Marx believed that the edifice of capitalism was built upon misery, and misery would bring the edifice down. To increase productivity and profit, he reasoned, bosses assembled workers in factories. Once there, though, the workers would soon notice that they were all similarly miserable — and that they outnumbered the bosses. The workers would organize and overthrow the bosses. Capital created its own revolutionary proletariat, Marx concluded: The system contained “the seeds of its own destruction.”

What old Karl did not predict was capital’s ability to pay workers enough to buy SUVs and flat-screen TVs — to emulate, albeit in knock-off form, the lives of the bosses. He didn’t predict that economic growth in the richest nations would come to depend not on the production of those cars and TVs, but on their consumption.

It didn’t occur to Marx that capitalism would prosper not on misery but on pleasure, and on the faith in future happiness secured by wages sufficient to buy more cars, more televisions, and more pleasure — consumer “confidence.”

He didn’t imagine that this edifice built not of steel but of gossamer — of optimism — would tremble only when that optimism started to evaporate.

But that’s what is happening now. Pushed by the expectation of misery — by mounting layoffs, stagnant wages and the spreading mortgage crisis — “consumer sentiment” plummeted in April to its lowest level since 1993. Shoppers aren’t shopping. Homeowners who still have mortgages are staying put, forgoing the kitchen renovations and in-ground swimming pools.

Meanwhile, with each bit of marginally good news — a stock price rise for Freddie Mac, a not-too-terrible inflation report from the government — Wall Street and its business-page boosters shout optimism from the rooftops, as if to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that it’s time to get out there and rally.

“The vast bulk of the housing contraction is behind us,” declared a keynote speaker at the National Association of Home Builders in February, forecasting “more vigorous economic growth following tax rebates by mid-year that will set up a recovery beginning in 2009.”

“S&P’s Optimistic Outlook on Financial Crises Sparks Turnaround on Wall Street,” the Associated Press headlined in March.

“Wall Street Shows Optimism That Crisis Is Fading,” reported The New York Times in April.

“Despite a drumbeat of bad economic news, the stock market is up — almost 11 percent in the last few weeks,” read the International Herald Tribune the first week of May. The article noted that, just as “bankers and investors appear ready to look past the crisis to more profitable times . . . consumers find themselves in a more precarious position as the job market weakens and banks make it harder to borrow money.” That’s an ominous bit of reality for Wall Street, which knows that if consumers don’t rally, investors won’t do so for long, either.

The traders resemble a family gathered around Grandma’s death-bed, smiling brightly each time she opens her eyes. But the more the family grins, the surer Grandma gets that her prospects are grim. In fact, she realizes they are counting on her to cheer them up.

We’re all Grandma. While the pink slips flutter around us, we’re exhorted to remain confident. While our credit card balances balloon and our mortgage payments come due, we’re coaxed to borrow more. It’s an impossible proposition, both practically and emotionally: Save the economy (and thus ourselves) by destroying ourselves.

That’s not optimism, it’s harikiri.

Maybe it’s this topsy-turvy emotional atmosphere, but I’ve got a perverse secret to confess: I’m kind of looking forward to the recession.

I’ve got no illusions. It isn’t going to be pretty, as the lines at the food pantries grow. As we slide down the other side of Peak Oil, things will probably get worse before they get better. Before we descend into Road Warrior-esque battle, we’ll feel our furnaces go cold. Before that, our little luxuries will vanish. I’m already starting to miss pineapples.

On the other hand, downturns have their upsides.

The gas crisis of the 1970s launched a movement of organic gardeners and appropriate-technology tinkerers. Today, what no amount of doomsaying from Al Gore or cajoling from Bill McKibben could accomplish, the $80 gas pump tab is getting done. Last month, for the first time ever, one in five vehicles sold in the U.S. was a compact or subcompact car — compared with one in eight 10 years ago, when the SUV was king. What the American Heart Association and an army of health columnists could not change, the $2 bag of corn chips is changing. The Portland, Oregon, Press Herald quotes a woman who is reducing her grocery bills by cutting back on snack foods for herself and her son. Though she “wouldn’t normally call herself a penny-pincher,” she says, “the real thrifty people must be having coronaries right now.” Or not. Another woman photographed for the article allows that she’s saving gas money by walking to the supermarket. Her picture indicates that she can use the exercise.

OK, so America is getting greener and fitter in spite of itself. But can we be happy in a recession?

