Excerpts from the Masters module Designing Politics supervised by John Reardon and Michael Dutton. It explores

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POLYCRISIS OR PERMACRISIS? WORD OF 2022

In a 1980 speech to the Conservative Women's Conference, Thatcher famously said: “We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative.” _That slogan, [‘There is No Alternative’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative#:~:text=%22There%20is%20no%20alternative%22%20(,British%20prime%20minister%20Margaret%20Thatcher.) _– no alternative to the self-admittedly unpopular policies of a newly financialised era – speaks anew in our current era of polycrisis.

Indeed, any recourse to ‘balance’ reads as tragedy in the year 2022 – when the list of crises constitutes a 1-minute-read of its own – and balance via “the market” as farce. And yet, it is still the ‘balancing act’ of an innovative ‘invisible hand’ that is relied upon to adjust responses to these crises through, it seems, ever-quickening cycles of boom and bust. This particular coping-mechanism, which favours quick-fixes over long-term planning, may work for now but, as Adam Tooze writes:_ “The more successful we are at coping, the more the tension builds.”_

It may then be wise to think less with the polycrisis – that is to say, the diversity of crises we face in the present – than the _permacrisis, _and the idea that such crises are here to stay… “that we now see our crises as situations that can only be managed, not resolved.” For more read on here.

SUN EXPLODES: MARKETS REACT

What happens when we think of the life of the Sun as a business cycle?

Some scientists believe that the current phase of the star's life-cycle will end around 5 billion years from now. On the one hand, that can be read as a long bull market, and optimistically, leaves a lot of time for continued economic growth; on the other, it seems that the thermonuclear cadence of a speculative solar economy fails to speak to the lived reality of our present moment. A moment which, as we’ve identified, is one of ever-quickening, ever-diversifying, ever-deepening crises. However – somewhere in-between – the Sun’s theoretical limit as an economic actor may expose something of the radical contingency or strangeness at the heart of cycles of all kinds; from fashion and physics to finance and biology.

The alignment of moons, planets and stars – and the cadence with which they orbit the Sun and other bodies – have a longstanding, important place in cultural memory. Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain, has been said to serve as a sacred meeting place, consecrated by celestial events such as lunar eclipses. Some have even argued that stonehenge was used to predict such eclipses. And such spectacular chance encounters between these orbits offer up a sense of oscillatory time that is profoundly plural – that exposes the plurality of ‘times’ which sit within what we think of as ‘the present’. Orbits within orbits.

These oscillations and repetitions take place on the earth as well, and similarly occur within one another – “a present whose present time is not singular but plural, not present to itself alone but to a cycle of ‘times’ it accommodates within itself.” As the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi might say: “Time does not pass, it accumulates…”¹ And this concept is as evident in stone-henge as it is in the discounted commodities of Black Friday.

As Baucom writes, paraphrasing Benjamin, “...time accumulates in things, even, or particularly commodified things whose commodification entails not only the assignation of an exchange value but the willed repudiation of the time stored within them, the denial of [...] the time it took to make them, the value of that labour time, the collective past-life it encodes, or even, or indeed much less, as ‘practical’ souvenirs of an antecedent phenomenology.”

What then to make of the ‘times’ contained within a moment whose ‘cultural logic’ turns to the abstractions of high-finance – with its stock exchanges, bond, credit and currency markets – over the grounded commodity and its materially ‘antecedent phenomenologies’? For Arrighi, each and all cycles of capitalist accumulation are twinned – Marx’s famous MCM (Money–Capital–Money) is paired with a second figure MM (Money–Money) in which money-capital can ‘set itself free’ from the commodity form. The linear notion of a ‘late’ stage of Capitalism is then, in this view at least, no more than a repetition of previously financialised moments – one which, according to Baucom, “inherits its nonimmediate past by intensifying it…”

Many critical analyses of capitalist cycles of development aim to show how such repetitions can be broken, how orbits can be unwound and smoothed out, flattened into a linear trajectory once and for all. But what happens when we start thinking through cycles? The cycles we want to see intensified, in all their plurality and diversity? Is a moment in which we are free to think outside the commodity form, not a moment for ever-denser orbits?

