Debtors' Unions: Counterpower and Abolitionist Presence in the Age of Finance

ABSTRACT: Alone, our debts are a burden. Together, they make us powerful. This is the provocation of debtors’ unions. Indeed, the power of debt is something the wealthy have long wielded. To put it in words often attributed to petroleum industrialist J. Paul Getty “If you owe the bank $100,000 the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100 million you own the bank.” With everything from student debt to medical debt, credit card debt to housing debt surging (and drowning households in the process) debtors, in theory, own the bank. But in practice, this is a complex provocation that raises strategic and empirical research questions about political economy, social movements, and contemporary capitalism. This talk - drawn from a book project in progress - draws on a decade of participatory action research co-founding and organizing with the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union. Grown out of Occupy Wall Street, the Debt Collective has begun to organize debtors across the United States, won nearly $200 billion dollars in debt abolition, and transformed the national narrative around household debts in merely a decade of work. But the full potential of debtors’ unions is far from realized and the underlying strategy and theoretical elaboration not yet developed. This talk (and the book project from which it is drawn) begin to do some of that work.

Hannah Appel is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at UCLA and Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

She is an economic anthropologist interested in transnational capitalism and finance; finance, debt and debtors’ unions; the African continent’s place in global capitalism; the economic imagination; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically, and to work actively to undo it?

Her first book, The Licit Life of Capitalism, is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. She is at work on a second ethnographic project—Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning—continuing her inquiry into the licit life of capitalism, and the displacement of how and from where we think about global capitalism and the imperial power of the U.S. dollar. Pan African Capital is a multi-sited project based on ethnographic work with transnational, African-owned banks and financial institutions on the continent.

Hannah is also a co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective. The Debt Collective works to build debtors unions through an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance capitalism: What if mass indebtedness is not simply a liability, but also a potential collective asset or leverage point in the fight to enact the new and radical economic forms we need? Hannah brings her organizing and scholarly work together under the auspices of the Future of Finance at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Co-sponsored by the Africana Studies and Research Center, Government and Sociology. Thank you.