ACFM - ACFM Trip 49: Debt

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

The concept of debt is as slippery as it is powerful. In this Trip episode, Keir, Nadia and Jem explain why debt is more like a belief than a calculation, and wonder how to imagine a society without it. From credit cards to dowries, they discuss the reality and fantasy of debt, with ideas from […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milbyn, and I'm joined by my very good friend Nadia Idol. and my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're discussing the very seasonal topic of debt. So guys, why are we talking about debt at this moment? What's going on?

Well, it's the aftermath of the Christmas season when traditionally the Western consumer finds themselves to be indebted. It's a huge topic, like philosophically, anthropologically, economically, sociopolitically. We've just been told in the past week that the Labour government that came into office promising not to implement any more austerity might have to implement more austerity. And why?

Because the price of government debt has risen on the bond markets. So the question of what debt is, who experiences it, what its history is, what we even mean by it, It's a huge, huge topic. Nadia, what about you? So, yes, I'm interested in all of the global and kind of governmental sides of debt, and it's kind of reminding me of all of the stuff I studied for my master's when I was studying 20 years ago. So all of that stuff is really interesting.

I'm also particularly interested in personal debt and kind of how it influences people. So, like, what debt does to us, how it influences our attitudes and behavior. and relationships, but importantly, I think, in terms of our propensity to act in the world and to agitate. So collectively, what does it do to us to have a population which is in debt? How does it influence our ability as societies to resist and, therefore, on the flip side, how is debt used as a political tool to exert, you know, influence overpopulations under late capitalism? I'm also interested in things like levels of discomfort. with debt and how that exists perhaps differently across various different cultures.

So whether it makes people icky to know that they are in debt or to feel in debt or to what extent they are comfortable because perhaps they have internalized the importance or the acceptance of the role that debt plays in being able to be a quote unquote good consumer in the world. So those are some of the reasons why I'm interested in talking about debt on ACFM. I agree, yeah, but we thought of this really because it's January and people are probably looking at their bank accounts going, oh shit, at the moment, as it's traditional, overspent at Christmas, etc. And then as Jim said, yeah, like last week is we recorded now, so mid-January, there was a run on government bonds, so the cost of government spending went

up really quite dramatic, to such an extent that people were talking about whether the Chancellor Rachel Reeves should resign or not, and she was reported to be very depressed. That crisis has eased off a bit now. But it's like a really good example of like how debt is a disciplining mechanism, you know, the financial debt markets, people who buy government bonds, etc. To some degree they were reacting because they didn't believe that the growth program or that, therefore the taxation and spending program of the current Labour government, in particular the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, they didn't believe it was believable. They thought that they would have to, she would have to alter.

a course basically and they were pricing that in. They were disciplining her and people immediately talked about Liz Truss and Quasi Qatang's budget a couple of years ago where they got forced by a huge increase in the cost of government debt to reverse course basically to abandon their budget. So you can see this thing of discipline. What we decided actually was that we would we would try to parcel off debt, that sort of macroeconomic debt, sovereign debt, the debt of countries and the debt between countries, et cetera. We're going to pass a lot off and do it as a microdose. That's a very interesting topic in itself.

And what we're going to focus on now in this episode is much more personal debt, and perhaps the effects of personal debt, and some of the theory of what debt is, et cetera. So we might do a little bit of a history of debt, but we will be sort of focusing as much as we can on that. And we'll get started on that in a moment. But before we do, let's just do the parish notices. Of course, we need to remind you about our newsletter,

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We should definitely play the standout anthem from the debut album, Feeding of the 5000, by Anarchopunk Legends, Anarchopunk Originals, crass. I can't believe it's taking us this long to play this song. This is crass. Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do. in the UK.

What is the actual state of debt by historic standards now? Do we know exactly? I do, yeah. Tell us, but I couldn't just carry on myself. I had to have an intermediary, an interlocutor. Basically, the important sort of statistic is debt-to-income ratios. So, you know, how much debt people have compared to their income, and you can, like, average that out over a country, etc.

the story of debt over the last sort of 30 years is something like this is that like debt goes up as a proportion of like household income it goes up massively in the 1990s so between 1996 and up to like 2008 the crash it goes up hugely it goes in 1996 the proportion of debt the household income is 85 percent so people owe 85 percent of their their incomes basically is this a UK This is a UK statistic, yeah. I've been on the phone to Mr. Stats. He's such a chauvinist. He will not look at any other country's statistics. So like 85% in 1996 goes up to 150% in 2008. And that's been, that's like the peak, basically. It's not been that high since that point. Of course, what happens in 2008, you get the financial crisis. If we could go before the financial crisis, you know, you have very, very low.

rates across the 2000s. They call it the Greenspan Putt, when he cuts, chairman of the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates from like 5% to something like 1%. And then it goes on to 0.5% or something like that, really low interest rates. Then you have the 2008 recession, etc. Banks don't want us to lend as much. The rules around lending get hardened a little bit. And so, and people are less inclined to take on credit. because they've just seen what happens when you get a crash and you're overextended yourself, et cetera, et cetera. So that falls

debt to income ratio falls to like 128% by 2015. And then from 2015, it starts to go up to sort of like a high of 136% in 2017. Then you get the corona pandemic, which forces it down again. Oh no, actually

raises household debts, but then you get a really big increase in interest rates because you have inflation. And so now debt to income ratios are around 120% in the UK, which is quite low, actually, compared to recent history, we'd put it that way. There's a very simple reason for that. It's much more expensive to borrow than it has been, or it was in the 2010s, for instance, where interest rates are incredibly low, sometimes negative, because they were below inflation. It's important to note right now that

that relatively low debt-to-income ratio in the UK, for example, is associated with very high levels of pessimism, economic pessimism and generally reported lack of optimism and lack of well-being that really going back to the 70s, if you try to track sort of the general mood as a population, like the more effervescent people are feeding, the more they'll binge on the credit cards. And when people are not doing,

it's generally correlated with, for example, governments being very unpopular in opinion polls because people are feeling pessimistic, people feel things aren't going well. And that is quite, that's quite significant, I think. It tells us quite a lot about the role that debt-funded personal consumption plays in contemporary capitalism. Because I think you really can't overstate the importance of people's ability to borrow money, relatively cheaply very easily not always cheaply but relatively cheaply by historic standards very very easily in quite large amounts in order to fund personal spending you can't underestimate the importance of that because that has been absolutely central really to people's

whole way of life i'd say since the 70s you know the argument made by people like like myself and Alex Williams in our book hegemony now is that fundamentally that is the basis of political consent to the whole neoliberal program since the 1970s, that broadly speaking, people went along with neoliberalism more than anything else because they could get, as I always put it, you know, big flat screen TVs and cheap holidays, which are things the previous generations didn't have. And the reason they could get those things was partly because of the collapse in manufacturing costs, because of the outsourcing of manufacturing to China, and partly because of the availability of cheap credit. Because what didn't happen is all of that

consumption being funded by wage, wage rises. And at a more, at an even more fundamental structural level, you know, I would say there's a basic problem for capitalism going back to the early 20th century. And that problem is after you get out of the 19th century, when most people are only spending money on the basics, capitalism has to keep finding a way of squaring the circle, that it doesn't want to have to pay people wages too much, but it also has to have people have enough money in their pockets to keep buying stuff and keep buying stuff they don't really need. And the way in which that situation resolves itself, as we know, in the middle decades of the 20th centuries, well, basically capitalism, capital has to make a load of

concessions, really. The wages have to go up, the amount of profits that go towards wages has to go up, that all kinds of social spending has to be supported by the government, that comes from taxation, et cetera. But then after the 70s, that situation ends for lots of reasons, and then we get into a situation where basically the way in which that circle continues to be squared is through facilitating like massive use of personal debt to fund consumption. So it's an absolutely key mechanism. And then so people, when people are not evading themselves of that opportunity to have a good time consuming stuff by making use of cheap personal credit, when they're not doing that, it is in a way they are just not fully participating in the

settlement which advanced neoliberal capitalism offers to you. And one of the really interesting things about thinking around and theorising around debt is this interface between, you know, the historical materialist kind of reality of, you know, money and wages and what people can afford with, you know, as you said, Jeremy, like perception and confidence and how people feel about the future, having a huge influence on how they relate to like debt and spending. So I think it's a really, really interesting area for us to talk about. Debt is a promise, isn't it? It's a promise on your future self. Your future self is going to repay this. You know, it's a promise into the future, etc. Debt is also tied up with like,

it's tied up with, we'll probably talk about that a bit more, but it's also tied up with a sort of disciplining of yourself, basically. And we'll probably talk about that a bit more later on. You're making a contract into the future, so you're binding your future self to a decision made by your present self, basically. Let's put it this way. Sometimes that can feel like a loss of freedom. One of the other things we might mention before we move off away from Mr. Stats, is a type of debt that people take on.

And so, like, you have mortgage debt primarily for home ownership. You know, that's one of the things that really massively expands in that key period from the 1990s up to 2008. and then you have car financing, and then, you know, you have student debt. Student debt gets massively accelerated in the tripling of student fees in 2011, was it? The 2010 student movement, wasn't it? And now it's something like the poorer students who don't have parental support, so about 40% of all students, they graduate with well over 50,000 pounds worth of student debt,

basically, debt related to being a student. Originally, that was at very favourable interest rates, but that's no longer the case, etc. With average wages, that just means that the average graduate basically won't pay off their debt. And so student debt repayment acts in effect as an additional 7% tax, marginal tax rate. But you have to pay an extra 7% tax,

which means poorer graduates, those who don't have support from parents, basically pay the highest marginal tax rates of anyone else in the country, basically. And then you also have another kind of... I don't know if you're about to mention this, but then I think there was like the height of the short-term high-interest loan sharks that came onto the UK market.