I can only say I have been.

I lived in New York in the 1970s, when the city was teetering near bankruptcy. The place was weedy, seedy, wild, raunchy, cheap, creative and, in many ways, far easier to live in than its current corporatized, manicured, hyper-policed incarnation. Back then, the landlord might have neglected to send up the heat now and then. But he wasn’t trying to force you out to make room for the next sports-stadium-cum-luxury-condominium mega-development.

Friends who grew up in Vermont or moved here in the 1960s or ’70s admit to similar feelings. Back then, good jobs in the state were few. Land was literally dirt-cheap; 25 years ago, my partner bought his house and 40 acres in Hardwick for $36,000. Vermont was poor. But a limited number of decent-paying jobs and low property values also kept communities stable. Generation after generation could buy homes and take up their fathers’ and mothers’ trades, plant a garden, volunteer at church, and drop the kids off after school at Grandma’s a few houses away. Nobody was renovating the farmhouse down the road, then demanding that the farmer next door clean up that smelly manure.

I don’t want to rewrite history all fuzzy and nostalgic. In the 1970s in New York, I got mugged — several times. The subways stalled and the garbage piled up on Sundays. In Vermont, economic scarcity sent more people migrating out of the state than into it, from the 1850s through the 1960s. If the home-price climb relents now, as it’s showing signs of doing, younger families and lower-income folks may no longer be squeezed out of the housing market — and those wanting to sell, retire, and move will be squeezed in.

All I’m just saying is, there are more ways to gauge economic health than the single measure we’ve got — growth — and other ways to feel about it than “bigger is better and smaller is scary.”

For instance, there’s the “security” of expecting ever-rising wages and ever-multiplying home values. And there’s the security of knowing you and your friends can stay in your community because prices will remain more or less the same. There’s consumer confidence, the feeling that you’ll be able to keep buying stuff forever. And then there’s what I’d call “non-consumer confidence” — knowing you can live happily working less, earning less, and buying less.

As for optimism, we can start from scratch on that, since America’s supply is virtually depleted. A Washington Post /ABC News poll last week found that eight in 10 Americans believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction. In last month’s similar CBS poll, only one in five said the economy was in good shape.

Marx, and the Marxists I grew up with, would look at these figures, see misery — and incipient revolution — and cheer as loudly as stock traders at the end of a record day for the Dow. It’s true that pain, or at least caution, is motivating the new small-car-driving, snack-food-limiting, walking, non-renovating American. And that’s a bummer for the growth economy. In this way, consumer capitalism, the capitalism of confidence, contains the seeds of its own destruction.

But unless the recession goes on endlessly — which no one wants it to — people are going to need more than misery and fear to stick with their Civics and keep off the Fritos. And just as Wall Street can’t persuade the realistically glum to act as if everything is hunky-dory, it is hard to convince those who feel their lives are shrinking that they’re actually living as large as before — just differently.

In the long run, pleasure is a better motivator than pain.

But if the economy is going to depend on the populace feeling good, it needs to give us something better than cars and TVs to feel good about. I’d start with sustainability, which would also reduce a lot of anxiety.

Meanwhile, by miring dreams of building and buying in melted-down credit and $125-a-barrel oil, the recession forces us to take time out, and gives us time to experience some different kinds of happiness, and new reasons for optimism.

It’s already working for me. Each proposed monster ski resort or McMansion village that bites the dust makes me feel a little bit better.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Still, I’ve noticed that lots of people lucky enough to enjoy a decent period of fully compensated R&R are not resting or relaxing.

I don’t mean the folks who sign up for a weeklong Arabic immersion course or go off to trek the Himalayas. I’m talking about those from whom I receive an email reply with an automatic “Out of Office” subject line and then, an hour later, a response to my work-related post. Yes, they are sitting on a lawn chair by the ocean or in a snowbank on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. But they have their BlackBerries with them, and they’re not using them to play backgammon.

Now, the reason may be that, even if they’re paid to not work, they actually have work to do. U.S. productivity has steadily increased even as wages and benefits have shrunk and companies have downsized. And when you think your job may be the next on the block, you’re not exactly sanguine about goin’ fishing.

But I don’t think we can blame only the greedy corporations and the laissez-faire government for our overwork.

