What Is the World We Are Imagining Beyond Debt?

We’re told that if we were just smarter, if we took enough financial literacy courses, if we only saved a little more, then it might all go away — that there’s a way out of the boundless architecture of racial capitalism that is the foundation (and economic engine) of this country.

But we know that’s a lie and that racial capitalism works to keep us largely atomized.

Debt Collective co-founders Hannah Appel and Astra Taylor opened the special takeover issue of In These Times positing that what is needed are new debtors’ unions to collectively leverage our debt to topple the monuments built to racial capitalism that stand in the town squares of our lives.

But the question remains: What is beyond debt, and what is a future beyond accumulation?

In These Times and Debt Collective convened this roundtable to dig into the ways racial capitalism works, the roles labor and justice movements can play in resisting its incessant attacks on working people, and how we can move towards debt abolition — and what that would mean.

Educator and activist Jalil Mustaffa Bishop of Debt Collective moderated the discussion with Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union; Alex Han, long-time labor leader and executive director of In These Times; Robin D.G. Kelley, author and historian of social movements, Marxism, the African Diaspora and surrealism at the University of California, Los Angeles; René Moya, housing and tenants organizer with Debt Collective; and Derecka Purnell, author, scholar, movement lawyer and organizer.

This roundtable has been significantly edited for length and clarity.

STACY DAVIS GATES: Debt can keep first-generation college graduates out of the classroom because they can’t afford to be in teaching. Debt keeps first-generation college students — Black and brown — out of labor because entry-level organizing gigs pay next to nothing. Because of debt, we lose our infrastructure, and it hurts our ability to project justice into these institutions that are so important in shaping our voices, our orientations, our ability to have a dimensional labor movement and public-school space that speaks to those who need it.

And this lack of infrastructure seeks to rob us of the expanding opportunity for some very radical transformation.

I keep thinking about this idea of abolition — to be free from something and its bondage. This idea that the same people are required to keep repaying debt that is owed just resonates in this moment, especially from the demographics of who pays the most in student loans. Movements toward debt abolition are the types of things where you win your freedom from physical bondage, but the system creates ways to maintain that economic dominance. The way in which we talk about Black liberation must have a sharper analysis about that continued bondage. Capitalism isn’t challenged enough in this idea of what is owed.

RENÉ MOYA: I’m an organizer with Debt Collective, and I’ve been a tenant organizer for most of the last decade. I come to this work because it directly impacts me. I owe a lot of student debt. I also experienced homelessness a couple of times.

I think it’s important to understand the interconnectedness of different types of debt. We can’t silo these different debt types because we know that a lot of the same creditor-actors that impact us in higher education and medical debt are the same folks impacting us when it comes to the housing crisis.

Another way I look at it is from a California perspective, specifically around San Francisco, where Black and brown communities are being pushed out of the city—something we’re seeing across the country in major urban areas. The response to this sputtering of the urban growth machine is to basically increase the disciplinary aspects of capitalism, but to do so in an uneven way, to do it specifically with the poor, to do it with Black and brown residents.

To me, racial capitalism is a framework to understand the reality of how a totalizing system like capitalism impacts us in very direct ways. Debt shouldn’t exist, but the very public benefits we need — that our communities need to be able to survive — those are things we should have access to on a universal basis.

DERECKA PURNELL: People like David Graeber remind us there’s many ways to think about debt. We can think about debt in ways that are beautiful, like, ​“You got me this time because we went out to eat; I got you next time.” That’s the kind of debt I’m excited about being owed and owing in terms of building the relationship. But these exploitive debts — the ones that cause us anxiety, the ones that rob us of our ability to be in loving relationships — that’s the kind of debt I’m interested in abolishing.

The other kinds of debts, the more beautiful kinds of debt, are the ones I’m interested in figuring out how to preserve. I’m thinking about a lot of these terms that we struggle with as neutral, and it’s up to us to be polarizing around them.

ALEX HAN: One thing I’m thinking about is debt as a continual multiplier. Medical debt, housing debt, student debt, all these different types of debt layer on top of each other, and they land on the communities that can least afford it. I’ve been trying to focus on how we can think big about what’s needed for transformation, to fundamentally change the systems that continue to multiply the challenges and oppressions that debt creates.

There are constructive, cooperative and collective ways to approach debt; debt is not a concept that is inherently negative. But the way debt exists inside our systems manifests as a collective problem that atomizes us and pushes us to interact with it alone.

