The novel’s genre was keyed to a particular social order: bourgeois, individualistic and meliorist; its advent, some 150 years earlier, signalled a profound shift in sensibility. For the first time in literary consciousness, as Mikhail Bakhtin observed, “time and the world” became historical, unfolding “as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process.”

Temporalities and timescapes vary across space and through history, with different ‘economies’ embodying diverse dispositions of time. Who owns the future: the gods on Mount Olympus, or is it – like credit – a resource to be exploited by the monied classes? In a capitalist society, time is sliced and priced by states and capital — a time-money continuum.

The conceptual twin of this ‘modern’ literary sensibility is Progress. It too courses through Mann’s novel. Its champion is the Italian lawyer Lodovico Settembrini, who sees himself as a warrior for freedom, knowledge, transformative action, and ‘Europe,’ in opposition to tyranny, bondage, passivity, and inertia—in short, ‘Asia.’

Capital is the command of labour time, with the worker appearing as a commodity: personified labour-time.

One hundred years on, ecological collapse is provoking a crisis in our perception of the ontological coordinates of human life, including nature and time. I’ll return to these. But first, how did we get here? And what is ‘capitalist time’?

In severing time from the natural and supernatural realms, it helped foster a vision of an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences, the sphere of Newtonian science. Time could now be imagined as a uniform continuum: linear, divisible, and abstract

In medieval Europe and the Islamic civilisations, clocks were used less to measure time than by clerics to mark it — the call to prayer.

Magic Mountain is a time-rich novel. It asks: is time a linear axis of existence or is it subjective and non-linear, a concertina? Is boredom the ‘compression of time’?

Capitalism eats time, and in the process erases nature.

Capitalist temporalities are differentiated, contradictory and uneven across space and time, and they face resistance. In the system’s ‘primitive’ phases, the plantations and workshops and warships and factories became battlegrounds in a war of capitalist time-consciousness.

The very idea of the ‘savage’ was constructed on the belief that to be fully human requires a rigorous separation of ritual and habit from the rhythms of nature. Indigenous peoples’ lack of alienation from their land served to justify the colonists’ alienation of their land

Religious time and capitalist time consciousness adapted to one another, most famously in seventeenth-century England, where Puritans “censored the social calendar, flattened the swinging seasonality of time and decreed instead a mechanical routine of six days’ work followed by one day’s pray.”

In European visualisations of the human journey, the correlative shift was from Providence to Progress — from a sacred cosmology “bounded by the approach of the Last Judgment” to a secular historical time in continuous forward motion.

the Progress idea became infused with connotations of ‘economic infinity’ — the beliefs that human industry has infinite wealth-creating potential and that the credit system is endlessly elastic.

In The Magic Mountain, the debate on progress pits the bourgeois progressive Settembrini against Naptha, a socialist-reactionary Jesuit. The latter was nostalgic for medieval hierarchy and sternly critical of liberal Progress.

In his Arcades Project, Benjamin highlighted a paradox in the temporality of commodity society. Competition drives the production of ever greater masses of commodities for which buyers must be found, with ever new lines and new seductions, yet novelty is immediately rendered obsolete by its own onward rush.

The SPD had become prisoner of its conviction that the historical tide was on its side, pushed ever onward by “technological development.”

finally to the “naïvely complacent” belief — shared by social-democrat and liberal economists — that nature donates itself “gratis” for the benefit of humanity. These beliefs, Benjamin suggests, lay at the root of the SPD’s rejection of radical strategies geared to rupturing the historical present.

Fossil fuels had become the elixir of growth. As Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics, long ago understood, fossil fuels confer on technologies “the invaluable advantage of being employable at any time and in any place, and of never suffering an interruption’ in their work.

Today, ecological time is changing globally, and fast. No longer is our image of the planetary future simply an extrapolation of the present. Ecological time is, for a significant minority, infused with a sense of hair-raising change.

The earth’s climate of the last ten thousand years was uniquely benign and stable, if at times with sharp local and occasional minor global volatility. That age is over. Put differently: whereas all human-recorded timescapes were lived under a (relatively) serene sky, over the next thousands, or millions, of years the forecast is stormy.

 “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.”

Far from being an idiosyncratic fantasy peculiar to Benjamin, it is a red thread through radical politics. (To give a notable example, it’s there in W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of the tragically missed opportunity to unite workers across the “colour line,” in Black Reconstruction in America.)

It’s against this background that Benjamin’s arguments, and his uncovering of the strings that attached the complacent historicism of his day to the modes and rhythms of capitalist time, appear, well, jetztzeitig.

And when it comes to human rights we don't really need to prove that you are representing a group of people as long as you are saying something that is right in the point of view of the human rights while protecting people's rights. So it's of use, it's evident that you are representing those whose rights are violated by this project. So I think that it's not a real debate, it's just trying to phase out from real debate to ask for the legitimacy of NGOs who are talking on behalf of poor people. Yeah, I think that's all.