Today, it is not the rich who are idle — the executives, surgeons, and frequent-flyer inspirational speakers — but the poor, who, being underemployed, undereducated (and, conservatives charge, undermotivated) have nothing better to do than loaf. Or so it is alleged. Idleness is not, anyway, a high-status condition.

We lionize the busy. Those who work too hard are proud of it, even if they dislike their jobs or suspect their occupations — say, missile manufacture or hedge-fund management — are of dubious social value. And those who don’t have “enough” work, which is to say, too much work, feel slightly ashamed.

This was brought home to me a while ago, when I called a college professor who represents the New York chapter of Take Back Your Time, a fine U.S.-Canadian organization that advocates for such reasonable entitlements as universal paid vacations, family and sick leave, and guaranteed adequate retirement income. I wanted to see if we could hang out on Take Back Your Time Day, which fell about a month hence, as it happened, on a Sunday.

But he couldn’t. He was working.

Might there be another time we could talk? A long pause ensued, during which he flipped through his date book. Finally he said he could fit me in on the day before Thanksgiving. We laughed. The irony was obvious to both of us.

Still, when I got off the phone, instead of being irritated or amused, I sank into a little slough of self-contempt. I mean, I could have made an appointment for the next week. I felt like a dust bunny in the cyclone of his activity.

••••••••••••••••

Workaholism is not new in the West. Every high school student who bones up on her Max Weber Wikipedia entry knows that Calvinism, with its emphasis on worldly gain as evidence of spiritual righteousness, boosted early capitalism into gear. The Protestant ethic, even with the Protestantism stripped out, is still powerful in America.

But workaholism has also had its discontents. “Industry and utility are the angels of death who, with fiery swords, prevent man’s return to Paradise,” wrote the German Romantic ironist Friedrich Schlegel. He condemned the predominant lifestyle of his time (circa 1800) as one of “empty, restless striving,” which he dismissed as “a Nordic bad habit.”

By mid-century, Marx had turned this Romantic yearning for idleness into political principle. “A nation is really rich if the work day is six hours rather than twelve,” he wrote. Legend has it that as its first order of business, the workers’ government of the Paris Commune of 1870-71 burnt the money and smashed the clocks. Now that’s taking back your time.

In 1883, Marx’s son-in-law, the French labor activist Paul Lafargue, published a pamphlet called “The Right to Be Lazy.” He quoted the Greeks and Jesus on the virtues of idleness and declared that Jehovah himself toiled six days, then lay on the couch watching football for the rest of time. He indicted the capitalist as a slave driver, but was equally distressed by what he saw as the worker’s masochistic lust for labor, even when technology might have eased his lot. “The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men,” he wrote. And this was before email.

Lafargue called for a three-hour workday. In the 1970s a Brooklyn anarchist group did some statistical figuring, accounted for technology, and concluded that we’d all have to put in four hours weekly to keep the world spinning. They named themselves Zero Work.

Still, even labor unions, to which we owe such labor-saving devices as the weekend, have never accepted a week of Sundays as a seemly goal. It was in response to 19th-century socialist demands for the “right to work” that Lafargue wrote his manifesto. Although the Right proselytizes the obligation to work, even when there are no paying jobs, it was Bill Clinton, the Democratic son of a struggling single mother, who ended welfare as we knew it. And the Left continues to struggle for “full employment.”

••••••••••••••••

We’re not going to beat the odds for time off in America until we knock busy-ness off its pedestal. Those odds are already slim. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees 12 weeks off every 12 months to care for a new baby or sick family member. Several states, including Vermont, offer more time for more reasons to more people — but nowhere is this leave compensated. Earlier this year, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Dodd introduced a bill to expand the FMLA (which was his baby) to include some paid time — but the bill lost steam, and would have expired on the president’s desk anyhow. Similar bills were voted down in Oregon and stymied in New York.

And these are proposals to pay workers recovering from childbirth and giving their demented parents sponge baths. Can you imagine demanding to be paid to read People magazine on the beach?

Actually, Take Back Your Time is doing just that. It is promoting an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that would guarantee three weeks of paid vacation after a year on the job. The group has challenged the presidential candidates to make the issue a priority. So far, not even now-candidate Dodd has done so.

The Take Backers may be Utopians, but they are also realists. So, alas, they are selling vacations as good for families, health and even corporate productivity. “This is not about slacking, not about being lazy,” campaign spokesman Joe Robinson made clear. “Vacations are as important to your health as checking your cholesterol or getting exercise.” Gee, maybe I should schedule a colonoscopy while I’m away from my desk.

