STUFF
all rights and media rights reserved, 2012
Even though so many things are getting worse, this means that some things are getting better. Thrift stores are thriving, for instance. Store-bought new stuff seems less important than it did a week ago, doesn't it? People are making music without necessarily spending all that much time thinking about the music industry. The Occupy movement has arisen and it will morph of course but it will not go away. Time may be valued over money in the future. In the near future, for certain, as for some this event has already occurred and once it happens it is virtually impossible to turn back. History is path-dependent; you cannot go back, it is too late for that now. Once the time-money sums are done, it is futile to pretend that you do not know the results of the equation. Store your wealth in your head; use your mind; paradigm shifts change social relations. For those fortunate enough to be able to pull this off. It all sounds quite good, in a way. It is not really the progressive immiseration of the working-classes (whose call themselves middle-class, in the USA, for our global reader), that is key here. For while that is happening, living standards have generally risen in the modern world now for roughly seven decades. The ninety-nine per cent are not all dirt poor. But they are pissed off. Alienated, in the classic marxist sense, from the 1844 Manuscripts.
Growing up, we were told in school that the economy was built on ever-rising expectations. That news, so obviously implausible as any kind of working future even to a teenager who was rubbish at maths, could be enough to send a person to a buddhist meeting at an early age. If the market feeds desire, and desire will exceed capacity, then the solution is to work very hard at having less desire. If commodities are fetishes then it makes more sense to find out what is condensed and displaced there, then cut out the middle man -- the object. If football teams are winning because they are rich (and this feels like good fortune when the team you love is purchased by a billionaire) the game gets boring in a hurry. More fun maybe to start anarchy in the uk by setting up your own semi-pro teams -- AFC Wimbledon, FC United of Manchester, AFC Chester. Because although so many things are getting worse, this means that some things are getting better. The transfer window closed yesterday, for the English Football League (even the Guardian uses EPL now and POP will not go there), and hardly any of the big teams spent much money on new players. This means that the best team will win the trophy this year (Manchester United) not the richest (Manchester City). It is much harder now to get books published and films made. And I should know -- the economy, or my sudden loss of form, or both, could be related, have created a brick wall somewhere in the gap between me thinking, writing and completing, and the actual place where things are bought and sold. So one solution is to keep trying it the old way -- central distribution of cultural goods and services -- while also creating alternative ways of being seen and heard. Blogs, for instance. Self-publishing, which is now more like a smart move than an acceptance of Rejection. Some writers, like film makers and musicians, must now be making more money selling directly. Not much money maybe but still at least Sony isn't keeping 99 per cent of your one great album.
Of course if you are at rock bottom, none of this information is of any use. It has no value. You might not have a computer; you might been given no chance to go to college (although that might be an advantage, to be fair); you might have too little cash to start up any of your ideas; you might be so poor that you are starving and art will have to wait; and you can also be so stressed out by the recession (Number Three is on its way, just a heads-up there for you) that even if you do have the means, you now lack the spirit, the will, the self-belief. We should be helping these people with all our might. Which amongst other things means voting Democrat next time around whether you like it or not. Doesn't mean you can't also repossess and re-populate foreclosed homes. Don't burn the flag, repossess it. OWN IT.
What is truly astonishing to me about the state of our minds and our wallets, is this: all those years ago, when we were told that rising material expectations could not be maintained -- we were addicted to stuff and on the road to ruin -- it seemed to me that while Small Is Beautiful, this would not work out for more than a week as an economic plan. No, it was clear that we simply had to give up our cravings for more stuff and like what we have; then circulate the stuff you are bored with, without worrying too much about how much your broken down car actually costs, in terms of exchange-value. Its use-value is the important thing, now. For its exchange-value is just going to keep plummeting anyway. Like the money under your mattress, when inflation kicks in.
Hence. What I find amazing, and utterly depressing, is that the creative-cultural-class that drives Hybrids and recycles, along with all the middle class and posh people who not that long ago were in apparent despair over poverty in the 'third world', well these people, these people are cheating on their taxes, and doing anything to re-prime the 401k pump. Whatever happened to the idea that it would be good, to have less stuff?
It went south, the moment the stuff did.
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