Debt Abolition After the Crash

Abstract

This article outlines the work programme for a national movement on indebtedness that recognises both a need for the abolition of current household debt and the recognition of socio-historical debt accrued to Indigenous, working-class, and other peoples as the result of racial capitalism. It finds capacities for the recognition of both forms of debt in qualities shared across Black radical abolitionism and the ‘New Reading’ of Marx. These qualities come together in the search for a contradiction within the prevailing order
that (1) unsettles those who are satisfied with existing arrangements regarding debt, which we can call a ‘competing contradiction’; (2) co-opts conservative attempts to derail progress in ways that, paradoxically, addresses socio-historical debt. The conservative ideology of ‘moral hazard’ is a site of potential contest through which both outcomes can be pursued.