Oikonomos

I am reading about utopian dreams again - in Susan Buck-Morss's excellent Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The book is about the images of "mass utopia" propagated in both the communist and capitalist worlds during the 20th century. The most interesting parts, thus far, are on early Soviet modernization efforts, which saw attempts - mostly thwarted, sadly - to thoroughly reconfigure material life and culture. Vestiges of these survived, even when their creators did not, and Buck-Morss attempts (in true Benjaminian fashion) to rescue them to build a progressive future.

The book reminds me why I fell for Walter Benjamin in the first place, and why the last century has been so remarkable and terrible. (And one further sad fact: That we can't conceive "remarkable" and "terrible" separately.)

Buck-Morss's approach is to fragment and integrate simultaneously. It's history constructed of "tiger leaps" from shard to shard, but not without a theoretical armature. She's willing to be heterodox - one chapter is devoted to the Soviet experience of time, while another brings up man's relationship to nature (i.e. technology) in connection with modernist art and reconstructive surgery performed on millions of war veterans. Where she drags in big philosophical names she prefers to gloss rather than expound. But it's clear that the work relies upon her earlier casting of a wide net.

Speaking now of nets that are not widely cast: Were I not working in an economic policy agency, I may not have cause to concern myself with economics. Perhaps I'd be thinking about graffiti or gardening instead. But we have to think in the world we inhabit.

The clothes have come off neoclassical economics, which is, broadly speaking, founded upon several questionable assumptions. (For more detail, see this Willem Buiter article.) First, humans are considered to act as rational individuals - a ridiculous conceit, really, and if we really did so the narrative form (at the very least) never would have gotten off the ground. Second, there are a few theoretical constructs called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis - the idea that unrestricted markets will "naturally" arrive at the best social outcome - and the complete markets paradigm - the assumption that there are markets in everything. (As it turns out, even very small "imperfections" in markets, such as imperfect knowledge, can lead to radically divergent outcomes.) Third, economics took these questionable ideas, and several others, and used them to construct linear and non-dynamic mathematical models to predict human behavior.

The result?

As economics was derived from political economy, shedding within a century, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, politics, psychology, and such-like, though, unfortunately not shedding mysticism, idealism, utopianism, and, eventually, all traces of real human beings, an imaginary world has replaced the real world.

[From a blog called Adam Smith's Lost Legacy - I don't agree with all of its conclusions or premises, but I did find this a good description of the state of affairs.]

Economics is currently in a crisis. It's not just that it has produced answers that were unpopular - although it has, in the sense that it has lobbied for policies that encourage the destruction of the environment, social stability, and the working class in favor of a few points of GDP growth in the pockets of the wealthy. It's that it's given answers that were appallingly incorrect. Most economists missed the crisis, and many still fail to recognize it for what it is.

In a sense, the problem with economics is its utopianism. The discipline is infested with blueprint utopians, who reason their way to perfection from unreal assumptions, deriving along the way iron laws that must be put into place for society to flourish (profitably, always profitably).

In another sense, the problem with economics is its lack of a different tradition of utopianism, the one that Buck-Morss draws upon to discuss the "dreamworld and catastrophe" of the 20th century. Iconoclastic utopians don't create blueprints of the perfect society (with its phalansteries and rules for liberalized capital flows). Instead, they draw upon bits and pieces of the broken past, attempting to save the pieces that can point the way forward for us.

I would like to say that we are on a beam reach with the wind of history in our sails - but I know that it's only the gales of progress caught again in our wings, carrying us inexorably away from our task. To go to Buck-Morss again:

"Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and exploited," Lenin wrote in 1905. But the physical violence of revolutions separates them decisively from carnivalistic play. Whereas carnivals are ritual repetitions, revolutions are one-time-only events meant to change permanently the arrangement of social life. Revolutions disregard the spatial and temporal constraints that are meant to contain collective discontent. [Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 140.]

The financial crisis bears some resemblance to a revolution. As we speak, corporate and ideological edifices are shuddering, halted in their tracks. Large certainties are on the verge of breaking up. So to is social life as we know it. But, unlike the revolution Buck-Morss discusses above, this is an upheaval without a protagonist. No force is emerging to reconfigure the social landscape.

Or is it? Without the will of the tax-paying, wage-stagnating, deindustrialized majority expressed in coherent form, there is every indication that the financiers are taking hold.

