"Today I am worth": K. Lorraine Graham's graph

In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato presents "the increasing force of the creditor-debtor relationship" in the world remade by financial capitalism since the late 1970s (23). "Debt acts as a 'capture,' 'predation,' and 'extraction' machine on the whole of society," he writes (29); "the creditor-debtor relation concerns the entirety of the current population as well as the population to come" (32). If, in the last chapter of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber exculpates contemporary workingclass debtors, subject to decreased wages and plied continually with credit opportunities, for incurring debt to live life above the level of mere survival, floating consumption as conviviality or social participation, Lazzarato perhaps more absolutely deindividuates debt, for in this neoliberal epoch it always already profoundly conditions any given economic circuit, whether one's transactions are mediated by payment plan or not.¹