My life seems to consist of an endless stream of "this weird bullshit just happened to me and now I've gotta deal with it." There are plenty of structural and endogenous - you could say they form a unity -factors in play which work together to bring that state of affairs about, part of which I'll be getting to in this post. I didn't really intend for all of this to read like a crabby comedy-of-errors diary, but I guess that's what I've got right now and it is the format I'm going with. As usual here, I at least intend to produce some workable universals from these particulars; if you're going to sit and listen to someone crab at you all day, you might as well get something out of it.
We've talked before about the commanding heights of a money-governed class system, and how the stocks and flows of that money - and by extension power - are maintained and governed. But what it is like at the opposite end of that polarity? More particularly, what is it like to be cash-poor and have subsistence rations of power in the United States?
I say cash-poor to lower the hammer a little bit on a loaded concept like "poverty." I have a wealth of resources in the form of a constellation of support and contacts and various useful skills and knowledge, and I don't consider myself desperately poor. But I do skate on the knife edge of economic ruin as part of daily life, which is a result of how lean I have to live to do what I do. Of course, given the ongoing forces of economic concentration and polarization in the United States, most of the people living in this country are not too far from financial misfortune themselves, getting sucked under by the social rip currents generated by this dire economic milieu in the process.
And besides, there is a case to be made for living lean and on the edge: it can be appropriate to tuck in what you can and cut the dead weight so you don't have more surfaces that are going to snag and drag you under.
The precipitating event for this discussion is a minor little car accident, the details of which we could briefly sketch out to bring into relief some of the forces at play here. I was sitting at a junction in a parking garage and someone came right around a blind corner and ran right into me, smooshing the front of my car and busting the radiator.
The accident itself was relatively uneventful: low speed, with minor damage that was significant enough that my car was no longer drivable, but relatively intact. The person who hit me immediately admitted fault and coordinated everything through her own insurance to ensure she took responsibility. Our interaction was cordial. It was when insurance got involved that things got interesting.
I'm a little ignorant about such matters. Twice I had to file claims in two different events when my car windows were busted and things were stolen from my car. Both times I had such minimal insurance that there were all sorts of little technical catches that I had to navigate in order to get the claim filled out. Insurance can be quite expensive and add up fast, so you opt for what coverage you can get depending on what you afford, which for me was pretty skimpy. I ended up having my window replaced on the second event after eating the loss on the first window which was under-covered- eating the loss in both cases on all the stolen shit - which in itself was like pulling teeth trying to collect from the damn company.
Talking about the impaired functionality of the engine itself, and damage to the frame of the car is a different matter entirely though. When I spoke to an insurance representative about the accident, they concluded that due to the age of the car I'd probably have to total the vehicle. I thought, well that's extreme, the repairs seem pretty minor, but OK. I then consulted with family about this decision and got, "nope nope nope don't do that!"
Through persuasion and education, what I eventually realized would happen is that the company would give me the bare minimum for a vehicle that was basically fine, and then take it to auction, hopefully at a profit and coming out ahead of the claim and then I'd be screwed trying to scrape money together for a used car that was now likely to be more expensive now, possibly with further mechanical issues that were difficult to foresee. I could opt instead for an owner salvage, get paid less of a value, and hopefully be able to get the car fixed myself within the allotted return; a gamble to someone without deeper mechanical knowledge and the personal means to advance the repairs. I'd be at the mercy of a local garage, rates for labor cost, replacement part prices, and etc. Personally, one's consciousness shifts from that of intentional daily movement to that of being pinned down and trapped between more powerful conflicting economic interests.
Note here that it was possible for me to wander naively into dramatically increased economic hardship, and through my ignorance I had to be pulled back from the brink by the scruff of my shirt by someone who knew a little more about the matter. Comparable to an ecological tourist being warned away from a dangerous plant or animal by an experienced local guide. The wilderness in this case involved economic movements in settled society, which require specialized information and experience of its own to navigate. We'll get more into that at another time.
Let's step away from this now and survey things from a greater remove. Theoretically, a stable community is one that can respond to shocks and damages with the proper remediation. Things like severe damages, injuries, and deaths are a little more complicated, but all in all if a damage occurs to some part of the community, and that damaged thing can be made whole, or at least healed enough to a satisfactory degree, then it is done, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of that community and its ongoing connections.
