“As With the Stroke of an Enchanter’s Wand”: Marx on National Debt and the State

This paper examines Marx’s argument concerning national debt and the state. Marx thought national debt a central lever of primitive accumulation, and he saw it as a force that had not only served to create the conditions for the rise of capitalism, but also as something that would ultimately cause the dissolution of the state itself. The article places Marx’s account of state finance in the tradition of anti-financial writings, and particularly of eighteenth-century republican denunciations of finance. Republican critics of finance feared the power it would accord to central authorities, just as they feared the fictitious and imaginary nature of such speculative wealth. Marx understood better than many eighteenth-century critics of finance the dual role that national debt played, both strengthening the state (by affording it the capacity to pay for outsized military power) and weakening it (by subjecting it to the rule of financiers). His was thus an extremely insightful account of the paradoxical power of national finance. However, when he began to consider the ways in which a post-capitalist collectivity would be organized, his thought tended to fall back into the types of anti-financial rhetoric that was so central to eighteenth-century republican writers. The paper concludes by suggesting the need for a radical rethinking of the relationship between collective agency and collective debt.