A long thread about the election and Trump, but really about the whole world.
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A long thread about the election and Trump, but really about the whole world.
In 2011, the town of Empire, Nevada effectively ceased to exist. A company town, Empire was home to a small community based around a gypsum mine. Gypsum had been in high demand as a component in sheetrock, a popular building material in US housing construction. But the 2007-2008 economic crisis caused a crash in the housing market and new construction, which in turn killed demand for sheetrock and thus gypsum.
So, Empire was closed down and its hundreds of inhabitants expelled. Essentially overnight, because of decisions made by financiers in places like New York, those people had their jobs, their homes, their schools and neighbors, their friendships—everything—stripped from them.
Empire was perhaps one of the more dramatic casualties of the Great Recession; the movie “Nomadland” was inspired by its experience and the resulting homelessness that many of its residents experienced. But Empire was hardly alone. Across the US, millions of people had their lives overturned or ruined because a handful of incredibly rich financiers, whom they’d never meet, wanted yet more money and were perfectly willing to risk everyone else for the chance.
Decisions that no one in Empire had any say in whatsoever.
1/10
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In 1944, Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi published a book titled “The Great Transformation.” Polanyi was, in part, trying to make sense of the rise of fascism globally, which had forced him into exile in the US, and the resulting Second World War.
Polanyi argued, among many other things, that capitalism marked a titanic departure from virtually every economic system before it—the great transformation in the title—by subordinating society to the economy, rather than the other way around. Past economies had been built on self-sufficient householding, reciprocity, and redistribution. Capitalism, in contrast, subordinated everything to the market, reducing human beings to a “fictitious commodity” called labor that could be pushed about by impersonal forces that could not be controlled or even really perceived (by anyone except the very rich, of course).
2/10
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In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, large numbers of Americans reported negative feelings about the economy. They felt worse off than they had been four years prior. Inflation and the high cost of living, in particular, troubled them. Their confidence in the economy was low and considerable majorities reported that the economy was weak and on the wrong track.
In response, it became quite fashionable in some liberal circles to dismiss these concerns as nonsense. Biden’s economy was *quite good,* according to important indicators, so these sentiments must either be the product of anti-Biden propaganda or, more simply, rank stupidity on the part of the electorate.
The inflation rate, after all, had gotten quite low! (Never mind that while the rate of price growth had slowed, prices remain high and workers will never recover the wealth stolen from them by firms that raised their prices.)
Sure, housing prices remain absurdly high and the homelessness rate is higher than it ever has been. Sure, Americans are encumbered by housing, education, car, credit card, and medical debt, and some have been reduced to buying food with credit. Sure, starting a family or retiring are increasingly out of reach for many Americans.
But did you know that nominal wages have *almost* caught up to where they were before the inflationary spike, representing decades of stagnation?
But did you know that unemployment is very low, never mind that many of these jobs are gig work with no stability or security?
But did you know that the stock market is doing quite well? Just don’t pay attention to the fact that more than 90% of stocks are owned by the stock richest 10% of Americans, and that most people can hope for nothing or, at best, crumbs when the market “does well.”
Why is economic sentiment still so negative? - Lawyers, Guns & Money
A new survey from Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies finds: Now the kneejerk reaction among We Enlightened Few is to Blame the Media. However: People who have more negative views of the economy are more likely to base their rating on their personal experiences or what they’re hearing from others, which tends to be […]
Lawyers, Guns & Money (www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
5/10
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In the years since Empire was dismantled, no one has done anything to change the circumstances that led to that moment. Countless communities barely, or never, recovered. Millions of people suffered immensely. Many died. And nothing fundamentally changed. Not Obama, not Trump, not Biden: no one has done anything to alter the structural conditions that created all that immense suffering.
Banks were bailed out, but not people. The same financiers are still in charge of the same financial system. The same political elites are still in various offices. The same systems and structures are still in operation. The same workers are subject to the same bosses, the same wage system. The survivors of places like Empire have no more control over their economic lives than they did before.
I have often argued that poverty is not merely material deprivation, but rather a measure of how much control other people have over you. Wealth, likewise, is not a measure of stuff so much as it is a measure of social power to command others. What, then, could be more “impoverished” in a modern capitalist context than having your entire community dismantled on the whim of some wealth elites and being cast into exile by people you will never meet?
