Debt Slaves
Paul quotes Hardt and Negri.
“The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory... With this shift the primary engagement between capitalist and worker also changes... Exploitation today is based primarily not on (equal or unequal) exchange but on debt.” (p 210)
But, this is wrong. I have myself pointed out that, as well as being wage slaves, the monumental build up of private household debt, since the 1980's, has also turned many workers into debt slaves. However, as mentioned earlier, under capitalism, a worker can only continue in existence as a debt slave, ultimately, if either their wages are high enough to cover the interest – which simply means that money-lending capital leeches more off productive-capital – or else the worker finances the debt by effectively converting their own stock of wealth into revenue. 
The problem for capital is that the baby boomer workers who saved from their wages, and accumulated assets as property, pensions, mutual funds etc. have largely not been conned into converting it into revenue. That is what is at the basis of all the gripes over “intergenerational inequality”, which also starts from the ridiculous premise that a 20 year old should somehow have the same accumulated wealth, and assets etc., as a 50 year old, who has had 30 years of additional income and saving during which to have accumulated the assets they have! As the state, via QE, has tried to protect the assets of the top 0.01%, they necessarily created the conditions under which, no matter how much they pleaded with the boomers to use their assets as collateral to take on debt, the very asset price inflation, the central banks were creating, encouraged the boomers to hold tight to their assets, and to acquire more where they could. The consequence is that all of the additional debt is then piled upon those who have no wealth to be converted into revenue, or appropriated when that defaults, as default it undoubtedly must. Its like Greece as opposed to Britain, but at a household level. So, ultimately, all that household debt will default, and the delusion that it was the main form of exploitation will be revealed. By the same token, as the debt bubbles burst, the asset price bubbles will also burst, and so the similar delusion that the baby boomers somehow got something for nothing will also be exposed.
It's not that the existence of this debt slavery is not important to recognise. On the contrary, it is, because it goes to the heart of what is specific about the Fourth Long Wave, and the conditions it created for the transition to the Fifth Wave in 1999, and the eruption of the financial meltdown of 2008. But, the point is that the debt slavery is not sustainable, and the conditions that flow from the commencement of a new uptrend, which results in the progressively higher global interest rates we are now seeing, causes a collapse in asset prices, just as they did in 2008, but will now cause an even greater explosion, as the current bubbles burst. It spells doom for the efforts of central banks to continue defying gravity, and keeping those astronomical bubbles inflated.
“If you accept that the main fault line in the modern world is between networks and hierarchies, then China is sitting right on top of it.” (p 212)
But, I don't. Partly for the reason described above. I believe the main fault line is between socialised industrial (productive and commercial) capital, and fictitious capital. In short, it is the contradiction between the interests of real capital, to accumulate in conditions of planning and regulation, which implies an extension of progressive social democracy, as against the interests of shareholders, bondholders, landed property and other such speculators, who act to create short-term instability, and which represent the modern form of parasitism, draining surplus value from potential productive investment. The resolution of that fault line, and addressing that parasitism is what social-democracy should have dealt with in the 1970's. It will have to address it now, for capitalism itself to be able to move forward.
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