Making of the Indebted Man

The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanismsof exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction betweenworkers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, betweenretirees and welfare recipients. They are all "debtors," guilty and responsible in theeyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor.--from The Making ofthe Indebted Man

Debt -- both public debt and private debt -- has becomea major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the IndebtedMan, 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-knownyouthful 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 politicalconstruction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Westernsocieties.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 andcontrolled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We areforever 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 tobecome the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human capital." In this way,our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended andreconfigured.

How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How dowe escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have torecognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must insteadradically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system ofdebt.