We're gonna have to go green

Anne and I are trying our best to live thrifty. A greater and greater percent of our worldly belongings are used; we just bought a couch for a dollar. Our dishes are Salvation Army. The big regret is food. Cheese is $10 a kilo, bread $2 a loaf for the cheap stuff. Budget pasta is $1 a pack, and our avocado habit isn't getting any cheaper as the days get shorter.

I think a lot about the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom - to paraphrase Hegel, we have yet to pass from A to B. Or have we? How much stuff can you fit into a studio flat anyway? When do material possessions become fetters? If we needed to buy less, would we work less?

I have no easy answer to that. I have the dim sense that, if one is living under a cardboard roof and scavenging for scraps and cholera-free water, more stuff is better. But for me, child of the upper-middle class that I am - I have no idea.

But things like this make me think:

Rufus and Lawson are the authors of the new book "The Scavengers' Manifesto," a do-it-yourself handbook and love letter to the joys of salvaging, swapping, repurposing and reusing stuff. Getting something for nothing -- or close to it -- is their way of life, and it defines what they wear, eat, how they decorate their home, right down to the way Lawson dispenses with the whiskers on his chinny-chin-chin. (He has literally never paid for shaving cream, using free samples that companies give away to U.C. Berkeley students to get them hooked on their brands.) These two are no slumming trust-fund babies. Rather, they save so much money scavenging that Lawson hasn't worked a full-time job in over a decade, and Rufus never has, which just gives the two writers -- they've both written other books -- time for their perpetual hunt.

Rufus defines scavenging as "any way of legally acquiring stuff for cheap or for free -- any way that's not full price. That's anything from clipping coupons and getting discounts to picking something off the ground, to going to yard sales to the Dumpster." While the duo clearly revels in saving money on something other people pay top dollar for, like fancy bread, they also relish the constant sense of the unexpected that comes with scavenging. Instead of going out and getting what you want, like a regular shopper, you accept and even delight in whatever you happen to find.

It speaks for itself

At work, I get media monitoring updates. At times, hundreds of them accumulate before I read any - this takes approximately five days - and I end up sifting through innumerable news stories. After a while, the exercise feels slightly absurd.

At times, what I am reading is truly absurd:

Int. Terry Olsen, World Potato Congress chairman.The congress
RNZ20090321071051BC0 Radio New Zealand 21 March 2009 <07:10:51 - 07:15:04>
Country Life
Int. Terry Olsen, World Potato Congress chairman.
The congress is about bringing together like-minded people to enhance the potato industry across the world. We've been trying hastily to get the news out about this congress meeting and hopefully on Monday we'll have a crowd. The people who attend will take away the knowledge that NZ is a smart country and that isolation hasn't inhibited our abilities.
Potatoes are taken for granted by the public. Olsen is a 2nd generation potato grower.

Maori potato expert Nick Roskruge from Massey University has
RNZ20090323084854BC0 Radio New Zealand 23 March 2009 <08:48:54 - 08:49:51>
Morning Report
Maori potato expert Nick Roskruge from Massey University has been given a chance to talk about tuakana strains at the seventh international potato conference.
V/R Roskruge.
Mentions Tahuri Whenua.

The 7th World Potato Congress has attracted more than 500
RNZ20090323182054BC0 Radio New Zealand 23 March 2009 <18:20:54 - 18:23:41>
Checkpoint
The 7th World Potato Congress has attracted more than 500 delegates from around the world to Christchurch.
Int. Alan Parker, World Potato Congress president.
The potato is a very efficient food to grow. The future looks very good for the NZ potato industry.
Mentions United Nations.

A visiting fungi expert has raised concerns about blight
RNZ20090324062739BC0 Radio New Zealand 24 March 2009 <06:27:39 - 06:29:31>
Morning Report
A visiting fungi expert has raised concerns about blight affecting potato crops. Rep. Carla Gray.
V/R Dr. Mark Cubetta, fungi expert.

A job where you receive updates, over the course of several days, on the World Potato Congress, is a truly satisfying job. More satisfying, of course, would be employment as a delegate to the World Potato Congress...

Your grandparents lived through this too

"This" being a global depression. They coped, I guess, developing eccentricities along the way. (I supposedly have a great-uncle who owned a car that ran on chicken manure. I worry about this apparent streak of congenital insanity.) Occasionally I joke to Grandma that we'll soon be able to compare recipes for boot-leather soup.

