Peasants with pitchforks...

... might be a sign of progress or bloody reaction. It's a nodal point, where history's pivot presents a very real bifircation.

Mark Jones eight years ago described the post-Cold War booms as the capitalist metropoles digesting the fallen Eastern Bloc, somewhat slowly, "like a snake who's swallowed a goat." The snake is shitting now... and starving.

The unfolding economic crisis -- which surprised the mainstream commentators and analysts, but about which those crazy leftists have been Playing Cassandra for a decade -- is now firmly off the tracks and roaring toward some abyss.

When these things hit, the peasants have a tendency to seize pitchforks from the barns and form scary mobs at the city's edge. Only in this case, the peasants have been barracked in the low-density exurbs, cleaned up and provided with technocratic educations, provisioned with thousand-mile food and entropic toys, called middle-class (whatever the hell that ever meant... but they believed it), then saddled with the debt that fueled their colossus-cars and, likewise, the runaway train.

The somnambulence of this sector is about to end.

Poor people already know the crisis; but the most dangerous potential resides within Suburbia, the political center of gravity in the US.

From yonder financial ridge, where the gran manje had thusfar shushed one another's feverish conversations, the cries of anguish are being heard in the 'burbs. The hot-shots are being eaten by bears. We may all be eaten by bears. The ruckus is rousing Levittown.

"The shit," as we say in Academia, "is on."

The question, one of the big questions, is what will the peasants do?

That depends, really. If they hear only from demagogues, then they will behave like demagogic mobs. When populism took hold in the US at the turn of the last century, "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman led the mobs who beseiged their creditors (rightly so) away from the banks and out to lynch Black people. Hitler led his peasants into the industrialized slaughter of Jews and Slavs... one might call it Genocidal Keynesianism.

Not having an answer to these questions, my two-cents is this. Start right now explaining that this crisis has a home address: Wall Street.

It also has a religion: property. I don't mean property like your house (though they probably own that) or your clothes or your grandma's china. I mean forests and prairies and development properties and strip malls and factories.

I bring this up from my memory of strip mall and box store parking lots when I was in the Gulf Coast two years ago. Hurricane Katrina gave us a snapshot of generalized disaster.

The massive parking lots had been taken over by relief-squatters. Thousands of (mostly young) people who wanted to help had converged from around the country and set up food-and-clothing distribution points, soup kitchens, day-care, and ad hoc flea markets. The need was so great, and the relief provided by the government so non-existent, that no one, not even the cops (many of them devastated by the strorm themselves), gave any of them the lecture about, "This is private property."

The people needed it. The people wanted it. And that, for the time, settled it.

No one knows where this will end up. But let's don't be led away from the bank to hang the innocent. And let's don't dismiss the value of squatting. We may have to re-write some rules.

Comments

[NoFactsJustTruth]

When Willie-boy said, "Let's kill all the lawyers", Stan, I don't believe he understood that the future held demons of corruption FAR more deadly to those 'peasants with pitchforks' than ANY lawyer, I speak of LOBBYISTS!

The SOURCE of our seemingly 'one-party system' are these insidious industry paid bribers, that see OUR country's Government as nothing more than a means to their ends. That elected officials ACCEPT campaign donations for legislation IS perhaps something the peasants can eventually change, but first they MUST recognize the TRUE snakes for what they are and vote accordingly, for the candidates that denigrate the practice and vow to do something about it.

While true bribes of an untraceable off-shore nature may never be completely over-come, publicly financed elections would go far in eliminating the 'visible access' provided through this corrupt method of petitioning OUR Government. I heard a few weeks ago that JUST the pharmaceutical industry had 2 registered lobbyists in Washington D.C. for EVERY elected representative. JUST the pharmaceutical industry...

You're correct that what's broke in OUR Government cannot be laid at the door-step on any one administration in recent history. The original creation of the electoral process and the refusal of CONgress to EVER remove themselves from 'bribery's path' in all our history, has kept OUR country from achieving what the framers of OUR Constitution had in their mind for the 'Great Experiment' in FREEDOM and EQUALITY.

