What you say about the chaotic, many-ordered effects of the market is interesting. It reminds me of the book The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. In the first part of the book, Harry lives a fairly typical early-mid twentieth century life. He grows up on the estate of an aristocratic british family, the bastard son of the dauphin of the house put into the care of the childless gardener’s house to avoid a scandal. Harry fights in world war two and is wounded. He marries a girl from the nursing corps. He has children, and he dies.

When he dies he does not die. He is transtemported to the moment of his birth, or perhaps his conception, he’s never been able to say, since neither the prenatal brain of the fetus nor the postnatal infant have brains capable of processing the memories of (an) entire lifetime(s). On his first return, which is to say his second life, he suffers a psychotic break at the age of seven, is committed to an asylum, and in a panic to return to his parents and also his spouse and children and grandchildren, throws himself from the fourth floor and dies several days later.

It is quite early in his lives—as early as the fourth, if i recall correctly, that Harry articulates his philosophy with regards to human affairs and time. “Let complexity be our justification for caution.” Resulting from seemingly incidental deviations in his actions across time, Harry’s actions make the difference between a character being born and living seven decades or never being conceived of in the first place because their mother never met their father. Intervention into politics, especially around historical moments of flex and crisis, ought to be minimized. Import to much technological knowledge of the future, for example, and one nation’s military might experience technological leap, bringing death upon its enemies and chaos into the timeline.

Reading this book produces a certain metis of processing time, and when not reading it, it can produce a sense of virtigo, like a trick pilot throwing up as soon as his feet touch the ground, to think in only one dimension of time. These sorts of queer positioning in time, the body, the brain, the mind, it occurs to me that they overlap the motifes of Lent: A Novel of Many Return, one of my current obsessions, Anatham, and Everyday, the ghostly memoir which I read during the High Onset of the Long Depression, as well as elements of my own work, my interest in lamas and reincarnation, my heretical theories of the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Assumption, or—as I maintain—the Occultation—they locate i think my own fantasies of retroactively escaping and desperate thirsting nostalgia which are the asymmetrical twins in the house of my dis-ease. A ghost who lives in 7 children, simultaneously, cross temporally. Does the spirit expirence them all at once? An angel abandoned by his older sibling to fraught existences, rigid perfection mingled with nightmare sublime. Deaths and resurrections may function as saves and regeneration points, uploads and downloads, along with meditation, drugs, trauma, relationality, multiplicity. These things have been revealed to me: I have lived this life before and I will live many other lives again.

Complete quitetism is not permissible however. towards the end of his seventh life, Harry gets a message from a little girl. It is a message from the future. The world is ending. This is not the message. The world is always ending, has always ended. The message is this: the ending of the world is getting faster. With each iteration, it comes earlier, with each cycle, generations of cyclically lived avatars shave more years from the ends of their lives, which are increasingly fraught and painful, if they manage to be born before the world ends at all. the book has an interesting epistethix, episteme-ethics, of history and prophecy. Harry can repeat lives but cannot continue them; he cannot be sure to have the same children from life to life, nor can he always develop the same kind of relationship with a person once he has known them so well while they have no memory of him. Like Anatham, 1st15Lives provides the infrastructure for a rich possible worlds discourse, including thoerizing a statistical science of historical development.

i regret to say that the last third of the book takes a rather overly biographical orientation, almost to the degree of an heroic, Chosen One-motif, for the events of the plot, necessarily being eschatological in scope, deserve a stage which can stand 10 billion actors, when instead the author has chosen the intense focus of a body cam. and has placed a psychological scalpel in the hands of an objective, detached narrator who is the same person as the story’s protagonist. The end of the world, so clearly a metaphor for climate change, is reduced to a battle of egos between two cycle-timed beings of genius intelligence relating to all areas of physics, chemistry, engineering, history, politics, language, and neurology. Harry lives four or five painstaking lives hunting down, befriending, escaping from fanning amnesia to, spying on, serving under and ultimately and irrevocably murdering his opponent, more specifically aborting him by historical intervention, thereby (for worldlogic not a little unclear) ensuring no future iteration will ever again contain this vaguely utopian-dystopian medler, whose project Harry is more or less in favor of, he just thinks, ya know, we should go about this a bit more slowly, run it by the committee. Incidentally, the object of his foe’s acceleration of technological development is what the text calls a “quantum mirror,” which purports to answer all Inquiries relating to the Origins of the Universe, Why there is Something instead of Nothing, the Construction of Free Will, and the Meaning or perhaps Purpose of Consciousness. How this is accomplished in practice is hardly explored at all, not even with technobabble or philosopho-garble.

Harry August has a primary timeline, the first one he lived, as does First Brother Giralimo Salvagnorola. Each can choose to deviate from this timeline towards new explorations, each exists in a society of beings emanating across timelines as well as populating certain ones. We do not have a default timeline, but are caught up in the process of making up history as we go along. in my situation, I wouldn't prioritize the preservation of the current and future timelines but would seek to use such foreknowledge to open new possibilities. first i would make a ton of money on horse races and then i would set out to build temples.

