Scylla and Charybdis

And now the goddess Circe told Odysseus of a narrow sea passage between two cliffs. Where the sun set the cliff was smooth and reached high beyond arrow shot to the cave of Scylla, a monster whose six heads were crammed with deadly teeth and dangled on necks long enough to reach the decks of all ships passing beneath. And each jaw will snatch an unfortunate sailor and carry him up to devour. On the other cliff grows a fig tree laden with fruit beneath which lurks the monster Charybdis. Three times each day she sucks the sea into her great maw and then belches it forth. No ship can escape ruin which is drawn into her whirlpool. It would be better for him to hug Scylla’s cliff, give up six sailors, and sail quickly on than to hazard the loss of all his crew to Charybdis.

Odysseus questioned in reply whether there may not be a way to avoid Charybdis and still fend off Scylla’s attack so that all his men might survive. But she scolded him that to do battle here as he had fought at Troy would be useless for this foe was immortal and he would only expose his men to even greater losses by attempting to fight.

In the end he bade his crew steer clear of Charybdis but said nothing of the danger from Scylla, He secretly took up his arms against her but he and his men were so distracted with terror when they beheld Charybdis that Scylla carried away her six victims to their horrible fate before anyone was aware of it.  

The well being of ownership is measured first of all in the individual; the individual owner, the individual company. Then it is gathered together as a general measure; of a town, of a country, of the world. The administrators will extol the value of general statistics for the health of the nation but the owners, even at this basic level of accumulating data, are already hostile. We've seen this in the current regime's indifference to accurate data and hatred of those tasked with gathering it.

Arithmetic is private and politics unnecessary to those who own everything until and unless they are challenged by those who supply them labor. Even then they will argue that private coercion will suffice for their protection. But fear and mistrust quickly breaks down that argument and they scramble to assemble vast heaps of force in their defense. 

For the working class, on the other hand, the books and politics are essential. They have no other way to defend their standard of living. “Affordability” is just a way of raising this banner within the limitations of American politics.

The very visible crisis of 2008 pushed the GOP from power. As that receded the parties have seesawed control. In 2024 the GOP rearmed itself with the resentment of workers for losses sustained here, there, and everywhere, since ‘08. Their margin of victory was attributable to their candidate's steadfast negation of the entirety of American politics. He ran as Charybdis. And now it is the Democrats’ turn to take up the cost of living cudgel.

What these twists and turns illustrate is the desperation of the American working class to make use of the two-party system to protect it from the austerity that it has long been promised was reserved for the rest of the world. When the party in power fails the other is given its turn. Each retains its loyalists but, at the edges and in between, the indifferent and the inattentive are swayed in numbers sufficient to redirect the 18th century calculus that awards that prize. 

It is hard to avoid the thought that the present moment in our tacking upwind is critical. The central bank confesses it’s in a predicament. The stock markets shrug their shoulders at their admitted addiction to a credit bubble. By the time the accounts came due in the crisis of ‘08 George Bush was packed to go back to Texas. Now we are not even done with the first year of an administration that is lost in the woods, setting fires, and claiming to be home safe.

And all of this is accelerating. Whether we suffer shipwreck or just the loss of sailors we always awaken back on the other side of this hazardous passage, back with Circe’s choice ahead of us. An abbreviated cycle of history, corso and ricorso. That our ship has the luxury of replaying its fate over and over this way is owing to the position the US attained with the Allied victory in WWII. But, while history may repeat, it does not last forever. Trump’s takeover of the GOP and his return to power is both symptom and contributing factor in the unmaking of this postwar global order. 

He promised a ricorso to a golden age economy which was never going to happen. Instead it is stunning how quickly the actual unravelling has been revealed all while new vistas opened on the frontiers of financial bubbling. He is creating the emergency to justify the dark empire which is being assembled in haste. It is a haste driven by panic and also by their idealist undereading of reality. Their momentary conquest of political power seduces them into overvaluing its ability, at this time of crisis, to guide history. To compound their error they are now demonstrating to the world the failure of this idealism in the Persian Gulf. An unnatural capability and willingness to destroy targets of value has long since failed to provide its proponents any sort of political victory, merely the postponement of defeat.

But what of us materialists? We will have plenty to do. We will have to continue to pay close attention. Appropriate to the Year of the Horse, history is at a gallop.

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train - namely, the human race - to activate the emergency brake.

Walter Benjamin - Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”