And then now you have the normalisation of, you know, this kind of like pay now, buy now and pay later, kind of Klarna and those kind of things. things where you pay really high interest to, like, buy stuff that, you know, food basically, stuff like that, which didn't exist some time ago, which has now become part of culture. Yeah, and then, so the last sort of major type of debt is unsecured debt. So the other, you could say, secure debt is usually cheaper. You know, it's backed by a house.

If I don't pay my mortgage, the bank can repossess my house and sell it, et cetera. So that's secured debt. And unsecured debt tends to be like credit card debt and payday loans, etc. that sort of like that sort of thing payday loans in particular where you do very short term very very expensive borrowing just to get through the week until payday etc yeah that's an important thing to clarify because i think people are quite intuitively conscious of the importance of credit card debt to the everyday consumption economy but statistically also a huge amount of personal consumption and family consumption since the 80s has been funded by secured debt which is basically

what happens is people have a house and they have a mortgage. The value of the house goes up, the mortgage gets paid down a bit, so in effect they have a pool of equity in the house. And then refinancing allows them to quote unquote release that equity into cash that they can spend. This is one reason why riding house prices have been so important to this overall economic, cultural, political, social regime because it's only when house prices are continually rising that people can keep accessing these pools of money in order to fund spending. And again, it's only people's ability to do that that has sort of disguised or compensated for the fact that in real terms, wages were not rising, as they had done in earlier decades.

So it's really, really important. And that has a huge impact on the overall housing crisis now. I would say this is the key reason for the housing crisis, actually. The key reason for the housing crisis is housing has not. not kept up with supply of housing has not kept up with demand for years. Governments have quite knowingly allowed the ratio of demand to supply to become highly unfavourable to people trying to enter the market, either as renters or first-time buyers. And the reason for that is it was politically more important to them that existing home owners

should continue to be able to experience this constant increase in the equity value of their homes as a way of funding consumption spending that wasn't going to be funded by wages. and it's really crucial and that's one reason why it is the issue of housing is really difficult for contemporary government in ways I think are very rarely acknowledged including by those of us who campaigned for things like rent caps and which I think we should be campaigning for but you know it's often not acknowledged that almost any government is going to find themselves in a real problem because if you really start pushing down house prices which is what does need to happen sooner or later then you are basically suppressing people's capacity to consume and spend money. And again, as I've said, it's only people's capacity to consume spend money that keeps them on board to some extent with the entire neoliberal capitalist, pseudo-liberal democratic formation that we've been inhabiting with the last few decades. So people are going to find themselves, any government that messes with that situation is going to find themselves facing very, very strong headwinds.

Yeah, it's an important point that about the difference between the cost of borrowing, growing when you've got an asset, when it's secured, when you've got a house is like so much cheaper than you haven't. You can really see that in like, in unsecured debt. So it's something like, I think it's like a third of all households in the bottom half of incomes have debt, which was originally, they originally took out to pay for like essentials like food or rent or council tax or energy bill or something like that basically. So it's like the essentials rather than luxury spending. The reason that house ownership is so, so important is that, you know, it really affects your ability to access debt, et cetera. And of course, one of the things I would probably say is

that plays a huge role in the outlooks of people of different generations, basically, because there was a particular couple of generations who had had access to rising house prices, well, access to housing and then rode that wave of rising house prices, etc. And then it becomes much more difficult, of course, generations get crossed over by class, etc. And so, you know, we're now in a situation where average incomes in many parts of the country won't get you on the housing ladder. You need some sort of inheritance from your parents. So you can see a class and inheritance sort of dynamic. And what's interesting there is kind of like the clash between kind of cultures of like debt and money within families and like the history and the kind of

material reality of what different generations are experiencing, of like, again, we see this with the boomers on various different things, but we see it very clearly with debt, whereas this idea of like where money and debt sits and what kind of norms they're passing down to their children, which, you know, their kids are like, our actual material reality is completely different. I'll have to think in a very different way and kind of how that kind of disciplines the mind and what it does to kind of that generation in terms of, of the whole self-responsisation agenda and like taking on kind of the guilt

and how that relates to debt I think is super interesting when it happens on a social level, you know, on mass. Just as like having a house that you can borrow against the rising value off to fund spending is a big marker of actually how secure and how able to participate

in the whole consumer economy you are in Britain today. I mean, really on some level what it means to be a member of the capitalist class is and always has it always has been the case that what it means to be a member of a capitalist class is simply to have access to credit to have access to enough credit

to be able to invest to be able to spend to be able to generate a return I mean that is one of the fundamental differences about being in the world if you come from a certain class or if you don't if you come from a certain kind of background

you can you know you can rock up to an investment bank and just tell them you want to get a load out you want to buy some houses to rent out to people and they'll basically just give you the money and they'll expect a return and some interest, but you can become a landlord.

This happens to people. So access to credit, which is a form of debt, you know, access to credit at rates, which make it possible to be able to profit from access, arguably that is just the defining feature of what it means to be a member of the capitalist class. And I think what's interesting from my point of view as well,

you see how a set of norms, a particular attitude to credit that you had to be kind of free and easy with it and you had to not worry too much about running up big credit card bills and overdrafts, etc. That set of norms which were kind of norms which I would have associated at one time only with members of a kind of ruling class group,

a hegemonic class fraction, became diffused and kind of throughout the wider culture and were ultimately forced upon people. They're now forced upon the students. Now you have to, you have to be willing to accept a huge debt burden as the price for omittance to the middle class. That, my friend, is how hegemony works. I think we should play the fantastic song. Nobody knows you when you're down and out about falling on hard times. Originally by Jimmy Cox, a US vaudeville performer. He sang the song

in 1923 after the US financial crash. But since I am of the MTV generation, we should play the Eric Clapton 1992 version. Nobody loves you when you're down in your pocket not one penny

and as friends you don't have many when you get back on your feet again Everybody wants to be your long more friend I said it's strange What plane of consciousness does any of this exist

Like to what extent Is it understood by people Or kind of the relationship between kind of debt and credit And, you know, how basically the system works It's not clear it's something you can be aware of Because it's something, it's in the nature of debt as Keir said, debt is a claim on the future. And as soon as you start trying to figure out things like the nature of debt and the relationship,

I mean, for example, just take the scenario I described, which is a real thing. Like, I have known people who have done this. They just decided, oh, I want to become a buy-to-let landlord. They went to the bank. They said, look, I want to be a vital landlord. I ain't got any money right now. If you lend me, like, this many million quid, I'm going to buy these houses with it. Rent are going to rent, I'm going to be able to rent them out for enough money.

I'll be able to pay you back and then I'll make a big profit. And they just did it. and so on some level apart from the tangible asset to the houses themselves everything involved in that transaction was kind of unreal it was all just about

yeah it was relational it was virtual it was about confidence and probabilities it was about gambling and persuasion and there is this sense that well that's all that stuff

has been built into the logic of capitalism right from the start for hundreds of years for a thousand years nearly it's been built into the logic of capitalism it's built into the whole context of money we sort of already

decided for this episode, we're not going to get too much into theories of money because we need to do a whole episode about money. But, you know, the thing that it's always really sort of staggering to students when when tries to explain it to them, it sort of staggers everybody, staggers all the economists, I know, even when they think about it, even though they know it's true all the time, is that how government create money in the modern banking system, and really this has gone about for hundreds of years. I mean, this is kind of a simplification, but it's basically right is, I mean, governments don't just like print off like a load of power notes and say, okay, now, well, there's no such things as a pound note anymore. They don't print off a load

of 20 pound notes and then give them to some people and say, right, now you've got some 20 pound notes. They'll say to a bank, okay, you can now issue a load of loans to people. You can go issue a loan and then they'll go issue the loans and the loans then become debt which is owed to the banks. And if it's in the form of the debt, the money which is owed to the banks by the people taking out the loans, the money comes into existence. So it's not. It's not a not the bank, the government doesn't like give the bank, it doesn't credit them with a load of credits even in their bank account. It gives them permission to issue loans. And this is a kind of, this is kind of a simplification, but that is basically how money is created. So the whole thing

is this sort of process, which is inherently virtual and inherently based on a constant deferral of the final moment of repayment, like into a future which can never possibly arrive. It's It's an example of what Derrida would call Difference. The moment of repayment never arrives. It's constantly deferred. It's constantly a different moment from the present one. And it can never arrive. It can never be allowed to arrive because if it does arrive, the whole system will start working.

This is why David Graber in his classic book about the debt, the history of debt, sort of speculates that on some level, on some level, even capitalists have to believe that eventually one day capitalism is, going to end. Because if capitalism is never going to end, then ultimately, no one is ever actually going to get paid back for all this debt that's constantly being created. The one bit that's missing from that is, I think, is that that person who walked into the bank, not anybody can walk into the bank. Do you know what I mean? So like debt and credit is also about evaluation. Do you

know what I mean? Do you fit? Are you going to pay it back? You know, do I believe you're going to pay it back. Like, credit comes, like, the root of credit is credet, which is like, to believe, basically. Redo, I believe. Yeah, yeah. And like, at a certain time, you would have, you would have a personal interview with a bank manager. And if you were the site of person, they could trust it back, etc., etc., they would lend you the money. But this is the exact point that Jeremy is making is that it's not necessarily about, you know, a set of criteria that you have to. fulfil. It's about a set of beliefs. Like, do you believe that this is the right person? This appears to be the right person who I would give money to. That's how it's worked for a

really long time. Yeah, it's absolutely how it's. And I would say, again, it's crucial to the functioning of hegemony, because you can just get a sense of which class fractions are really hegemonic at a given historical moment and what their norms are, according to the idea of what kind of a person is it that a bank wants to lend money to. So, again, in the mid-20th century, if you're going for an interview with the bank manager, the whole deal is you've got to look as stolid and respectable as possible. You've got to look calm and predictable. You've got to be a completely regularized and normative and mainstream sort of individual. Of course, from the 80s onwards, that changes. If you're going to convince the bank to lend your money, what do you've got to look like?