Grandma makes great relish and apple tarts. But I wish she had some recipes like this:

..like my Grandma Gert used to say, "Oh, shit!" Most grandmas teach you how to bake bread, play Yahtzee, or sew a button. Mine taught us how to turn nasty cheap schwill vodka into delicious Kentucky-style whiskey—very simply—no stills or fancy equipment required. See, vodka is essentially just straight ethanol with varying degrees of purity. Who's stopping you from filtering it again, then aging it with some oak to turn it into whiskey?

The article goes on to give detailed directions for turning plastic-handle vodka into whiskey of dubious quality.

This is definitely cunning plan of the week, and another positive aspect of the financial crisis. You can make weird hooch liquors, gag them down, and when your friends look at you funny, say, "What? Don't you know there's a depression on?"

Favorite phrases resulting from financial crisis

This financial crisis is, in a certain view, an artifact of excessive financial complexity. The language used to depict the tangle is, in a sense, obscurantist and anti-democratic, a snarl of acronyms. CDOs, CDS, whatever. Tell it to Adorno.

On the other hand, it has its fun side! Some of the catch-words that have emerged have been whimsical and amusing - zombie banks, black swans, fat tails.

Path-dependent fashion

I was thinking about suits today while taking the bus home. It was cold and I was wrapped up tightly, three buttons and a tie against the cold. (I wear suits and ties now. Me! I used to be notable for persistently ripped jeans! What the hell happened? But in my defense, all of my work clothing is bought second-hand.)

I looked down. Why collars? Why ties, and why ties in that particular shape? Why lapels? In short, why do we go to our bourgeois jobs looking as we do?

I thought about path-dependent evolution, the notion that starting points have a crucial impact on subsequent developments. Think about making dinner. You reach into the freezer and decide to go with whatever you pull out. In one scenario, you grab a package of sausages. In another, you lay hands upon vanilla ice cream.

In the first scenario, it is extremely likely that you will be making a meat-based dish - it could be pasta with sausages, it could be sausages and eggs, whatever. (Your vegetarian girlfriend is displeased.) In the second, you end up with Baked Alaska. (Your ice-cream-loving girlfriend is overjoyed.) But you can't start with sausages and end up with Baked Alaska, and an ice cream beginning will result in a sickly fry-up (at best).

It's the same with professional attire. We started out with collared shirts, ties, and suits, and we have ended up with the same. The ties looked different a century ago, and the collars were often much different, but the general idea was the same. Once we got onto the path of suits, a sudden change became unlikely or difficult. It is hard to imagine millions of sober professionals exchanging their black suits and matching ties for gold bodysuits.

Needless to say, matters would be quite different had we originally set out to offices wearing brightly-colored circus attire.

So lapels have waned and waxed - I myself own a splendid example of 70s-era lapels, and regularly wear it to work - but not gone away. Ties have changed color, and gotten skinnier and thicker, but have not been ripped away. Collar styles have come and gone, but we still button them up tightly around our necks.

Sometimes I fantasize about a catastrophic event in workplace fashion, in which all of the established wisdom is lost to us. We would go to work for a week wearing sweat-pants and white t-shirts, wondering what manner of fashion consensus would coalesce from ignorance. Would it be spats or spandex, Oscar Wilde or the Ottoman Empire, space age or cave man? Although it would be a wrench to reinvent a wardrobe that I have spent almost $100 compiling, I would revel in the excitement.

New music

I have, however, added to my list of things that are really great as of late. The list now includes the Aro St Video Shop (which stocks the obscure - time to watch a double bill of Toxic Avenger and a documentary on Derrida), the baroque Hellboy comic, Anne's homemade bread, and Astronautalis's new album.

It's called Pomegranate, and several songs can be heard at his site. It's a step away from his minimalist rap - produced by the same guy who works for Modest Mouse - and tends towards braggadocio rather than melancholy. However, it has songs about con artists, impressed sailors, imperialists, and George Washington crossing the Delaware.

Go listen to it:

The brothers born of wondersmith, we started as a team.
By complimenting cogs and gears we built a head of steam.
The tragic flaw of charming men is exactly as it seems:
Too much grease can break down a machine.
-"The wondersmith and his sons"

Ellipsis

I am getting bad about writing again. This reflects, in part, a life that's gotten more complicated, and in part the fact that I'm thinking a lot about the global economic crisis and not so much about other formerly interesting ideas. I can tell you a lot about industrial production figures in Japan, a lot about cack-handed bailouts of bankers, and not so much about novels, graffiti, bird life, or drinking.

