AT

Inherently, I don’t think so. You can make a philosophical claim that we are all born debtors to what came before. You can call that social debt, which needs to be repaid through taxes, through solidarity, through making the world habitable for those who come after you.

But there’s no doubt that debt has been used as a profoundly anti-democratic tool. If you look at the modern era, and look at the way debt has been used to enforce capitalism and white supremacy, it’s kind of astonishing. Look at the way debt was used as a form of punishment for the Haitian revolution. Look at the way debt was used to limit emancipation through sharecropping in the United States. Look at the way that it was used to limit the progressive agenda of decolonized nations in the seventies.

On an individual level, debt ensnares the future. It’s a claim on your future wages, ensuring that you’ll be working the rest of your life to pay off your loans. That limits the scope of what you can do, what’s possible in life. It binds you, and in this way it limits your freedom.

We do need credit sometimes. Credit is a tool that can open up possibilities in the moment, because if you can manage to get your hands on more resources, you can do more, and that can benefit you as an individual or benefit a community or a country. But we need to figure out what socially productive credit would look like instead of the predatory, extractive and domineering forms of indebtedness that we have now.