4/10
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Here’s what Polanyi had to say about the effects this would have:
‘To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...’
The demolition of society. Does that feel familiar to you?
3/10
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When a majority of Americans report feeling economic distress and prioritize the economy as one of, if not the, most important issue to themselves, and Kamala Harris responded by saying she couldn't think of anything she would have done differently than Joe Biden during his term in office, she probably didn't do herself any favors in the election. But that kind of analysis gives too much credit to the electoral system as a horserace. "Maybe is she had done this or that, things would be different..."
A global phenomenon goes way beyond this kind of analysis and points to a global system in absolute crisis, with vast majorities around the world expressing two related preferences for their rulers: absolutely no one at all or, in a pinch, anyone but the people in charge now.
7/10
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The problem is, I’m not really sure that there was much of anything that any of these presidents *could* have done. @CrimethInc put it quite well:
"We have long argued that in the 21st century, state power is a hot potato. Because neoliberal globalization has made it difficult for state structures to mitigate the impact of capitalism on ordinary people, no party is able to hold state power for long without losing credibility. Indeed, over the past few months, upset defeats have undermined ruling parties in France, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Japan."
It’s true: this year, incumbent parties have effectively lost every election they contested, everywhere in the world. Not just France, Austria, the UK, and Japan, but also Indonesia, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, France, and now the US. Oh, and the German governing coalition has collapsed.
When something happens once, we might look for contingent explanations. When something happens all over the world at the same time, we need to look for systemic explanations.
History Repeats Itself: First as Farce, Then as Tragedy
In many ways, the Democrats are responsible for Donald Trump’s return to power. Let's explore why.
CrimethInc. (crimethinc.com)
6/10
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Which is to say, I don’t know that there was much Biden or Harris could have done to meaningfully divert the trajectory we’re on. Trump might, a little bit, but only for the worse. But we have to be careful to avoid assigning too much blame to any one candidate or policy. The crises we face—of the climate, of capitalism—were set in motion literally centuries ago. Our capitalist and political elites are failures in their own right, but they are also probably *structurally* unable to do anything about it.
Too many of our society’s resources and its productive capacity have been captured and consumed by elites. We have eaten all the seed corn; there is nothing left to plant in the spring.
If you could imagine going back two or three decades and trying to forecast the polycrisis, as many people did, would this not be precisely the scenario you would imagine?
Mass migration from the global south and a resulting fascist backlash. Ecosystem collapses. War in the hottest parts of the world and over some of the richest farmland in the world. The breakdown of a multi-decades old global system of institutions. Mass famine. The collapse of states in the most vulnerable latitudes. The failure of political elites to deliver results and a roiling and running backlash against them.
This—the failure of Harris to beat Trump, the US’ latest fascist turn, the defeat of incumbents around. The world—is what a system in collapse looks like. Trump will face his own backlash when he inevitably fails to deliver any solution or improvement, not that this helps us now, and so on down the line.
9/10
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I keep thinking back to a particular passage in Joseph Tainter’s "The Collapse of Complex Societies." In this book, he argues that complex systems, and especially extractive and hierarchical systems like ours, tend to collapse when they reach a point of diminishing marginal returns on additional complexity. As elites exhaust the people who produce wealth for them, they have to invest in yet more mechanisms of control to squeeze more from them, which require yet more resources, which prompt yet more discontent, which require yet more mechanisms of control, in a vicious feedback loop. At a certain point, so many resources are being poured into maintaining the status quo that the system can't confront any new challenges. We tend to experience this, subjectively, as a kind of social exhaustion, a feeling that a society has reached an old age approaching an inevitable death. Nothing works anymore, even though we keep paying higher and higher prices. Sound familiar?
"I do not wish to suggest that leadership is immaterial, only that it is of much less importance than many believe. Complex societies do not evolve on the whims of individuals. Circumstance-induced perception is likely to be of greater consequence: rulers look good when the marginal return on investment in complexity is rising, for in such a situation almost anything a leader does is overshadowed by the large payoff to society-wide investment. Conversely, when marginal returns are declining there is usually very little that leadership can do in the short term to arrest this trend, and so anything that is tried is bound to appear incompetent."
8/10
