Creation Time and Capital Time Professor Michael Northcott School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh
IPCC 5ARb ( 2014 ) finds Mediterranean hardest hit by climate change in Europe with frequent forest fires, heatwaves, and failing harvests but increased heat in N Europe = less energy use In the Americas Brazil and Mexico will be hardest hit with heatwaves, low crop productivity, forest and grassland die o ff Asia faces threats in mid - term from glacial melt and ongoing ocean level rise requiring large - scale resettlement particularly in the Indian delta. Long term ( 2050+ ) food supplies in Asia are threatened by declining availability of Himalayan meltwater. Russia faces long term food scarcity from heat Africa faces desertification, drought, soil erosion, food shortages
UNFCCC designed to ‘prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’ to allow ‘ecosystems to adapt natura lm y to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner’ UNFCCC would mediate between capital time and earth time but its only economic reality is carbon emissions trading
The methods and interests of this world capitalism suspend the very spatial borders and distinctions that give concepts and images of interference and non - interference any intelligible content. The transformation of a spatially conceived principle of non - interference into a spatially undi ff erentiated general system of interference was made possible by the fact that W oodrow Wilson substituted for the original and true Monroe principle ( non - interference in the Americas ) the ideological idea of liberal democracy and its associated images, especially those of ‘free’ world trade and ( a ) ‘free world market. Carl Schmitt, ‘ Grossraum versus universalism’, 1939.
( T)oday nothing is more modern than the onslaught against the political. American financiers, industrial technicians, marxist socialists, and anarchic-syndicalist revolutionaries unite in demanding that the biased rule of politics over unbiased economic management be done away with. There must no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea. The modern state seems to have actually become what Max Weber predicted: a huge industrial plant. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
The acute question to pose is upon whom will fall the frightening power implied in a world - embracing economic and technical organization. This question can by no means be dismissed in the belief that everything would function automatically, that things would administer themselves, and that a government by people over people would be superfluous because human beings would then be absolutely free. For what would they be free? This can be answered by optimistic or pessimistic conjectures, all of which finally lead to an anthropological confession of faith. Schmitt, Political Theology
Economic End Times Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. W e can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world. Frederic Jameson, Future City
Capitalism as an imaginary seems more durable than a stable climate or the North Pole It takes the form of a global electronic skein of communication and information systems that encompass the earth from satellites to trading screens This skein creates global simultaneity - synchronous time - which is more ‘real’ than geographical distance or ancestral time
Through the time of money each surveilled site on earth must accrue or lose $£ E Interest accrual on balance sheets drives a process of ‘liquefaction’ so capital time depreciates ‘natural capital’ Hence ‘social cost’ of Syrian drought and civil war is not on capital balance sheets Carbon emissions trading - atmospheric derivatives - is the only ‘reality’ economists can give to the ‘externality’ of climate change
The logic - time is money - creates fatalism Hence ‘one of the a ff ects of capitalism, that is, of thinking in terms of capitalism, is to generate for most people who do not benefit from its wealth a feeling of helplessness’ ( B Latour, A ff ects of Capitalism )
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In Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari said that the prevalence of psychotropic drugs in societies dominated by contract and money time is the social cost of capitalism Breaking Bad is a deeper metaphor W alter White the chemistry teacher as the drug baron is known as Heisenberg He represents Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ - but he has to kill his business partners one after another
Nineteenth century economists modelled their ‘laws’ - such as their sealed model of supply and demand in a perfect market - on the laws of physics In Breaking Bad the sealed model of supply and demand keeps breaking bad - each attempt to seal o ff the drug production and supply chain turns eventually into the need to kill again
So interest accrual, discounting the future, is a ‘law of nature’ but it is breaking bad into the laws of atmospheric physics But when Lord Stern said that the future e ff ects of climate change required a lower discount rate to bring them onto contemporary balance sheets economists said he was wrong - capital time is more real than climate temporality
Christians from the first century until the sixteenth refused to lend money at interest This refusal originates in the biblical connection between debt and slavery In Israel debts were to be redeemed every fifty years through the return of the principal - land title - to the heirs of the debtor This fifty year monetary cycle prevented speculation and inflation from becoming more real than human slavery or tra ffi cking
Time in Christian culture before modernity was governed by the cycling of Ordinary Time and Sacred Time Ordinary time - days in the year when the crops are either in the ground awaiting harvesting, or the soil lies fallow awaiting the rising of the sun Sacred Time - Christmas, Lent, Easter, Rogation, Harvest, Advent
In Christianity agricultural/economic production is mediated by myth and ritual of liturgical time This mediation mapped the sacrifice of time in planting and harvesting and tending the soil onto the movements of the sun, moon and stars Liturgical time mapped agricultural production onto the quantity of sunlight emitted onto the earth’s surface
Time in Christian theology is given time The Creator gives time to Adam to tend the creatures - and also gives rest The balance between ordinary and sacred time made 100+ ‘holy’ days in pre - Reformation Europe in addition to Sunday But usury destroys time as gift and hence in capital time ‘time is money’, so Keynes wrong when he said rising GDP over generations results in more leisure GDP has to rise indefinitely in usury/debt based money systems because without limits on debt creation GDP is required continually to rise to meet rising interest payments Hence future climate costs must be discounted to zero > 50yrs
Modern economic production is mediated by the instantaneous rituals of consumption which ‘ take the waiting out of wanting ’ So climate scientists’ accounts of a temporal lag between cause and e ff ect lacks cultural purchase Monetised compression of space/time produces a new consciousness of instantaneity - delayed gratification also disappears from national and corporate accounts
Adam Smith first imagined Homo economicus as acting towards a providential alignment between small business makers But this new providence involved monetising space and time and dissolved the old forms of their cultural mediation such as guilds, liturgical time, virtue Marx understood the monetisation of space as rent and time as wage as an ethico - political and not only an economic project
Taylorisation of factory/wage time - time and motion - is the logic of time already contained in Smith’s account of pin making So time is commoditised - mathematised - in ways that deny its reception from ancestors, gods or the heavens Now the signs from the heavens reveal that mathematical time - atomic time - is a social construct that is unsituated in astronomical time and cannot resolve climate temporalities
To get climate temporalities into modern forms of representation economists invent a ‘carbon emissions market’ of financial derivatives in which atmospheric change - the laws of physics - are represented in the post - political abstract market mechanism But derivatives are subject to expert manipulation - e.g. High Frequency T rading which relies on time stamp technologies that give the trading advantage to the highest precision time stamping machine Carbon emissions derivatives represent a new market in the toxic waste of the fossil fuel industry in the atmosphere Underlying assumption of R Coase’s ‘Social cost’ paper that ‘social cost’ only ‘valuable’ as marketable property
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