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Caravaggio picks up the Herodotus. He turns a page, comes over a dune to discover the Gilf Kebir, Uweinat, Gebel Kissu. When Almásy speaks he stays alongside him reordering the events. Only desire makes the story errant, flickering like a compass needle. And this is the world of nomads in any case, an apocryphal story. A mind travelling east and west in the disguise of sandstorm.
Everything I have loved or valued has been taken away from me.
I stayed with her. I discovered three of her ribs were broken. I kept waiting for her wavering eye, for her broken wrist to bend, for her still mouth to speak.
How did you hate me? she whispered. You killed almost everything in me.
Katharine … you didn’t –
Hold me. Stop defending yourself. Nothing changes you.
And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
She will, he realizes now, always have a serious face. She has moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but that it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character. It seems every month or two he witnesses her this way, as if these moments of revelation are a continuation of the letters she wrote to him for a year, getting no reply, until she stopped sending them, turned away by his silence. His character, he supposed.
Whether we can get out of this crisis in a different way depends very much upon the balance of forces. It depends upon the degree to which the mass of the population rises up and says, 'Enough is enough, let's change this system'. [...]
As more surplus capital went into production during the 1980s, particularly in China, heightened competition between producers started to put downward pressure on prices [...] Profits began to fall after 1990 or so in spite of an abundance of low-wage labour. Low wages and low profits are a peculiar combination. As a result, more and more money went into speculation on asset values because that was where the profits were to be had. [...] the debt explosion and the new derivatives markets took off, which, along with the infamous dot.com internet bubble, sucked up vast amounts of surplus capital. Who needed to bother with investing in production when all this was going on? This was the moment when the financialisation of capitalism's crisis tendencies truly began.
But why this revolutionary impulse in the heart of capitalism and why is capitalism so different from other modes of production? Human beings are clearly fascinated by the perpetual pursuit of novelty, but the social and cultural conditions under which such a fascination can become a central driving force in human evolution are very special. Most hitherto-existing social orders were inherently conservative. They sought to preserve the status quo, to protect a ruling class and repress human impulses towards innovation and new ideas. [...]
[...] What is called a crisis of 'under-consumption' results when there is not enough effective demand to absorb the commodities produced.
Workers spending their wages is one source of effective demand. But the total wage bill is always less than the total capital in circulation (otherwise there would be no profit), so the purchase of the wage goods that sustain daily life (even with a suburban lifestyle) is never sufficient for the profitable sale of the total output. A politics of wage repression only heightens the possibility of a crisis of under-consumption. Many analysts came to regard the crisis of the 1930s as primarily a crisis of under-comsumption. They therefore supported unionisation and other state strategies (like social security) to bolster effective demand among the working classes. [...]
think about this more ... this just implies that not all firms can realise a profit, right?
[...] capitalists, as we earlier saw, have a choice as to what they reinvest in: they can reinvest in the expansion of production or they can use their wealth to buy up assets, such as stocks and shares, property, art objects or shares in some speculative enterprise such as a private equity company, a hedge fund or some other financial instrument from which they can realise capital gains. In this case their reinvestments play no role in bolstering effective demand.
Something to think about: if the argument against raising marginal tax rates for high incomes is that these people will thus be less incentivised to "work more" and thus earn more, doesn't the same reasoning apply to falling profit rates? so they're less incentivised to reinvest productively if the rate of profit goes down, or even if it just doesn't go up enough? esp since they don't "need" to reinvest
[...] Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) argues that the relation to nature is what counts, thus transforming human evolution into a tale of environmental determinism. Africa is poor for environmental reasons, not, he says, because of racial inferiorities or (what he does not say) because of centuries of imperialistic plundering, beginning with the slave trade. [...]
interesting take on it. I'll need to go back to the source because I vaguely remember Diamond saying that the environment is what resulted in the plundering (thus, he didn't ignore it completely) but maybe I'm wrong