Richard Dienst - The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good

Who will write the history of these troubled times? For many years now we have heard one overriding story, the official story, rehearsed day by day before global audiences. By its reckoning, the inexorable forces of capitalism are remaking the world once and for all, their victory ensured three times overby the allure of their wares, the threat of their arms, and the blessedness of their cause. Every setback or sign of resistance has been portrayed as one more reason to finish the job. In the wake of a tumultuous twentieth century and in the face of mounting uncertainty, the self-proclaimed victors of history keep declaring that there is really only one zeitgeist blowing us along: the spirit of total commerce, pitched at the most encompassing level possible, capable of bringing everything to market and bringing the market to everyone. As long as the economic prescriptions are followed, any kind of political system can join the cause, so-called dictatorships and so-called democracies, strong states, weak states, and failed states. No time for losers: the recalcitrants and reprobates simply have to join up, drop out, or be left behind. From now on, the newly rehabilitated angel of history promises nothing but good news to those who heed its callor so we are told, incessantly, even when there is nothing but bad news to tell.

The official story was never true, but it remains powerful. Although their victories have never been as decisive as those of ancient generals and golden-age imperialists, the rulers of our era do exercise a special kind of dominion. Above and beyond the monopoly of The effective horizon of this control oscillates somewhere between the news cycle and the business cycle; moment by moment it translates everything it knows into the present tense. It seeks its glory not only in ratifying its mastery over what happens today; it meticulously amortizes what used to be and assiduously discounts what is yet to come. The past is worth saving only if it is worth saving right now, and the future, insofar as it has not already been paved over or scheduled for expiration, will just have to take care of itself. Cut loose by destabilizing flows of capital and caught by ever tighter nets of competition, people everywhere live more fraught, more bewildered, more defensive, more pressured lives. Market ideology, working its way deeper into the textures of social life, becomes something more absolute: a legitimation of every present indignity for the sake of unnamed opportunities to come. Market logic, elevated to the status of a natural law, demands that everybody should live within the circle of free choices and calculable consequences, even while inventing a full range of techniques to deprive nearly everyone of effective freedoms, channeling rewards immediately upward while dumping bad consequences onto those least able to bear them, somewhere else and sometime later. Through the vigilant management of expectations and the peremptory refusal of alternatives, our common life is split up into countless schemes for survival.

So while the spirit of our age still celebrates military strength and technological inventionif only because warfare and high technology are still crowned with the highest spiritual justificationsthe main historical plot is being written in the prolific and obscure scripts of capital. That is why the official version of this history will not be written by the victors but by the creditors, for whom every human accomplishment or aspiration becomes subject to henceforth interminable wrangling and hoarding. In a world where basic decisions about everything from fisheries and crop rotations to pharmaceuticals, nuclear power, and old-age pensions are ruled by extraterritorial economic reason, the most basic circuits of social lifealliances, obligations, and solidaritieshave been hotwired to disseminate corrosively antisocial energies. Any expression of collective possibility and promise, beleaguered in the best of times, must struggle to make itself heard in an atmosphere filled with endless chattering in praise of immense wealth.

In a moment like this, the most fateful world-historical figures are not captains of industry or globetrotting entrepreneurs, let alone heads of state, but central bankers, fund managers, insurance brokers, and the legions of traders and fixers swarming behind them. They do not presume to rule this world by themselves, trusting in their own righteousness; each wants merely to carve out the most profitable niche, manage one or two variables, guess the trends, beat the averages, take a cut, charge a fee, and let the rest of the world go its way. They do not care for policy or planning, except where it might jack up or bite into their profits. They are generally indifferent, even ignorant, about the global system they help to animate. Their sense of history is calibrated by the split seconds of arbitrage, the volatile turnover of portfolios, the slipstreams of interest, the fitful jockeying over exchange rates, and the implacable arithmetic of the actuarial tables. In striking their deals and hedging their bets, they aspire to achieve a kind of bootstrap transcendence, suspended for as long as possible between too soon and too late, long enough to seize a good chance but not long enough to face the fallout or the blowback. Nobody who can wield the power of capital wants to be stuck in the stubborn temporality of material things and everyday life, even if that remains the only world there is.