Marx actually admired capitalism in some ways, which means that he might have been right about a few things; meanwhile, his trenchant criticisms of it will be treated as the quaintly perceptive observations of an awkward crank

the toys are recognizably like commodities, expropriated from the one who makes them and sent out to travel a long (but never infinite) chain of transactions before they can be allowed to resume their unremarkable existence as objects of use or enjoyment

Note that the German word for “debt” and “guilt” is the same: die Schuld. Not only Nietzsche but also Benjamin probed this polysemy on several occasions.

To assemble a full definition of debt, one would need to address philosophies of morality and justice and anthropologies of sacrifice and potlatch

debt names something basic to the experience of social being as a dimension of historicity, even in its most eschatological form

the most absolute kind of debt, original sin, appears as the most foolproof way to give meaning, proleptically, to one’s death, an act that thus becomes a way to ensure that one’s debts will never be paid except by the God who granted them

[...] Credit appears as a kind of corrupt Absolute Idea developing itself in ever higher spirals of alienated activity within a hollowed-out community. Although it might seem, Marx argues, that credit would allow for the purest, most transparent (because abstract) form of mutual recognition, it is in fact the most direct form of subjugation, because it takes on the dimensions of a whole social and cultural order. The one who must accept credit (the debtor) submits to the judgment of the creditor, who stands for the judgment of all those who possess wealth. Credit becomes a more thorough way to mediate the struggle between master and slave: everyone who participates in the struggle thereby becomes committed to maintaining its formal structure. system as the alienation of an essential social “wealth,” and based on that understanding, “debt” appears as the negation of an originary or potential plenitude.

Whatever the polemical virtues of this account—and it sounds as true as anything Baudrillard ever said about the simulations of the capitalist code—it remains firmly within Hegelian coordinates.

The credit system ... accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market ... At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these elements the dissolution of the old mode of production.

The credit system has a dual character immanent in it: on the one hand it develops the driving force of capitalist production, enrichment through the exploitation of others’ labor, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling, and restricts ever more the already small number of the exploiters of social wealth; but on the other hand, it establishes the form of transition to a new mode of production.