Credit and Debt

Have they found a body? They've found no body. We gather with the other spectators along the railings at the edge of the beach. A second helicopter has joined the search, following the edge of the shore to where sand gives way to rock. The currents are very strong, the man next to us says. You never know where a body will end up. By the ambulance, a teenage boy with a towel around his shoulders sits with his head bent down.

We have to look at capitalism as a religion, W. says. Perhaps all our political problems are really religious problems, he says. Benjamin said capitalism is a kind of cult, W. says. It is that mysterious force that supposedly sustains our lives, and money is the god we worship.

Schuld, the word for guilt in German also means debt, W. says. Capitalism functions on credit, so we are all guilty. Debt is only the other side of credit, and it is always the debt of the poor which pays for the credit of the rich. 

Consume!: that is the unspoken religious commandment of capitalism, W. says. This commandment sustains the fantasy that the moment of paying back this debt can be endlessly postponed. Hidden within this fantasy is the real material destruction which makes endless debt possible in the short term, and impossible over the longer term.

The whirling blades of the helicopter leave a shadowy impression in the sea. Beneath it, the lifeguards, spread out over a few hundred meters, paddle out on their floats. Sometimes they dive, and then reappear, but they've found nothing. Much higher up, the second helicopter surveys the whole area. Maybe they have special equipment, a kind of sonar, we speculate.

The apocalypse is coming, W. says. All the signs say that. It's the real future that underlies the false future of capitalism. It is the reality of the real material destruction that underlies the infinite cycle of credit and debt …