°Usura/Subprima
The introductory paragraphs of “In Praise of Usura,” written with Melinda Cooper:
In the heady maelstrom of official and tripled declarations of crisis, there are some notable phrases doing the rounds, again. With a recycled air of self-evidence, we have all heard of green new deals, and new readings of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to note the most prominent. We had joked between ourselves, and somewhat grimly, that there would soon be more serious talk of the sin of usury. Or, that it would be taken seriously in widening circles. In other words, the various attempts to fasten panic to desire, under the rubric of such a perfect storm, would not only reach back to the moral economy of the 1930s for dubious inspiration. In the circulation of what would pass as critique and commentary, there would not only be talk of parasitic capital, of something called unproductive (or unreal) capital, or another round of calls for greater regulation, criminalisation, or to euthanise the rentier. Of these, there had been much discussion already. But, just to make everything more explicit, we thought these motifs – these fantasies of equilibrium, without which no punctual, if not always anomalous, definition of crisis is possible – would be joined by usury, that more medieval bundling of evils.
In March 2009, and rehearsing an earlier piece in The Guardian, Ann Pettifor (self-described co-author of the Green New Deal and co-founder of Jubilee 2000) wrote for the Huffington Post on the need to revive the sin of usury. In the next month, Harper’s published a special edition, featuring an article by Thomas Geoghegan on “infinite debt,” in which he lamented the dismantling of “the most ancient of human laws, the law on usury.” Of six pieces carried on Democracy Now’s website, five were published since January; while The Daily Kos carried a post in the same month titled “Obama vs. Usury? Why Not?”
Much of this had an obviousness about it. After all, the logic that proceeds from the announcement of a crisis in subprime to that of (as the jargon has it) the liquidation of toxic assets requires a moral turn against usury – and such that, among other things, words like liquidation begin to sound either reasonably bereft of consequence or morally obligatory. We will return to the question of these consequences below, but note that the current talk of usury marks, under the banner of a tripled crisis, the re-invigoration of certain conservative agendas which circled around what the mainstream opted to call the anti-globalisation movement. And, just as the panic over some apparently new-found globalisation at the end of the 20th century was attended by an actual proliferation of controls on the movements of people – and in some notable instances, open alliances between greens, social democrats and xenophobic groups during the campaigns against the MAI and WTO in the late 1990s – we would argue that the inclination here is toward a normative rectification that is more or less violent in its requirements and decidedly transcendental in its vantage point. […]
:: trackback url | permanent link |
Douglas Rushkoff has been posting excerpts from his forthcoming book, LIFE INC.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, at BOING BOING. This one, in particular, http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/07/debt-is-not-a-good-p.html (same day as your post ;) quips that “Debt is not a good product” and adds: “I’m arguing in my book, this whole scheme was arranged by 14th Century monarchs as a way of making money by having money, rather than providing value”.
Mark Crosby [May 13, 2009 @ 3:42 am]
Ah yes, “activity and value creation”.
I suppose the gist of this debate (without leaving aside many of its complexities which are in no way incidental) is to what extent one reads these admonitions to “activity and value creation” as the command to an intensification/extension of labour. And at a time when the story is simultaneously one of subprime and declining rates of GDP/GNP growth - with some sense of what subprime, Domestic Product, National Product mean in all their (gendered, racialised, sexualised, embodied) complexities.
s0metim3s [May 13, 2009 @ 1:10 pm]
Brilliant
Johann [June 18, 2009 @ 10:10 pm]
Thanks. We thought so too - or, to be more specific, we thought it made some huge analytical moves forward, for us and generally.
s0metim3s [June 20, 2009 @ 6:17 pm]