The Ghost Dance of the Economy

(music: ‘Stress’ by Justice)

As a matter of fact, economy is the religion of the current era. It is through the economy that the inhabitants of today’s world are given the possibility to achieve a better life (once the afterlife has disappeared), to enter the Olympus of glamour, and to be today’s equivalent of a good believer: that is, a winner. Like every religion, the economy also has its churches, its priests and its wars.

The main religious war ended just twenty years ago, when the crusaders of Western Capitalism defeated the infidels of Soviet Marxism. A few years of jubilee followed, through the 1990s, when the gods of growth, credit and liquidity (the holy trinity of GDP) cast their benevolent gaze all over the chosen people of the West.  But then, inevitably, as soon as the golden age ended, a new wave of war took over.

This time, an internal war. The Protestants appeared, with their new words of rage, self-sacrifice and moderation. Degrowth! they said. Sustainability! they screamed. Enough with credit! they preached. Faced by the growing opposition of the new Protestant church, the clerics of the opulent and corrupt Neoliberal Capitalism had little time to imagine a defensive strategy. The Councils of Trent multiplied, sometimes involving only the G8 wardens of the Church, sometimes the G20, and sometimes opening to a general assembly of wardens, academic clerics, financial inquisitors and international military police. But the gods struck first.

Credit, growth and liquidity frowned and turned their blessings over their chosen people into lightning of crisis and thunder of catastrophe. Recession hit the West like a billion locusts, devouring everything it found in its path. At the same time, on the horizon, the caravels of new conquerers began to appear: Chinese, Brazilians, Russians, Indians and Turks put up their flags on top of the masts and shined their cannons in preparation for landing. Like the Aztec priests before them, the clerics of Neoliberalism looked at the apocalypse descending upon them and decided that only sacrifices could have calmed the angered gods. Austerity spread all over the altars like blood, as one after the other thousands of the unemployed, elderly, young, disabled and migrants were cut open by the sacred knife. But it wasn’t enough. The thirst of the gods could not be satisfied. Despite their number the sacrificial victims didn’t have enough blood to offer. Also, taking them to the altars became increasingly difficult, as they started to rebel.

From their strongholds, the Protestants chanted with the joy of the latter day. We told you! The end is near! Repent, meditate! Protestant priests wore their best robes and invaded newspaper offices, TV studios, radio stations. They took their icons out of the shrines and showed them to the public. Adore the true pictures of the gods! they ordered, as they presented their plans for recovery. Your theory, your paradigms, your models are wrong, they are blasphemous! they told the Neoliberal bishops. Seated around large tables, wearing their pointy hats, orthodox and heterodox priests challenged each other over endless discussions on the true faith. As the walls of Byzantium started to crumble under the attacks of invisible Jannissaries, the clerics raised and raised their voices, their chants became ever more complex, their robes swirled faster and faster as they danced around with desperate vigour. All around them, the population held its breath, looked up at the sky in fear and waited for the seventh seal to break, for the seven trumpets to sing their deadly melodies.

The End is coming, it is understood. The time has come for new Millenarist discourses to spring. Babylon is destined for destruction, it was written. Yet it won’t be with these priests and clerics that we will reach a New Jerusalem. Today’s economists, both hortodox and heterodox with their daring ties and their dull jargon, with their modest arrogance, with their round glasses and their screechy voices, hardly function as shy captains in this tempestuous ocean. The institutional era of the Ministers of the Church and of their Protestant equivalents is over. It is now the time for a new Ecclesia, for a new people’s assembly (this in the original meaning of the word in ancient Athenian slang) that speaks with the gods and about the gods as a multitudinary chorus, standing on stage alongside prophetic, tragic heroes. This is the time for heroes, for poets, for prophets. Let us sing about the economy dancing on the corpses of the priests, with the fiery eyes of a shaman, with the visionary voice of a Guarani Karai!

Let us pay homage to the economy as the god of our social mind. Let us rise schizo-chants to the collective hallucinations of the economy! What is the economy? What is economics? We shall explore these questions with the keen eyes of a poet, restlessly, in doubt, skeptical yet adventurous. Churches are dead, long live the heretics, long live the mystics! While the priests keep rotting in their catacombs of glass and steel, in their central bank, in their business class flights, we shall climb Olympus and look the gods in the eyes. What is growth? How do we understand wealth? What rhymes with GDP? How can we sing the inflation? How many steps does the dance of unemployment have? Rant economy, delirium of formulas, microecophysics, temporary autonomous finance, conceptual pensions, mutual funds of joy! How many layers of paint do we need to portray stagflation? The End is near; our imagination is nearer!

Poetry and art are useless onanisms if they don’t sleep in the same bed as the gods. Experimental interest rates! Enough with Keats, long live the Mayakovsky of microeconomics! We shall bring the harshness of techno bass lines into the grave of Keynes!  “God Save Alan Greenspan!” we shall sing with distorted guitars on the last jubilee of the Church, while the Landscknechte give the final assaults to the walls of the monetarist Vatican. This is the language of the end, the dubstep of Kropotkin!

We need to reinvent the economy, and economic science is not up to the task. The age of science is over. In the night sky of chaos, only the shamans can read the stars. Forget Caravaggio, forget Lord Byron. Yawn at Oscar Wilde, dump all your books of Rilke. Today’s poetry is made of economics. Study the numbers, observe how you manage your resources. They talk about scarcity - what do you have a scarcity of? They talk about employment - what is your work for? How much is it for a bowl of pasta and a night of love? What is the deflation rate of your youth? Let us open cooperatives! Let us share our wealth! We don’t need Monbiot, we need Wovoka! Black Elk had a vision, and he saw that if we will dance the Ghost Dance on the burning ruins of Wall Street, our shirts will make us invincible. Black Elk had smoked dope. We have too. Our shirts are beautiful; their rifles are made of paper. This is the End! This is the End! Let’s dance towards it! Let’s make our hearts so bright and dark that even the End will get lost inside them.