You provide great analysis and insight, sir, thank you.

[Rule Of Law]

Oh, have no doubt, Stan--The next step in THIS fascist takeover will be the demonization of Someone; some party, some race, some minority of other qualities, but someone needs to be made the demon and the fall guy here in American for this thing to really work. And the simple minded red necked peasants will be led away from Wall Street and the Federal Reserve into the darkened streets of their own home towns, and by torch light they will beat, mutilate and kill whoever the State aims them at. I fear for this country.

[Henry]

I think it also has something to do with speed. For example, the likes of Goldman in the PRC "creating" wealth through IPO in a Communist Country. This is a bit more complicated than it really appears and it has the resemblemce, to me, of kids at a keg party.
The global disparities with wealth creation, that American phenomenon, are shifting styles of life that were "tenable" in to an exuberance of demand that will demolish a relative balance that previously existed.
And here is the moral to this story of the pursuit of opulence: The elephant will go the way of the buffalo. (and this is only one example)
The real greedy ugly bastards are the investment banks. (as you know they could give a shit about the buffalo)

[BadChristian]

You talk about ex-burbs, then you talk about New Orleans...

After Katrina, I don't remember hearing about rioting ex-burbs, or pitch-forks, for that matter... And the mobs at the cities edges were trying to get out, not in. If there were as many guns layin' about in the old days, as there are today, I don't think they would have opted for pitchforks either.

Everyone in the pirating industry knows that cities are where it's at now-a-days. All the training centers are designed to look exactly like "Urban centers," and all the propaganda is designed to make people understand that we, who live in our "Urban Jungles," are savages and "Ghetto hood-rats" and "Nappy Headed hoes"... Who speak our profane "Gutter languages"... You know that Stan. And, from all the posts of yours I have read, you know why they are presenting us this way... "Dehumanizing" us as the stupid mobs, and even the Democrats are confabulating new and creative ways to justify keeping our choices, the choices of population centers, from making a difference.

You are one of my favorites, Stan.
I hope people finally start to see that the cities are the places that the "Culture War" has been waged. Not the Manhattans, and inside-out cities, where the wealthy live... But all the rest of them. They'll turn it all into parking lots and box stores if the rest of this country doesn't finally notice... AND, when they're done, people who hated us city folk, will finally realize why they should have given a shit about it before ...

[Stan Goff - Huffpost Blogger]

See Stan Goff's Profile

This mess was not created by Bush, but by imperialism. It's roots can be traced back to Vietnam and Nixon... and to WWI if you follow Michael Hudson's financial history. Alan Greenspan has been around through serial administrations. Blaming Bush for this crisis of accumulation, resulting from megatrends going back decades, is exactly the kind of self-delusion I allude to adentro.

Democrats were complicit in this from the get-go, and the most beloved of Wall Street was Bill Clinton, the King of Fictional Value.

Go read and assimilate the lessons laid out by Peter Gowan, Michael Hudson, Susan Strange, and Henry Liu... then come back and we'll have an intelligent conversation. They all predicted this well before we even knew who George W. Bush was outside of Texas. You can't get the straight story from MSNBC or even NPR... they are too cautious to offend you with the details (or the truth).

Every one of the three major candidates now has a list in their top-ten contributors' list of the very capital markets scammers that are about to get a bailout at your expense. This is not a Bush issue, it is a systemic one.

PATIENT: Doctor, you are saying I have only three minutes to live? What can you do?

DOCTOR: I can boil you an egg.

[BadChristian]

"Democrats were complicit in this from the get-go, and the most beloved of Wall Street was Bill Clinton, the King of Fictional Value."

They've got a family of puppets for the right hand, and another for the left.

It's like watching the frickin' "Punch and Judy" show.

[flatus]

The only thing I'd like to know is when do the perp walks begin?

I disagree about this crisis having a home Wall Street home address. The home address is the Republican party because of it's methodical destruction of regulatory bodies. Sometimes it is not a good thing to hate government.

[RPLinNYC]

Welcome to Bushville.

[hopeless277]

You forgot the torches. Pitchforks are no good without torches.