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.

[...] 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.

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. [...]

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.

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. [...]

it becomes startlingly clear that the longest-lasting strands of Marxist discourse are those grounded in defeat, hinging on the experience of one reversal aft er another. [...]

That is how we can approach, on one hand, the statement made by Perry Anderson when he relaunched the New Left Review in January 2000:

The only starting-point for a realistic Left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat . . . No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon . . . But if the human energies for a change of system are ever released again, it will be from within the metabolism of capital itself. We cannot turn away from it. Only in the evolution of this order could lie the secrets of another one.

And alongside it, this remark by Fredric Jameson:

The vocation of Utopia lies in failure . . . its epistemological value lies in the walls it allows us to feel around our minds, the invisible limits it gives us to detect by sheerest induction, the miring of our imaginations in the mode of production itself, the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself.

[...] Think of the example often cited by Thomas Friedman: the California farmworker earning $14,000 a year who acquired a mortgage for a house worth $720,000. Instead of sniffing, as Friedman does, that such people should not be living in such houses, we should ask, “Why not?” In the absence of any comprehensive housing policy, and in light of the manifest inequalities traversed by the circuits of credit, why is the farmworker’s leverage any more outrageous than the deals struck on Wall Street every day? Instead of trying to regain some prudent sense of proportion that once again excludes the wrong sort of people from borrowing, shouldn’t we aim for a future in which nobody is, as Deleuze put it, “too poor for debt”?