Revolutionary Road

My review of "Revolutionary Road" by way of a fragment of a conversation between myself and a good friend:

I watched "Revolutionary Road" last night and it reminded me what I meant to say in response to the points you raise about how easily the seduced the public can be by the promise (often only a promise) of greater comfort. I don't know if you've seen the movie but its about the "emptiness and hopelessness" of suburban life in the 50s - but despite the emptiness, the protagonists can't break with the security of suburban life. the promise of an even bigger house and still newer car seems sufficient consolation to keep them running along the hamster wheel. I think this has been a major problem for the Left for a century now- the danger that our constituency can be bought off with the promise of greater creature comforts. The Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci termed it Americanism/ Fordism, a system of mass production and mass consumption that keeps the masses safely within the system.

However, I think we are on the precipice a secular shift in the system's ability to provide the gooodies that keep a sufficient number of us contained. As empty and hollow as it was, the suburban house w/ two car garage (often more illusion than reality for whole categories of people) is no longer on offer. The amount of (fictitious) value that has evaporated over the last 6 months or so, in retirement savings, in home values, not to mention job losses and home foreclosures, is staggering, and it is and will continue to lead to the further accumulation of grievances. The system can no longer make a credible claim to provide what it promises, and more and more are losing faith in it (hence Obama... they had to bring in somebody pretty good to try and restore faith in a rapidly collapsing system). Of course people tend to believe in systems far longer than there is any rational basis for doing so, but this is where I think human agency comes in. The better we are at articulating the nature of the problems, and a vision of where we would like to go, the easier it will be for people to let go of their dying faith.

Of course Obama and the Establishment, would like to reflate the bubble, and get people to continue buying in. Dean Baker, Krugman and the other Keynsians seem to think that with enough stimulus this is possible. But the monetarists are saying, "look at the medium to long term implication of this strategy": who is going to buy all this US govt debt? the bond market is already falling off a cliff. Once they start printing the money willy-nilly, all bets are off... maybe Krugman is right and this is not the "Big One," maybe this is just a 30, or 70 year crisis of capitalism. If so, and this is not "the Big One," then is it is most certainly a harbinger, or preshock of the big one on the way. If not today, then sometime in Jordan and C'enna's lifetime. We're due for the 500 year crisis. Who knows what emerges out of the crisis, but the sooner we see through the false promises of the system, the sooner we can start dealing with the situation as it is. And in this, successfully dealing with the situation as it is, will certainly require operationalizing the new conception of the human that Wynter speaks of. Another ray of hope, is that SDS and the New Left did not end the war or recreate the world in the way they envisioned, but they planted some seeds that are coming to maturity. Wynter's new humanism, in my view, is the fruit of this effort. There is a consensus among intellectuals about this new humanism. The challenge is now putting that vision in effect.