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The cycle of external indebtedness of dependent countries has become a huge constraint on any strategy for radical social change.

Argentina has recently entered a new process of debt overhang and renegotiation with the International Monetary Fund and private global creditors. The dominant debate around the country's foreign debt revolves around the conditions that can guarantee the sustainability of repayment. The underlying objective is to remain in the debt system that produces and reproduces dependency.

This chapter will seek to analyze the question of debt sustainability from another point of view: Is it possible to guarantee the (financial) sustainability of the debt at the same time as guaranteeing the sustainability of life? Our argument is that by remaining in the global debt system, Argentina creates conditions that violate the requirements for the sustainability of human and nonhuman life. Drawing on a discussion from Marxist dependency theory and the traditions of Marxist feminism and environmentalism, we will discuss how the debt sustainability argument presupposes the impossibility of reproducing life. In particular, we will show how the conditions required to guarantee debt sustainability in Argentina entail the deepening of the superexploitation of the “productive” and “reproductive” labor force, and the exacerbation of extractivism, putting social reproduction in crisis.

Following a successful debt-renegotiation process in the mid-2000s, Argentina consolidated a path of growth and debt relief. The outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007–2009 and other domestic imbalances altered the economic scenario. In this context, the authorities tried to return to global financial markets, but legal conflict with vulture funds made that option unpalatable. In 2015, the triumph of a right-wing political coalition restored the dominance of neoliberal economic policies, including the return to debt and equity markets. The subsequent cycle of indebtedness and capital flight faced by Argentina not only unleashed a major crisis but also caused the return of the International Monetary Fund, which granted the largest lending arrangement to a single country in its history. The aims of this chapter are to analyze the winding cycle of debt reduction and overindebtedness experienced by Argentina between 2001 and 2022; to examine the set of structural factors as well as the role of certain domestic and foreign actors; and to consider the long-term effects of external indebtedness and some lessons that can be drawn for other countries in the Global South.