And I really do think that it would be wonderful to have Sebastian pursue that subject in the affirmative way that he's referred to here in order to get the word out because I think he's right that he in overlooking the positive. And his writing at this point serves the cause of those critics. And, in particular, I guess I'm aware of the critics coming from the American Enterprise Institute and from the right who have been on an assault against the NGO movement and particularly around these issues of democracy and credibility and legitimacy.

But are we addressing them with an intention to achieve what Sebastian refers to, this more pluralism, more democracy? Or as some of those writing in the American Enterprise or on NGO Watch on the website are I think intent on doing, really undermining the NGO movement to the advantage of the United States and the sole superpower and the role that it should play as a democracy and that others don't have the right to play.

I wish he had seen the meeting that I intended at the World Bank with Delphine and with several others where the World Bank several months before the project was adopted where somehow mysteriously the World Bank had mobilized to bring so-called NGO leaders from Chad and Cameroon. And no one knew who they were and how they got there, at first.

Well, it turned out that many of these people in this group themselves had very dubious basis for being there in that meeting or themselves had been led into the meeting without knowing what they were doing.

But this issue of accountability, of legitimacy within the NGO movement is one that the credible NGOs have been dealing with for some time and will continue to struggle with. But I think that we have to be careful about feeding the frenzy that has grown in the attack on the NGO movement.

I can guarantee you that the right will hate the book. They're going to hate the book because it's basically sympathetic towards the role the World Bank tries to play.

The right way to deal with episodes where NGOs do, which by the way is not Chad-Cameroon, in my book there are other examples which I regard as much clearer, open and shut examples of NGO campaigns that were wrong, flat wrong. And I don't think this about Chad-Cameroon and the book doesn't say this about Chad-Cameroon.

I do regard opposition to western China poverty project, which the Tibetan (unintelligible) picked up as a very bad campaign. And I had a whole chapter about that, and it's not a subject of today's debate.

I think that you've done a very clever job of talking to your audience. You provided what actually you critique NGOs for doing. I think that you provided a very biased, an inaccurate description of your book. And the outraged part of me says and you can't get away with it. Your book does not say I am going to look at one to two percent of NGO campaigns. Your book does not say 98 to 99 percent of campaigns, and therefore most of the campaigns have been really useful. This is interesting that your book doesn't do it. Because what your book does do, and does a wonderful job of doing is saying let me look at James Wolfensohn warts and all, he's part good, part bad. Let me look at the good, let me look at the bad and then come up with what do I think of this man in the end and what do we think of him. You've just presented your book as if it does that on NGOs. That's not what you do. That's not what your articles on foreign policy do.

on your methodology could you tell us how many hours you spent interviewing James Wolfensohn and World Bank people? And then how many days you spent on the ground in Chad-Cameroon and in China, and what resources besides Ö we've heard a lot about Chad-Cameroon Ö but what resources besides Robert Wade's work is your China chapter based on? So a methodological question.

I'm a representative of Mr. Ngarlejy Yorongar, North America, the last elected president of the past election in Chad. We really appreciate the opportunity. It is a pleasure for me to be here myself. What the World Bank is doing in Chad it is catastrophic. Can you explain that people live in the region that oil is getting out, talk in presence of foreign oil that went to Chad, about composition of those three at the gun point. My leader almost lost his life for the last election. He was in favor of the NGO, he's still alive. And I'm really surprised about what the World Bank is doing in the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline project is the wrong matter for other countries. It's a disaster. Thank you.

I don't doubt as Sebastian Mallaby doesn't doubt in his book that Jim Wolfensohn was motivated by a desire to reduce poverty, but why the conclusion that this is the institution that can do the most to reduce it? Is it the right people with the right training with the right world view?

Part of the frustration is external and equally part of it I think is driven by the fear that if you put wrong foot wrong in your environmental impact assessment it can have 17 volumes. If there is one bit wrong you will attract an NGO campaign, which will point out the one thing that you got wrong or the three things that you got wrong and leave aside the ones that you got right. And this will be debilitating. You will then have faced a media campaign, a reaction in Congress and so on.

Thank you. About the future of the Chad-Cameroon project I think that the broad coalition of NGOs working on the project have been consistent by saying that the Chad-Cameroon project would not help elevate poverty in Chad in the context where there is no democracy, there is no good government, and where people are poor and where their view is not taken into account. And that is exactly what is happening now. The project is over and money is coming to Chad. And there is no signal to show that the project is helping poor people in Chad. The main reason that the World Bank was given to say that this project would help elevate poverty was the law on the management of the revenue, which established the oversight committee. But what is clear now is that the oversight committee would not be effective enough to allow the money to go to the benefit of the poor. Because as you all know the government of Chad will always find a way to go around all those and it's always already happening, because the oversight committee does not have the real power to take action against the misused of funds.

