ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the connections between debt and human rights. The concept of accumulation becomes not just about privatization and the expansion of capital but more accurately about expanding the zones of debt to capital. The division of the world in the new debt era is less a matter of former geopolitical divisions and more starkly a question of labor and privilege. The chapter shows how the ideas of rights and debt have always been intertwined, offers a periodization of the ideas of rights and debts, and also shows how individual debt is connected to state debt – and that the history of state debt is far more pernicious and far more damaging to the rights of individuals than that of personal debt. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world trade system was framed by the rhetoric of reciprocity, the practice of hegemony, and the development of interconnections that cultivated bare states, which lacked both sovereignty and credit.