What if vacations weren’t good for anything except feeling good? Don’t we deserve them anyway? When will we win the right to be lazy?

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Amateur porn stars with Amazon Indians.

I refer to Fuck for Forest, the brain- (and bod-) child of a pretty, young Norwegian couple named Leona Johansson and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, who describe their project as “concerned humans” who “use their sexuality and love to direct attention to and collect money for the earth’s threatened nature.”

Fuckforforest.com, founded in 2004, is an “ecological porn site.” It recruits tree-hugging exhibitionists to donate photos and videos of their pleasure-taking, signs up subscribers at $15 a month, and sends the proceeds to rainforest conservation and reforestation efforts in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil.

For a site dedicated to wild nature, FFF is pretty tame. Skinny, pierced and tattooed white people cavort in leafy settings. The occasional vegetable is introduced, as is mild fetishism. In one video, Leona in a blue wig employs an enormous leek to flagellate another woman. On the homepage, a woman in a gas mask kneels before a floating chainsaw. It’s all rather . . . Norwegian.

But Fuck for Forest is also an unprecedented hybrid. Leona and Tommy probably don’t know it, but their project represents the bridging of a historic divide between two political discourses, two heretofore separate spheres of activism. If we are going to save the Earth, it’s a gap worth closing.

On one side of the divide are the discourses of desire — the politics of sexual liberation and personal freedom. These are the values of the Age of Revolutions, including our own, with its inalienable right to pursue happiness. For better or worse, they’re also the values of capitalism, with its confederate desire, its promise gratification, and its job to cycle the two in endless escalation.

On the other side are the discourses of restraint, where environmentalism resides. Here, need — as opposed to desire — and limited resources are assessed; a just and sustainable balance of the two is sought. Economically, restraint is closer to socialism than to capitalism, or at least to regulated capitalism than to unfettered free markets.

If the pleasure people’s Utopia is Dionysian, the restrainers’ is Apollonian. It seeks satisfaction in rational moderation, and in saving some for later. Sustainability is by defintion a principle of delayed gratification.

There are aesthetic differences between the two, as well as a kind of culture-nature divide. Broadly speaking, the pleasure politicos embrace technology, fashion, the contemporary arts, media, speed, novelty. The restrainers prefer the rural; they like slow processes, durable, old things, things that are born, not made. John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club and widely seen as the father of American environmentalism, found spiritual and emotional succor in nature. Like many of his successors, he had less use for the products of human imagination. “One day’s exposure to mountains,” he wrote, “is better than a cartload of books.”

Neither side is monolithic or doctrinaire. Indeed, pleasurites are often critical of the consumer economy, especially its inexorable imperative to grow, obsolesce and discard. But they also take in stride the contribution that commerce makes to culture and community, identity and sexuality. Transpeople, for instance, are not above shopping the surgical and pharmaceutical mart to create bodies that match their self-images. And activists like FFF, the casual heirs of category-smashing movements from Pop Art to pro-sex feminism, regard as academic the lines between commercial and fine art, or porn and erotica.

For their part, some of the most sophisticated restrainers — such as Adbusters or Reverend Billy, whom I wrote about last month — humorously, even affectionately, twist the tropes of the mainstream media and use it to get the message across.

But there’s a strain of moral environmentalism that would throw the baby out with the gray water — that is, the imaginative, juicy, fun aspects of consumer culture with its devastating consequences. For such people, it’s not enough to love your bicycle; you have to hate your TV, too. It’s not enough to buy less and buy green; you have to condemn the whole enterprise of shopping as a crime and a sin and look down on shoppers (yourself included) as advertising-addled, instant-gratification-addicted zombies. Substitute a cartload of DVDs for Muir’s cartload of books and you get the gist.

So it was into this little DMZ that Fuck for Forest innocently stepped. There they discovered . . . a market niche! Green wankers! In its first year, 2004, the site raked in $100,000.

Then FFF got stranded on one shore of the divide.

No mainstream environmental organization would take their money. WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) in Norway and the Netherlands declined. “[W]e cannot connect our brandname and logo to certain sectors of industry,” read the latex-protected prose of the latter. A San Francisco reporter calling American environmental organizations for comment on FFF met with “terse brushoffs.”

