CHAPTER SIXTEEN: BURDENED WITH DEBT
the periphery that have taken the form of the enclosures of communal land and of the violent proletarianisation of millions of people in South-East Asia, Latin America, and Africa.3 W A key driver of the above-mentioned process has been
the “sovereign debt” as noted by Marx already since the 19th century.4 However, the politics of the expansion of “sovereign debt” was not limited to the periphery. According to statistical data provided by OECD, since the end of the 1970s, the “sovereign debt” doubled or even tripled in all the developed countries in the West5 for two reasons: one reason has been the successive reductions in the taxation of capital to prop up its burdened profitability; the other reason has been the inability to restrain government expenditures despite the restructuring which aimed at directing expenditures towards productive investments through the privatisation and monetisation of a significant part of the forms of reproduction of labour power. W The welfare state has been partially transformed from an
institution for the extended reproduction of labour power into an institution for the control of the marginalised proletarians and the imposition of low wages and poverty. The reforms of the welfare state have been also directed against the weakest parts of the working class—young workers, women, ethnic minorities, etc.—reinforcing the separations within the proletariat. However, this transformation has proven expensive and difficult to implement because of the high administrative and policing costs related to the control of the surplus population and due to the cost of the unemployment benefits which fluctuate according to the rate of unemployment. Despite the subordination of the state to the rule of money and the growth of relative surplus population, the national state still has to stabilize and secure the expanded reproduction of domestic capital and its integration into the accumulation of capital on a world scale. At the same time, the state has to guarantee the physical and social reproduction of the working class and the maintenance of social coherence
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