Bud: Credit is a sacred trust, it's what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia?
Otto: They don't pay bills in Russia, it's all free.
There's something poignant now, even charmingly retro in the post-apocalyptic financescape of 2009, about the phrase "Credit is a sacred trust." It seems to belong to another world.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan might have been thinking of Bud when he said in a 1990 commencement address at Harvard College,
Trust is at the root of any economic system based on mutually beneficial exchange. In virtually all transactions, we rely on the word of those with whom we do business...If a significant number of business people violated the trust upon which our interactions are based, our court system and our economy would be swamped into immobility.
Prophecy, or just a gloss of the Gospel According to "Repo Man?" You decide.
As for Otto's utopian vision of the Russian socio-economic complex, credit cards and cowboy capitalism put an end to all that. For an excellent account (no pun intended), see Prof. Alya Guseva's recent book, Into the Red (Stanford University Press, 2008).
Meanwhile, Happy Birthday "Repo Man!"
1 comment:
well, that was "intense"...
You quoted Greenspan:
Trust is at the root of any economic system based on mutually beneficial exchange. In virtually all transactions, we rely on the word of those with whom we do business...If a significant number of business people violated the trust upon which our interactions are based, our court system and our economy would be swamped into immobility.
What goes unspoken here is who is trusting whom? If trust is involved, then risk is involved, and where risk is involved, then authority comes into play.
So, what he is actually saying is:
The trust of the working class in the ruling class is critical in the appropriation of wealth out of the pockets of the working class into the pockets of the ruling class.
He is also playing on the assumption of a post-revolutionary world, where the hegemony of the ruling class, while contested in media, continues unabated, if amended. So, in this way, the working class is sucked into it even more, because they find that their grievances are expressed through various Ideological State Apparatuses (Courts, Economic Institutions, etc.) with some degree of satisfaction.
What we see through the lens of Repo Man is an illinformed undereducated reactionary youth incapable of acting as a subject in history because every act of rebellion exists in the plane of culture, and thus signification. The signifiers become commodities, and thus prevent change to the substructure/base of industrial capitalism.
The youth of Repo Man have neither the mental horsepower or ability to focus their attention long enough to appelate themselves as historical subjects, and are thusly cast into the role held by the lumpen proletariat, regardless of their actual economic status.
Awesome blog. Keep it up!
I would recommend you read this one:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/
He is also quite brilliant.
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