We’re More in Debt than Ever. What Now?
W hen I was nineteen, after being told that I was unemployable for every dishwashing, barbacking, and retail position that I applied for, I found myself working as a debt collector at a third-party collection agency. It was my job to motivate people to clear out their debts in the face of mounting interest or tarnished credit scores, and I was incentivized to do so by the opportunity to earn a commission percentage on each repayment I successfully negotiated.
One of the most insidious things that I remember occurring in this industry was how we offered to close accounts if debtors agreed to pay portions of their balances, usually in the neighbourhood of 50–75 percent of the outstanding amount. We were urged to phrase this offer with a degree of finality: the debtor would think they no longer owed any money, but in reality, there was nothing preventing creditors from rebundling the remainder of the debt with other agencies, all while the meter of interest ticked on. Debts like these seemingly ensured that people would never escape the thumb of usurious creditors, and debt collection, I realized, was but one cog in the silent, efficient machinery of the credit system assailing us.
Years later, I encountered American anthropologist David Graeber’s writings on debt, in which he described the veiled purposes of economic dependence, financial instruments, and debt underwriting in detail. Graeber, an anarchist and leading activist in the Occupy movement, called consumer debt the “lifeblood of our economy.” Speaking more broadly in Debt: The First 5,000 Years—perhaps the most well-known study on the subject to emerge in recent memory—he wrote that the “very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt.” He believed that debt was an imposition that those in power placed on their “victims,” whether it involved banks, nation states, or even members of organized crime syndicates.
