Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition

Abstract

Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making Indebted Man: Essay on Neoliberal Condition. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012, 1,999 pp., $13.95 paper(9781584351153) In this brief yet dense theoretical treatise, set out in three brisk chapters and a conclusion, Paris-based Italian sociologist and philosopher, Maurizio Lazzarato, offers an exploration and genealogy economic and subjective production indebted in what he calls neoliberal age (p. 9). This age, according to author, began in mid1970s with changes to financing structure welfare such that Western central banks were forbidden to coin interest-free money to ease public debt, and Western countries were compelled to turn to financial markets to service their deficits. The subsequent indebtedness both individuals, states, and even entire world to powerful private interests reveals extent to which markets have been able to plunder population over last forty years (p. 19). Lazzarato is concerned not simply with fact global debt, but more with its fundamentally class-based nature. Finance, he insists, is above all a power between owner capital and nonowner, between creditor and debtor. This transcends and precedes all other social relations, even capital and labour, since everyone is included within it, including children and poor, who may have no access to credit, yet remain indebted via (p. 32). Indeed, money economy comes before and determines market economy (rather than other way around). What is more, creditor-debtor power relation is fundamentally asymmetrical, so undermining classical economic theories commercial exchange that imply and presuppose equality between buyer and seller (p. 33), and quashing fantasy whereby state and society begin with a contract (p. 43). In On Genealogy Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche demonstrated his understanding primordial primacy creditor-debtor relation and precedence credit to exchange. Debt, as a promise repayment and a guarantee self-worth, first began to engender memory, conscience, repression, calculation, duty, and guilt. It is origin subjective evaluation between men, and subjectivation--the labour man on himself such that he is made predictable, accountable, and answerable to his creditor (p. 42). Through debt, moreover, capitalism bridges gap between present and future, which results in objectivation time--the elimination future choice and possibility in subordination to reproduction capitalist power relations (p. 46). The strange sensation, Lazzarato writes, of living in a society without time, without possibility, without foreseeable rupture, is debt (p. 47). A young Karl Marx, Lazzarato maintains, echoed these Nietzschean notes in his early essay, Comments on James Mill. Creditordebtor seems to run counter to capital-labour, for latter is a relationship between things, whereas former appears to establish trust between fellow human beings. Such abolition estrangement, however, is superficial. Debt actually completes alienation by exploiting man's moral existence, social existence, and the inmost depths his heart (p. 56). Through indebtedness, trust becomes universal distrust, which turns into a demand for security and ultimately intervention. In case welfare, Lazzarato observes, erstwhile social rights have been transformed into latter-day debts, about which recipients services are to feel guilty and for which they are to have their private lives examined in order to determine their validity and their conformity to norms providing institution. …