As Benjamin writes in the Arcades: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” Or, as Warren Buffet put it: “the rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.”

SLOWING GROWTH: WHOSE FOOT’S ON THE DECELERATOR?

The latest projections for 2022’s global growth rate are in and, once again, have been revised down – this time, to just over 3%, almost half of last year’s 6% jump. In the distance, 2023 seems to continue the trend with estimates hovering at around 2.7% for the world and just 1.1% for advanced economies. Such downward pressure on GDP statistics have multiple causes, but the full effects have yet to be seen. In October of this year Gaurav Ganguly, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics, somewhat pessimistically said recent actions by the UK government had made a dreaded period of stagflation and recession “almost inevitable”.

However, a slowing in growth or ‘degrowth’ of the economy may not be the inherent evil it is often taken to be. Degrowth activists and researchers have been advocating for similar – albeit managed – declines in traditional measures of productivity since at least 2008. While the negative growth of 2020 (with the social and economic pain that was caused by Covid-19) is often used as a straw-man to combat this line of thinking, “sceptics of ‘growth as prosperity’ do not want a recession, or, as is looking increasingly likely, a depression”. Instead they wish to take the largely unmanaged ‘decline’ of the present and manage this process, retooling the global economy to look beyond growth as an overarching economic, social and political goal – to slow things down on purpose instead.

The choice then appears to be between those who wish to weather an ‘almost inevitable’ economic forecast, and those who don’t (or can’t). The question is then, whose foot would you rather on the decelerator?

TAKE THE DAY OFF: A SOCIETY OF CHOSEN TIME

“Go to any high-street bookshop and alongside those books promising to instruct readers on how to influence others, accumulate fortunes and achieve career success, one can also find a shelf of books telling readers to slow down, find a better ‘work–life balance’, and seek happiness by consuming less.”

Thus begins David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work, a publication which documents through anthropological observations and interviews the joys that can be found from a managed decline – a slowing – in one’s working life. In ‘advanced economies’ such as the U.K. at least, there is clearly a desire twinned with the neoliberal drive for personal success and self-development – to break from the circuitous logic of accumulation and acceleration. Throughout the conversations Frayne holds with those who have reduced or eliminated their working hours (predominantly outside of conventional retirement), people reflect on such a standard logic through the work- week:

“I guess it was just like, the less I worked, the more I realised I didn’t have to. I guess it’s just looking at friends who are still stuck in the cycle of working to pay ridiculous rent, doing Monday to Friday and then going out for the weekend and getting completely hammered, and then spending the next few days at work being really miserable and then recovering enough for the weekend to come around, and then feeling just about OK enough to do the whole thing again.”

In the financial sphere, one is reminded of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street and the lawyer who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to do any other task required of him, refusing with the words “I would prefer not to.” Taken to its extreme, such inertia kills Bartleby, but in Frayne’s account – echoing Kate Soper – it is in fact the so-called ‘good life’ of work and play that is killing us all, as she writes “It is, after all, now widely recognised that our so-called good life is a major cause of stress and ill-health. It subjects us to high levels of noise and stench, and generates vast amounts of junk…”

Following André Gorz, we can clearly see how the material culture of ‘ever faster production turnovers and built-in obsolescence’ becomes enmeshed in what he calls a Politics of Time – a politics that optimistically preempts what he came to name ​​a (somewhat utopian) ‘Society of Chosen Time’. This society would shift “the production of the social bond towards relations of co-operation, regulated not by the market and money, but by reciprocity and mutuality…” and, as Frayne points out, the single most important feature of this society would be a society-wide policy of shorter working hours.

It seems then that an answer to both ecological and personal collapse lies in thinking carefully, slowly through the politics of time – whether that leads to the lofty goal of a ‘society of chosen time’ or not. Such a political project may seem abstract to some... unsure of where to start? Our advice: Take the day off.

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Footnotes

1. Spectres of the Atlantic, p.24 ↩