You've got to have a bit of a flare. You've got to look like you're a bit of an entrepreneur. You've got to look like a guy who's going to get out there in sell. You've got to look like a guy. And ultimately, now we got to the point where the world is run by people whose ideal entrepreneur is a Sam Bankman freed. Now what you've got to look like to get money from the bank, ideally is a sort of, you know, is someone who's going to just successfully be able to bullshit enough people to part them from their money. That's if you're dealing with actual investors, like at the level of, say, investment banking. Of course, that's at that level. I mean, of course, the actual interview with the bank manager doesn't happen anymore and hasn't happened to decades. Because if you're below the level of people who are trying to borrow millions

on some scheme to rip off million other people for 10 to millions to make a profit out of it, if you're below that level, then your loan processing application is all just going to be dealt with by the algorithm. It's going to be dealt with by AI. It's going to be dealt with by a often mysterious set of factors by which the AI and the credit scoring system is going to decide whether or not you should be lent a certain amount of money. It's really good that you said he there, Jeremy, when you were talking about the kind of character of a person you needed to be around the ages to get money, to get the bank to give you money. Because we should point out, because many listeners might not know this. And until 1975 in the UK, you could not open your

own bank account as a woman under your own name. 1975 is a very, there is not a long time ago at all. And so all of this conversation over history about taking money out of the bank was basically like entirely male. And women were seen as like high risk anyway until further down the line when, you know, and we'll talk about this later in terms of like loans for women and like the role of women and the story of debt, which is also complex. but this is entirely like a male history until 1975 in Britain.

Yeah, that's totally right. Like it was much harder for women to get access to credit for those reasons. And of course, one of the stereotypes about women was that if you wouldn't give them money, they'll just go and spend it on pretty dresses. And of course, and a whole bunch of things change, of course, we know around them in mid-70s. And of course, the major thing that changes is the impact of women's liberation and the feminist movement in challenging a set of norms. But part of it also changes, of course, is that what is,

going on in the world of finance just around the mid-70s is we're shifting to a situation in which if you want to borrow loads of money to spend on pretty dresses, that's absolutely fine. That's what we want you to do. We're going to give everybody. We're going to give everybody money, lend everybody money to spend on pretty dresses from now on. Whereas historically, of course, women have been like the controllers of the purse in the, in the household and it's been, you know, often the men who have been squandering it on like drink down the pub. So like, that in itself was always a perception, you know. It was highly differentiated by class, wasn't it? Yeah, the tradition in a lot of working class communities was the man just came home from, which just gave his wife

the money when he came home from work. She was in charge of it. So women, so the sphere of consumption was ruled by women. But then in the, I mean, it was also the case in the conventional bourgeois household and the middle class household, but for example, but any borrowing that had to be done, had to be done by the man. What's really interesting about that as well, just to link that up, like that sort of transformation up to sort of like neoliberalism and like the invention of these Reddit rating agencies and then eventually this idea of a credit rating, a credit score, is that like you could see that as in some way I'm doing inverted commas here, people, do my air quotes in some way progressive because you're moving from like personal relationships

in which all sorts of prejudices coming to an impersonal relationship of the algorithm, etc. etc. The personal sort of relationship only, you know, that, that sort of fits a bit, a bit later on, basically, a bit higher up, I mean, when you get to the venture capitalists, etc., which Jen was talking about. But the other thing about, I just wanted to say about that, about credit, your credit score, et cetera, is if you have no debt, that counts against your credit score, basically, you have to be in debt. That's not like that permanent debt sort of thing, is that, yeah, you know, the best credit scores when you have a lot of debt and you reliably pay it back basically and your income, etc. is seeing that you can, you can pay it back. Because it's like,

obviously, they want people to take debt on, basically. It's that thing of like, you know, there is an infinite debt, basically. And there are various ways to get at it. We should obviously play the best song ever to have the words I-O-U in it. And that is the sort of classic of British Electro Pop. This is Freeze. I.O.U. Sometimes cry Should we do a little bit more Like what debt is

A little bit more into like perhaps the history of debt Yeah You already mentioned David Graber's book Debt the first 5,000 years Which actually, it came out in 2011 and one of the other books I went back to this week because we were doing this show was by Lazzarato. Maurizio Lazzarate.

Yeah, yeah. The Making of Indeated Man, which also comes out in 2011. And so you have this wave of thinking about debt in 2011. Obviously, we know why it's theirs, because 2008, etc. And people are trying to come to terms with what's going on and what had happened before 2008 as well, basically, when the mystifications of the stories being told in the pre-2001, eight era get burnt away basically by the by the crisis so we could talk a little bit about

about david graber sort of like he does this debt the first 5,000 years and makes this argument that the first recorded debt system dates back to something like 3,500 BC or bCE so there's a Sumerian empire or civilization which is in like modern-day Iraq and so that's the first sort of like indications of an unorganized recorded system of debt And in fact, you know, there's all arguments or there's theories that, in fact, recording debt might be the origin of writing, etc. And the earliest examples of writing we have is all about complaining about debts, et cetera, and all these sorts of things. And so, like, yeah, he goes back to that, to 5,000 years and he sort of traces it through through various waves, etc. Then he says that we're into a new historical era in 1971.

We'll get to why 1971 is important. But part of what Graber's doing in his debt book is he's trying to overcome the sort of origin myth about money that's taught in economics 101 classes, basically. And that story is, before money there was barter, and that was inefficient, I've got a cow, and I only want something worth a chicken, etc. This is really difficult, let's invent money. And he says, that's not true, basically. what actually debt comes before money and both of those come way before barter is his argument basically or something a little bit gloss but something like that it's one of those books were like everyone who's a real expert on one of the bits it talks about will want to quibble with some

of its claims about some of the history but you know if you're doing a history in 5,000 years you're going to have to be glib sometimes yeah it's the critique of the myth of barter is it is really important because it is like you say it's when you're explaining to students like the you know or how money is used in a capitalist society it's very even if even if you're teaching from a Marxist perspective actually it's really easy to slip back into this assumption that there's some moment in history when people just swap things for each other and actually there isn't any good evidence for all that and so yeah the idea that notions of debt like pre-exist both concepts of currency and anything you could really cause or barter is really

important. And I mean, the way the book does this is it gets into all these anthropological sources, but you look at people in indigenous communities and look at the way in which they, how they treat the concept of exchange, whether you're talking about the exchange of gifts or the giving of gifts. And if you try and do that, then you've, then you quickly realize that actually that on one level, a lot of Western liberal capitalist assumptions about the ways in which people do or don't exchange goods. And the way which people do or don't share goods are at very best tendentious. You know, and Graber famously wants to say that actually sort of a kind of communism. What's the adjective? It's what community. Everyday communism is a sort of fundamental

aspect of human relationships. I mean, he says everyday communism. He's referring to what a lot of people like myself would just call sociality. The being social of human beings always to some extent has to come before they're being individual, they're being private, they're being property holders, they're entering into transactional relationships. It's one thing that's keeping the UK society afloat at the moment. Without it, it'll be much more of a catastrophe that already is that kind of sociality. Yeah, exactly. It's definition of every communism though is so he says that like it's sort of relationships that follow the logic from each according to their ability to each according to their need basically yeah yeah and the

really basic example is is just that well you know most people if if you start them in the street and ask for directions they won't ask for a fee first they'll just do it because because they can because you need the directions and they have the ability to give them to you so it is it is a good formulation that any kind of situation in which people you know people some people will receive a to their need and people give according to their ability can be understood as in some sense, in his term, communistic. And I think that is a really useful formulation. I mean, it really reminds me of a thing I often say about the relationships which underpin, you know, the practice of education. One of the big problems with the neoliberal program in education at every level

from primary schools, even from, you know, preschool, childcare level to graduate university level is neoliberals want to remodel educational relationships, according to the understanding that there are relationships between sellers and buyers of something. So students become consumers and the institutions from which they purchase services become providers for which their teachers are employees on the provider side of that relationship. And the problem with that is that does not really how education works. And it's not really how even a lot of quite conservative people or feel intuitively education works or should works, education is what some people would call a relation of care,

and in Graber's terms, it is a relation of everyday communism, because if somebody needs to learn something, you try to teach it to them, and you teach it to them to the extent that you can, and that is fundamental to the relationship. So I think that is really, it is really useful. He also makes this argument that, like, if you look inside the capitalist firm,

you're not going to see market interactions, you're going to see, or, you know, there are, are some but you're going to see everyday communism and he has this like the example of you know you're working uh you're working on i don't know as a plumber or something like that or perhaps you're working as a building cars and you say hand me that wrench you don't say uh yeah what's in it for me then you know what i mean it's because i mean Marx makes this point doesn't he basically that capitalism provides the capital and then workers cooperate around it basically and that sociality of that cooperation is one of the roots of the workers movement,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think it's a good point. And there was this famous example, so famous, I can't remember the firm. One firm tried to put into place internal markets, basically, and it just collapsed. It collapsed within, like, really, really quickly because it's just not how, you just cannot live most of your life like that, basically. And I think that's his point, is that most of our interactions.

are basically not market interactions. And like if you look back historically or relations mediated by money, even, like, you know, if we look back historically as well, you know, most, you know, even once money was invented, you know, most relationships were not done that way. They were done through not just everyday communism. Basically, he says, you know,

even today, if the need is tiny or huge, everyday communism comes into play somebody asks you for a light if you're a smoker you give them a light I'm just going to say I lament the end of public smoking or the attempt because of exactly that

can I have a Rizlamate or can I have a light is like a really important part of culture do you know what I mean and it's like it reinforces that kind of sociality in a way that has real and lasting impact on human beings

as has been proven and like those sort of interactions are really really really important to human beings you know yeah In fact, even like asking for directions is almost redundant now if you've got your phone, etc., etc.

