The commune is our payable debt

Abstract

This essay holds a conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s book, Unpayable Debt. Ferreira da Silva describes Unpayable Debt as a Black feminist reading tool that stages the onto-epistemological conditions for the unrelenting persistence of the Colonial and the Racial—modalities of power and violence—in the present, in/as global capital. A major part of the work performed by Ferreira da Silva with this reading tool is the re/de/composition of a Marxian theory of value. This work is intended to show that Marx’s analysis conceals gendered and racialized violence in the way it renders the dynamic of capitalist accumulation. In concurring with the urgency of Ferreira da Silva’s question and ensuing interrogation, I offer a different way of reading Marx’s theory of value, as a theory that illuminates how capital comes to mediate gendered and racialized subjugation, sustaining it through its dissimulation.