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This lesson seems especially apt for the good citizens of the West, many of whom tend to mistake their own moments of private repose for the final realization of peace on earth. Against those who assume that the planet has been working its way toward an eventual state of tranquil prosperity—except for some final pieces of humanitarian business to be tidied up, a few cases of unresolved ethnic unrest, some shocking atrocities, and an occasional multinational police action—one should point out that the fault lines of conflict keep spreading all over the place. The front lines of warfare may not be visible all at once, but they cut everywhere, across households and workplaces, down streets and over countrysides, around patches of urban turf and rural tracts, through overlapping jurisdictions and spheres of influence; they weave back and forth through forced migrations and acts of exodus, erased and overwritten by territorial seizures, armed threats, surgical strikes, and grand strategic zones. What was advertised as an era of peace, when war was finally confined to the hinterlands or carefully administered in calibrated doses, should instead be recognized as a generalized system of violence long in the making, a fraught world where peace remains a precarious and elusive exception—and that only by virtue of careful stagecraft . In the name of keeping the global peace, the strongest combatants have claimed permanent emergency powers with monopoly privileges.
man this aligns so well with some of my ideas (on the prevailing attitude being that things are fine, the system is working, there are no more big battles to fight, now all we have to do is live in peace etc)
[...] She tries to outsmart the bombers. But, Kluge notes, it is too late. Her only chance to develop an effective strategy against the bombers did not occur that morning or even the night before, or in 1939, or in 1933 . . . but in 1918, at the end of the previous war, when she would have had to join with thousands of other teachers, to organize and teach “hard,” in order to build lasting social relationships that might have blocked the rise of the Nazis. But Gerda learns the lesson of November 1918 in April 1945: Once upon a time, it would have been possible to turn history around.
from the short story “Strategy from Below” by Alexander Kluge, about a German schoolteacher during an air raid in 1945
That is why the issue of debt relief necessarily raises historical and political questions about the way such debts have been contracted, enforced, and unequally imposed across whole societies and the whole world. There is, to say the least, always a disparity between the official parties who contract debts and the multitude of people who try to live under the burdens of sovereign indebtedness. In the contemporary global economy, indebtedness should not be viewed as the accidental product of bad luck or poor planning: as we have seen, it functions everywhere as a regime of top-down control and network discipline, designed to replace older forms of social negotiation and political autonomy. As this regime becomes entrenched, every dimension of social life will be restructured according to the wishes of the creditors and their local enforcers, rationing access to everything from work and education to clean water and air, subjecting every component of the local economy to increasingly direct pressures from the global markets. [...]
[...] More people did indeed receive anti-retroviral drugs than before, because the US government brokered a patent-protection deal with the Big Pharma companies. Surely this strategy has its costs. Should we count the number of people “saved” by the pro-patent approach against the number of people who might have been saved if the patents had simply been broken by the endangered countries? And who can quantify the damage done by narrowly moralizing public health campaigns? As long as the standard of performance begins with “better than nothing,” there will always be a semblance of progress even if nothing really changes. But it is difficult to celebrate the number of people “alive today” because of President Bush’s policies—which is Bono’s constant refrain—without asking whether more people might be alive if different priorities had prevailed. Or to put it another way: whenever a superpower trumpets the lives it has saved in one place, it is absolutely necessary to ask about the lives it has taken elsewhere.
It is hard to avoid the impression that the “new paradigm” is essentially the same as the old one, now pursuing global free market restructuring in the name of morality rather than economic efficiency. [...] Above all Sachs wants to argue that the end of poverty can be accomplished without diminishing, let alone threatening, the accumulation regime organized by the rich world. Thus the accent of guilt has been switched from the past to the future: the rich should no longer feel guilty about the historical processes that brought about impoverishment and suffering, because that had nothing to do with the accumulation of their wealth, but they should henceforth feel responsible for ameliorating the suffering of others, because their security demands it and, in a pinch, their surplus can afford it.
on Jeffrey D. Sachs' book The End of Poverty (I think I gave it away without ever having read it because even as an unwoke teenager I thought it seemed kinda weak)
[...] Credit appears as a kind of corrupt Absolute Idea developing itself in ever higher spirals of alienated activity within a hollowed-out community. Although it might seem, Marx argues, that credit would allow for the purest, most transparent (because abstract) form of mutual recognition, it is in fact the most direct form of subjugation, because it takes on the dimensions of a whole social and cultural order. The one who must accept credit (the debtor) submits to the judgment of the creditor, who stands for the judgment of all those who possess wealth. Credit becomes a more thorough way to mediate the struggle between master and slave: everyone who participates in the struggle thereby becomes committed to maintaining its formal structure. system as the alienation of an essential social “wealth,” and based on that understanding, “debt” appears as the negation of an originary or potential plenitude.
The credit system ... accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market ... At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these elements the dissolution of the old mode of production.
The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the driving force of capitalist production, enrichment through the exploitation of others’ labor, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; but on the other hand, it establishes the form of transition to a new mode of production.
citation: Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage
Books, 1981), p. 572.
Nothing obligates us to reckon with history, except history. There would be no need to think about history if it always flowed like a river or rolled back and forth like a tide, indifferent to whatever we might have to say about it. And so when we say that history opens possibilities or sets limits, expands horizons or shrinks them, bears promises or poses dangers, delivers surprises or disappoints expectations, we are not simply describing a particular state of things or recording a series of events, but expressing that we are implicated in something much more dynamic and complex. Whether or not it ever takes shape as something else—a story, a structure, a project, or a destiny—history always makes its presence known by drawing us in its movements, even and especially when we come to realize that we were already there. [...]
pretty
So we live between two debts. On one hand, there is the ineradicable debt described by Agamben that comes from having or being a potentiality that we can never really possess, exhaust, or fulfill, which prompts us to live as if we were always in pursuit of something else, like happiness, which can never be ours alone. On the other hand, there is the full array of as yet unreckoned debts that constitute the complex historical situation in which we live, ranging from unresolved family romances and the duties of identity to the very persistent obligations imposed by the dominant forms of political and economic power. A practical orientation toward the overdetermined complexity of history demands that we learn both to bind and to break our debts, coupling a willful effort to preserve and augment our common powers with a determined refusal to capitulate to the regime of the always already there.
also pretty on the surface but I'll have to think about this one more to see if it holds up
Th e very idea that we live in history as a kind of immediate and infinite indebtedness can be understood as a defining attitude of modernity. On one hand, as Nietzsche described, human societies undergo a ruthlessly inward reorganization as soon as each person internalizes the drama of obligation within himself. Subjectivity twists itself into a perpetually bad conscience, deferring its sovereign powers to a higher order that, in default of anything else, is none other than “value” itself, raised to a moral eminence. The structural and rhetorical permutations of that defaulted or deferred sovereignty thus constitute so many different apparatuses of indebtedness. On the other hand, as Polanyi describes it, by generalizing value relations throughout the social order, human societies turn inside out, held together by nothing but exchange and the enforcement of exchange. Capitalism is that apparatus of indebtedness in which all debts, public and private, pass through the cash nexus. Postmodernity, as Jameson describes it, would be the moment when this process has run its course, so that the only common element animating the global historical situation is the virtually universal obligation to participate in the world of markets, which have staked a claim upon everything once produced and protected within the framework of more restricted and protective social arrangements. [...]