From a short-term perspective, I’m as relieved as anyone about 47’s tariffs climb-down. As a person whose employment situation has historically been fairly precarious, I’m in many ways predisposed to an appreciation of relative economic stability; as a person who now has their own business as a freelancer, I suspect I’m even more so than before.

From a longer-term perspective, though, that even the unhinged instinctive autocrat currently at the helm of the world’s largest economic egregore can be persuaded to blink when confronted with the full stare of the basilisk deity that we have dubbed “the markets” cannot be read as anything other than bad news.

Do you long for a more economically left-leaning paradigm of governance? Well, good luck with that; British readers may wish to recall the rallying of the autopoietic troops that attended even the partial prospect of a Corbyn government, while anyone reading from outside of the Global North (or whatever we’re supposed to call it this week) likely has a more local version of the same story. Do you long for a clear but gentle bending of the arc of economic history toward a mode less rooted in relentless extraction and consumption? Same—but I know it ain’t gonna come from me voting for it.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is not me arguing that it would have been “better” if 47 had been permitted to tank the US economy, and the world economy with it. Rather, this is me arguing that we have been shown, many times over, that any notion of political control over the economic sphere—be it democratic or otherwise—is at best a comforting fiction, and perhaps more so for the political class than for anyone else.

“The markets” are the final arbiter of what is permitted and what is not. “The markets” will decide the route until the hijacked bus crashes into a sufficiently solid wall. An alternative to “the markets” and their rule will only be constructed in the aftermath of their self-destruction. “Number go up” is the only game in town; you can play or not, but the casino is coextensive with the world. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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I dare say this could be labelled as a sort of accelerationist argument? “The way out is through,” as I’ve been saying for years (after having stolen the phrase from Trent Reznor’s confrontation with his habituations). I’d much rather we got to slow the bus down and disembark safely, than be obliged to cling to the seats and hope that our relative privilege will grant us the good fortune to hobble out of the eventual wreckage. I would be happy to be proven wrong!

Regular readers will now that I’m long on hope—but hope is, in part, a faith in a sort of grass-roots human goodness whose emergence is best documented in exactly those spaces and circumstances where the dominant systems of economic and political control have collapsed.

(Rebecca Solnit’s canonical case was New Orleans, post-Katrina, right up until the point when the cops and bean-counters came back.)

With the admission that it is less a scientific or rational thing than a conviction born of a certain emotional necessity, I actually think that humanity will survive that bus-crash, and in the yet-still-longer run be better for it. I’m not going to try to convince you that you should stop trying to get your less-crazy driver of preference sat behind the wheel—but I think I’m pretty much done pretending, even to myself, that doing so has any chance of averting the inevitable.

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I am reminded once again of a riff that I remember seeing credited to Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, which I paraphrase thus: “left and right are merely directions for the limo driver”.