For those of us who believe as Sebastian said that trading oil for pluralism is actually a positive goal, there was a lot to hope for this project, and there's a lot still to try and use the project for. And if people like Dobian Assingar, who's in the room today, and is a member of the oversight committee can be empowered, if civil society in Chad can be empowered to play a more important role in the country and in the spending of money

I wanted to pose two questions I guess related to that. One is at what point do we stop and reflect whether or not these are the right projects to be rushing through and implementing? There seems to be a nostalgia for the time when infrastructure projects, which I understand from several articles and from hearing Mr. Mallaby speak before, are the solution to poverty. The time when those projects could push ahead without hindrances such as the social and environmental safeguard policies of the institution.

Sebastian you mentioned here again that NGOs have exaggerated, and I think that you seem to say that we have exaggerated on the environment. And in the Chad-Cameroon project we have exaggerated on the environment you claim because Exxon has provided 19 volumes of environmental assessment studies. And you are repeating that twice. I wonder what the journalistic standard was that leads you to believe that the simple volume of paper provided by Exxon is actually addressing the environment when there are World Bank commissioned reports out there that have been out there for several years which show very clearly that everything from coastal resources to indigenous peoples, to fresh water sources is actually being threatened by mistakes made in the project. That's a specific question.

you seem to believe that the poor are better off without NGO involvement, without World Bank safeguard policies, without the World Bank inspection panel. So I'm wondering if you have done some other thinking on how to hold the World Bank accountable for anything that it does, because these are the mechanisms that are more or less in place right now. We're all in favor of NGO accountability, but we are kind of surprised that you do not call for World Bank accountability nor for the accountability of the large transnational corporations.

That countries like Chad should not get debt, I say that rather than credit, debt loans from the World Bank at all because this is an odious regime, the people should not be held responsible later for repaying this debt. On the other hand, the argument could be that these kinds of loans can have a positive contribution to poverty alleviation and they should go forward. So I wonder where Delphine and Sebastian stand on that issue.

So I wanted to hear from the panelists about what you think, whether there can be, and maybe for other NGOs, and I am speaking for the IMF, whether it will increase work on governance, on public expenditure management, etc. And also whether you think there can be some work that can be done together on these issues.

the question about the odiousness of debt, it's a really tough one. I mean, debt is clearly odious in retrospect, if it fails to produce growth and therefore becomes impossible to service. Then it's odious, particularly if the recipient government at the time was dictatorial. If it succeeds, it's not odious. Lending to Suharto's dictatorship in Indonesia in the early years, not odious because it reduced poverty massively, lending towards the end when he became more corrupt then he had been before. Extremely odious. So you know there is no easy solution to that, which is why we continue to debate it. And probably will for a while.

I just pointed that out a couple of times, because 19 volumes would seem to me to be a fairly long and serious study. So the idea that there hasn't been an effort to take environmental issues seriously and social impacts seriously, I think it is. At least you have to pause and think about whether one can say that it was unserious after 19 volumes.

What I say is that the safeguards have kind of grown beyond the original intent. As in this picture that I drew for you before of the pendulum, right, in the early 90s or the mid 90s you had the safeguards then. And that was a good thing. That's what I regard as the sensible, middle ground in this balance between environmental caution and on the other hand needing to get projects out the door in order to try to help poor people.

My point in the book is simply that if you think about what is the niche for the Bank in development you've got lots of groups that could build schoolrooms, which can do clinics. And I'm all for the Bank doing some of that. But if you think about a big dam, which is going to produce hydropower for several different countries, that's multinational. Well, the World Bank is multinational. It's going to take a long time to build and the benefits would be over a very long period. But the Bank has very long-term loans it can give. It has environmental consequences. Well, the Bank has environmentalists. It has social impact. Well, the Bank has some anthropologists, a few. Perhaps it should have more. It has engineering consequences. Well, the Bank has engineers. It has big economic and public revenue management issues. And the Bank has people in those areas. This is what you need, a big multinational, multi sexual organization for. You don't need it necessarily to go and build schools in a village, which could be done by a smaller organization just as well. So that's my only suggestion. That if you look at World Bank lending towards dams, it goes up in the 60s and 70s, peaks in the 80s, starts falling from the early 80s when the Environmental Defense Funds and other people started to shine the spotlight on the problems. And I think that they were right to do so at that point. It goes down, down, down, down, until it the first five years of Wolfensohn's leadership, between 95 and 2000, zero new big dam projects, zero new projects, zero. Maybe that's just a bit too far. Maybe the pendulum again needs to swing back a little bit.

