Credit/debt and human capital: Financialized neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity

Abstract

Adding to contemporary debates about the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism, this article investigates their entanglement at the level of subjectivity. Primarily, the article argues that financialization and neoliberalism are converging to produce a new form of subjectivity, post-profit homo œconomicus, an always indebted but credit-seeking enterprise. The value of this approach, the article demonstrates, is that it provides theoretical tools capable of grasping the differential production of subjectivity across the uneven and unequal striations of contemporary neoliberal society, from precarious workers of the gig economy to financial sector elites. The article examines two figures who have become central to public and academic debates about neoliberalism and financialization – the low-waged, precarious worker and the indebted student – to consider how neoliberal subjectivity is produced and distributed unevenly. It concludes that within these fragmentary socioeconomic positions are different instantiations of always indebted but credit-seeking human capital.

Everyday experiences of digital financial inclusion in India's ‘micro-entrepreneur’ paratransit services

“…Critics indicate that financialisation and entrepreneurship are increasingly creating conditions for indebtedness and the transfer of financial responsibility to credit-seeking vulnerable individuals who can no longer access financial security through employment rights or state welfare to the effect that precarity is now a source of value and enterprise (Bowsher, 2019;Chhachhi, 2020;Lazzarato, 2009;Mitchell and Sparke, 2016). Meanwhile, the structural inequalities that have produced exclusion, exploitation and financial risk among the poor are not addressed (Brigg, 2006;Carroll and Jarvis, 2014;Gabor and Brooks, 2017;Lazzarato, 2009;Mader, 2014;Natile, 2020;Soederberg, 2014).…”

Debt as Pacification

“…All told, capital is a "giant debt machine" (Graeber 2011: 390) and "we are now governed by debt," in Lazzarato's widely-cited phrase (Lazzarato 2012;2015;Neilson 2007;Mulcahy 2017;Bowsher 2019). Debt is class power, reproduced through a culture of indebtedness and the collusion between financial institutions and the state to endlessly create new rules that encourage new debts or that make it harder to pay off old debts.…”

Beating Broke by Getting Out? Examining the Relationship Between Personal Debt and Community-Outmigration

“…Debt is central to everyday lived experience in the current phase of capitalism, which is often characterized by scholars as "neoliberal" (Bowsher, 2018;Chakravatty & Ferreira da Silva, 2012;Lazzarato, 2012Lazzarato, , 2015Soderberg, 2014). In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey (2007) regarded this era as having begun approximately four decades ago, in the late 1970s to early 1980s.…”