Debt, and not money is at the base of Skopje’s incredible construction boom. As companies do not have the money to pay their workers, subcontractors, or even the owner of the land they build on, they recur to debts; eventually, they are forced to use apartments as “in good” payment (compensatia). Yet paying services with goods such as housing units is not a linear process: the deferral between the service and the payment, and the issue of converting money into goods rests upon hierarchies within and without the companies.
The paper explores how debt push actors to “liquefy” other social relations in order to make “in goods” payments fungible to structure productive relation – and relations of production. Building on Verdery and Rogers’s studies of the vagaries of postsocialism, the paper contributes to the growing exploration of property and liquidity in the context of the privatization of Eastern Europe.