I'm Greg Binkert. I was the World Bank country manager for three years in Chad. So I met Delphine and the other ones. I finished my job by the end of the September, so I am no longer there. But I'd just like to make maybe a few sort of general comments. On the role of NGOs I must say I've worked very well with them. And they play a very, very important role in this whole project.

it was very important, and it was a very, very important feedback mechanism, particular NGOs in Moundou, in Doba. They had a lot of information that we would not have gotten otherwise. And they were very important also for the whole outreach and development planning that is not finished yet, but the process got underway. It's very important for this inclusive type of governance to have a broader approach and it played a very positive role.

But also the other thing in my three years there I had to get used to their language, which is a very, sort of an extreme language, which even today I encounter again, which is for example here peers say well, the compensation is a total tragedy, a total failure. Well, probably you could have done it, that's what I heard you say. You can correct me if I misunderstood. But that's not the way that I saw it. For the three years that I traveled a lot through the villages I saw big things. I saw the number of bicycles going up and up. I saw sewing machines going up and up. I don't have the exact figure in mind, but it's about half to 60 percent of the compensations were paid in kind. So they were using those things.

So I was not revealing that cost with Ellen Brown. But I mean there are lots of positive examples. There are also negative examples. But I got used to that, the language where you can stand next to a school, a newly built school and not say we have not seen anything positive at all.

But when we look at ,today you presented a much more nuanced picture of what you're trying to say. But when you read your book, when you read your writings you get this arc of an argument that says NGOs bash the Bank, Wolfensohn opens up, NGOs continue to bash the Bank. So what's the conclusion? Close down the space? Close down the participatory space of the Bank for working with NGOs? And I ask this because we're already hearing the Mallaby argument to be invoked inside of the World Bank, to dismiss criticisms of what the World Bank is doing. Because the way that your argument was presented in your writing leads to an easy conclusion that we don't need to be listening to these people.

And it's something that the Bank to a large degree has been resistant to. And it's been something that we can't understand why Jim Wolfensohn, who is someone who speaks about them rhetorically hasn't made those changes in the Bank itself.

I think that Ellen Brown take her word for what you will, her line is that, when I talked to her about this issue, she was perfectly up front and said yes, the compensation thing some people took the money. I tried to develop partnerships with local NGOs to go and counsel people on accepting in-client conversation or thinking about how you're going to use the cash if you get cash. She thinks that the cooperation from the NGO side in doing early counseling with villagers on this issue of money management that they didn't cooperate because as much as they should have because they were often more trying to kind of attack the whole project. And that if there would be a better partnership there, there might have been a better compensation story. I mean, Peter might know more. But I think those are just some comments on that one.

And that particularly experiences like the one that I describe in my book with western China poverty, where the inspection panel played a very central role, and it became an incredibly sort of bruising experience from all points of view I think. Because even if you wanted the project to have more environmental protections the fact is that the criticism of the Bank drove the Bank after the project so that the Chinese then went ahead and did the project by themselves, relocated twice as many people as they were going to, scraped a lot of the environmental protections the Bank had built into the project. And so even, you know from any perspective, whether you're an environmentalist, someone who cares about Tibetan rights, anything, it seems like the outcome was appalling, because the Chinese just went ahead and did it on their own without any safeguards at all.

Now one reason why Ellen Brown is probably the most hated person in these three villages is because she's the most visible person in those villages. She goes there and none of these people in these villages has seen an office, a government official from agriculture, water, health or anything else in probably the last decade. They see someone who represents money and means. And they're not getting what they want. And it seems like the tension. What we saw was the increase in tension and frustration. And then going into things like compensation, those bicycles for one year of use of land? You're out then looking at the long-term ,It had a bizarreness to it that only was experienced, where we only felt like it when we were on the ground.

I would say something about the good project -- who should decide that a given project is a good project? Is it the World Bank, the oil companies, or the governments? And where is the poor people's place, because the development projects are about them. Do they have a voice? Do they have something to say about that? So I feel if they have a voice and if they have something to do about that then NGOs need to play a role. And I thank Binkert for raising that NGOs have played a positive role in the Chad-Cameroon project.

I want to say a few things about the language that Binkert talked about. It could be extreme. But when you are in Chad and when you see what is happening that is not extreme because what does that mean for a person who lost his leg to have a bicycle? And I would say that most of those bicycles already broke down and they don't have means to repair them.

So are we talking about the same development? The development has to be sustainable. And in this case what the World Bank and the consortium are trying to show as development signals is for us meaningless. They would show that a family who has gotten compensation has bought a new dress for kids and a new sewing machine. But who is going to pay them for a dress or for any services, I don't know. I think that it's more complicated. It's more important than that. And we need things that could really be sustainable. And the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline is not giving us opportunity for a sustainable development in Chad.