Empty Futures

October 8th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 12:52 pm

And so the global debt economy receives another injection of insulin.

The Prime Minister is pleased with his Government’s decision to finally get around to implementing some of the 1983 Labour manifesto

“This is not a time for conventional thinking or outdated dogma but for fresh and innovative intervention that gets to the heart of the problem,” he said. Brown also claimed that taxpayers would be protected and would earn “a proper return”.

In other words, the £50bn (plus £200bn plus £250bn) inducement to the financial fraternity to stop pouting and start talking to each other again is acceptable, on the basis that we can now look forward to a period of sustained economic growth, which will ensure that the loans made today will be paid back with interest, as opposed to being passed on to future generations to sort out.

Just as technological optimism looks at the ecological mess we’re in and sees in the future a set of technofixes that will somehow avoid dumping externalities on anyone or anything, this kind of sudden resurgence of economic optimism from within the depths of a general panic seems to see what is to come as a wonderland of prosperity. How is this possible? Again, like technological optimism, we have to diagnose here a long-ingrained habit of mind, one which finds it difficult to imagine the future as anything but a place where all the key indicators have inched a bit higher.

It’s difficult to get behind this inclination, harder still to place oneself in the position of a European who, sometime before Aquinas decided the merchant’s vocation was a net contributor to the common good, would have seen borrowing against the future as a sin. However, since the Church’s injunctions against usury were done away with, together with its commitment to “just price” doctrines, however, credit has been the secret genius of social change, and with it the conversion of the future into nothing other than the x-axis of a graph measuring changes in the rate of profit. Credit is, to use Johan Galtung’s phrase, all about the “colonization of the future”: if I put myself in debt by taking out a loan, then I mortgage resources which I hope will be available in the future against an increase in my power over the conditions of my life in the present. Economic activity based on turning over credit (the ideal limit of capitalism lies in this direction, towards which the activities of commercial banks point) is therefore one which is aimed at, as it were, sucking in potential from the future. The purpose of this is to augment an actor’s capacity to transform the present and with it the future itself, to create new opportunities and to break existing constraints. But it does so by making the massive temporal redistribution of debt the basis of all economic activity.

But this gain in power, because of the way it hooks into the future, is different from that provided by a “long surplus”. And this difference is vastly different again from that between the long surpluses thinkers like Locke saw as created by money economies and the short surpluses available during the good years of a subsistence economy. The attraction of it is its accompanying weightlessness, the tempting illusion of being unanchored in the uncertainties of real production that, in the fully financialized form to which we’ve become accustomed, it can project. And this weightlessness, together with the sense of autonomy that accompanies it, is generated by an emptying of the future, achieved by concentrating on nothing but the balance sheet on the boardroom table.

So I think the emblem of the current conjuncture has, once again, to be the Angel of History, hurled backwards into the future by the storm caught in his wings, the wreckage of the past a never-ending trail of destruction receding constantly before him. Only now he’s given up contemplating it and is distracted instead by a promissory note he holds in his hand.

UPDATE: Or alternatively, it’s a very Marxian crisis.