Okay, I have a few drinking stories: A couple weekends ago, I almost got into a fight with a man wearing a fake-leopard coat. I should have grabbed him by his absurd goatee and beaten him. Ah well, missed opportunities.

Here's one other thought: I live in Kelburn in the hills above Wellington, and as I'm walking down to work every day, I tend to look out to the right to the sunlight coming in over the harbour. The view makes me incredibly happy - and the other day I figured out why. It looks like the view of the San Francisco Bay you can get from the Berkeley hills, site of many good times.

I turned 23 last Friday - thanks to those who noticed. It was a weird experience, and I'm not so thrilled to be 23. It seems like a pointless age.

At night in a slight fog, the city seems filled with fairy lights. They promise re-enchantment, a small world after all. That was always the seductive quality of fairy tales: they served to orient people in their environment, making unexpected sense out of woodlands, remote cottages, rabbit-holes. People always found a place in fairy tales - humble wood-choppers were connected to royal lines, bread-crumb trails were reconstructed, and everybody lived happily ever after and exchanged greetings at the corner store.

Fairy lights shimmer in the modern city, and cast the faint impression that we can track them down and find our true place. Walter Benjamin defined modernity as re-enchantment (coating industrial products with fairy-dust). I have searched for re-enchantment, and found dis-connection. After coming down from the hills, you're anonymous on the lit streets. The tricky part of growing up is that you realize that the world isn't magically held together. The only worlds you get are the ones you construct yourself.

I am reading books about utopia again.

Tent cities in Sacramento

The tents may have gotten better since the 1930s, but it's a shock to see 1,200 or more of them popping up in Sacramento again:



Ye gods. Things continue to slip, slide, careen into social destruction. It's impossible to feel good about this.

Here's the Wall Street Journal - they think it's fine:

A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism.

Roll that one around. The only way that statement makes sense is if the WSJ sees this financial crisis as a desirable part of the system. This is the preferred result.

Given the history of financial crises triggering accumulation by dispossession (i.e. "vulture capitalism") in the Third World, the latter is not inconceivable. Tent cities in Sacramento are the flip side of speculative profits (i.e. bonuses) accruing to the financiers.

On that note, David Harvey has written an excellent essay on this topic: The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Power. He interprets the crisis as another overaccumulation crisis - too much capital searching for too few productive outlets:

This growth of the financial area after the 1970s has a lot to do with what I think is another key problem: what I would call the capitalist surplus absorption problem. As surplus theory tells us, capitalists produce a surplus, which they then have to take a part of, recapitalise it, and reinvest it in expansion. Which means they always have to find somewhere else to expand into. In an article I wrote for the New Left Review called ‘Right to the City’ I pointed out that in the last 30 years an immense amount of the capital surplus has been absorbed into urbanisation: urban restructuring, expansion and speculation. Every city I go to is a huge building site for capitalist surplus absorption. Now, of course, many of these projects stand unfinished.

This way of absorbing capital surpluses has got more and more problematic over time. In 1750 the value of the total output of goods and services was around $135 billion, in constant values. By 1950, it’s $4 trillion. By 2000, it’s $40 trillion. It’s now around $50 trillion. And if Gordon Brown is right it’s going to double over the next 20 years, to $100 trillion by 2030. Throughout the history of capitalism, the general rate of growth has been close to 2.5% per annum, compound basis. That would mean that in 2030 you’d need to find profitable outlets for $2.5 trillion dollars. That’s a very tall order. I think there has been a serious problem, particularly since 1970, about how to absorb greater and greater amounts of surplus in real production. Less and less of it is going into real production, and more and more into speculation on asset values, which accounts for the increasing frequency and depth of the financial crises we’ve been having since 1975 or so; they are all crises of asset value.

My argument would be that if we come out of this crisis right now, and there’s going to be capital accumulation at 3% rate of growth, we’ve got a hell of a lot of problems on our hands. Capitalism is running into serious environmental constraints, as well as market constraints, profitability constraints. The recent turn to financialisation is a turn of necessity, as a way of dealing with the surplus absorption problem; but one that cannot possibly work without periodic devaluations. That’s what’s happening now, with the losses of several trillion dollars of asset value.

