For at least 5,000 years, before capitalism even existed, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to make relations fundamentally based on violence and inequality seem morally upright. When this trick no longer works everything explodes, as it is now. Debt has revealed itself as the greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of control. But debt also allows endless opportunities for organizing.This is absolutely right. The trick with debt is that it’s made to appear as a function of personal responsibility. Those who are responsible don’t get into debt they can’t pay back. If you’re in debt now and can’t pay it back, that’s your problem. You shouldn’t have borrowed the money in the first place.
The problem with this appeal to personal responsibility is twofold. First, if it’s an individual problem, they how can the problem be so general? According to this article “There were 145,000 home foreclosures last year -- a 21 percent increase from 2007 and a 108 percent increase from 2006. Another 11,000 families lost their homes in January alone.” The problem isn’t one of personal responsibility. It’s a systemic problem. Something went wrong beyond people’s personal choices. Choices don't exist in a vacuum. Holes are dug, and people are pushed toward them.
That brings us to the second problem: even if this couldn’t have happened without individuals making bad personal choices about their own money, it’s definitely a general, societal problem now when you consider how things have spiraled out of control as a result of it. The point has already long past where we can sanctify debt. What we need now is for companies like Countrywide to be forced by the government to get off of people’s backs and let them keep their homes. And if the government won’t force them to do it, we need to form a debtors’ union and collectively negate our debts.
Graeber sounds lukewarm on this proposal though. See what he says next:
Some speak of a debtors’ strike or debtors’ cartel. Perhaps so, but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions. Neighborhood by neighborhood we can pledge to support each other if we are driven from our homes. This power does not solely challenge regimes of debt, it challenges the moral foundation of capitalism.This power creates a new regime.I mean, I guess. To respond to the idea of government intervention in the debt crisis or worse, to respond to the idea of a debtors’ union with a “perhaps”, in favor of a “moral” challenge to capital seems hopelessly perfectionistic and idealistic to me. While I'm not intimately familiar with Graeber's line, I suspect it comes from this general view that the only institutions that have the moral right to challenge capital are those that reflect the will of the people in a direct, almost mystically immediate way. A lot of leftists are skeptical of a debtors' union because they're skeptical of unions in general. They’re skeptical of the “traditional” organs of working class struggle, the ones that don’t really end up representing the people, after all.
Surely we need both. We need to turn around the moral logic of personal responsibility and constantly point out the ways in which capitalism is a system of slavery and theft, even in the relatively affluent United States. We need to mediate so-called personal problems with general categories and concepts, showing how what appears to be personal in fact exemplifies class antagonisms fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. But we also need to take a practical point of view with regard to these criticisms, and that means utilizing to the greatest degree possible all the institutions and organizing technologies at our disposal, not just the sexy, radically decentered ones. Our orientation should not just be moral or practical. It should be political. That means creating new institutions that adequately express working class power, but it also means seizing power from the hands of our masters, taking over their institutions, and wielding that power against them with impunity.