But he says also, in times of like really great need when somebody's life's at risk, et cetera, or you've got a disaster like these wildfires in California, etc. People behave in a communistic fashion, basically. Like if I can do something and somebody's need is great enough, I will do it, you know? Yeah, right. So the question then is, well, where does debt come from then?

And I think Graber's basic argument, being the good anarchist anthropologist that he is, in the tradition of people like Scott he basically wants to say that the concept of debt gets imposed upon these basically these forms of relationship which

you could say a reciprocal because everybody does what they can for everybody else but you could also say they're not reciprocal because it's not a matter of well I did this for you therefore you must do this for me yeah well he says that they can't be they're not reciprocal because basically he says like if you look at how

relations happen they happen through this like everyday communism but they also happen by through this building up of these complex personal networks of debt basically and they're like in most circumstances you do not want to acquit those debts because if you acquit that debt that means you're indicating you want to end the relationship do you know what means we has all these examples of people coming around you know and well you've got to do it very imprecise you know okay so they borrowed a cup of sugar so I'm going to come back

with this thing here it's not exactly the same it's roughly the same but not exactly the same, et cetera. And when you have anthropologists who sort of mess up and like give the exact amount or whatever of the debt, people are really shocked because they think, oh, well, fuck you then. You don't want anything to do with me anymore. You know what I mean? Instead, there's this ongoing relationship where people's debts are given back and forth. And it's like a personal relationships, it's complex web of relationships that people live in. I think one of the things that the account in that book sort of strains against is the attempt to explain the idea that people are caught up in this basically non-calculable web of social relationships always

in which people are constantly doing things for each other. And to try to find a language in which to describe that situation, which doesn't actually rely on a language of debt. Because to some extent, part of the claim in the book is that, well, the concept of debt, as we understand it today emerges out of a situation in which authoritarian states try to impose on populations a kind of a way of relating to each other which is disempowering for them collectively and therefore empowering for the state which is trying to control them and it does that so is to enhance the power of a ruling elite and disempower the rest of the population and in the process it has to find a way of classifying social relationships in such a way that they become

conceptualised as debts, rather than just as, well, just the way you do things, just the way you be a human in the world. So, and if you really wanted to do a sort of literary deconstruction of that book, you could do, because you can see that David himself is often, you know, I think he's sort of struggling to find a different language. And when, because because, and that is because all, so much of the language that we have simply for talking about, sort of human relatedness is shaped by this concept of debt. And that is one of the things that comes out in that book. It's one of the things that comes out a little bit in Mauritio's book, The Making the Indeated Man. Also one of the things that comes back in another book. I also published in

2011, actually, Richard. I think it's Deinst, he pronounced his name, D-I-E-N-S-T, the bonds of debt, borrowing against the common good, another 2011 debt book. And all these people are really interested in something which has been of interest to philosophers and thinkers going back, at least to Nietzsche, the idea that was so much about language for just thinking about notions of human relatedness is shaped by concepts of debt. And there are several different things you can do with that idea. You can try to completely get away from the idea of debt, or you can just sort of run with the idea of debt and say, yeah, well, we all owe each other everything all the time, and that's what it means to be human. I'm much obliged to you for your rendering of that argument.

And much obliged to you, obligato, et cetera, all of that sort of stuff. Yeah, well, part of the issue is that, and this is something that various people have said over the years, I mean, Graber wasn't the most meant to say this, is that almost any concept of obligation tends to get coded in a capitalist society as debt, and even not just in capitalist society, it's been in any kind of a market society, actually, which from the point of view of that kind of anthropology predates capitalism. And it's not to say that humans aren't always going to have a, obligations to each other. But the moment you start to try to understand those obligations is in some way calculable, then you get into a concept of debt. And indeed, for people like Graber and people

like James C. Scott think the author of books like seeing like a state, from their point of view, really, the whole concept of the state, it's the, they're sort of, you know, they often want to differentiate themselves from Marxists, because Marxists think everything goes wrong for the modern epoch at the moment of the invention of capitalism, or it goes wrong. So, you know, somewhere back in the midst of prehistory at the moment of the division of labour. But for Scott and to some extent I think for David, then what happens is when things go wrong is the moment of the invention of the state, which you can trace back to maybe somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia.

And the thing that goes wrong with the invention of the state is the same thing that sort of goes wrong with the invention of the market, which is that this idea comes about the human relationships ought to be calculable and human obligations to each other ought to be calculable. some way. And therefore, because they're calculable, they should be limitable in some way when the reality of being human in the world is that the nature of human relationships to each other is non-calculable. And here I'm sort of betraying my own commitments. Because my own thinking about that is really shaped by sort of people like Derrida and Levinas a bit who, you know, have this

idea of that we are all sort of responsible to each other, as Levinas would say, but in ways which you can never really calculate or enumerate. And what's interesting about that stuff is kind of how people tend to, well, there is a tendency, at least in part of society, for people to act in one way, but then believe that people are another way. So like the discourse around, you know, the hegemonic discourse around, you know, people are selfish or like people won't help you out or people won't act in these ways of sociality, whereas those very people who are saying those things are the same people who will behave in quite a social way. and will accept that kind of sociality outside even, even if they're using that kind of like debt and credit language, but their form of behaviour sits outside that, but they will still, you know, they will still spout this banter

that, you know, like people are selfish and it is tit for tat and you have to kind of, you know, repay on your debts and you do owe people things. And I think that's really interesting as well, like how that discourse kind of sits above what actually people experience. But that's people in, it's like, yeah, the banker in his personal life if he walked past somebody drowning in a in a river might jump in and and save him because that's a personal connection and like things such as debt and money etc and like bureaucracy to some degree

a distancing mechanisms where you distance yourself from the human effects of of things because they're impersonal mechanisms etc and so that same banker will walk into his job or perhaps not a banker perhaps a CEO of a health insurance company in the UK I can't think of the name of one now but like they'll sign off on something, you know, which means that, you know, tens of thousands of people will die because they won't get the healthcare that they need, etc. There's a disjunction between how what they would do if they had a personal relationship with somebody, even if it's just seeing them in a river, and then these impersonal mechanisms. I think that's one of the things that Grae is trying to point to about, you know,

you move from these personal relationships of debt to an impersonable, calculable conceptions of debt and money and all of these sorts of things, which, you know, allows, these huge, we might even say, inhuman sort of mechanisms, machines and behavior. I wanted to play a song about credit cards. This is a bit of contemporary Rwandan Afro Soul from Nilan and Mistake. Most of it is not sung in English, but in the chorus, the guy promises the object of his desire that he's going to give her his credit card. They call me shy and lazy

Gondi ambo and crazy Sinakoriko's I'mo, Tremu di mapenzi I'm born a pum-pum daily Yeah Shaka stamina Who ya, Oya

Na quiveria Oya Oyaudavita Pum Pooooooeeway I give you Give you my creditor I need you need you at any time

I give you give you my creditor Baby you too my mediter the other key feature of ideas about debt going back into prehistoric times according to people like graver and scott and others i mean i say it's according to them but i think it's undeniable i mean anyone who anyone who's looked at the relevant history and prehistory is going to agree with this that the concepts of debt are in this are completely bound up with concepts of bondage and slavery and un-freedom, going all the way back through time.

There's very little evidence of societies that, for example, have a concept of slavery being legally acceptable that don't somehow have the concept and institution of slavery bound up with concepts and institutions of indebtedness. And the bondage and bonds, as in government bonds, the things that are traded in the bond market, which apparently determine the fate of nations these days, obviously have identical kind of etymologies. It's so interesting the language around this stuff. I mean, I'm happy that we're talking about this because it's like, I can't think of any other

kind of issue or like, you know, technology, which is so, like, central to how we talk about things. Mortgage, French for death grip. It's great. And, um, Because most forms of institutionalised slavery will have some notion that, well, in some sense, like the freedom or even the life of the slave is owed to the slave owner. I mean, you do get systems of chattel slavery, like in the latter stages of the antebellum South in the United States, where slaves are just property and they are just, they're not, slaves are not slaves because in some sense their freedom is being owed to the slave owner, they are just chapel slavery. But most systems of slavery have some idea

built into them. The slave has ended up indebted to the owner, which is why, you know, in most systems of slavery that we know about historically, like in ancient times, you know, freedom could be purchased or could be bought back and like quite often was. So there's like debt peonage. So you get that really early, even in Sumerian sort of a civilization where where we have the first recorded debt peonage where you can't pay off your debts and your children go into inherit those debts and become basically slaves as one version of that.

But the other version is like slaves who were captured in war and it's the logic is something like we could have killed these people but we didn't. Therefore they owe us a debt of life basically, do you know what I mean? In some sort of ways they're already dead and we can treat them not like human beings which is I think the root of the zombie myth for a callback to our horror episode a couple of years ago.

I just want to do this argument that Graber has, which I think is really interesting, because one of the ages that he talks about in terms of the origins of money is like the Axial age, which is like this anthropological sort of term, for something like between the 8th and 3rd centuries, B.C.E., basically, where you have the growth of these huge empires in, like, China, in India and across the Mediterranean,

Mediterranean, so you know, ancient Greece and Rome, etc. We're sort of talking. And he says, like, what you see there is a development of a great, it's a great phrase, the development of the military coinage slave complex. And it's like, it's something like, you know, these empires get built up and eventually they come to rely on like mercenary armies, etc, which can go and like capture huge amounts of slaves and bring them back to like Greece or to Rome or whatever, that's something like that. And what goes along with that, that huge increase in slavery and like, you know, development of slave societies such as Greece and Rome is the need to to pay your soldiers in coins, basically. And this is the thing that ties it up with the state for Graber and for James

Scott is that, you know, so basically you have this huge introduction of coinage in order to pay your mercenary armies or going and capturing your slaves, etc. But then that comes with taxes to pay the soldiers, etc. And then those taxes have to be paid in coins, money, etc. And that's the main mechanism by which coins get introduced into society. And even then, in those sorts of societies, virtually no interactions apart from paying taxation are done through money, basically.

