I think they almost get it...

Marketwatch is headlining this story as "Shoppers on Strike": exactly.  See the "general strike..." post below.

Surrogate Intercorporeality: Urbanization and the growth of the ?world-wide inter-web, as you call it?

It seems like the curmudgeony insistence on the alienating effects of the internet must be both right and wrong. In Dreyfus? ?On the Internet?, this notion seems to emerge out of a certain reading of Merleau Ponty, in which ?intercorporeality? is a taken as a concept of limits. We need our bodies to interact with the people we interact with. The limits implied by the emphasis on this type of intercorporeality signify that bodily interaction is not possible over the internet. And yet, if studies have found that internet usage decreases connectivity in families and communities, if people seem to be bodily compelled to hang out online day and night instead of using their bodies to communicate with their ?actual? location, then we must pose two skeptical marxist questions:

1) Can we be so certain about the non-intercorporeality of internet users with each other?
2) And may not the information-seeking public be actively deploying a tough therapy for a previously existing alienation?

The very concepts of surrogacy and the urban suggest that we need not touch, see or even hear each other in order to participate fully in intercorporeality. Surrogacy means that we can act as each other: my bodies can be you across space, and be for you. The urban means a closeness beyond the epistemic positing of presence: we live close together, in an infinity suggested only by the perceptual experience of finite multiplicity. The play of metaphore involved in surrogacy dominates experience, for even direct investigation is given over to the gestures of all our others. Taken together with the fact that even the particularity of our egos is still a we composed of all names, faces and unknown bodies, and it becomes clear that even cats have internet, and that it has probably been theorized since at least 6,000 BCE.
And the second question tomorrow...

The Sublation of the General Strike

The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat.

- George Sorel, Reflections on Violence

Since violence is clearly illegible as violent, we may as well admit that the type of violence known as "resistance" and "anti-capitalist" struggle will work with as much insipid, invisible, globe-engulfing force as anything like "capitalism".  Keeping in mind that the "capital" of Das Kapital is more an arche-principle of any organon, than the designation of any specific economic system, it might seem as if violence itself were in any case anti-capitalist.  The specific illegibility of violence as violent (our inability to identify all possible consumption as violent, for instance) leads us to the same equipollence we find surrounding so many concepts, such as sovereignty, perpetrator, terrorism, and roguishness.  So, of course, capitalism is auto-immune, as Marx and so many others have pointed out.  But, further, if its violence has failed to live up to the stupidity of our concept of the "event" as irruptive, as violent, then so, by any argument, must its self-violence.  

It is for this reason that the violent destruction of aggregate demand in "advanced" economies must be judged along the same lines as the violence of the general strike once was: not does it "work" (as if we could know what this means), but is its futurity proletarian?  Does it expect an aneconomy of the other, not knowing what it will be? In this way, and only in this way, is the myth of the general strike growing out of its long, long infancy...

Early halloween post: Skeptical Ethics and the Deflation of the Uber-bubble (Crashes of 1873 & 1893)

Wikipedia (the moment of telos of human intelligence) tells us:

That in May of 1873, just as the global economy collapsed, barbed-wire was invented, and Jesse James carried out the first successful train robbery.

[Aneconomy: What is taken, is also taken.]

and that in 1893: "The huge spike in unemployment, combined with the loss of life savings by failed banks, meant that a once secure middle class could not meet their mortgage obligations. As a result, many walked away from recently built homes. From this, the sight of the vacant Victorian (haunted) house entered the American mindset."

[Many are still vacant (in Philly, say); many more vacancies are being added (in Stockton, say). As long as territories (dwellings) multiply faster than people, the periodic bubbles will only continue to deflate the larger bubble of monumental history.Nice to think the spectrality of the haunted house as the hope of abandonment, rather than the abandonment of hope. Lets add the McMansions to the ranks of the scary-beautiful!]

How classist was the ideology driving the inflation of the debt bubble?

Not answerable beyond the simple affirmative, of course: "It was extraordinarily classist."  But still worth a comment.  The dominant, driving assumption (yes, assumption is drive, assumptions after all are assertive) was that the the species-being of humanity was a certain becoming-American and, distinctly, a becoming-European.  (The overarching becoming-Western doesn't work, as the mutual transatlantic contempt continues to alter these bourgeois territories enormously.)  It based the mechanism of this becoming on the continuing-to-be-American of British and American consumers specifically.  The desires of these particular joe-the-plumbers were to drive them to increase a debt-emburdenedness which they would, stupidly, honor.  This piggish consumption would cause the Chindians to engage in similar debt-based contractual obligations as they increased their consumption of meat, oil, and received opinions.  Instead, the Yanks defaulted and the Chinese saved.

No-recourse

This system broke down at so many points that it now appears with the arrogant, brutish naiveté of a medieval political theology.  You cannot secure against default and the withering of desire for tat; least of all by deploying a doctrine of human nature as deluded and constrained as that of original sin.

Yes, but will it succeed?

Feudalism, Hyper-capitalism, Socialism or Utopian Star Trekian paradise? Who knows.

In a move that could only possibly make sense for Britain (since it has an independent currency and Britain is the only country in Europe with no economy beyond banking and financial services), the ECB has declared economic war on the rest of the world's wealthy elite, and socialized the future bad investments of the wealthiest European elites by guaranteeing all interbank lending. If the coordinated move stokes inflation fears in Europe, fails to lower the TED spread, or even fails to boost the Euro in the near term, the dollar could go through the roof. Whether this will happen depends on several factors. If European banks start lending to each other, they will recapitalize themselves and each other by making bad insured investments - a backdoor recapitalization. In this case there could be a race between banks and countries within the Eurozone to make as many bad investments as possible. Sound familiar? Yes, because that's how we got here. If it works, inflation internally all around. But inflation of what? Commodities of every stripe have proved themselves too vulnerable to demand-contraction, housing is going to go into oversupply in the very near future - yes, even in Europe. At first, the tech profits look too hypothetical to re-bubble, but...Energy? Yeah probably. Energy: now there is some tech with material, non-hypothetical (and yet metaphorical) teeth behind its profits. And a sector that European xenophobes will love, because it can sustain a certain discourse of 'independence'. Or maybe they will just horde it all, and everyone will start fighting over benefits. We'll see.
If it doesn't work, and credit markets don't "unfreeze", the move is going to look both desperate and indestagflationary. The economy will look so bad in Europe, and everyone will assume that banks are so unstable, that money will flee to the dollar, especially if the economic news in the states continues to be bad, and if Paulson and friends opt not to inflate and socialize their way out of the crisis (the republican illiterati will almost certainly get their way with this).
All this in freak reaction to last week's markets: the worse the news in America, the worse the news in Europe, the better the dollar did against the Euro and the Pound. Gordon Brown and the ECB are trying to break this logic. Very risky considering how complete dollar hegemony is, and how deep the hatred for Europe is in an administration that is determined to have as much affect as possible while it remains in power.

Wither

If the withering of demand produces the withering of production, what produces the withering of demand?  Efficiency of production leads to the exhaustion of consumption.  Over time all production simply conquers demand. Some commodities never really recover from this.  Like parsnips and housing.  Other commodities, like prostitutes, energy and digital media storage, we have not yet had our fill of.

Most prominent among this later category is the commodity "service".  What is service?  Well, genealogically it can be nothing else than the entire terrain of the infantile, when we infants were being absolutely served, and when we were not being served, we were absolutely alone, and absolutely helpless.  This at any rate is the dominant experience dynamic of the terrorized, anxiously-attached, neglected modern infant.

So a technology that deflates service can only be therapy, and not just a cure for bougy neurotics, but one that makes them better parents....