mirror theories

"Every aspect of reproduction is becoming an immediate a site of accumulation. This is because you now have to pay for many services that in the past were provided by the state. In the post-WWII period, the capitalist politics was to invest in the reproduction of the workforce that was seen as a sort of ‘human capital’ to be developed. This is what is usually referred to as the ‘welfare state’. Behind it there was the idea that investing in workers’ health, education, housing, would pay out in terms of increased workers’ productivity and discipline. But clearly the struggles of the ’60s convinced the capitalist class that having more space and time would not make workers more productive but only more rebellious. This is why we have seen an inversion. Now we have to pay for our reproduction, they tell us it is our responsibility. It is a major change. First of all it is a change in the temporal structure of accumulation. Employers now don’t invest in the long term, in our future productivity. They do not expect us to become more productive in the future. They want to accumulate immediately from our ‘investment’ in our education, from the interest on our credit cards: they want to cash in immediately. So, reproduction becomes immediately a point of accumulation. That’s a very important change. This has also changed the relation between workers and capital. Being indebted to a bank hides the fact that there is a relation of exploitation. As a debtor, you don’t appear any longer as a worker. Debt is very mystifying. It brings about a change in the management of class relations. This is what is at stake in the ideology of ‘self-investment’ and ‘micro-entrepreneurship’, which pretends that we are sole beneficiaries of our education and our reproduction, and occludes that the employers, the capitalist class, benefits from our work. Debt also has a disaggregating effect; it isolates us from other debtors, because we confront the banks as individuals. So, debt individualises, it fragments the class relation, in a way that the wage did not. The wage in a sense was a sort of common. It recognised not only the existence of a work relation but of a collective relation strengthened by a history of struggle. Debt dismantles both. We see it with the struggle of students indebted because of their education loans. Many feel guilty, they have a sense of failure when they cannot repay that would be unthinkable in a wage struggle. There, you know you are exploited, you know your boss, you see the exploitation, you have your comrades. Whereas as a debtor, you say ‘oh my god I miscalculated,’ ‘I took more money than I should have’ etc."

— Sylvia Federici in Mute (x)