Debt has been defined as a mechanism of subjection and servitude, which structures the debtor-credit relation as constitutive of capitalism. Friedrich Nietzsche links the “genealogy of morals” (2014 [1987]) precisely to the mechanism of the infinite, unpayable debt and its Christian translation into terms of guilt.
Silvia Federici (2012) provides key elements for a feminist analysis of debt: she emphasizes the fragmentation of the class relation that debt produces, its role when it comes to dismantling the wage as an accumulation of the struggles that have constituted it, and the financialization of services that were the state’s responsibility, such as healthcare and education. She makes a crucial connection between these problems and the exploitation of common resources and women’s reproductive labor.
Maurizio Lazzarato (2012) has returned to Nietzsche to argue how the dynamic of the worker has given way to the “making of the indebted man,” to explain how debt imposes a “work on the self” that directly links it to a debtor “morality.” We are always in debt with something and with someone. That is, we take on responsibility and guilt for achievements and failures, ultimately, for our own entrepreneurial capacity, as a way of individualizing risk and thinking about life itself as a business.
David Graeber (2011) historicizes the economy based on the institution of debt (both public and private), particularly looking at how it functions as a mechanism of subordination of countries in the Third World as a regime of global governance.
Saskia Sassen (2014) has conceptualized finance – from debt to the financial derivatives composed, for example, of mortgages – as a preferred mechanism for the “expulsions” enacted by contemporary capitalism. Contemporary finance works, she argues, by securitizing – that is, invading – non-financial tasks, sectors, and spaces to relocate them within financial circuits.
Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015), d QAedicates ample pages to debt in the North American university system to explain a more general hypothesis: the relation
between debt and neoliberalism. Detailing the way in which financial capital seeks to financialize everything, she points to the importance of debt and derivatives when it comes to “transforming neoliberal ratio-nality itself – its formulation of markets, subjects, and rational action” (p. 70).
Frédéric Lordon (2010) studies the affective mobilization that con-temporary capital requires, in which the exploitation of desire and the reward for consumption activate financial formulas in partnership with the drive of marketing.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) illuminates the racist dimension of foreclosures on mortgaged homes (with subprime mortgages) during the 2008 financial crisis, in which more than 240,000 African Americans lost their homes, reinforcing gentrification processes in the main cities of the United States. To do so, the criminalization and police persecution of the Black population is assembled with indebtedness through fines, traffic offenses, and arrest warrants that complete the circuit of multiple forms of violence.
Cédric Durand (2018) explains how finance appropriates the future temporality through the dispossession and parasitism of common resources, which makes finance “sovereign” thanks to austerity policies, as well as how finance takes advantage of a juridical architecture that gives it a stability that it does not itself possess.
George Caffentzis (2018) draws a connection between micro-debts and macro-debts and details the differences between the wage and debt as divergent temporal modes of exploitation.
In general, the horizon of these recent perspectives is the problema-tization of the 2008 financial crisis. And the question that they lay out is related to neoliberalism’s capacity to redouble its policies of austerity and structural adjustment through that same crisis. That is, they ask how neoliberalism manages to govern the crisis through public and private debt.
There are several analyses specifically regarding the Latin American region. In Argentina, research has focused on how finance lands in popular economies and, in particular, how indebtedness has been inter-woven with social subsidies in such a way as to “skip” dependence on the wage in producing “debtors” in parallel with a feminization of labor (see Gago 2017; Gago and Roig 2019).
In Bolivia, a pioneering investigation by Graciela Toro (2010) analyzes the expansion of microcredit especially designed for women, called solidarity credit, and how it has been contested by a powerful social movement of debtors. As Maria Galindo emphasizes in the prologue to Toro’s book, the bank exploits women’s social networks, their relationships of friendship and family, to convert them into guarantees for debt.
Nina Madsen (2013), questioning the discourse of the formation of a “new middle class” during the progressive governments in Brazil, affirms that access to greater levels of consumption for a significant part of the population was sustained by the massive indebtedness of households and the over-exploitation of women’s unremunerated labor.
CĂ©sar Giraldo (2017) analyzes the dismantling of social policies in Colombia and new financial forms, particularly loans, for popular economy workers.
Magdalena Villareal’s (2004) investigations in Mexico are also a reference for thinking about how everyday finance organizes the social reproduction of popular classes and, in particular, the role of women in those economic forms and networks.
The case of Chile is perhaps the most pressing in the region (OssandĂłn 2012). According to data from 2018, households have over 70 percent of their income in debt, a record high, due to the decline in income paral-leled with greater banking indebtedness.
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