Household debt now sustains demand, survival, and economic governance in capitalism.

Evidence

Growing and unevenly distributed indebtedness is understood to provide for macroeconomic demand in an age of fiscal austerity, and for microeconomic survival in an age of stagnating and falling real wages and intensified precarity. As the extraction of value operates on and through social reproduction and ‘indebted life’ (Langley et al., 2019), so credit-debt is understood to have become a principal economic and governing relation in contemporary capitalism (Lazzarato, 2012). — Paul Langley, Assets and Assetization in…, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lazzarato’s ‘indebted man’ and the broader financialization-of-households literature familiar from Mian & Sufi and Lapavitsas. — connects to: The Chilean state socialized private debt while keeping the neoliberal framework intact — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1595; Debt has historically served to capture and fix people within political bonds — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 133; Pre-2008 capitalism cannot be restored because debt fueled its demand

Related

• Pre-2008 capitalism cannot be restored because debt fueled its demand (similarity 0.81)
• The economy structurally requires debt that it then moralises as individual failing. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The Chilean state socialized private debt while keeping the neoliberal framework intact #exemplifies (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1595
• Debt has historically served to capture and fix people within political bonds #expands (0.80) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 133