ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to denaturalise the payday loan industry and transcend the assumptions underpinning the economistic treatment of money and legalistic literature that dominates the subject. It suggests that through processes of debtfarism, the state facilitates the expansion of credit-led accumulation by supporting ongoing spatio-temporal displacements in the interest of banks and the loan industry. The chapter provides an overview of the loan industry and describes the core features of its debtor base, namely: the surplus population. This chapter maps the rhetorical and regulative landscape of debtfarism with an eye to explaining how these processes have served to expand and reproduce the payday lending industry. The legal and political framings of debtfarism have been successfully employed to bolster the loan industry and the underlying dynamics of capital accumulation. The payday lending industry is central not only to highly lucrative forms of secondary exploitation, but also to the commodification of social reproduction in the United States as a disciplinary device.
