By Creston Davis
A certain story underlines the truth of the relationship between the rich and the poor. Set in a small farming town, a group of workers would meet every week for lunch at a local restaurant. The men talk about anything from local politics to sports and the occasional vulgar gossip. Lunch was always paid for by a rich man (who was also part of the group) until one day the working class men starting complaining that the tax code disproportionately favored the wealthy and unfairly burdened the workers and farmers of the town. By the end of the meeting, the rich man got so mad that he refused to pay for everyone’s lunch. The cliché moral of the story is that the workers committed the fallacy of biting the hand that feeds them.
But this interpretation fails to see the true reality that resides in the power of the workers (the majority of the labor force in society), a reality that Hegel rightly identified in his master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, namely that the power only appears to be in the hands of the master (capitalist, bankers etc.) but really resides in the hands of those who create and produce reality as such, namely the slaves (workers). In this story, it is almost as if this group of workers could not exist until the rich man brings them together and thus brings them to “life” (appearance) out of sheer and gratuitous grace that is a fake—a mask behind which the reality of a enslavement logic lay.
The world according to the master seemingly makes the workers come into existence out of the pity in the rich man’s heart, whose gift of sustenance only repeats and reinforces the debt that the poor owe him. The truth of the world is thus hidden from view and obscured by a false logic of debt that the workers must carry around with them in order to exist at all. But is not the correct interpretation of this story that if and when the rich suddenly fail to pay for our lunches we are free to take what is really ours. Are we not dependent more immediately on the work of our hands than on the rich? In other words: in a time of crisis we finally see the truth of the world hidden from us by the rich. We the workers are the condition of our own possibility.
In this way, Bertolt Brecht’s famous line that goes something like, “There is no difference between founding a bank and robbing one”[1] needs a further twist: There is no difference between a bank collapsing and getting robbed by one. And is this not precisely what is happening in the United States at the moment? The banks are rapidly collapsing one by one by one and who comes and saves the banks (who can only save a bank?) the taxpayers! The truth hits home! Never before has such a crisis revealed the dirty trick of capitalism: you get screwed both ways—which adds insult to injury! When you open up a bank account and when you save a bank—either way you get the short end of the deal. But this is the beauty of the paradox: the people finally grasp the truth of capitalism’s brutality! And this awakening we can grasps reality and make it our own again.
Professor Carl Raschke’s article “Hyperreality” nicely identifies the financial meltdown on Wall Street by appealing to theological and philosophical categories, which helps illuminate some basic factors in the opaque aftermath of the collapse. Raschke shows how the attempt to get to the materialized bottom of what Fred Jameson called “the cultural [financial?] logic of late capitalism” is impossible. Indeed one of the most frightening aspects of this meltdown (and there are several) is the fact that no one understands the full extend breath and width of the problem. The article description of what is effectively un-describable reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction short story “The Last Question” in which human beings create a GIANT omnipotent and omniscience machine-computer in order for it to perform the mundane tasks of living (for example, redistributing energy, financial capital, maintaining itself and other sundry by-products etc.) only to discover that the GIANT machine is so enormous that it simply transcends any one’s ability to even find, much less trigger, the on/off switch. In chillingly appropriate terms, Asimov says that “[t]hey had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole”[2]
Ominously this capitalist financial crisis rings true to one of the basic plots of science-fiction: viz. humans create a machine so big (or robots so plentiful) that it/they ends up taking over the universe only to become conscious of the unforeseen negative efforts when it’s simply too late in the game to make a difference. Come to think of it, perhaps this basic plot that ties together the standard plot in science-fiction and global financial capital can describe the 20th century. This provisional hypothesis is too general to prove of course—it will die the death of a thousand qualifications. Nevertheless this hypothesis does comport with Alain Badiou’s idea that 20th century philosophy. For Badiou understands philosophy in a triad of hermeneutic, analytic, and postmodern orientations which collectively and in their own different ways puts “the category of truth on trial, and with it the classical figure of philosophy.”[3] And the result Badiou tells us produces two inter-dependent axioms:
1- “the metaphysic of truth has become impossible.... Philosophy can no longer pretend to be what it had for a long time decided to be, that is, a search for truth.”
2- “The question of meaning [language] replaces the classical question of truth.”[4]
And now, in the dawning hours of a new century we are shocked by two different Septembers, 9/11 in which the World Trade Centers are targeted and fall to their doom, and in 2008 with the financial crisis—the fallout of which is less “symbolic” and dramatic but sure to be more financially painful to more people regardless of their race, creed, and gender. On the surface, these two Septembers seem only to have a month in common, but perhaps there is something (an extreme “fundamentalist” take on life at the expense of common hard-working folks i.e., capitalist soldiers/terrorist) that ultimately connects them.
What I found most striking about Raschke’s article was not only his ability to name the unnamable, but more importantly was how he closed the article with a sign of hope. Here are his words that blend with Jacques Derrida’s: He with us are obliged "to think the virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever...from opposing presence to representation, 'real time' to 'deferred time,' effectivity to its simulacrum...in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come and thus for justice." (Specters of Marx, Routledge, 1994).
It is in times such as now— in the dustbowl of the crisis’ fallout—that will inevitably change the course of history. And, we must not be afraid to ask the hard questions, that is, to see the light of truth (however blinding it may be). At bottom there are two basic questions:
1- What group (or corpus of individuals) is able to determine the future coordinates given this crisis?
2- What ethical and political guidelines will this corpus draw on and emphasis as they make certain fundamental decisions about addressing this crisis? For example, will they lean more towards an elitist laissez-faire economic outlook or will they take into account the majority of individuals who comprise the poor, the working and the middle classes? In other words: Will these leaders reproduce a system predicated on greed, privilege, and alienating finance (a system that is de facto broken) or one that takes as its starting point the concepts of sharing, equality, and community?
Regarding the first question, the answer is clear: The executive and legislative branches of the government are the one’s responsible for making policy decisions. We stand at a basic and unprecedented crossroads. And judging from the ubiquitous nature of the lobby industry and their corresponding scandals that have rocked congress to its core, I must admit I have a pretty good idea about how to answer my second set of questions. Power tends to want to preserve its influence and keep to itself. I suppose then that we are left with a glimmer of hope that congress will side with the masses, with the common, and with working people. But already in saying this—by stating the fact about the elite—it does force us to ask: Are we not the ones who have the freedom to choose—it seems we are too far removed from determining for ourselves our own future, our welfare and happiness. And a crisis like this allows us to see the truth in all is horrific glory. Perhaps the most important question of all is the one that asks: How and why did we get here in the first place? How is it that the working people of this country allow themselves to get here in the first place?
Is not a time like this the exact time to alight with a hope in taking back what is ours irrespective of the elite (and even despite of them)? Perhaps we need to appeal to the thought of folks like Thomas Jefferson who called for a revolution every generation. A crisis is another word for the birth of a democracy—something that America has always promised but has yet to deliver on. The credit is due and the truth of democratic justice can never be exhausted.
Creston Davis is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Rollins College (cdavis@rollins.edu) and co-editor of Insurrection –an academic book series published by Columbia University Press.
[1] Bertolt Brecht’s, The Three Penny Opera
[2] I. Asimov, “The Last Question” in The SFWA Grand Masters, Vol. II edited by Frederik Pohl, (New York: A Tom Doherty Associates Book [TOR], 2000) pg. 210.
[3] Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Desire” in Infinite Thought, translated and edited by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum Press, 2003) p. 46.
[4] Ibid. pg. 47.
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