The term ‘national bailout’ is therefore inaccurate, because they’re not bailing out the whole of the existing financial system – they’re bailing out the banks, the capitalist class, forgiving them their debts, their transgressions, and only theirs. The money goes to the banks but not to the homeowners who’ve been foreclosed on, which is beginning to create anger. And the banks are using the money not to lend to anybody but to buy other banks. They are consolidating their class power.

[...]

Alternatives

We need in fact to begin to exercise our right to the city. We have to ask the question which is more important, the value of the banks or the value of humanity. The banking system should serve the people, not live off the people. And the only way in which we are really going to be able to exert the right to the city is to take command of the capitalist surplus absorption problem. We have to socialize the capital surplus, and to get out of the problem of 3% accumulation forever. We are now at a point where 3% growth rate forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs, and such tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to go from one financial crisis to another.

The core problem is how you are going to absorb capitalist surpluses in a productive and profitable way. My view is that social movement must coalesce around the idea that they want more control over the surplus product. And while I don’t support a return to the Keynesian model of the sort we had in the 1960s, I do think there was much greater social and political control over the production, utilisation and distribution of the surplus then. The circulating surplus was put into building schools, hospitals and infrastructure. This was what upset the capitalist class and caused a counter movement toward the end of the 1960s – that they were not getting enough control over the surplus. However, if you look at the data the proportion of the surplus which is being absorbed by the state has not shifted very much since 1970, so what the capitalist class did was to stop the further socialisation of the surplus. They also managed to transform the word government into the word ‘governance’, making governmental and corporate activities porous, which enables the situation we have in Iraq where private contractors milked the possibilities ruthlessly for easy profit..

I think we are headed into a legitimation crisis. Over the past thirty years we have been told, to quote Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to a neo-liberal free market, privatised world, and that if we didn’t succeed in that world it’s our own fault. I think it’s very difficult to say that when faced with a foreclosure crisis you support the banks but not the people who are being foreclosed upon. You can accuse the people being foreclosed upon of irresponsibility, and in the US there is a strong racist element in this argument. When the first wave of foreclosures hit places like Cleveland and Ohio they were devastating to the black communities there but some peoples’ response was ‘well what do you expect, black people are irresponsible. We are seeing right-wing explanations of the crisis which explain it in terms of personal greed, both in Wall Street and those who borrowed money to buy houses. So they attempt to blame the crisis on the victims. One of our tasks must be to say ‘no, you absolutely cannot do that’ and to try and create a consolidated explanation of this crisis as a class event in which a certain structure of exploitation broke down and is about to be displaced by an even deeper structure of exploitation. It’s very important this alternative explanation of the crisis is discussed and conveyed publicly.

Linguistics

In the US, we have this bizarre obsession with "fair and balanced". In political terms, the "moderate", "non-ideological", "non-partisan" thing to do is always the one that lies directly in between the two positions espoused by the Democrats and the Republicans. Never mind the fact that one party is mainly well-intentioned and interested in the facts, while the other is composed almost entirely of raving lunatics and war criminals.

In the interests of maintaining balance, I will leave you to form your own conclusions about which is which. But as an American, I think about balance and fairness quite a lot. For example:

Whenever I hear about one of these "Run for the cure" things - "Relay for life", "Race for hope", etc - I think it's terribly unfair. Why does nobody ever lace up for diseases, death, and despair? The whole thing seems askew. Perhaps I should start a "Race for Death and Despair" next year. Its beneficiaries would be a charity that mailed enraged baboons to strangers, and a nonprofit seeking to relocate the world's population to Antarctica.

At work, the library and information services team is called "Knowledge Management", and the people inside it are "Knowledge Advisers". They send out news briefs, assist in research, and generally hunt down and disseminate the information that we need to do our jobs correctly. Why don't we have an "Ignorance Management" team as well, though? Nobody ever has a good word for ignorance!

The "Ignorance Advisers" could go around the Ministry beating clever-looking people in the heads with cricket bats.

A final unrelated note: Yesterday at work, I received an email inviting me to a presentation on the economic meltdown. The subject line read: "Invitation to the Global Depression". I didn't respond, as I think we've all already been invited to that.

Always loot before you pillage

Oh man. In the ongoing very rigid search for a cheap beer, Anne and I uncovered this gem:



Viking Premium Draught: Conquer the taste!

It retails for $12 for a twelve pack at The Mill - about as cheap as they come in New Zealand, to my infinite frustration. A semi-decent beer costs about twice as much.