Due to our political economy - which we'll have to continue to explore in further posts - it is in the nature of the insurance company to minimize costs on its customers' claims as much as possible, while profiting as much as possible on the insurance obligations coming in, which are possible given an established monopoly privilege in which their business is ensured through political and legal enshrinement.
It's also in the nature of our political economy to have all of our social and economic needs - including that theoretical social and material process of remediation - handled by self-interested private businesses operating on their own specialized and technical knowledge and experience, and of individuals themselves to be cast as self-interested and clawing what they can out of any given interaction, which as such a state of affairs advances, results in the shredding of social trust and the progression of such a state of affairs into something ever more intensely resembling itself.
Socially this produces a powerful downward pressure with individuals in association with each other constantly dragged down and into gradients of disintegration, requiring a constant maintenance and then accumulation of social and economic power to remain buoyant and above these gradients. This in turn requires individuals in association with each other to leverage their collective power, knowledge, and experience to capture what power they can from the greater collective economic surplus, which simultaneously shrinks that surplus, while producing cleavages of oppositional associations forced by necessity to do the same thing in response, to survive, accelerating the contraction, destroying ever more trust and increasing the pressures for exploitation and domination. Plenty more to address on that later too.
With that relentless social conveyor pulling oneself ever-closer to the abyss, one discovers a problem. It begins to appear inevitable that one proceeds ever downward, no matter how one angles or thrashes. Something curious happens though. The deeper one goes, the darker and quieter it gets, one begins to see and hear curious things, by virtue of the absence of the things one is normally seeing and hearing. Some of this is strange and unsettling, yes. But one learns things. Namely that there remains plenty of life where death presumes to be, and for that matter, vice versa. One learns much more about navigating both the depths and the heights and everything in between.
Nevertheless it is dangerous down there. You don't want to lose so much power that you are thrust ever downward, especially not being built for such things, where you are eventually crushed by the extreme pressures at the terminus. Much like the Titan submersible, that small libertarian vessel whisking CEO and friends down for a voyeuristic peek at the abyss, to be crushed like an empty soda can in the process. An uncanny inversion of the Icarus myth, which upholds the myth's core lesson all the same.
Back to the immediate problem though. What does having an intact car have to do with survival in the United States? It is not the end of the world to be without a car. There are plenty of places in the country where you can get by just fine without a car. But departing from the mainstream economic regime and car-dependency requires some consideration and preparation. All in all the infrastructure in the country is built for cars.
The reasons for this are complex and deeply rooted. The individuality of the personal automobile, reflected in the individuality and self-interest at the core of our political economy itself, makes for a tight fit. And the material reality is a simple matter of an enormous influx of concentrated energy (in the form of oil) and the relentless material expansion afforded by that influx, a material expansion that was well underway before fossil fuel, but which was further enabled and even intensified and accelerated by it.
This results in massive distances opened up in the relationality of economic ties. That is, the entire economic regime is built upon the ability to annihilate space, which through repeated application, establishes a dependency. You have massive tracts of land in which virtually no food or other types of natural resources can be found, which aren't trucked in. Because within a certain regime of cheap energy it might be more efficient to truck in various resources to centralized operations with mechanized logistics, which can then be further trucked out to the extremities.
This is not just an application in transportation, but a general economic principle. Witness the social and economic destruction of older, slower, collective methods of communication and organization, in favor of a homogenization and standardization administrated through the central nervous system of the Internet, embodied in the stories floating around of libraries or bookstores in which the actual books disappear, with various forms of merchandise and computer screens remaining. This may afford a certain form of efficiency and convenience in the short run, but it can also represent a dangerous vulnerability if that system suddenly goes away, as demonstrated in the chaos and angst arising when electronic payment systems go down, with central banks slowly and quietly backing away from their endorsement of full cashless schemes.
I'm getting further and further away from my initial point: due to the function of our political economy - namely constant material revolution and expansion - one must constantly reproduce and regenerate one's literal and metaphorical economic engines to be able to traverse that landscape, in an environment where those engines are progressively deteriorating with every iteration, through the combined effects of planned obsolescence, economic hysteresis, inflation, and so on. Yet all of this too we'll have to get into at another time.
I talked about interesting things down in the depths. Old, redundant modes of economic production and material survival for example, old social and spiritual relations, and so on, which tend to be maintained and preserved especially by those "left out."
Further, not all of the directionality of our collective sinking is downward. The down-going is more turbulent than all that, with various updrafts and other oppositional forces generated within the agitated waters. I might have even found an updraft of my own, particular to my immediate predicament that could be of some use.
