Book Review: The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and Their Repudiation

does not do this, as he treats the pedagogical forms of learning and stupidity in a more dialectical fashion. He reminds his readers that ‘[i]t would be a mistake to valorize stupidity and annihilate learning. Instead, both are necessary educational processes. It is only after one learns to read, for example, that they can study a text’ (p. 100). Today’s working class may first need to go through a phase of learning before deploying the pedagogical logic of stupidity as the class struggle becomes more acute, which it necessarily will. In fact, the current ‘resignation’ that dominates the working class might allow for a rapid development of ‘stupid’ revolutionary struggle. Once the mass labour movement begins again, we can start afresh – workers will not be so influenced by bourgeois ideology and thus not so legible to the capitalist class.