You know, most of the others are still tied up in these sort of impersonal debt relationships. There's some sort of market, but even markets are like done on basically. on debts, you know, calculable debts now. And he makes this argument, I'm not sure it's true, but if I'm really, really interesting, he says, look, what goes along with the Axiol Age and this development of, like, the military coinage,

slave complex and the development of, like, coinage as its impersonal relationship between peoples, basically, is you get the development of, like, monotheism, the great religions, in fact, not just monotheism, but the great religions, and also, like, you know, the birth of, like, philosophical inquiry, and his argument

It's something like, you know, that's a situation which you suddenly have, like, large areas of life or some areas of life anyway. There's a huge introduction of, like, impersonal relationships done through this impersonal mechanism of coins. And so, therefore, you need some sort of, like, religious or philosophical inquiry to try to recreate, like, an ethical grounds for society, which allows impersonal social relations. I thought that was a really neat sort of argument. I wanted to clarify, because I was thinking, because we read the book and we're kind of rattling through some of its ideas, I'm worried listeners are going to be still thinking, Ricky, if people didn't have money and they didn't do barter, like, what do you mean? They used credit to manage transactions. So the way this account goes is that people, literally, like if you're in somewhere, like, if you're in like an ancient Mesopotamian city, like it's not that you can't buy stuff, like you can go and buy stuff. But the way you would buy stuff is there was basically, like, there was sort of credit system that would say something like, okay, right, in theory, because you've got, I've got this sheep off you. Look, I now owe you like, you know, three barrels of rice or whatever the thing they were supposedly using as currency was, but people wouldn't

actually, hardly ever, like, hand over three barrels of rice. It would just be on a bit of paper, on a clay tablet. I owe you three balance of rice. This other guy owes me two barrels of rice. Can we just say now, like, I owe you one and he owes you two? Yeah, we'll do that. And that's how it would work. And the argument is that form of a way of exchanging things actually predates the use of either physical currency or any situation which probably never existed in which people would actually be looking barrels or eyes around to swap the things. So that is how the argument goes. Today I thought we could not not play this classic of American sort of folk protest from

1955, the absolute high point of the Fordist consumer's golden age and a reminder that resistance, dissatisfaction, opposition, and radicalism are always there in the culture. No culture is ever homogenous because this was a huge hit in 1955

for Tennessee Ford containing the classic line, I owe my soul to the company's store. This is Tennessee Ford's 16 tons. Some people People say a man is made out of mud. A poor man's made out of muscle and blood.

Muscle and blood and skin and bones. Mine that's weak and a back that's strong. You load 16 tons. What do you get? Another day older and deeper in depth. St. Peter, don't you call me because I can go. I owe my soul to the company store. We need to skip ahead a few millennia, I think.

Let's skip over the Middle Ages. But, you know, when we talk about the Middle Ages, we're basically talking about the collapse of these Axial Age empires, etc. Graber's narrative sort of goes, well, look, you get the discovery of the Americas. You get this looting of the Americas, you know, by people like Cortez, et cetera, a huge influx of gold and silver from the Americas. You know, you also get, like, the development of, like,

the slave trade from Africa, etc. We're running centuries together here. But he talks about this like the reinvention of the bullion economy basically, or this golden silver. It floods into this sort of like deterioratorialized resources, flood into European cities, spark capitalism. And alongside that whole sorts of like financial instruments get created promissory notes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And like Graber runs this whole age, from the axial age to the middle ages, The sort of bullion age, it runs it right up. He says, really important thing happens in 1971, which you mentioned earlier, which is when President Nixon, he ends the gold standard, basically. And so, you know, money used to be backed by gold. And, you know, in the post-war period, the gold standard fell apart during the First World War,

got put back together after the Second World War by using the dollar as being as good as gold, as they said. And so you have huge amounts of gold stored in Fort. Knox. If you've ever seen the James Bond film Goldfinger, you'll understand what that is. The plot of Goldfinger is, this evil villain from James Bond, he's going to set a nuclear bomb off inside the gold reserves at Fort Knox, wiping out something like 40% of all of the gold ever dug up out of the earth, and his little bit of gold will then be very expensive. But basically, the whole global system depended, monetary system depended on the dollar being as good as

gold, basically. You could exchange the dollar for gold. Nick Smith ends that in 9721. And you know, what we see in the next couple of decades is the opening up of the financial sector, basically. The post-war period is sort of held in place partly by financial repression. You're not allowed to take large amounts of money from one country to another, etc, etc., etc. All of these things that seem totally alien to us now. And that produces this huge, huge increase in the importance of debt and finance in the global economic system. One way, there's all sorts of ways you can understand that move in 19701 and then like, you know, the development of the sort of neoliberal sort of counter-revolution, if you want to put it that

way. One of the ways I like to think about it is that like one function that debt can play when we think about it in terms of like antagonism and class struggle, etc., is it can displaced antagonism temporally. So if we think about it in Europe and like in many third world countries, there's this huge upsage of struggle. It's like, you know, revolutions, etc. In Cuba, tempted revolutions, you know, in Latin America, etc., they get drowned in blood, etc.

But the other thing that happens is that you can displace that antagonism from the factories in Europe and the US, you can displace that a couple of ways. You can displace it geographically. you move production to the global south in countries where their workers movement has been repressed, etc. But you can also displace it temporarily. And like debt is you have access to resources now, but you don't have to pay for them now. You can have access to them in the future, basically.

You have to pay the piper in the future. And so, you know, that allows levels of wages not to rise or to rise very slowly compared to what they rose in the decades before that, in the sort of golden age of captain the post-war settlement, you have increased consumption while wages don't rise, if you know what I mean. There's no need to struggle over the level of wages now because you have access to debt and credit. One way you can understand the sort of like the last 30 or 40 years is, you know, if you display something temporarily, it has to come due at some point. And because of the way that the access to debt fed into a sort of housing boom, et cetera, one generation had access to

that, they didn't have to pay the piper, basically. You know, that antagonism came back, which was displaced temporary, came back, you know, in part in an intergenerational tension. That's one way to understand that intergenerational sort of tension is that the antagonism displaced from the 1970s and from the 1980s came due when the whole thing fell apart in 2008. Yeah, unfortunately, historically, you get back thousands of years. Like when you get a population that wants to,

to have their debt cancels, usually what they'll do is support some populist, authoritarian figure. Sometimes they'll establish some sort of democratic settlement, but that's another optimistic prognosis of where we're probably going. I mean, you know, 2008 is like a moment of a debt crisis. You know, if you look at the student movement of 2010 in UK is a struggle around, the imposition of debt for for um which we talked about earlier student debt etc across the 2010s you have like sovereign debt crisis in the early 2010's Greece being disciplined etc all of these all of these sorts of things like one of those things that I'm really interested in debt about is this idea that like

you know basically it is a contract uh in order to discipline yourself contract you undertake either willingly or less willingly or with very little choice as in with student debt that will govern you in the future, basically. It will discipline you and govern you in the future because it will discipline or reduce the choices you have in life, basically. You want to go travelling? Well, what about this debt? You've got to repay, etc, etc, etc, etc.

All of this sort of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think we can say just continuing on from that here, just explicitly the relationship between, you know, debt and freedom and like what it does to individuals and what it does to, we shouldn't be saying individuals, I guess, but what it does to, like, people on the individual level, but more in terms of, you know, the aggregate of what it does to society. Because if we follow that logic of, like, you know, as you were saying,

disciplining yourself, you're effectively, if you kind of build that picture, you're saying, I'm making a decision now to the kind of life that I will live for the next, you know, 40 years or whatever. And I mean, suppose for some people under current, uncertain conditions, especially current conditions, that kind of fantasy could be quite stabilising, perhaps, you know, for people to think, I'm going to be in a secure job and do this sort of work so I can pay off my mortgage or whatever, like into the future. But the reality of both climate change and, you know, economic booms and busts mean that there's something almost pathological about that fantasy

in itself. And, you know, it's very interesting that people are kind of, buying into that. And I understand why, with the reality of how society is structured, that people will be saying, well, I have to, if I want to be able to live, you know, especially in Anglo-America, and we'll come onto this. That's not the same, perhaps, how people view deaths in other countries. But in a way, you are kind of going back to this idea of a promise to yourself, you're saying, I'm choosing to not be free, because then it frees me to, like, understand the world in a specific way. And that is mitigated on a belief of some kind of stability, which I think is completely unrealistic, given, you know, the current circumstances, both in terms of climate, but also financially in terms of the world. But I think people need something to hold on to. So maybe debt and a certain relationship to debt and credit kind of helps psychologically in one way.

