There is a justified suspicion of those who use the third person plural to designate a particular groups with particular interests. How can I say ‘we’ at all without usurping the place which would allow you to speak? And how could you invoke a collective identity without excluding me in my specificity and difference? The danger lies in refusing to acknowledge that we all stand before the same horizon, the same looming catastrophe, whether we want to or not.
What is this horizon?
Time and money come to us from the outside. They fix our lives, rather than express it. We measure ourselves in relation to them, rather than evaluating them in relation to ourselves. It is not man who has replaced God, but time and money that has replaced man. Time and money are not our projections, but we the projections of time and money.
That from a paper from William Large. How should one understand the apparently abstract claim that the human being – you or I – are merely the projections of time and money? The capture of our belief and our desire by the impersonal workings of capital.
The risks of inflation, until the eighteenth centuries, meant that total coinage could only be introduced with the conquest of new territories. With overseas investment, the asset-stripping of the conquered territories, the organization of the slave trade, such an increase in coinage could occur. But the greatest step came with the nationalization that created the Bank of England, which allowed a secure value to be attached to bank notes, enabling long term, low interest loans which could be secured against future taxation. Thus, the economy could function on the basis of an infinitely deferred redemption of a promise of value.
Money is thus created as a loan on the basis of a debt. But this means production is always increased in order to obtain a profit on the loan. The value of assets is now determined through a speculative anticipation of its rate of return. But just as currency is circulated in the form of banknotes which never have to be cashed in, the value of assets is determined by a future which never arrives. Since the market will not crash (the government can always raise more taxes), there is now no limit to the amount of money that can be created. Our material and social reality is wagered on the basis of an ideal future; the national power which creates the Bank of England it is seized by what it seized. The issuing of government bonds and, later, trading on financial futures and derivatives, exacerbates what has been already set in motion.
What follows? Prices are determined for commodities, excess production is encouraged and new needs are created with the consequences of ecological devastation and financial uncertainty. The operation of the free market sees labor subordinated by debt bondage, slavery, the threat of unemployment or the outsourcing of labor to countries where it can be bought more cheaply. Labor has no choice but to participate either because of debt or because it is enthralled by the idea of making money.
‘Time and money are not our projections, but we the projections of time and money’: as indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital. What does this mean? Is it a question, as I have suggested in a previous post, of a change of perception which might precipate direct political action? I argued, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, that one might rethink the proletariat as the subject of history, expanding this notion to include each of us, all of us, insofar as we fall short of a molar ideal. But I think my argument remains naive whilst I pass over the real class differences which Large indicates as follows:
In finance capital, the fundamental class difference is not between capital and labour. Rather inequality is measured by mobility. The lie of the market is that exchange is equal, but one exchanges for subsistence, whereas the other for speculation. In the latter case, the presene exchange is measured against future profit, and in the short term a loss can be sustained, whereas in the former, exchange is measured against life now. Nonetheless, it is speculation, rather than subsistence which determines the terms of exchange, and thus 24% of the world population lives in extreme, not relative poverty.
Large is drawing on the arguments of Philip Goodchild in his brilliant Capitalism and Religion. As he continues:
The second fundamental class difference, Philip writes, is between ‘relations of contract and those of property’. Normally in exchange, it is imagined that there is an instantaneous swap between the buyer and seller, since even if the product takes time to reach the buyer it is no different from what it was when it left the hands of the seller. But in finance capital, profit cannot be given all at once. It takes time, and the time is measured by the expectation of profit in the future. Every investment is a contract over time, as opposed to property which can be disposed of at any time, and the power of finance capital is measured by how much time it can wait for future profit. It obscures the inequality and property capital, by treating contracts as though they were properties. Thus shares are bought and sold as though they were property like any other, but in fact the value of shares are only truly measurable over time, as the expectation of future profit.
Result? The autonomous free market leads to the transformation of the world into a market for goods and services; formerly self-sufficient peoples, along with their customs and traditions, are homogenised; more fossil fuels are consumed and carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of goods and services; fertilisers, pesticides and pollutants are used in order to extract the maximum possible yield, and agricultural land is taken from rural populations in order to provide irrigation for industry. Alongside the reality of ecological catastrophe, there is the threat of economic catastrophe: how might any government bail out an economic crisis when the national economy is vulnerable to the volatility of the international movement of finance? There is also the danger that national economies default on the loans.
The most pressing task is the awakening of a new universalism – of a commonwealth alert to ecological and financial catastrophe. But no longer can this be conceived operating within the existing political framework. Our political system encourages short-termism and populism: the political candidate must be adept at handling the mass media; it is necessary to look and speak the part, which means wealth, appearance and debating skills supplant the ethical sensibility which would allow the politician to respond to what matters most. A political response articulated out of a universal awareness is barely conceivable.
How to bind apathy in the face of existing politics into a universal mobilisation? One might say: there is no one to listen; the commonwealth has disappeared; there is no public when the European tradition of reason with its faith in a public standard of rationality has collapsed, and when there is only suspicion of the same values which once united us: truth, wisdom, the human being. Another response: those values have been swept away by the value of money, which is not just a medium of exchange, but the very possibility of economic relations. Then what matters is to transvalue those values which have been handed down to us, and, through this transvaluation, understand why it is the world has been stolen from us, and by what infernal mechanism.
Large continues:
As Philip reminds us, since Plotinus, philosophy has seen the life of the soul as being synonymous with time. Our interiority, as opposed to the exteriority of nature, is essentially temporal, and the temporality of the universe ows itself to us. The quantifiable time of movement is dependent on the intensive temporality of life. This intensive time cannot be exchanged. I can give my time to you, but nonetheless I still have to live this time. I cannot abstract myself from it, and this time can either go slow or fast. The fact, however, that I cannot live forever means that this time can be used as measure. The value of something is measured by the amount of time I am willing to spend upon it in relation to the amount of time I have left. Time appears, therefore, to have the same function as money. it is both a measure of value, and a value in itself.
Against what I wrote in an earlier post, the issue surrounding the ideal form of the worker as it is ‘miraculated’ from the body of capital is a sideshow. It is not our aspiration to live up to molar forms of worker or consumer that matters so much as the body of capital itself as it opposes itself to subsistence and survival. A transvaluation of money would involve a transvaluation of time. Seize back the time that has been taken from you. And, in doing, learn to say ‘we’: for is it not in this seizing back that a new kind of commonwealth might open? Beyond micrological analyses of micropolitics and the elevation of specific differences to the level of the analysis of class difference, there is, first of all, the task of awakening oneself to the commonwealth of those whose time has been stolen. The commonweath which comprises each of us, all of us, as we fall below what the transcendencies of time and money require of us.
Then we are bound together by a sense of our finitude – by a sense that time is limited. By an urgency born from the fact that we will die.
The future of capital is diametrically opposed to subsistence and survival. To survive is to postpone death, but for capital there is no death. Capital does not flee death in anxiety. To avoid death is to know that it is there. Capital does not even recognise it. It does not have to triumph over death, since it is not part of its time. In the future there will be no death.
Capital will not die. But we will. What, then, of our future – yours and mine?
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