1988 or 2008? Raymond Williams Reads the Current Economic Crisis

In a deeply prescient 1988 essay (Afterword to Modern Tragedy), Raymond Williams describes "a widespread loss of the future" he diagnoses in contemporary culture. Williams writes, "the dominant messages from the centre are now of danger and conflict, with accompanying calculations of temporary advantage or containment but also with deeper rhythms of shock and loss. Managed affluence has slid into an anxiously managed but perhaps unmanageable depression." How could he have known? Or, better, how is it that no one remembers that the late 1980s bore a curious resemblance to the early 2010s?

"While the old order is still powerful, even if visibly dying," Williams writes, "it still exercises, even if in new forms, its many determinations. Thus the simple shock of disturbance, the relatively sudden but slowly settling loss of effective continued development . . . spreads at first, beyond values, through the whole of the culture. This indeed is inevitable, since the shock is not only to an abstract social order but to millions of lives that have been shaped to its terms. Thus a capitalist economic order is in the process of defaulting on its most recent contract: to provide full employment, extended credit and high social expenditure as conditions for a political consensus of support." In Williams's prognosis, it becomes clear, things are going to get worse before they get better: a dying capitalist system will continue to exercise its usual determinations in increasingly desperate forms. Your bank will demand five dollars per month for your "privilege" of access to a debit card. Temporary gains will mask the fact that an economy predicated on steady growth has grown all it can, has begun to reach its limits. Worst of all, we will all realize the extent to which, our opposition notwithstanding, our very lives are intertwined with this situation. "Go ahead," the banks will say. "Just try disentangling your life from the way we've structured your finances if you don't like our increasingly desperate measures." Not a rosy picture of Williams's future, or ours.