On permanent crises, James O'Connor might think that capitalism has been in crisis since the thirteenth century (I am not sure it even existed then), but that old fool Karl Marx stubbornly stuck to his belief that "Permanent crises do not exist." (Theories of Surplus Value, Vol II, p 497, fn)
On the metaphor, it's Ulrich Beck's not mine. He meant that people are often prisoners of ideas handed down from the past, and that these categories are something like the living dead walking the night, only because they haven't been replaced by other categories.
I don't see this as depressing as Travis does. That people should enjoy some well being does not seem so awful. I don't think there is a need to invent problems when there are real ones in the here and now to address - such as the war in Iraq, or the assault on civil liberties, or the promotion of personal insecurity by states. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040909/c310ee60/attachment.htm>