last night duncan appeared in horsemouth's dream (this morning actually) he was heading upstairs and paused to look down.
what a terrible calumny. that people could be anti-growth. that they could be against the very thing that renders us all more prosperous (and some more prosperous than others). thus is general prosperity for the many produced out of the selfish desire for gain of the few (isn't that wonderful, look how wonderfully realistic it is, look how it effortlessly handles that contradiction, look at good come out of bad in the final reel like the silver lining on a cloud that makes getting soaked an aesthetic experience).
horsemouth admits it freely. he is anti-growth. he has looked online but cannot find the anti-growth coalition (for he would join it if he could, pantomime horse though he is). he can only conclude that it is a secret society of wreckers aimed at increasing interest rates and so stopping people from owning their own homes (no wait wasn't that the actual effect of government policy).
how can anyone be anti-growth?
grow sounds terribly ecological but as our aged king points out if you grow the crop of poor people that will leave less space for those wonderful animals (and consequently less opportunities for hunting).
malthus says horsemouth's father. bollocks replies horsemouth.
in this the aged king is surprisingly prescient - the growth of the economy implies the destruction of nature, the rare earth metals for those computer chips and solar panels won't mine themselves, just as it implies a continuous action of primitive accumulation, the dispossession of native people from their lands, slum dwellers from their slums, peasants from their fields to make way for agri-business, 'local' populations to make way for air-bnb flats and pale ale joints.
horsemouth is anti-growth (or so he says). capitalism must be ended or there will be ecological catastrophe. that there are limits to growth strikes horsemouth as a truism and as a plain objective fact. of course resources and goods can always be redefined, one man's rat is another's meal and so on.
now horsemouth is not the smartest mule in the team and you should probably not take your prognostication from him.
in which horsemouth regrets that ecological catastrophe is the most likely outcome.
capitalism will reconfigure to a green capitalism and probably de-grow, that is living standards for the poor (for the vast majority of the earth's population) will decrease beyond bare survival for many millions possibly billions. the west will build walls to keep out the climate refugees. this is our future. and it is indeed our present. (gawdelpus).
look at us now. scrambling to insulate our houses before winter.
of course the invocation of the holy spirit of capitalism (growth) by truss and kwarteng does not mean that it will manifest in these difficult times. in many ways western societies have lost the recipe and indeed cannot compete in attracting capital with that giant china bubble. mere production has been outsourced to china and to legacy cities at the edge of government consciousness - only the re-division of the world into warring blocks can help restructure capitalism into a form that permits western growth.
and what we witness is this re-division of the world into warring blocks, the gas and wheat shocks from the loss of ukraine, the vast restructuring of supply chains (post financial crisis, post pandemic, post ukraine war). these are the symptoms of the change. the giant cold war with china to come.
what horsemouth broadly thinks is that (sadly) capitalism will not collapse. that there will always be new commodities -the rat for example, the insect burger, soylent green, that there will be some kind of green transition to solar panels and pedal power and not heating your home in winter. the poor are in many ways piloting this scheme already.
the world is a giant game of pass the parcel and within the parcel is debt, the reckoning (the bill) for the speculative games of capitalism. there is no end to the game because the debt always needs to be paid but quite how much will need to be paid can never be made clear.
the losses crystallize around us.
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it's a beautiful sunshine-y morning out and horsemouth has sat too long over typing this. there's a piece to be written on recent stock market attempts to turn music into an asset class (and how this has been working out for them). soon horsemouth will be finding out how his savings are doing (they are heavily stock market implicated) - broadly horsemouth views it as the equivalent of hiding it under the mattress, as long as it is no worse than that he is happy (if it is better than that he is delighted).
ok his stomach is grumbling and the coffee is finished - time for breafast.
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