Yeah, I think that might be true. I think certainly Mauritio Lazarato's argument is that what it means to become an indebted, person under conditions of advanced neoliberalism, it is to become someone who just isn't capable actually of acting collectively with others in the pursuit of democratic goals and has to constantly think about themselves as somebody who has to monitor and judge all of their behaviours by calibrating them according to a sort of financial logic. I mean, whether or not that's really how it goes. I think it's an interesting point actually because partly what you're raising a question, not about whether that's what the system is supposed to do, but whether that is how it always really affects people. And that is an important question because I think

it's always important to acknowledge that the systems which try to control us never do it perfectly. They do it imperfectly. They produce sort of friction and people do find ways around them and they find ways to use those systems to their advantage. But certainly that is the intention. And there's no question, for example, that the student debt regime has always had the very explicit intention on the part of its original architects, certainly both in the US, which part really pioneered it and here in the UK where we've had a student debt system in places the 1990s. And in both those cases, that the objective has been to change the nature of the relationship or students to their education is to change it from an idea according to

which the fundamental logic of education was this communistic logic of from each according to their ability to each according to their need. Change it from this logic of care, change it from this idea that education was an inherent good, the co-production of which, the collective production of which was an end in itself and change it to the idea that education was something you had to pay for, something you had to incur debt in order to get to acquire, and that the only real reason for acquiring it was so that you could then pay off those debts. And that is that is the outcome the situation is largely designed to produce and it's designed to produce a situation in which populations will become more individualized, more fragmented, less solidaristic and ultimately

less likely to cause trouble because because that debt system is all bound up with other changes that have taken place in the labour market, like the spread of precarity, it's bound up, as I said right at the start today with the implementation of a whole culture really, whereby your capacity to participate in the culture at all is just dependent totally on your capacity to act as a consumer. And in all those contexts, what it's designed to produce is a situation in which people are very highly motivated to be very economically self-interested, to be very short-term in their thinking, or if they're long-term in their thinking, they're only long-term in they're thinking about their own financial prospects as speculators on their own human

capital in the future labour market, rather than thinking of themselves as members of local or national or even global communities who might want to be making long-term plans for the kind of future they want to live in. That is the whole point of it, really. The point of it is to turn us into people who can only think about the state of our bank balance and only think about the world and our relationship to it through thinking about the state of our bank balance, rather than thinking about ourselves as citizens or as creatures living on planet earth. Like Lazzarata's really sort of intrad, he sort of takes, he starts a little bit from like Foucault and his analyses of like, of neoliberalism, that what we need to think about

debt and the sort of techniques and technologies, the credit rating systems, these sorts of things are, as techniques in which discipline us and shape us in a certain way, you know, we'll encourage us to shape ourselves if you want to put it that way. Delo's this famous very short essay on control societies makes this argument of like, there's a shift basically. So Foucault has this idea of like you have these disciplinary institutions, the school, the prison, the workplace, etc. They all look a little bit like like themselves, basically.

You're sort of like disciplined or trained to behave in a certain way when you're in there and that sort of thing. So as all of those start to break down a little bit, actually. I'm working from home, are you? Oh, well, you're not in a job for a long time. You've been between different. Oh, you've got four jobs. Have you? Oh, you're self-employed. You work for Uber to hear. Where does that discipline come from? And like Foucault says, you know, in control societies, you know, man is in debt, basically. It's an indebted man is the man. Because debt is this ability to control people into the future and control people almost like pre-control them, basically because you shape people as you have to shape yourself as somebody who is credit worthy

who's able to take on debt basically and service debt into the future you know and who's able to you know and make themselves look to all of these techniques and technologies of evaluation like like somebody who is a creditable person do you know what I mean so he says like you know that requires a subject who's a capable of accounting for themselves accounting for their future selves, et cetera, somebody who's capable of keeping a promise, making a promise and keeping a promise, somebody who's going to work on themselves, basically, to improve themselves so that they become more, they maintain their creditworthiness, and they become more credit worthy in the future. And so he takes up this idea that, like, Foucault has that, like, under neoliberalism,

what neoliberalism are the techniques of neoliberalism try to do is to make a, turn us into entrepreneurs, basically. Not necessarily an entrepreneur who's going to go and start, a company, etc., perhaps what really will be is entrepreneurs of ourselves, people who work on ourselves, try to improve ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. In that book, making of indebted man, Lazerato has there's like, there was a sort of promise to that during the high point of neoliberalism, the heroic point of neoliberalism is that, like, you know, if you became an entrepreneur of the self, you know, you could become your own boss, you could get a certain sense of freedom, perhaps, you know, you wouldn't need to work in the factory for 40,

years, etc., etc., etc., etc. All of that breaks down. It starts breaking down, you know, in the 1990s, but it really breaks down after 2008. And now the idea of, like, pleasure and self-fulfillment, et cetera, mobility and all of that sort of stuff is like disappeared. And what your entrepreneurial self now manages is not your ability to live this fulfilling life, etc. It's actually, you know, your ability to take on all the risks of life, which the state is offloading onto you, no longer wants to take responsibility. responsibility for. So you're managing your own precarity, basically. That's what you're managing. You're managing your own precarity. And that develops a certain sort of subjectivity, a really

hardened subjectivity, a sort of like isolated subjectivity. You know, you're the one who's responsible for the conditions of your own life, et cetera, et cetera. You know, you're the ones who are in competition with everybody else, et cetera. Just to finish this rant, I wanted to say, like thinking about that has helped me think through it's a really weird thing that we talked about before which is like the roots of contemporary far right and fascism and like why is it that like you we talked about we had an episode on the cosmic right

why is it like wellness societies as one of the sources wellness influences etc wellness therapy culture that sort of culture is one of the roots of contemporary fascism why is self-help one of the roots the whole self-help culture one of the roots of contemporary fascism if you want to think about Jordan Peterson, et cetera, et cetera. Or even, like, you know, at a moment, like, mixed martial arts is one of the roots of contemporary fascism. It's one of the arenas in which contemporary fascism is emerging out.

And you can relate it back to that, like that injunction to work on yourself, to improve yourself. Do you know what I mean? You can see how, yeah, you can see how wellness that culture fits into that. You know, and when that work on yourself doesn't go anywhere, when it doesn't lead to it improved life, you need us to work out why do you know what I mean and you need that you start from you start to address these problems from an individualized sort of isolated lonely in fact this huge epidemic of loneliness etc and one of the ways you could do that is look for scapegoats sorry Nadia off you go no no no I just wanted to embellish that by saying to any listeners who are interested in

exactly that like what is the relationship between the wellness industry like in like individual thinking and, you know, then that cosmic right fascism stuff, then Naomi Klein's doppelganger is amazing for this. Like really good analysis in there. Great book. We should play Nothing Going On by the Rent

by Gwen Guffrey from 1986. The opening line, Bill Collectors at my door, what can you do for me? Hey, no romance without finance, which is an incredible life. It's like really interesting.

song like 1986 and you can sort of read it as one of the pop cultural representations of this hardened subjectivity this sort of like hardened isolated subjectivity that um you know the introduction of debt technologies and neoliberalism is introducing and the line no finance no romance without finance can be read in lots of different ways but one way you could read it is you know i can't got time. I've got time for these sort of imaginaries around romance, you know, when I've got the debt collector at the door. Yeah, it's a record I've dropped DJing regularly, like for years and years and years. And it's a record that both myself and Mark, actually, Mark Fisher, were always sort of fascinated by, I'm still fascinated by, I still like playing it and DJing it, because indeed,

there's no getting away from that, away from the fact that the explicit purport of the lyric of this song is obviously just deeply reactionary. It's about a kind of embrace of neoliberal subjectivity. You know, you've got to have a job and an income if you want to be my boyfriend. And it sort of anticipates that Destiny's Child's song, you know, become independent women, which is all about kind of economic independence as a mode, the only available mode of feminist subjectivity. But of course, you know, there's also no getting away from the sense that somehow, you know, something about the way the song is sung, the tone of it, the vibe of it, who is singing it, you can't help feeling there's something more going on, that there is a genuine desire for

for freedom, you know, from the kind of position of the subordinated woman in the romantic relationship, which is being expressed here, even if it's being expressed in this seemingly sort of impoverished language. And there's even, you know, there's something kind of seemingly kind of cool and radical about the way in which this, you know, it kind of takes apart a certain kind of romantic ideology which did always have a subordinating effect on girls and women and which was still pretty hegemonic within like pop music culture, even when this came out in 1986. So the feeling, the sense that at the level of affect, there is a desire for freedom being expressed here. Even while it's being expressed in these

quite strange terms, it really kind of animates the record. I really, I do sort of love it. I mean, whenever I play it, like, everybody loves it. And I sit and I just spend the whole track thinking, well, why are we enjoying this? Why am we enjoying this? But, you know, Mark also was really sort of fascinated by it. He wrote it, he wrote about it, her plan C, I think. So it was, it remains a source of intrigue.

Boy, nothing in life is free. That's why I'm asking you. What can you do for me? I've got responsibilities. So I'm looking for a man who's got some money in this band. Because nothing from nothing leaves nothing. You've got to have something if you want to be with me. Oh, my life is just serious.

Love's too mysterious. I think what we're saying is partly that debt is one of the key mechanisms of individualization and the privatization of experience. And the privatisation of experience on some level, I think, is the fundamental operation by which, to some extent, capitalism in general, and particularly neoliberalism, and maybe whatever we're in now, some sort of post- neoliberalism, prevent people from engaging, both in solidaristic and democratic relations, but also just experiencing collective joy. So for all those reasons, I think this is really important to think about, I mean, it's notable, it's worth reflecting, of course, Nietzsche, Nietzsche himself, like, thinks that the whole concept of morality coming out of the Christian tradition and having a kind of inherent joylessness is bound up with ideas of debt, the idea of guilt, which is built into the Christian idea of morality, according to Nietzsche is

inherently bound up with this idea of debt. And indeed, it is built into a lot of understandings of the whole Christian story, the idea that somehow humanity owes God a debt because of the fore in the Garden of Eden, and that debt can only be repaid by God himself, or incriminating himself as his own son and sacrificing himself to himself, according to that rather peculiar logic. That's Nietzsche's idea, and in later years, lots of, as we've alluded to already, lots of thinkers of people like Derrida, as I've said, have kind of played around with the notion that, well, maybe a kind of an unpayable debt that we all have to each other or that we all have to the future and to the past from which you've inherited everything we have now

is a way of conceptualising a kind of ethical relation to the world. But what I really wanted to get onto was thinking about some specific issues about the way in which debt affects and is experienced by particular groups of people. So, for example, a great book that Joe said we should talk about, and she's right, is really good, is a Lucci Cavallaro and Veronica Gargo's book, a very recent book called A Feminist Reading of Debt. And that book draws heavily on social reproduction theory to look at the ways in which very often,

