A contribution to marxist memory studies : the structural need of capital to forget violence and eternally remember debt

english

2025

volume 41, issue 108/109

Slovensko sociološko društvo
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

The text departs from Traverso’s hypothesis concerning the impossibility of Marxism and Memory Studies encountering each other, and juxtaposes it with a few theoretical areas in Marx that may be useful for contributing to Marxist Memory Studies. The dialectical relationship within capitalism between the structurally necessary forgetting of violence and the structural remembering of debt is described before the concept of the primitive accumulation of capital and Lazzarato’s (2013) crucial notion of indebted subjectivity is deployed. The moral and memorial aspects of debt have been often overlooked by Marxism, while the relationship of memory to debt and capital has been completely ignored by the majority of memory-studies scholars. In the conclusion, it is argued that this missing link provides fertile grounds for Marxist Memory Studies and for furthering debates, especially on the topics of reparation, restitution, and debt cancellation.

22.04.2026