You could charge the envirocrats with plain prudery. Giving them more credit, you could countenance their worries that some constituents might consider FFF a pack of exploiters, even sexual assailants of women. But sex itself, even sexism, was probably not the whole of it (for one thing, many of FFF’s models are men). Nor could these organizations have honestly objected to hawking product. After all, WWF Netherlands was defending not its principles but its pocketbook — its “brandname and logo,” metaphor of both.

Seems to me that what made FFF’s lucre so filthy was the site’s cheerful marriage of sex and money. While Tommy and Leona were trilling about nature (sex) teaming up with nature (forests), their critics saw the commercial exploitation of naked bodies and the commercial exploitation of rainforests as a cynical alliance: Both despoil sacred nature for profit.

In response to these snubs, FFF expressed bemused exasperation. “What is morality when people are destroying the world?” Tommy asked the San Francisco reporter. The real obscenity, his comment suggested, is the rape of the emerald forests. But, good at getting it up again and again, FFF trekked south and found warm welcome among biologists and indigenous activists laboring to save both the nature and culture of the Amazon. Maybe these new beneficiaries are more relaxed about sex. Or maybe they just can’t afford to be picky.

Who’s right? In one sense, both. The important tension between the two — restraint politics focus on the public good, pleasure politics on the rights and desires of the individual — is almost three centuries old. And it’s not about to dissolve. That’s because it’s the tension at the heart of any live democracy.

But let’s not create conflicts where none exist. Some things are a matter of morality, others just of taste. I can compost my vegetables and still love watching “Deadwood.” You can titillate me with tits and ass and also move me with seed conservation. Go to FuckforForest.com. Get off on the picture of two bare butts ascending a tree. Pause for a cup of fair-trade coffee. Then spin another kind of fantasy gazing at the picture of a straw-hatted farmer tenderly planting a seedling.

POSTPONED: Environmentalist Bill McKibben and Judith Levine will have a public conversation about activism across the two-discourse divide on February 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Middlebury College’s McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Room 220. Free Info, 443-5355. POSTPONED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21. CALL FOR INFORMATION.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

As always, the Reverend (a.k.a. performance artist Bill Talen) exorcised the demons from a member of the audience (a.k.a. “congregation”). Laying his hand on her head, he peeked into her sweater collar at the “Made in China” tag and was propelled backwards by the force of the Devil Consumerism exiting her body. The choir swayed. “Back away from Wal-Mart,” they sang, “Back away!” And “Are you my lover? Are you my logo?”

The faux-yet-real preacher danced and shouted his sermon, excoriating the evils of globalization, worker exploitation and the seduction of the Product while evangelizing the gospel of community, justice and peace. At the back of the hall, a table was piled with the gifts we’d been asked to bring “to give a stranger” — and “recreate the gift economy.”

All the sweat and swelling voices onstage, however, could barely draw an “Amen” from the crowd. They sat, like Lutherans in eastern South Dakota, nodding their heads, laughing, but barely moving. Then, to the tremolos of the keyboard and the hallelujahs of the choir, Billy “sainted” three organizers from Retail Action Project, or RAP, a campaign for fair wages and working conditions in the Lower East Side’s chain stores. The crowd rose to its feet and cheered. Not for nothing are the Reverend and his entourage invited to heat up rallies wherever unions and communities are being organized to hold back the big-box bulldozers.

This one break from quietude was a clue to Billy’s problem, though — that is, the problem of the anti-consumerist movement. RAP is a campaign to do something: organize workers and, that evening, gather the multitudes to march with them the following Sunday. The RAP folks were passionate, their cause righteous. It felt good to get behind them.

Anti-consumerism, by contrast, is a campaign to not do something — shop — something that, if we’re honest about it, feels pretty good, too. This inaction is particularly difficult at holiday time (unsurprisingly, it’s Billy’s busiest season), but not buying is close to impossible at any time of year. That’s what I discovered during the year my partner Paul and I bought nothing but “necessities” — food ingredients, Internet access, insulin for our diabetic cat. I wrote about the experience in my book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.

No question, Paul and I reaped all the rewards of non-consuming — from hours of free, fluid time to weight lost and debts dissolved. To boot, we did our bit for the environment. Still, I learned, without the exchange of goods and services, civilizations would not exist. In a money economy, that exchange involves cash and plastic. So never mind procuring the calories to keep the body warm or the roof to keep it dry; without purchasing, you can’t have a cultural life, a social life, a political life, or even an identity, which is communicated by the clothes we wear, the movies we see, the furniture we put in our homes. If we’re all socially constructed, in capitalism we are commercially constructed.

