Making of the Indebted Man
* Book: The Making Of The Indebted Man. Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. By Maurizio Lazzarato. Semiotexte, 2013.
URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/making-indebted-man-0
Description
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.
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, Félix 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."
(http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/making-indebted-man-0)
Contents
José Ignacio Nazif:
"In essence, Lazzarato argues that within neoliberalism debt is the archetype of social relations. In particular, the creditor–debtor relationship ‘shapes all social relations and neoliberal economies’ (p. 35).
With this main thesis in mind, the core of the book is divided into two parts:
(1) the genealogy of debt and debtor; and
(2) the ascendancy of debt and neoliberalism.
In the first part, Lazzarato combines the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault in order to theoretically reclaim the importance of debt as both a social object of analysis by itself but, more important, as the element that constitutes neoliberalism. Although one would expect a more nuanced contrast among the ideas of these prominent authors, the author only reintroduces very basic concepts to claim that credit has been overlooked in the analysis of neoliberalism. Lazzarato argues that the creditor–debtor relationship is asymmetrical, and therefore in order to understand domination and the distribution of power one needs to acknowledge how this relationship has emerged and ossified in the past 30 years. His reading of Marx allows him to advance an alternative interpretation of contemporary society because the tension of capital–labour has been transcended by the creditor–debtor relationship. He particularly stresses that the ‘credit relation does not mobilize physical and intellectual abilities as labor does (material or immaterial, it makes no difference) but the morality of the debtor, his mode of existence (his “ethos”)’ (p. 55).
This effort is important because Lazzarato unintentionally reminds the reader of the ambiguities of Marx’s concepts, but also sug-gests that neoliberalism is made of complexities and therefore any attempt to under-stand its dynamics should be fully acknowledged.
In the second part, he provides examples that could be located at both macro and micro levels of analysis:
(1) at the macro level, how states have had to reorganize and restrict their policies because they had to follow ‘recommendations’ provided by the usual suspects (e.g. the International Monetary Fund and/or the World Bank) – debt in this case occupies the centre of his analysis because debtor countries are in weak positions to reject or renegotiate models of repayment;
(2) at the micro level, how individuals have reorganized their lives in order to participate fully in neoliberal society. Debt becomes nothing more and nothing less than the mechanism of individual integration within contemporary neoliberal society. Nevertheless, according to Lazzarato, the materialization of the indebted man is only complete when individuals ‘are not expected to reimburse in actual money, but rather in conduct, attitudes, ways of behaving ... the time used for conforming oneself to the criteria dictated by the market’ (p. 104)."