What does that mean? It means we have the further shrinking welfare state, but it doesn’t disappear because it’s still there to subsidize corporations.

I think half of all fast food and retail nonunion manufacturing workers depend on public assistance, and that public assistance subsidizes McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon, Dollar Tree, Burger King, Taco Bell, on and on. They don’t have to pay for healthcare; they got Medicaid to pay for that. They don’t have to pay a living wage because there’s food stamps. The federal government, ironically, subsidizes these big corporate interests, and the same federal government spends all our money on weapons.

In the end, when you look at the whole system, of course we have debt because we’re poor, and the world is poor because of these kinds of policies. This is part of the root of the problem.

HAN: I do think about some of the demands coming out of the new leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) over the last year. If you want to talk about something like a shorter workweek, if you want to talk about retirement security, these are questions that won’t be solved in contract bargaining. And they understand that these are questions that are going to be solved in universal and broader ways. And they must be about a bigger movement. To me, some of it is frankly around this question: How are we creating safety and security for working-class people?

MOYA: On the question of the interconnectedness of debt, I like to think of how, in the student debt fight, we recently had this situation where a few notorious big donors — who themselves are corporate landlords — were funding a lot of lobbying efforts to get the Supreme Court and Congress to fight against student debt cancellation, and it reminds me of the need to pull ourselves out of these silos.

HAN: We’ve been doing some coverage at In These Times about a current struggle happening in the Twin Cities, where you’ve got eight different unions, maybe more, who have coordinated a set of contract expirations. The seeds for this moment really were planted by and come out of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and particularly a group called Occupy Homes Minnesota, about action and defense against foreclosure and eviction.

I remember talking to people around that time, and I couldn’t have imagined that 13 years later we’d be on the path toward multiple unions holding their contracts open at the same time and trying to fight together. And I couldn’t have imagined that we would have a UAW that’s calling for a general strike in 2028 and giving us something to work toward. Part of that makes me think about where these paths can lead us over the next five or 10 years.

There’s connectivity that came out of organizations and moments and movements that were willing to think expansively and were willing to allow leadership to come from nontraditional places.

PURNELL: Sometimes I mistakenly pick up on these movement narratives that say, ​“You know how much easier it was for us to buy a house in the 1960s versus today?” That kind of intervention, it cues us toward condemning the current state of economic affairs where it’s now harder for millennials to buy a house. But buying a house shouldn’t be the goal of what we’re trying to ultimately do.

I’ve been struggling around narratives of accumulation and ownership and possession as precursors to debt abolition. And I think that what’s funny is that there’s all this financial literacy stuff. Every city has an effort around ​“we’re going to make sure that people are more financially literate!” And what that essentially means is that you’re going to have the tools to figure out how to save your pennies to be able to buy in and be able to be an accumulator.

I think what’s been beautiful in the defund space is that we’re thinking about what James Baldwin had been saying, that Black people want safety and that doesn’t necessarily mean more police. And I think when it comes to private property, there’s a very uncomfortable conversation we have to revisit from years and years and years of communist and leftist organizing around what it means for us to be stable. And does that mean more accumulation? Does that mean fighting for the same interest rates as white people?

How do we move beyond, ​“Well, you need financial literacy as your way out of being oppressed”?

The second thing I’m thinking about is strategy. We really need an intervention in the reparations movement. Because the reparations movement has moved in a direction that is all about reinforcing forms of debt about homeownership as a way of resolving the issue, about using the same capitalist principles to somehow pay people back, as if the way you calculate overcoming loss is that you pay them back, and it’s done and the system never changes.

BISHOP: One of the projects that I’ve worked on has been to go and talk to Black people who have student loans. And what became clear to me is that a lot of Black people may not use the word strike, but they were already in the attitude of it. If you asked them if they’re paying off their student loans, they were like, ​“Fuck no on that.” That was the response I got all the time. When I got connected with the Debt Collective, and they were talking about a debt strike, one of my immediate thoughts was: ​“I think Black people are already on this strike.” I think one of the main tools for us to organize here is tapping into the energy that’s already there.

There’s also a political piece where people are saying these student loans are not more important than the things that I’m trying to build for myself and my future. There’s a lot of possibility in that. That’s a way that we can invite people into this bigger dream. Because if they’re having to say ​“fuck student loans,” they also are probably positioned to say this about tenant debt, about what’s happening with being underpaid, with healthcare that’s too expensive. There are ways I think we can tap into those emotions, those politics that are already existing.

There is a wider, more justice-filled freedom dream than what we’re usually sold.