Debt can be read as a failed attempt to reclaim stolen value

Evidence

I argue that it is well worth entertaining a thought experiment that would imagine the recent waves of financialization as rooted in resistance. Here I suggest that the spike in financialized borrowing (both among nations in the Third World and among individuals in the First) might be read not merely as the punitive and predatory machinations of capital, but also as (Pyrrhic) working-class or subaltern attempts to reclaim stolen value. In an age of neoliberal and neocolonial retrenchment, there may be merit in imagining debt as a means to claim wealth otherwise clawed back by capital. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 52

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reframing of debt as a subaltern claim on capital is provocative but the passage is inconclusive — worth chasing the developed argument in Chapter 6 to evaluate it.
• XREF: connects to: Debt securitization served as inadequate compensation for welfare-state dismantling — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 963; Fictitious capital promises security and fulfillment it structurally cannot deliver — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 582; The economy structurally requires debt that it then moralises as individual failing. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1669

Broader Connections

• Debt securitization served as inadequate compensation for welfare-state dismantling #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 963
• Fictitious capital promises security and fulfillment it structurally cannot deliver #expands (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 582