Excerpt from The Contagious Assembly by Alex Benham:
For Mitropoulos, the pandemic also “presents us with another understanding of debt as an acknowledgement of the interdependent conditions of survival and care.” Another order could come to be in this “moment in which what it takes to live, to be healthy and flourish, vividly clashes with the capitalist mystique of economic productivity, of the idealised household and the metrics of Gross National Product.” It is here that one can take hold of Pandemonium as a weapon.
In the present moment, the weakness of capital and the state is in the clear divide between their health and the health of those from whom they extract surplus. The crisis clarifies the contradiction between the reproduction of the current order and the reproduction of all those attempting to survive its cascading violence. The task is thus to see this split in the grain and to drive a deep wedge into it.
This call for an elaboration of indebtedness makes me think again of Moten and Harney, and their irrepressible claim that “debt is social and credit is asocial.” Each time the care of another keeps you alive you become even further indebted, for how can a person ever repay such a debt? How could a debt like this ever be consolidated into credit, financialized into the distinct clarity of risk and reward?
Reflections
"TL;DR - Looking at systems like the 📝Resonance Dollars (R$) not just as a means of ascribing credit for all types of capital...but as a means of resolving debt for all types of capital" ~ 📝Will Cady