good morning. good morning. it is one of those misty mornings out there (but the sun obviously has the strength to cut through). yesterday afternoon horsemouth put the mower round (with the help of his mum). he also took the scythe to some nettles.
horsemouth supposes his model here is mutant jazz (revisited) by DJ trace, a considerably darker drum and bass track than the original mutant jazz.
horsemouth has been re-reading his (dire) prognostications from 3 years ago (from during the first wave of the pandemic).
already horsemouth could see that there would be an end point for the pandemic. one when the virus was merely endemic, spread through the population, the death rate fell to an ignorable level and people disdained further control measures.
broadly the premise of horsemouth's blog post was this - after the original black death was a good time for the workers and peasants because so many people had died and social control had broken down to such an extent that they were free to move around and sell their labour to the highest bidder. as a result they became considerably less poor and many of the chains of feudalism were broken.
this time horsemouth imagined that not as many would die that there would be no labour shortages and that wages would stay low - this would be a problem because the ruling class lavished money on themselves during the pandemic (to give the appearance of the economy being kept going) and that this money would be inherently inflationary (and thus further impoverishing the workers).
subsequently there have been labour shortages in some sectors (aggravated by brexit and an anti-EU citizen immigration policy) and some of the workers have been able to mount some defence of the value of their wages.
to some extent this has happened. ultimately it is an ongoing battle over who gets to pay for capitalism's crises with whoever occupies the state (the caste) in a position to decide the matter should they chose to do so.
it is a process taking place over time. the 'wage' is complicated by other rights and factors (housing availability, health care provision, credit availability) that can either drive down the effective wage or drive it up.
horsemouth noted that the daily torygraph (ever pessimistic) was touting a UK bank run - rising interest rates create an instability of value in debt that is held in other forms. horsemouth has already noted a lack of enthusiasm among the banks for lending money out (you would think with interest rates about to hit top (maybe) and thus returns about to hit top on lending that the banks would be keen to lend money out but not a bit of it).
even when the banks rediscover their enthusiasm for lending it may not be that the general public or business rediscover their enthusiasm for borrowing - we may enter a period of bitter parsimonious lent (a depression).
yesterday horsemouth watched a documentary on an intentional community called the garden - they had an open door policy (but you could be asked to leave if you didn't fit in). they were busy advertising themselves on tik-tok (they're a good looking bunch of hippies) and this had produced a backlash. commune or cult went the tag-line. but of course all communes are a bit culty (and all cults have a liberatory aspect as well as an authoritarian one).
he went for two zoom beers with howard (and they planned to reconvene next saturday).
horsemouth promised to tell you something about ravenna (and blok's visit there). lucy vogel says that ravenna was blok's utopia - a city that had reached its perfect point and stayed frozen there 'in the arms of a drowsing eternity', where it's young energies were preserved.
today is a sunday (the day of rest). horsemouth is not sure what he will be up to.
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