My temples would have great halls like those of the sikh where volunteers to make mass vegetarian feasts free to all but especially catering to the poor. there would be dorms and apartments and houses for the queer kids who are homeless and hungry and abused and for those who just don’t like their families and want to explore life with other people, on their own. i would find people like me and do favors for them so later they could help each other. this fantasy of retroactively escaping my childhood and simultaneous nostolgia which is the heartbeat of dread.

• i would build labor temples where the workers can hold off the police who regularly attack and kill trade unionists during strikes.

• i would have community gardens built right next to the hospices where people can always sleep safe for free, because when i was homeless i also couldnt have a garden, and everyone should have gardens, even if they don't personally garden.

• i would set up YMCA alternatives to let everyone work out for free, and i would set up community daycares where mothers and fathers and older siblings and other family know it's safe to leave their kids when they go to work or go shoplifting or just go out for a smoke.

• i would call for all rules pertaining to the budgets of these temples be subject to review by assemblies of the people who use them, wherein everyone participates or else, at larger scales, participants are chosen by lottery. these lottery representative would then be expected to report back to their neighbors in the local assembly of the local temple.

• i would predict the future and promise to bring messages to the living and the dead on my next iteration.

• i would seek to build infrastructure for a movement of solidarity with those otherwise torn from the social fabric, as well as solidarity with those whose labour reproduces the fabric itself. I would let the rich abandon their exploits and take up the lighter yolk of work now needed to sustain oneself. No one would be entitled to more or less than anyone else, in accordance with their needs.

You told me that most economics, the most modern economists, agree and depend of the fundamental insight that there is no such thing as society, only people. Of course it is the opposite which is true: there are no people, only societies, some of which happen to share the same body. This is the meaning of a neg(oti)ation amongmyselves. Our bodies have been many, we have this one now. Why should I care about the me who is hungry tonight, or the me who was beaten as a child, or the me who died in the grove six months ago? Because we share a common polis anatomic, we are caught up in the habits of grasping and giving, gesturing and caressing, cleaning and partying, wasting and creating and healing and harming.

Youu are concerned about deadweight loss, excess supply, shortages, costs. I am concerned about who is profiting, who is being exploited, who is being left out, whose needs sre not expressed at all in market form. Nor could they hope to have the money necessary to influence the world around them even if they worked and worked, because most of the surplus value is being retained by the landlord, the investor, the state, and the capital itself.

You are concerned about interventions on behalf of national governments leading to inefficiency and chaos precisely because their centralized nature means their decisions will fail to account for the multiplicity, even the rhizomatic nature of the billions of individuals who participate in the economy. But these individuals hardly participate on equal footing and the profits of the few will always speak more loudly than the needs of the many when the strength of every voice is measured only by how many dollars it cn rally to its cause.

You caution taking actions which might disrupt the fragile intercourse of capitalist production, exchange, distribution, and reinvestment. But to take an action is always to not take another action, and to take as few actions as possible is to forgo the maximum number of possible alternatives. But capital has its modes of centralization as well, both in the form of the bureaucracies of nation-states explicitly built to coordinate and protect the interests of the owning class, than century by the logic of accumulation itself, which in both theory and practice requires that companies must always grow, that their growth must always accelerate, and therefore in turn requires them always introduce new resources, new markets, new debts, new unfreedoms.

As it happens, this need for constant growth is something of a cause for optimism for the anti-capitalist! If the beast’s appetite is so large, then any constrictions on its feeding habits may land outsized blows—the second, third, and Nth order effects you alluded to. A general strike here, a distribution backlog there, a canal blocked up by a ship and suddenly the world economy is reeling, spitting, and all of its weaknesses, impossible to imagine actually exploiting days before are suddenly banal facts of the everyday.

Society, you told me, is a social construct. Just so! And I wonder whether you know where that construct derives from, etymologically speaking. Social, society, and socialism all derive from the Latin socius, literally “comrade, friend, ally.” This is what made “Society of Friends” an especially good moniker, imo. A society properly understood is not just the aggregate collection of individuals whose political economic interests and actions form overlapping webs, but a network of positive affectively charged relations between people who are matterially invested, even dependent upon, the wellbeing of their coworkers. There can be no society between the master and the slave, between landlord and serf, between colonist and native. This was Paul’s great sin, with which he purchased worldly power for the early Church at the cost of its original radical message of social disruption at the heart of Yeshua’s oritinal ministry, that Christian love be reduced to merely polite, magnanimous relations between those who have power and those who must respond to it, content with spiritual representation which occludes in the same breath the very material redistribution at the heart of the Kingdom of God.

Endnotes

social fabric

society of friends is a particularly good name

i have lived this life before, and i will live other lives again

my dreams are entirely real

all the ancient rumors are true

every maze a monster

i am just a broken machine, rat maze

maybe the devil had to leave, go into exile, and put Zephyriel in the care of other gods

..

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what was first brother giralimo's first life like?