Are Debtors the New Workers of the World?
Mass household indebtedness is a key feature of financialized capitalism, driving insecurity and sustaining poverty around the world. Could a union of debtors join forces to agitate for the abolition of all consumer debt?
The Debt Collective sets out to convince us that one identity is worth fighting for, organizing around, and forcing to the front of the line: that of the debtor. (Shunya Koide / Unsplash)
President-elect Joe Biden is considering plans for unilateral student debt cancellation. But it’s not just Biden: 235 organizations across the United States are united in calling for an executive order to erase student debt on day one of his presidency.
The debate now rages between those who believe its impact will be progressive or regressive, whether it will help high-income lawyers or low-income plumbers. But the salience of debt cancellation in the Biden transition makes one thing clear: debtors have arrived as a distinct constituency in American politics.
In the foreword to Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, Astra Taylor describes the book as a “resource for everyone struggling to build a better world.” Coauthored by various members of the Debt Collective — founded in 2014 against the backdrop of the Occupy movement — Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay offers a powerful and concise account of finance capitalism and the dynamics of “accumulation by dispossession” through which mass indebtedness drives insecurity, sustains poverty, and generates massive inequality around the world.
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