debts that they had themselves given birth to; 6) and this up to the point that this crisis becomes irremediably theirs once again, threatening a second collapse on the scale of 2008 ; 7) while ’Europe invents hastily new institutions proposed to come to the aid ‘of states’, there everyone sees well that it is a question of saving the banks for the second time. Thus, so to speak, for the second time too many – for we still want to know how the first time was swallowed so easily by the social bodies, decidedly, with an Olympian calm.”
All of which is indisputeable, and of absolute indifference to our rulers. It will take a long time to understand the latter – a long period of disinvestments, of alienation, of the refusal, finally, to identify with any of them.
I have no time to write today or probably tomorrow, as I’ve been sick and now must edit for my meat.
But I did want to refer readers to Frédéric Lordon’s article, don’t destroy the banks, seize them in Le Monde.
I’m going to translate this paragraph:
To the question of how all of this is going to finish, the response is thus: badly. And this all the more so since the social bodies are beginning to rail seriously. Without doubt, the enchainment of facts is complicated to follow in its technical detail, but the picture of the whole is more clear to them, and all the world now sees perfectly well its disgusting colors.: 1) private finance is the author of the most gigantic crisis in the history of capitalism; 2) the banks only are able to force the public powers to support them by the fact that they occupy that neurological place in the structure of the whole of capitalism which permits them to enchain the social body as a whole entirely to their particular interests; 3) this situation which has all the elements of a perfect hostage taking should have guided the salvage operation of 2008, not only to closing more largely the game of market finance, but to recommunalizing the banking system in as much as precisely it is the fact of the deposit of vital common goods, to wit, the security of the public’s monetary accounts and the general conditions of the real economy: 4) infested by the representatives of the power of money, the states did nothing like that and gave their support for nothing, or rather for a double arm of honor, which firstly took the form of the maintaining of exorbitant remunerations and chiefly and more gravely, the application of the ruler of the markets to public finance, bled be it because they had directly saved the banks, be it to make up for the costs of the recession; 5) the splendid mechanisms of the capital market concur with a rare elegance in the organization of the wordst in rendering insoluble a crises of debts that they had themselves given birth to; 6) and this up to the point that this crisis becomes irremediably theirs once again, threatening a second collapse on the scale of 2008 ; 7) while ’Europe invents hastily new institutions proposed to come to the aid ‘of states’, there everyone sees well that it is a question of saving the banks for the second time. Thus, so to speak, for the second time too many – for we still want to know how the first time was swallowed so easily by the social bodies, decidedly, with an Olympian calm.”
All of which is indisputeable, and of absolute indifference to our rulers. It will take a long time to understand the latter – a long period of disinvestments, of alienation, of the refusal, finally, to identify with any of them.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
three weeks that were heard around the world
It isn’t exactly the week that changed the world – but the astute observer must find the last three weeks fascinating. It has long been the case that the states within the developed world have encouraged, at one and the same time, the conditions for plutocracy and the advance of the protector state. It is a double movement that is only reflected in a distorted way in the issues about ‘deficits’ or ‘deregulation’ – since the plutocracy could only arise, as it were, in conditions that hid it from the social order, which had temporarily pivoted, after WWII, on ‘democracy’. Of course, this talk about democracy is loose – you will hear Americans go on and on about their ‘democracy’ without the least awareness that, up until 1965, America was anything but a democracy – it was, in truth, one of the world’s worst apartheid states.
However, the very fact that myth disguised this fact is a significant indicator of the hegemony of the democratic reference.
It has been clear for some time that the double movement of encouraging both plutocracy and the protector state – middle class ‘entitlements’ – was eventually going to come up against the limit of its internal contradiction. The only question was whether the plutocratic element was strong enough to overcome the inertia of the democratic culture and the desire of the majority of the population to retain its ‘entitlements’.
2008-2009 should be known, in the future, as a sort of unveiling moment. It is here that the rhetoric about capitalism and free markets were calmly thrown into the garbage can, as the real goal of the state – maintaining the plutocracy – proceeded in defiance of all rules, and against all the surface ‘ideologies’ of the supposed opposite political sides. The most conservative of American Presidents, Bush, and the supposedly progressive Democratic presidential candidate, Obama, made common cause in saving the wealthiest. Of course, due obeisance was paid to democratic rhetoric, and we were told that saving the wealthiest was ‘saving the economy’. The economy was near a ‘meltdown’. In reality, it was only the plutocracy, which had long dispensed with the role of investing in real social goods and innovations in the developed countries and had engaged in an orgy of much more profitable rent-seeking that was truly in danger.
The Anglophone countries were at the heart of the rise of the plutocracies. Not all of them have nurtured the combination of plutocracy/entitlement to the same extent, but in the UK, Ireland and the U.S., this combination has become the template around which all political actors gather.
It is against this background that the three events of the past month – Ireland’s takeover by the IMF and the unprotesting submission of the population to the world’s first case of a nation run solely to pay off bank bondholders – the UK’s decision to slash funding for education to a level not seen since the 19th century, while simultaneously continuing to backstop the bankers –and Obama’s decision to continue the Bush tax cuts while beginning the policy of decimating the Social security fund, in preparation for its future ‘reform’ – take on their significance. A population that has grown comfortable under the entitlements regime is non-plussed by the fact that the plutocrats are openly shrugging off the accountrements of democratic culture. But the struggle that put in place the entitlements is so long ago, and the institutions that guided that struggle are in such disrepair, that the population is, as it were, disarmed. The index of that vulnerability is the fact that the population turns, as though naturally, to the parties.