like indebtedness as a mode of oppression, both at the level of the exploitation of whole populations in the Global South and at the level of personal debt in households, it particularly affects women. And it affects women particularly badly. a lot of the time, partly for reasons we've already alluded to, because really, because it's true, it's interesting, we have this phrase household debt and debt is partly experienced at the

level of the individual consumer, but it's also often experienced at the level of the household and at the level at which, you know, women globally usually have responsibility for making sure everything is continuing to tick over. And they point to the really important role played by women in Latin American struggles against debt, for example. It's a really useful book. The role of debt and the way it interfaces with like social reproduction is a really important angle which, you know, isn't spoken about enough for sure, not just the resistance stuff, which of which women have been central in Latin America, which of course is also a story

which needs to be, you know, platformed. And it's interesting when we're thinking about debt to also be thinking cross-culturally of kind of where debt sits in various different kind of cultures and expectations and historically. And one thing that we've not mentioned that is worth mentioning specifically is the relationship between like debt and dowries. This idea that exists still exists in some culture, it's been officially outlawed by some governments with this idea that as a woman gets married or gets married into another family, that she's given, as the groom's family is given, an aid, dowry, this can be money or this can be an actual thing or something, there's several

readings of this. On one hand, the bride's family's contribution to the marriage or in a different reading and sometimes explicitly in other societies as a way of kind of paying off the debt, a contribution towards the debt of the groom's family, taking the burden of the woman and having to, you know, spend money basically effectively on this kind of female subject. And of course, that, like, both psychologically, like, and in terms of, like, the role of women, like, is, you know, like a really important thing to consider. And it's interesting that how it's explicitly been tried to be outlawed by, as a practice, by certain states, in the case of dowry specifically, I mean.

But also, if we look at debt, and I know we're going to expand on this more when hopefully we do another episode on this, but the role of kind of microloans and microfinancing specifically to women in the global South and the Grameen Bank and all of the debates around that, on one hand, this idea of like how important it is for women to be able to like, you know, be able to start businesses or, you know, various different enterprises and by kind of ring fencing financing for women in that case, being seen as a positive thing, but then also like what it does structurally to communities and to, you know, families and also like the role of men in being able to coerce women to then take out loans in their own names, etc. is, you know, just a whole

area that can be spoken about in terms of like how, you know, patriarchy shows itself up in cases of like debt and exchange and like women as like subjects or, or, or, or, obviously. So, like, this is a huge, huge, huge field, but I think it's important to mention. It's quite a bit in the David Graber book, actually, about the centrality of how debt and patriarchy, patrimony. Well, that's related as well, but patriarchy, so bound up together, precisely around dowries, basically. But dowries both ways in different societies and through history, as in sometimes it's like purchasing a wife, basically. And not just that also, it's like, you know, part of the whole debt-pianage thing would be that women, usually daughters, etc., would be the security for a loan, that they would have to go and live with a lone in various forms of societies, basically. And I mean, it's like the number one thing that shows up the reality of like women as property and women as objects rather than women as people.

You know, when used in exchange in that way, like it becomes inherently clear. I mean, also, talking about people becoming objects, obviously we've alluded to the historic relationship between ideas of debt and bondage and slavery. But it's also, it's a point made by various people, actually. I'm thinking in particular, Kiyangya Yamata Taylor in her book, from Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation. She talks about the really huge impact of like bad debt lending and, punitive and parasitic lending and punitive debt repayment regimes and imprisonment for indebtedness on African American people in the States. And there's a very interesting sort of history there of that particular population being really subject to high levels of exploitation

by lenders or being forced into situations where they couldn't live without paying debts. And of course, you know, one of the ideas to come out of the Black Freedom struggle, which is sort of bound up with an idea of debt, is the idea of reparations, the idea that, you know, the white society, the post-slave-holding society, owes a sort of moral debt that could be turned into,

material debt, to people who suffered the effects of slavery and their descendants. And I think it's an interesting example because this is an example of an issue where it's people who are basically on the right, people who want to dismiss this idea, who have to sometimes,

resort to arguments a bit like some of the ones we've seen coming from radical and progressive thinkers in this discussion so far the idea that oh well you couldn't possibly calculate the debts the debts couldn't be paid everybody owes everybody for everything anyway when those are the things you sometimes hear as responses to the idea that actually reparations should be paid and the idea reparations it is an idea which is taking an idea of indebtedness and you know purposing it yeah in a radical way, and I think that is interesting to think about. I don't know, it's not just a

moral debt, though, is it? Like, it is material, i.e. Howard House and Lord Harewood just outside of Leeds, a big, you know, country estate. That was built with sugar money, you know. Didn't get that from fucking making cakes. If you think slavery is wrong,

not just now, but always, like, why should they keep having the benefit of slavery? We should take that house off them, basically. Make them work in the cake, the vast cake plantations of North Yorkshire, the root of like the wealth of most people, you know, Musk, apartheid, etc., etc.,

of most wealth is rooted in these relations. Do you know what I mean? If they are wrong, why should their descendants keep benefiting from that huge, huge world historic crime? Do you know what I mean? I think it's that sort of argument you need to make as well. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right, yeah.

I hate Lord Howard. Well, he's very nice about you. It's a personal grudge. He's read your book here, actually. He's been the best of you. I really hate him because he's tied up with Bloody Lee's United and he always parade him around. Right.

Okay. Now we're getting down to it. We've talked about reparations on the show. I want to play. This is a fantastic anthem by Sounds of Blackness. Sounds of Blackness are an American sort of radical gospel. This is Sounds of Blackness from 2021 Reparations. Right now, time for reparation

Right now time for reparation Right now, time for reparation pay up, time to pay up, Well, reparations is one example of ideas of debt being used arguably for progressive purposes But of course, for the most part, if we try to think about how ideas of debt

have been treated by radical campaigners, then we'd be thinking about the long, long history of activism and campaigns against debt. And of course, this is an idea that it's very importantly informing books like the David Graber book, but it was already an idea that had become really popular towards the end of the 20th century, actually. This idea that in ancient times, there were these traditions according to which, you know, in some societies, supposedly every seven years or whatever, there would be what was called a Jubilee, which precisely meant the cancellation of all debts,

because it was generally recognised that debt was just a condition of servitude, and you simply couldn't allow people who were supposed to be free to remain in a condition of servitude indefinitely. Now, this is often held up as kind of evidence, amongst other pieces of evidence, that the possibility of what it would be like to have to live in the capitalist society was something that people going back to Hunter-Gatherer times were sort of aware of and deliberately try to avoid and evade.

But obviously the way in which that idea gets taken up, say from the late 20th century onwards, is around campaigns for the abolition of third world debt. But that itself can be seen as about, I think we're going to talk about that more. We'll talk more about third world debt when we do our episode specifically on kind of international global debt. I think if we think about campaigns against debt on organized political campaigns against debt, I think that's an interesting thing to think about. Also, as part of our preparation for this episode, we did a lot of research for this episode.

I reread another book from like about 10 years ago. It was Andrew Ross's book, Creditocracy. And that, I have to say, that was, it was very depressing reading because it's an excellent book, Andrew Ross's Creditocracy. It was a really good analysis of the politics of debt and indebtedness, and especially student debt and university finance, especially in the US, but relevant absolutely in other places, especially the UK and places like Australia.

That was from about 10 years ago. And at the time, there were a lot of hopes. I remember the book coming out. I remember lots of people who were coming out of the Occupy movement, hoping that it was going to be possible to mobilize large campaigns for the cancellation of things like credit card debt, the cancellation of student debt. It's pretty depressing, like reading that 10 years on that book

and thinking about all the hopes that were not. really realised and how things just continue to get bad, but still really relevant analysis and it's a really interesting history and we never know, you know, there might be successful campaigns against debt yet to come. Yeah, I mean, I

think that anti-debt movement in the US, a post-occupy wasn't, was quite successful or it went a long way basically. And for that we'd have to talk about like the now departing, warning us about

the oligarchies put in place, President Biden, who actually did, you know, he did try to do some debt, well, he did debt relief, basically, but he also tried to do a much more general debt relief of like relieving $20,000 of everybody's student debt, everybody who owns student debt, would get $20,000 forgiven, basically. The far-right dominated U.S. Supreme Court basically prevented him from doing that. It had a go at that. This is really relevant to thinking about this absolute centrality of debts to ideas of capitalist propriety.

The Supreme Court literally said it's unconstitutional to go around forgiving debt. You literally can't do that. Unbelievable. I mean, there was, so like, it's something like 183 billion dollars worth of student loans were forgiven by Biden when he was in office. It's all related to all sorts of stuff, including like, basically people who were defrauded by some of these private colleges, et cetera, et cetera. So what has actually been the outcome? Because I'm still, I'm really not clear.

Like, are there a load of people who have actually had debt forgiven and it's going to stay forgiven? Yeah. So there's like five million borrowers had 183.6 billion of student loan forgiven while Biden was in office. And forgiven is the terminology that everyone's using. Sorry to interrupt. So like, be forgiving debt. Like that is that the official right. Yeah. Yeah. It's great, isn't it? Because it's like, yeah, it's like that's your guilt thing. That's your shame right there. We forgive you for your sins, basically.

