Precarization and Credit

In his 1844 text “Comments on James Mill”, Marx thinks about credit in a way that helps to understand the politico-economic entanglement of debt and precarization in the present. Already in his critique of Mill’s Elements of Political Economy Marx formulates thoughts that would become his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Marx problematized the logic of credit and debt as separating the individuals from one another, destroying social connectedness and blocking common political action. In the logic of credit, Marx makes clear that it is “man’s moral existence, man’s social existence” that is at stake and which becomes valued. In the relation between the creditor and the debtor “a man recognises another man by advancing him a certain quantity of value.” It is a relation of trust and distrust: the creditor should not be a usurer or a swindler, the debtor should be “a “good” man […], a man who is “able to pay.”” It seems that the main relationship in debt economy is one in which “a rich man gives credit to a poor man whom he considers industrious and decent.” But this, Marx emphazises, is nothing but “the romantic, sentimental part of political economy”. The creditor passes a moral judgement on ‘the poor’, assessing his creditworthiness. As return it is not the social capacities that count but the ‘blood and flesh’, the ‘morality’ and the ‘existence’ of the ‘poor’: “That means, therefore, that all the social virtues of the poor man, the content of his vital activity, his existence itself, represent for the rich man the reimbursement of his capital with the customary interest.” For Marx, it is not the labour that is exploited by the credit but the ethical action of the ‘poor’, the work of self-constituting, the way of life (Lazzarato 2012, 54-5). The aim is not to allow the ‘poor’ a better life, but to not let him pass by: “It is the death of his [the creditor’s] capital together with the interest.” In credit, however, money is not the medium of exchange, it has “returned out of its material form and been put back in man, but only because the man himself has been put outside himself and has himself assumed a material form. Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money is transcended in man, but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existen