The Promissory Self – Credit and Debt Rationalities in the Work and Life of Karl Marx

Abstract

Credit, Karl Marx writes, is “the economic judgment on the morality of a man.” Possibly more than any other economic issue, debt reveals the interrelations between economic and moral rationalities. This chapter investigates the moral side of debt as revealed in two marginal writings of Karl Marx, namely in his Paris notebooks and in a letter to Friedrich Engels. Both texts grasp with the same moral issues of private indebtedness and shed light on both a theoretical and a personal coming to terms with the condition of indebtedness. Developing out of a close reading of these two texts the chapter provides an entry into more general issue of how debt is always already over-determined by not only its economic, calculable and payable issues, but also with moral issues of settling scores, paying one’s dues and performing in all its dimensions what we can refer to as a “payback morality.”