Let's just say that Viking pillaged our taste buds. However, I have tasted worse beers:

• The rejected batch of home-brew that had been left in Geoff's basement for three years


• The flat Miller-Lite-from-a-milk-jug Shine Ning once served me to celebrate my recovery from surgery


• The vaguely alcoholic swill imbibed during the Williams rugby team's weekly tipples.

Would not buy again. But I still plan to drink the remaining cans.

Status quo

A further reflection upon financial crisis: I've been reading a lot of comments, from economists and politicians and businessmen alike, to the effect that they were shocked, absolutely shocked, at the dysfunctional turn capitalism's recently taken. This is not the way our system should work, they all say. What an aberrant turn of events!

I'd like to investigate a more pessimistic hypothesis: that financial crisis is not dysfunctional but necessary for the continued functioning of capitalism. It's a version of accumulation by dispossession - wealth is being Hoovered (in the dual sense) from the mass of society into the pockets of financiers.

Look at it this way: Investment bankers have done very good business making short-term profits. They speculate, blowing ever-larger bubbles, and in the inflation phase all is well. For doing so, they are paid extravagant bonuses on a yearly basis. After four of five years, their bubble bursts, and the losses are socialized. This has been a recurring event: Mexico, East Asia, Russia, Argentina, and now the world. While the profits from this speculation are all captured by financiers, the losses are repeatedly absorbed by working classes the world over. Think of the costs of the bank bailout - who pays them? Certainly not the bankers. Think of your pension fund - where did it go?

In short, accumulation by dispossession seems to have become a functional element of capitalism, and the financial crisis is one of its chief mechanisms. A heavily financialized economy will not be able to escape such crises.

There is, of course, a geographical element to this: First-world commentators were not overly distressed when Third-world economies were being pillaged. In general, such events were seen as the culmination of a morality tale of corrupt institutions. But when the consequences are global, they suddenly discern dysfunction within their neat world. (To paraphrase Hegel, perhaps the dysfunction lies in the gaze that discerns it.)

On that geographical note, I used to argue for a variety of one-world-government, on the basis of the fact that capital flows and corporations operated on a global level, and could only be regulated as such. Thinking back, that argument ignored the fact that the world was not yet flat. I should have realized at the time that there was such a thing as a center and a periphery - and that Frantz Fanon was not exactly wrong when he discerned misery accumulating at one pole and opulence at the other. The dilemma for now is this: how to turn the potential immiseration of the majority of both poles' populace into the condition for real, mutual enrichment.

It's not entirely implausible, I suppose. Take this puff piece on consumer habits that Time magazine recently ran. It finds that the rich are slightly uncomfortable in a world in which the mask has slipped from inequality.

[They have] learned that conspicuous consumption is bad manners. Also, there's an entangling of consumption and morality. I just heard a story about somebody saying, 'I can afford a new car, but I'm not going to get one, because I just had to lay a bunch of people off.' [...] There's the fundamental realization that Americans have woken up. Their bellies are too big, their cars are too big, their homes are too big, their debts are too big, and they have to go on some kind of a diet. The era of "bling" is over.

Of course, there are many examples of capitalist strata that lack ostentation - for example, in mid-1800s England, thrift, rather than bling, was the cardinal virtue of the bourgeoisie. (Even today, there's a sense that the most ridiculous ostentation is the purview of the lumpenproletariat. That impression only survives because the obscene spectacles of corporate bosses are conducted behind many walls.)

Nevertheless, there is a sense of grass-roots unease filtering up. Nothing socialistic, no more than minor grit in the gears. This is a moment in which people can be convinced to change.

Time is, of course, not a very good publication. They crudely repeat conventional wisdom, waffle, support the worst excesses, and generally misunderstand the world. So it's not a surprise to see their article contradict itself. After paragraphs of market-research goop about how people want to buy less, etc, etc, we find the following:

I credit our President for giving a sense of confidence that something is happening... I think there's a basic sense that yes, it may get worse, the market may go down, but the dust is settling. The dust is settling.

Walter Benjamin once referred to dust as an index of our participation in the collective dream - "Under Louis Philippe [King of France in between the revolutionary years of 1830 and 1848], dust settled even on the revolutions." The dust is settling as we speak. Ironically, part of that is due to Obama - a regime change in Washington DC has given people more confidence in the continued functioning of capitalism. (See above for what that might entail - the dysfunction that is the inner truth of capitalism's function.)

Gogol Bordello: "And you think, all right now people, they have finally woked up. But as soon as the trouble over watch them take another nap."