The gift table at the Great Hall was a case in point. Only one item was homegrown: a dozen potatoes, the soil still on them, in a paper bag. Some gifts were recycled — a used “Doonesbury” book, a 2005 Labor History Month poster — but even these were once bought. Attracted by its newspaper wrapping, I picked up what turned out to be a box of TNT Pop-Its noisemakers, manufactured in You-Know-Where. Paul and I brought a pineapple. Nicely uncommercial? Well, the fruit was purchased at the supermarket, and no doubt grown in a pesticide-soaked field owned by a multinational and tended by underpaid workers.

The preacher and I have discussed this dilemma. (Full disclosure: We did a scene together for Morgan Spurlock’s upcoming documentary, Shopocalypse, and Bill enthusiastically reviewed Not Buying It.) We agreed that the best you can be about shopping is conscious and moderate: Buy local, buy union, buy green, and, when possible, recycle, repair, reuse, and resist the pitch.

Still, tongue in cheek or not (this ambiguity is part of Bill’s genius), the Church of Stop Shopping mobilizes not just desire for all that good stuff — community, etc. — but also guilt about our desire for the “bad” stuff. The preacher even describes the Product as evincing an erotic thrill in the consumer. Back away! sings the choir. The implication is, from sin.

So here’s where I part ways with the good Reverend. Especially this month, I say, forget sin. Yes, these are holy days — but they’re not days of atonement. I’m not advising anyone to purchase a $1500 flat-screen TV for every adult on the list, or for each kid a pile of plastic crap destined for the landfill. By all means, bake cookies for Aunt Sarah, knit a scarf for your girlfriend.

But holidays are feasts, and feasts are rituals of gluttony, which, last time I checked, was one of the Seven Deadlies. At Christmas, Chanukah or Kwanzaa, the thing to do is overdo it.

We eat fat. Christians gorge on buttery cookies and eggnog, ham and goose. Jews consume latkes, fritters and schnitzel, oily foods to commemorate the miracle of the long-burning oil in the victory of the Macca- bean fighters. Kwanzaa celebrants fry coconut-coated chicken and bake coconut cream pies. But the midwinter rites, in anticipation of the cold, dark days, are older than all that. They may not even be species-specific. Polar bears devour a blubbery walrus before crawling into hibernation.

Accordingly, every year, including our Year Without Shopping, Paul and I throw a massive Chanukah Latke Bash. We shop and clean for two days, rise at 6, fry 20 dozen potato pancakes, and scatter the table with bowls of sour cream and a small school of smoked fish — $15 per pound of fatty flesh and skinny bones from Russ & Daughters, New York’s “Louvre of Lox,” as the Times of London called it.

Our Bash is a ritual like those in the gift economies Reverend Billy wanted us to emulate at the Great Hall — societies where diplomacy is conducted and power established or overturned by the passing of symbolic objects from person to person and tribe to tribe. Gift rituals, like the Native American potlatch, are orgies of extravagance. Animal or human captives are sacrificed, gifts too numerous to count are spread before the guests; sometimes, to demonstrate the profligacy of the giver, they are smashed or burnt or thrown into the sea. By the time it’s all over, food, table, house or village may lie in ruins.

To the philosopher Georges Bataille, this devastation is not the unfortunate consequence of a celebration gone overboard, à la fraternity party. Devastation is the point. “It is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury,’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems,” Bataille wrote in The Accursed Share. Classical economists are wrong, he argued, that consumption is a “productive expenditure” in service of a human drive toward accumulation. Quite the contrary, said Bataille: Consumption is, literally, about using up, compelled by the need to annihilate the excess energy that is around and in us, from the sun to the libido. No matter how materially poor a society, it is driven to “squander,” through gifts and feasts, sex, art and war.

The Latke Bash aspires to such grand-scale squandering. It is a single-minded event; meeting and greeting are secondary. Arriving around 4, our guests throw off their coats, move straight to the table, load their plates, and gorge until a stupor descends on the room.

Where getting and having are concerned, enough is significantly less than we, and Americans generally, think it is. But, as Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” In giving and celebrating, too much is just enough.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.