The economy structurally requires debt that it then moralises as individual failing.

Evidence

More importantly, the entire economy now needs people to be in debt — they are doing their duty to capital! That duty to capital in the past is used as a new reason in the present to exploit them further, to cut their public services and standards of living. It would be funny if it were not so grotesque. But this ridiculous personalisation of debt, as if it were a moral failing, is the meat and drink of capitalist realism. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1669

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Debt can be read as a failed attempt to reclaim stolen value — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 52; Debt politics functions as a morality play shifting blame from banks to the state — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 56; Finance operates as a disciplinary mechanism that mobilizes debt to exploit labor. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Blaming individual borrowers hides a systemic precariousness produced by finance #corroborates (0.90) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 208
• Debt politics functions as a morality play shifting blame from banks to the state #expands (0.85) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 56
• Finance wields power by forcing agency to express itself as debt #expands (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 264
• Neoliberalism governs through guilt and debt rather than the body #expands (0.85) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 53
• Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90
• The state frames citizens’ lives as a debt it can call in for sacrifice. #expands (0.82) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 562
• Finance operates as a disciplinary mechanism that mobilizes debt to exploit labor. #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58
• Capitalism condemns the poor’s present-orientation while itself running on debt-financed gratification #expands (0.80) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1269
• Individual resistance is reabsorbed into speculation through personal debts and savings #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 544
• Financialization captures and encloses human creative capacity through debt #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 390
• Capitalism structurally requires excess for some and deprivation for others #corroborates (0.78) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1094
• Responsibilized individuals remain disposable when economic exigencies require it #corroborates (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 417
• Debt can be read as a failed attempt to reclaim stolen value #qualifies (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 52