in that instant (the higher-rent clearances)

there is a moment between the ending of the senseless babble of sleep but before the listing of the tasks of the day when memory returns. in that instant life returns.

horsemouth didn't get much reading done yesterday - left to himself he is a bit disorganised and aimless. he played his simplified version of la fille au cheveux de lin through a few times (because that's how the guitar nearest to hand is tuned).

horsemouth continues reading merquior's western marxism (then he snoozes a bit and farts about on facebook). it is as thorough and well executed a hatchet job as the one merquior did on foucault - he compares sources, he finds counter arguments, he tracks changes but above all he takes to a nearby hill and shows us the disposition of forces. we are with lukacs in budapest, he has a reading circle with kodaly, bartok, arnold hauser, michael polanyi, he will soon be writing history and class consciousness (the book horsemouth hasn't read yet).

in the cities that thrive the workers are being driven off the land so that a higher rent can be sought (horsemouth is tempted to call them the higher-rent clearances) to be replaced by workers who can pay more for the priviledge of still working. outside of the city (where 50,000 famillies have been driven in the past 3 years) there is rent plus season ticket - the reproduction of the labour force is effectively taxed and milked for profit.

companies seek to buy-back their shares so they will not have to distribute dividends and the dividends they didn't distribute appear as profit. these companies then won't be subjected to the judgement of either the shareholders or the market. they don't need the capital to expand, why would they expand? this is the productive part of capitalism roaring with risk-aversion, a capitalism drawing in its resources and trying to go back to sleep.

in the cities that are dying the rioters smash a few windows on the new boulevards down by the harbour and then are driven back up the hills past the 16,000 vacant row houses and their sub-prime rent gathering (a rent gathering so subprime it is only worth doing by means of a bubble) - more higher-rent clearances with the poor eventually forced out of the city too - to the neighbouring counties.

capitalism has never totally energised the whole of the economy, the whole of the city, its coverage (like horsemouth's phone network) has always been patchy. it has until now always needed a convenient outside - a reserve army of labour in the squatter camps.

horsemouth supposes that all over the world the homeless are walking out of history into the freedom of poverty and the cyclical daily tasks necessary for survival. horsemouth supposes that all over the world the young are preparing to make the march into the cities in search of work. the will stay many years and then they will be gone.

come on, get up, it's time to go to work.