Though that post sat for some time, it was executed more or less by shooting from the hip. A little messy I admit, with various metaphorical images thrown together, which may or may not have provided flashes of insight. I don't have the time or the energy to do the deep dives into domestic and international politics (or economics) like I used to, but I do try to keep up with various news updates and do some reading here and there to get caught up, so there you have it. The writing is going to reflect that reality.
But perhaps a couple of quick caveats could lend a little more clarity to the mottled picture.
Perhaps it could be helpful to be a bit more clear on what is meant by a "rotten edifice" and all the like. What exactly is rotten, how advanced is this rot, how long before it gives, what can be anticipated due to this state of affairs, and so on?
Yes we do have the habit of focusing in on a given tier of activity in daily conversation and poetic play, to the exclusion of various backgrounds and foregrounds, but the truth is that there are many tiers of organized power in existence, some of them working next to each other, some of them nested inside each other, and so on.
A useful area of inquiry is this: what is the nature of a given structure of organized power, how does it interact with other structures, how is it derived, and how much force can it exert in the material world, to the end of manipulating, preserving, and/or transforming what is? What insights can be gleaned from this analysis?
For instance, it is clear that what is rotten is an existing political and economic regime, as there are now emerging countless new factions that seek to reverse or fundamentally alter decades-old trends, and the existing regime itself is very clearly producing its own failures and widening circles of destruction.
Within the existing regime itself are various factions in conflict with each other, and attempting to hold or take more power, and outside the regime are various forces which want to accelerate that regime's own methods of preservation, or disintegrate it altogether.
And all of these regimes take place on more general arenas of collective human action. What kind of collective labors are still possible, given the extent and depth of the resent and polarization of so-called "human capital?" How effective is labor when the natural levers of power are being rapidly disintegrated themselves? What is the status of those lower levers of power that make regenerating political and economic regimes possible, such as the basic availability of clean air, water, and useable energy, including food?
It may be that the given neoliberal global free trade regime is completely rotten, and then capable of being replaced with something freshly grown and more stable. But then how long is that state of affairs to hold within the greater rotting tier of spiritual and environmental devastation?
After this widening out of our area of focus, it becomes more clear that the original post was more or less an instinctual snapshot of the relative health of the political and economic establishment, which plainly is looking worse every day. But it is the consideration of those other tiers of power that can allow for more substantial contemplation on wider trajectories.
