On full view in this Socialist Unity threat, full of handwringing about Fred the Shred’s smashed windows.
Big Numbers #3 now online
Back in the eighties, after Swamp Thing and Watchmen had made a superstar of Alan Moore he cashed in on this not by getting some prestige assignment at the Big Two, but by self publishing his most ambitious project to date: Big Numbers. Originally it was going to be called The Mandelbrot Set, as Moore’s big idea for the series was to be fractals and fractal storytelling. Bill Sienkiewicz was tapped to do the artwork, two issues were released in 1990 to general applause and then Sienkiewicz and Moore had a falling out, Sienkiewicz’s assistant Al Columbia was slated to take over, drew one issue which however was never published as Columbia destroyed the pages. Big Numbers became one of the big lost classics of comix, some excerpts of the third isssue were published here and there, taken from high quality photocopies, but there were no photocopies of the entire issue in circulation; that is, until now:
In any case, everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn’t believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn’t have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.
“It’s like hard SF where the science is literary history.”
On the Tor website, Jo Walton talks about one of her favourite books, A. S. Byatt’s Possession.
Possession is an odd book, and I love it and re-read it frequently. It’s about scholars in 1987 trying to find out some precise events that happened in the late nineteenth century and which concern the relationship between two poets. But what it’s really about is the way we are what time has made of us, whether we know it or not, the way we exist in our time and place and circumstances and would be different in any other. The way it does this, the very precise way in which the theme is worked out in all the curlicues of the story, makes the experience of reading it more like reading SF than like a mainstream work.
Jo Walton was a science fiction reader and fan long before she became a published writer. What she’s doing for Tor now, back in the mid-nineties she did on rec.arts.sf.written and I can’t tell you how many books and writers I only discovered through them. Including Possession.
Obama’s “Nixon in China moment”
Doug Henwood on the possibility that the bailout of the financial elites will be financed by an austerity programme:
U.S. workers are certainly used to long-term declines in real wages: the average hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, is almost 10% lower than it was 36 years ago. But the blow of that fall was significantly softened by the availability of easy credit, which allowed people to maintain the semblance of a middle-class standard of living. What would wage cuts without easy credit look like? What kind of retooling would be necessary for an economy now dependent on high levels of consumption, and a society dependent for legitimation on the same? Hard to say, but we should start talking about it.
It would be a nice Nixon-in-China turn, for a Democratic president elected on high “progressive” hopes, to preside over something like an IMF structural adjustment program applied to the U.S. It could be portrayed as a necessary sacrifice for the common good. In fact, we can already see the outlines of a liberal apologia for austerity on the Nation’s website.
Jump you fuckers!
Dan Hind has written an excellent short treasise on the true origins of the recession,
available in PDF format from Verso Books under a Creative Commons license. After demolishing common explenations of the crisis he argues that the foundations for this recession were laid down in the seventies in the breakdown of the post-war pact between workers and capital (he doesn’t quite put it in those terms of course) and the subsequent falling of real wages:
After a long period of expansion between 1945 and 1979, in which real wages grew steadily throughout the developed world, workers’ compensation levelled off. Average earnings per hour in private non-agricultural industries in the United States reached $8.99 in 1972 (calculated in 1982 dollars). By 2007 they had risen to $8.30. Sorry, no, they had fallen to $8.30 (again, calculated in 1982 dollars). More widely, in the rich, industrialised world, the percentage of GDP captured by all workers in the form of wages fell from 75% in the mid-seventies to 66% in the middle years of this decade.
This trend took several decades to become dangerous to the new economic consensus, as workers leveraged their labour by working longer and getting more members of their households into work. (In other words, feminism saved the world):
As the economist Richard Wolff explains, workers also worked more. The single income household, which had been more or less the norm after 1945, became increasingly unusual. Where one (usually male) wager earner had been able to provide for a family of four and to increase consumption year on year, now a more affluent style of life would only be affordable with two incomes coming in. So women went back into the workforce in growing numbers and children entered the workforce earlier.
The working week also grew longer ‐ more hours being needed to achieve any increase in real buying power. In some cases one or both adults in a household took a second job, extending
hours spent working even longer. Each of these moves helped offset the reckoning. As industry and the economy expanded, longer hours enabled workers to consume more. Indeed longer hours encouraged them to consume more, even forced them to do so. Women and children who went out to work needed cars and clothes, parents needed child‐ minders.
but with wages continuing to fall, or at best to stagnate, the next step was to borrow, using
what little real wealth the wroking classes had built up over the decades –their own homes:
Those who had secured a higher share of output in the form of profits and executive pay would lend the money they couldn’t spend themselves to the workers who wanted to enjoy higher living standards. In other words the people in the system who liked to call themselves winners would lend the people they liked to call losers the money that they could no longer command as wages. From 1970 onwards levels of debt began to rise in the United States, quite slowly at first. In
1985 total household debt in the US reached 70% of disposable income. After 2000 debt grew at more than 5% per year and had reached nearly 122% of disposable income by 2006.
This was of course unsustainable and once it started to go wrong, it all went fast. the reason I highlight all this is of course because Dan Hind comfirms my own theories about the crisis. I’ve made exactly the same points he has made here about the impact of declining real wages, multiple income households and credit secured by home ownership.