You fucking told us to take this debt. And what you're on about? Exactly. And just yesterday, as we record, as Biden leaves, and we move into Trump II era, he forgave another sort of, like, I think it was like 1.5 million debt or something like that, basically. So what is the impact of the Supreme Court ruling going to be then? Well, so he wanted to forgive $20,000 worth of student debt for like tens and tens of millions of Americans. So Biden could have fought that. He could have fought that and like,

you know, basically took on the Supreme Court, did all of the things he said yesterday, when he did his final address to the US, he said, you know what, we've got a problem with oligarchy. Perhaps we ought to put time limits on Supreme Court justices. Perhaps we ought to get dark money. Yeah, if only somebody could have done something about that, you were fucking president. Now you tell us as you fucking go. So he could have fought that basically and didn't. So that is dead. It's absolutely dead. And like, you know, there are other sorts of things which are still going through, but would likely be unwound by the Trump presidency. But my main point of that is, I don't think that would have happened. Like, he wouldn't have made an attempt

to forgive $20,000 of student debt for like, you know, just normal. student debtors. It's a way of injecting money into the economy, isn't it, basically? You just have this huge injection of consumer spending into the US economy, which prevented. But I don't think he'd have made that if it wasn't for that debt campaign. It's worth talking a little bit about the form that that took was sort of interesting as well, basically. So it was this campaign called strike debt in the US. And they had this rolling jubilee, what would you call it, campaign, I suppose, where they would buy up, they would buy up debt on the secondary market. So basically, debt that is, that looks like it's not going to get repaid, it gets

sold on. And it gets sold on for like dollars on the, on, uh, cent on the dollar, basically, you know, 10 cents will buy you a, a dollar's worth of this debt, basically, this, like, badly rated debt. I might have to get it to me. Yeah, it's good. And then, like, presumably, you basically, you sell it onto people who are going to be, you know, really go and threaten these people. and they're trying to get, you know, 20 to 20 cents worth of it repaid, basically. So they, in 2013, they raised $400,000 through sort of like by a big campaign, I suppose you'd call it crowdfunding now.

And they purchased 13.5 million pounds worth of medical debt. So this is, that's one of the real key drivers of debt in the US. It's like people go into debt to pay for like, you know, medical care, et cetera. And then they, yeah, so it was like 3.5 million of medical debt. and then another $1.2 million of other personal debt. Yeah, I forgot they'd actually done all that. That was, yeah, no, that was great. Yeah, they did do all that.

And it was, it had a huge impact on the lives of loads of people. This is a really good example, listening. Well, you know, if you judge your sense of political, successful failure entirely by the kind of all or nothing, if you just, if, if all we remember is that finally Bernie got defeated and then we got Trump, then we're going to forget that, you know, the struggle, you know, did achieve some real, really concrete gains. Yeah, well done. Well done. Andrew Ross, a hero of American critical scholarship. I think they'd be great about help come up with that campaign as well, and Astra Taylor, etc. But basically, in 2015, they did another sort of

waver on private school, private student debt, basically. The problem with that is that you have to raise money, buy this and forgive it. All you get is like an address. And they wrote to everyone whose debt is forgiven. I said, look, we've done this. You know, we've done this. And they had this thing of like, look, if you can afford it, why didn't you pay it on a bit? You know, pay us back some of that money and we will buy more debt. And in that way, it can keep rolling. Do you know what I mean? But of course, like, you can't forgive all of debt that way because it hasn't got a self-expansive thing built into it. And so they always said, look, this is a pedagogical thing. We're doing these big things. It's going to help certain people

completely. But it's going to teach people how the debt system works, basically. How debt works, we're going to expose debt. Yeah. And so to some degree, I think it was successful because it brought debt and student debt, in particular, medical debt, you know, as a live political issue and it feeds through into President Biden's mainly failed attempts to forgive student debt, et cetera. That sort of stuff, you know, basically Biden's legacy is this attempt to sort of attempt to do stuff influenced by the left. in his first couple of years, rolling into defeat, basically, a turn to hard securonomics,

a hard sort of like foreign policy adventures, acting against China, etc., etc., and then ending in dripping in blood with a genocide, etc. They have a really successful anti-debt campaign I'd point you from the 2010s as well as one in Spain. So it was called the Pah, so it's called, as you translate that into English, a platform for people affected by mortgages,

Ada Kalao, who later went on to become mayor of Barcelona, was one of the key activists in this campaign. And so in Spain, they've got really unforgiving insolvency laws. So basically, after the financial crisis 2008, a huge wave of insolvencies, huge wave of people getting evicted, mortgage holders getting evicted. And in Spain, you know, you get your house taken back off,

you get evicted, but the debt remains, basically. there's no mechanism whereby you can get yourself insolvent, you know, I mean, and have that debt wiped off. And so they would do, this is really, really successful campaign where they would do all sorts of stuff, you know, like occupy banks, etc., defend people from evictions, you know, go to court and like, you know, really argue it out and drag it out, etc., etc., etc. It became a really, really huge thing. And it's really interesting because we normally think of mortgage holders of the people who

can't be affected, who can't be a got, basically, the people who were going to resist social movements, but that was a situation in which that didn't work. No, sorry, it worked in a different way. Well, I think what's really at stake in all those struggles is getting, is sort of raising consciousness to the point where people come to understand the experience of debt as a social experience rather than as a wholly privatised one. That is very important for building forms of solidarity. And clearly across Latin America, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, often been the way things have worked. So those anti-debt campaigns, I think, are really important. It's still, it's very hard to imagine it working in this country. It's very hard imagining,

imagining, persuading English people to understand their credit card debt as something that has been in some sense forced upon them. Because people's belief in their own sovereign agency, even to the extent of being the authors of their own problems, is very deeply ingrained. I think that that was why I always thought it probably wasn't going to happen here. Maybe I still don't think it's going to happen here. But I think certainly you could have a campaign around student debt here now. I think the fact that the idea that student debt has been unfairly imposed upon people by a program which nobody voted in favour of, really, is I think that should really, that should be part of our discourse on the left here, actually. One of the many things

nobody voted for, a lot of massive is student loans. If we're talking about reparations, we could also play the song Reparations by Chain and the Gang. Chain and the Gang are a U.S. band led by Ian Savonius, who became famous for being in a band called Nation of Ulysses and came out of that Washington, D.C., sort of straight-edge scene surrounding, first of all, minor threat, and then Fugazi, etc. He is the best frontman I've ever seen in my life. I saw him do that play this song at the Brutonnell Social Club in Leeds, and he's waving a dollar. He got a dollar out of his pocket. He was waving it round saying, tell me what's a dollar.

What do we want? Reparations. It's great. I'm going to need some reparation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to need some reparation. Oh, yeah. One of the present is about the people affected by people affected by mortgages.

So that this proceeds, no way, it follows on from the movement of the indignance, the 15M movement, the movement of the squares. People talk about it in that way, that 2011 thing. and they found those like which had one of the forms was this big general assembly and one of the big things that the platform of those affected by mortgages one of the organizing things was to have like debt assemblies basically where people go and testify to their debt basically and it's that that thing of like debt is linked to morality and it's linked to shame and so the first thing to overcome it is like it's to basically testify to your debt where lots of other people are testifying to your debt you know that that that big thing of collectivity where you see other people below in the same situation as you, et cetera, et cetera, therefore it can't be your own personal

failing, you know, it's got to be somebody else. You know, we talked about that in terms of consciousness raising. And that, that form of assembly was a form of consciousness raising. They would get people to talk about their debt, how it came about, et cetera, and then sort of examine it, analyze it and say, well, look, you know, basically get people to come to the conclusion that their debt was odious. So there's this thing of odious debt, which is basically unjust debt, which should basically not exist. There's also was a wave of these things. called citizens debt audit basically where people would in in things like such as universities etc you know you would look at the debts of the university how they came about and those debts are the

things the repayment of those debts would be the things which are leading to people losing their jobs etc and it's like well let's have a look at how those debts come about they're basically odious basically they're certainly not our fault and they should be your fault etc basically understanding debt how it comes about to overcome both the shame but also to understand it as this control mechanism this thing that predetermines how you can act etc etc the last thing i sort of say on that as well is that like the first social movement i was involved in was the anti-pole tax movement in 1989 1990 which was a non-payment of a tax the poll tax the local tax basically to replace a local property tax with a tax in every individual and it was a successful

movement. And like, you know, so it's a non-payment campaign, but basically it turns into an anti-debt campaign quite quickly. The tactic was people would not pay their debt, their tax, so they would owe a debt, wouldn't they? They'd be in debt. And then the process of collecting that debt, of getting people to pay that debt was interrupted in various ways. So basically, the first thing would be for people to turn up to their court cases and argue for as long as possible. And like, They'd have legal aid, McKenzie's friends was the phrase I remember from that time. They'd have legal aid to sort of turn up, drag out the debt hearing as long as long as possible so that the legal system couldn't nod through 20,000 debt cases in one minute, etc, etc.

And then you'd interfere with anti-Bailiff stuff to resist evictions, all of these sorts of things. You're interfering and trying to make the collection of debts impossible. I think it's an interesting lesson because one of the other things you might point to around that are like the non-payment campaign, don't pay UK around energy bills, basically. It got to the stage where people didn't really not pay. It was like the threat was enough to make this trust act and then make huge promises about, you know, that they would put a cap on the prices and pay the energy companies a huge amount of money at the same time as doing tax, tax cuts, etc., etc., which caused the debt market,

to move against them in an international scale. Just recently, earlier this year, the same group of people tried to initiate a campaign called Take Back Water, which was so non-payment of water bills, basically, demanding. They didn't take off, but this time round, they were really, they'd recognise that the thing that didn't exist in the Antipaltax movement era

was these credit ratings, credit scores, and that the thing that people were really worried about with non-payment wasn't that they would have some sort of interest on their debt repayments, it was that they would interfere with their credit scores and not be able to get credit. So this time round, they tried to construct it so that people would strike for a short period, enough actually probably to cause real financial difficulties to the water companies such as Thames Water, who are really, really indebted and basically insolvent. But they wouldn't affect your credit scores because it'd be too short or it'd really minimally

affect it, basically. I do think that that sort of thing, we're going to have to. really think about that because I think like inflation and price rises are going to they're going to be a continuing thing basically. That struggles under contemporary conditions are something we're going to have to get ahead around. Well I think we should we should keep in mind that so many of these anti-debt campaigns have actually been quite successful. I think there is considerable scope for mobilisation around that issue even in the the debt-paying respectable United Kingdom in the years to come. Wow.