I normally do not like it when writers
use a personal scale to talk about the economics of countries. If you see that
rhetorical move in the wild, you know that it is about to be used as an excuse as
to why we have no policy that somehow takes care of a broad base of people but oddly
can still funnel contracts to arms dealers and remove social obligations from
society’s wealth winners. I’m going to talk not about a household with its
simplification, but myself as an economic actor.
When I was a younger man, I had wanted
to be a poet. I took the classes and studied the literature, but not too hard.
I also wanted to go out with my friends and drink as much as I could almost
every night and be told I was clever. I wanted that poet’s life. So, when I was
close to graduating from undergrad, I applied to MFA programs so that I could continue
that life. I only applied to four programs and did not get into any of them. I
then sat around in the town I was trying to leave for a whole year and waited
on the application cycle to come back around. This time, I told myself I was
being smart and pragmatic and leveraging my skills for a future that was more
certain than being a poet. I was going to get a master’s in literature. I know
it sounds strange now, but at the time an MA in literature made sense from a
pragmatic standpoint. This was in 2005, times were different.
I got into a program and was funded so
that I could justify moving halfway across the country with me and my truck and
my dog. I was about three months in when my anxiety was spiking, and I was not
sure if I had made the right decision. I had spent a whole year waiting for the
opportunity to redo the applications, to be accepted in somewhere and get out
of the one town and now I was somewhere new and somehow all my problems were
not solved. I just wanted to drop out. I wanted to get my dog and some of my
books and just go somewhere. I was not sure where I wanted to go, but I had to
go somewhere. The most concrete place I had thought about was going to the
beach somewhere in Mexico.
But here is the problem with that. You
cannot drop out. I had my truck, but that truck was registered in the old start.
I had bank accounts, I had debt, I had old friends, I had new friends. I had known
people in my past who had made this severing of the past, but once that
severing was done, their social position was a step down, and they had to exist
in society – new linkages were necessary. Even the most off the grid person who
can make everything they need and never talk to another person still exists in
the realm of social relations because of how property is designated in our
country. You must be off the grid somewhere, such that you are either
trespassing or on your own land which creates its own tax obligations. Now,
these linkages are not necessarily bad, either those that bind us to corporations
or the state or other people, but they are undeniable. Each choice we make that
involves another body creates these linkages, so that every other future choice
is brought forth in context of all the others that have happened in the past.
We love the idea of a Tarzan or a Robinson Crusoe, but even these men were brought
to their states through social interactions.
I talk about these personal linkages
because reading in economic development has really shown me that these linkages
are not just for one person that wants to drop out. One of my old thoughts was
that if I were running a developing country, I would just repudiate the debt.
This thought was spurred on by reading books like “Confessions of an Economic
Hitman” where it seemed that so much of the work of the multilateral
institutions was done in bad faith and saddled the developing countries with,
at best, questionable infrastructure for hydroelectric power that displaced thousands
of people. At worst, the funds from loans were siphoned off by corrupt rulers
and spend on European riches. Either way, if a new government came in post-post-colonial
and represented the will of the people, there would be a big debt overhang that
hamstrings the government from investing in the people of the nation and instead
facilitated the flow of resources outward so that any growth paid off the loans
in the investor countries. Reading Yilmaz Akyüz’s essay “Internationalization
of Finance and Changing Vulnerabilities in Emerging and Developing Economies”
really showed me that the linkages that I found as an individual within the
capitalistic system that bound me to the system even though I wanted to get
away from it were persistent even at higher levels of analysis. A country
cannot just say goodbye to the IMF or the world bank, but there is internal and
external debt in internal and external currencies held both by people inside
and outside the countries that make any kind of withdraw impossible. These
linkages mean that trying to start a new slate is not just turning your back on
the IMF but is a huge and seemingly impossible coordination problem with all
your creditors and equity holders to make any kind of fair reconcilati0on with
the past. And that whole thing is that we are talking about equitable
distribution on claims of property while people inside the Developing Countries
live in dollars a day – somehow their claims matter less, as we have seen with
contemporary issues with Puerto Rico. On top of that these ownership claims are
transferrable, as Akyüz does mention a contemporary issue with Argentinian
debt, where a fund came and bought debt for pennies on the dollar and then sued
Argentina in a court in New York and their claims were decided to be valid, so the
vulture fund was able to claim possession of Argentinian assets abroad. In this
case they were able to gain possession of a ship even though they were not the
original claimant of the debt.
What we see
is that these linkages are strong and persistent and no matter what, you can
not pull yourself away from them. The economic system has its own logic at
every level, from the personal to the seeming sovereign. I’m not sure what is
to be done. Akyüz suggests that “one of the key lessons of history of economic
development us that successful policies are associated not with autarky or full
integration into the global economy, but strategic integration seeking to use
the opportunities that a broader economic space my offer,” all the while minimizing
risks (55). An arms-length, circumspect relationship is probably a best-case
option of what we can do. Full integration means that you give up control, but
you cannot fully remove yourself from the relations and linkages as even a global
economic hermit like North Korea has borders.
I have long
had a metaphor in my head about what capitalism is. It is such a totalizing
force that you cannot imagine postmodernism without it, since it is the first
world system that you cannot really think of something outside the world system.
Even the development and collapse of the Soviet system happened in the context
of capitalism, and if Marx is right, would not have developed without capitalism
developing first. Where Marx seems to have been wrong was that Capitalism is
malleable and changeable and flexible with the development of technology, but
it subsumes all. In his novel “Cat’s Cradle,” Kurt Vonnegut posits the idea of
a new substance, Ice-9. In the novel, water had normally only crystalized at
our commonly known temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit because that was the only
way that the molecule “knew” how to do. Substances crystalize because once energy
is removed from a system, molecules find a way to order themselves based on
their chemical properties and the surrounding conditions. A scientist in the
book figures out a way to make water crystalize at a higher temperature. This
is an incredible problem for the characters in the book, as once water “learns”
a new way to crystalize, every crystal of the new substance is a seed crystal
that once it touches more water, will teach the new molecules this crystal form
and so on. All the water becomes Ice-9, and the world as we know it is destroyed.
This is capitalism. Once in existence, it spreads broader and deeper until
every breath you take is monetized – and there’s no escape.
Works Cited
Akyüz, Y. 2015. “Internationalization of finance and changing
vulnerabilities in emerging and developing economies,” South Centre Research
Papers 60.
Perkins,
J. (2016). Confessions of an economic hit man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Vonnegut,
K. (2010). Cat’s cradle. New York: Dial Press Trade Pbks.
