A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist "new
economy" through the political lens of the debtor/creditor
relation. "The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of
this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination
indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between
workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and
non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients.
They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of
capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor."
-from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt-both public debt and
private debt-has become a major concern of economic and political
leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato
shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt
lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading
of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a
rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix
Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is
above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor
relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.
Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is
also a technique of "public safety" through which individual and
collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is
to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the
governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to
private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations.
To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and
compelled to become the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human
capital." In this way, our entire material, psychological, and
affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate
ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the
neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we
will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic,
or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the
fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of
debt.
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