Alone, our debts are a burden. Together, they make us powerful. This is the provocation of debtors’ unions. Indeed, the power of debt is something the wealthy have long wielded. To put it in words often attributed to petroleum industrialist J. Paul Getty “If you owe the bank $100,000 the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank.” With everything from student debt to medical debt, credit card debt to housing debt surging, debtors, in theory, own the bank. But in practice, this is a complex provocation that raises theoretical and empirical questions about political economy, social movements, and contemporary capitalism. This talk - drawn from a book project in progress - builds on a decade of participatory action research co-founding and organizing with the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union, to explore the underlying strategy and theoretical elaboration of debtors’ unions, and to work toward the realization of their full potential.
Hannah Appel is an economic anthropologist interested in transnational capitalism and finance; debt and debtors’ unions; the African continent’s place in global capitalism; the economic imagination; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically, and to work actively to undo it?
