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Another few fragments from the oikopolitics piece - because some people think I’ve been uncanny and coincidental. Me, I’m just wondering if someone can send me a url to Obama’s speech, and whether I have the time or inclination to rewrite some of these final paragraphs. Thanks to Eric for a url to the Inaugural. But, yes, storms …. And I forgot to work in a quote from Machiavelli where he talks about the Prince arriving as the redeemer - though it’s implicit.

[…] In a speech on September 1st 2008, in Michigan, then-Presidential nominee Barack Obama remarked that “not all storms get on tv but they are there.” Speaking a day later in Milwaukee, on the themes of “how to sustain the middle class” and the “dignity of work,” he said: “there are some folks who are going through their own quiet storms.” He added:

all across America, there are quiet storms taking place, there are lives of quiet desperation, people in need of just a little bit of help. Now, Americans are a self-reliant people […] every once in a while somebody’s going to go through some hard times [….] we rise and fall as one nation, the values of family and community and neighbourhood and that express themselves in our government, those are national values […] the spirit that we need in our own homes and the spirit that we need in our Whitehouse.

Needless to say, the question being posed here was that which had been precipitated by decades of what is usually referred to as neoliberalism (the displacement of risk onto households) followed by the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry and rising unemployment. But if Thatcher and Obama seem to diverge on questions of the extent of, say, union involvement in the procedures of government or their particular emphasis on the line of welfare-warfare that is referred to as state “help,” they nevertheless both articulate the problem as one of unemployment – which is, echoing Machiavelli, the notion of unproductivity conceived as both a moral and political-economic problem – and determine the solution in terms of productive and self-managed households (conceived as analogous to the nation-state). It is all a question of the intimacy of risk-management. The International Monetary Fund stated the question in these terms:

there has been a transfer of financial risk over a number of years, away from the banking sector to non-banking sectors. […] This dispersion of risk has made the financial system more resilient, not least because the household sector is acting more and more as a ’shock absorber of last resort.’ (2005:89)

If the modern financial system is premised on the historical emergence of national debt, the late twentieth witnessed the democratisation of its risks through the household. And yet, as it turns out, the dispersal of risk opened the door to the cascading effects of subprime instability and default. The idealised household had not taken hold in any generalised sense, much as it imposed itself as norm, and beyond any attempt to assume that all of those who defaulted could not pay rather than had decided not to or, more broadly put, did not budget and toil as they ought. That this cascade (or storm) has, almost without variance, been read as the teleological urgency of a new New Deal that will raise Gross Domestic Product, in the coupled language of post-storm reconstruction and a progressive faith (that is, hope) – not to mention alongside renewed calls for the euthanasia of the rentier, of the dangers of unproductive (fictitious or parasitic) capital, and for the redemption of the US as a de facto global currency – indicates the ubiquity of oikopolitics that is as nostalgic (in its recourse to the language of the New Deal) as it is progressive (in its bid for social and environmental auditing), as reactionary and moralising as it is calculating and hopeful. It also suggests that the celebrated turn to soft power – to note Joseph Nye’s nomination of Obama as the exemplary, redemptive expression of such (2008) – does not imply a turn away from violence, war, death; though it may well indicate something of its redistribution. George Caffentzis, writing of claims about peak oil, argues that:

there has been a capitalist critique of “rent-seeking” throughout the history of political economy. Rent is presumably the epitome of unproductive income. This critique still goes on today in the text-books and among the ideologues of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism. However, for all the critique of the rentier, rent still is a decisive form of income in a capitalist society […] But the productivist ideology that has its roots in John Locke’s defense of English colonialism in the late seventeenth century is always waiting on the horizon to be brought in to justify attacks on the rights of the rentier. If the rentier, though his/her right of exclusion, disrupts the productive development of a profitable industry, then there is a right of the “more productive” to lay claim to the right of exclusion. […] war is always on the wings of all rental claims. (2005: 172)

In other words, the apparently technical, non-violent appeal of soft power, not to mention the social and environmental audit, remains contingent upon violence and exclusion, war and decrees of superfluity, even and especially where what is secured – under the headings of an exit strategy, environmental citizenship or the liquidation of toxic assets – are the boundaries inside which peace is said to reign and outside of which war continues to be unleashed. And yet, if this century began, in the protests that went by the misnomer of anti-globalisation, with a call for the defaulting on (mostly, World Bank) debt, it bears some further consideration that the financial crisis was precipitated by such, though with little anticipation that it would, along with newer financial instruments of derivatives and futures trading, be imported domestically into the US, and with such effects. What is the encounter here if not the entanglement, and therefore in a very real sense, the anachronism of any distinction between First and Second Worlds? Very briefly put, and whatever else this signifies, the collapse of subprime was a contingency that was neither widely expected nor, entirely, budgeted for, despite – or perhaps because of – the ostensibly auto-immunising strategy of distributing risk and its management to households. Which is to say: how people live, their inter-dependencies and its architectures, their forms of arousal and attachment, exceeds its accounting and any norm, even as the emerging lines of conflict are increasingly, it seems, around what might rouse (or compel) them to a greater, virtuous productivity.