The political class in all Anglophone countries have long been recruited from professions that are ancillary to the plutocrats – mainly lawyers – and, in their day to day lives, the political class of all parties sees and establishes personal relationships with other plutocrat ancillaries. The political class – whether Labour or Tory, whether Democrat or Republican – is united in the policy that binds together the alliance of the government and the plutocrats. Blair and Obama, insignificant suits in themselves, become potent historical symbols by having been both the recipients of ambient anxiety about the structure of the economy and the great pursuers of policies that were the opposite of what their followers presumed. Obama is, at the moment, subject to a very personal rage on the part of American ‘liberals’ who have reached a point at which they are beginning not to accept the dogfood poured out by the usual media propagandists – the host of media personalities, bloggers, talking heads, and think tankers. The dogfood – usually wrapped around meaningless phrases about the most ‘progressive’ president of the last seventy years, or other kinds of hype – is beginning to stick in the throat. This is the moment that Marx speaks of in the German Ideology – the moment of the ‘unbearable’.
Yet, it is hard to see what will reverse the trend towards plutocracy. I suffered the illusion, in the 00s, that the plutocracy was somehow Bush’s ‘fault’ – that the Bush regime, with its faint odor of an illegitimate coup, its corruption, its gathering together of the very worst of the media messengers and gray eminences, was somehow causing the plutocratic tilt. The salutary experience of watching a very different president, Obama, advocate for the same policies makes one think. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what pony you bet on if they all race around the same circular track.
However, the very fact that myth disguised this fact is a significant indicator of the hegemony of the democratic reference.
It has been clear for some time that the double movement of encouraging both plutocracy and the protector state – middle class ‘entitlements’ – was eventually going to come up against the limit of its internal contradiction. The only question was whether the plutocratic element was strong enough to overcome the inertia of the democratic culture and the desire of the majority of the population to retain its ‘entitlements’.
2008-2009 should be known, in the future, as a sort of unveiling moment. It is here that the rhetoric about capitalism and free markets were calmly thrown into the garbage can, as the real goal of the state – maintaining the plutocracy – proceeded in defiance of all rules, and against all the surface ‘ideologies’ of the supposed opposite political sides. The most conservative of American Presidents, Bush, and the supposedly progressive Democratic presidential candidate, Obama, made common cause in saving the wealthiest. Of course, due obeisance was paid to democratic rhetoric, and we were told that saving the wealthiest was ‘saving the economy’. The economy was near a ‘meltdown’. In reality, it was only the plutocracy, which had long dispensed with the role of investing in real social goods and innovations in the developed countries and had engaged in an orgy of much more profitable rent-seeking that was truly in danger.
The Anglophone countries were at the heart of the rise of the plutocracies. Not all of them have nurtured the combination of plutocracy/entitlement to the same extent, but in the UK, Ireland and the U.S., this combination has become the template around which all political actors gather.
It is against this background that the three events of the past month – Ireland’s takeover by the IMF and the unprotesting submission of the population to the world’s first case of a nation run solely to pay off bank bondholders – the UK’s decision to slash funding for education to a level not seen since the 19th century, while simultaneously continuing to backstop the bankers –and Obama’s decision to continue the Bush tax cuts while beginning the policy of decimating the Social security fund, in preparation for its future ‘reform’ – take on their significance. A population that has grown comfortable under the entitlements regime is non-plussed by the fact that the plutocrats are openly shrugging off the accountrements of democratic culture. But the struggle that put in place the entitlements is so long ago, and the institutions that guided that struggle are in such disrepair, that the population is, as it were, disarmed. The index of that vulnerability is the fact that the population turns, as though naturally, to the parties.
The political class in all Anglophone countries have long been recruited from professions that are ancillary to the plutocrats – mainly lawyers – and, in their day to day lives, the political class of all parties sees and establishes personal relationships with other plutocrat ancillaries. The political class – whether Labour or Tory, whether Democrat or Republican – is united in the policy that binds together the alliance of the government and the plutocrats. Blair and Obama, insignificant suits in themselves, become potent historical symbols by having been both the recipients of ambient anxiety about the structure of the economy and the great pursuers of policies that were the opposite of what their followers presumed. Obama is, at the moment, subject to a very personal rage on the part of American ‘liberals’ who have reached a point at which they are beginning not to accept the dogfood poured out by the usual media propagandists – the host of media personalities, bloggers, talking heads, and think tankers. The dogfood – usually wrapped around meaningless phrases about the most ‘progressive’ president of the last seventy years, or other kinds of hype – is beginning to stick in the throat. This is the moment that Marx speaks of in the German Ideology – the moment of the ‘unbearable’.
Yet, it is hard to see what will reverse the trend towards plutocracy. I suffered the illusion, in the 00s, that the plutocracy was somehow Bush’s ‘fault’ – that the Bush regime, with its faint odor of an illegitimate coup, its corruption, its gathering together of the very worst of the media messengers and gray eminences, was somehow causing the plutocratic tilt. The salutary experience of watching a very different president, Obama, advocate for the same policies makes one think. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what pony you bet on if they all race around the same circular track.
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