By now the pliant is all to familiar. They were the smartest ones in the room. They had invented the game and perfected the equipment required to play it. They had convinced regulators, investors, accountants, journalists, consumers–all the relevant participants–that theirs was the way of the world. They had the track record to prove it, the returns to justify it, the bonuses to affirm it. But suddenly, in the course of a few weeks, it all fell apart. The gleaming towers, houses of cards, the spectacular castles made of sand, revenue streams parched riverbeds, mountains of sophisticated contracts worthless paper–the metaphors were chanted repeatedly in an anesthetizing mantra. The great vision so many had bought looked so obviously contrived in hindsight. How could they not have seen the collapse coming? What made them think their schemes could last? How could their knowledge have failed them so? These questions were posed by the innocent bystanders in tones of righteous indignation and surprise.

But this script of meteoric rise and precipitous fall of best and brightest had already been written and performed many times over. The iteration applies not only to the present fiasco, and the wizards at Bear Stearns, the house of Lehman, or A.I.G., but was said of other board rooms that broke big. Think Enron, Long-Term Capital Management– and that’s just going back a decade to similar debacles soon forgotten and only now appearing smaller in scale. The sterling credentials of presidential intimates and Nobel Prize winners weren’t enough to keep their ships afloat. Thousands of lives were disrupted, rescues were required, investigations were commissioned, remedies were proposed. Some were punished or shamed, but the instruments for isolating, pricing and trading in risk returned, the markets in derivatives flourished, the factories of financial machination soon began to hum again. Indeed, between the fall Enron at the end of 2001 and the subprime meltdown some six years later, over-the-counter derivatives increased roughly fivefold to over a half trillion dollars. The implosion of energy futures gave license to a take-off in innovation of financial intellectual properties that made the universes of the previous masters seem small indeed. With the Citibank brain trust that had helped engineer the new financial order in disrepute, Jamie Dimon, head of the equally culpable but bullishly victorious JP Morgan Chase, now the one to whisper explanations in the president’s ear. “No worries. You can have your money back now. Let’s press the reset button.” How could such intelligence prove so dumb?

Maybe it’s time to get over the surprise. The swings of moralistic discovery and subsequent amnesia of capital’s ups and downs can seem as much a naturalization of the business cycle that presents crisis as a requirement to restore the order of private wealth as a momentary fretting over how things got this way (again). If there is something to be learned (and taught) of this crisis beyond the paeans and pains of business self-interest, it might be more useful to ask what it means for everyone else. Rather than letting capital off the hook, exploring what the financial maelstrom means for labor can focus attention more comprehensively on how to think about the implications of novelty and range of political responses that can be placed under consideration. If capital is, in effect, continuously in crisis or bringing the world to crisis as it destroys the very firmament that had created it, the more salient class crisis is that of those who have worked to produce the wealth the private ownership can neither sustain nor live without–that is to say the millions of knowledge workers pressed into the service of this particular interest, namely, the professional managerial class. Whether it was ever disinterested, professionally credentialed expertise is subject to norms of productivity not of its making, while the managers are themselves the minions of an intensively managed existence. The failure of intelligence to master the world may turn out to be a condition not simply of a few rarified board rooms, but of a more general problem for the work of subjecting the world to the powers of cognition that purportedly lie at the heart of what has been touted as a knowledge society. What if it is not just a few smarties whose ambitions got away from them, but smartness itself that once could confidently rule its specialized domain, but now, asked to deliver on behalf of ceaseless accumulation, cannot command the world according to its perquisites and methods.