WHEN: April 15, 2026 @ 12:00pm

WHERE: MCB-102

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 theoretical and empirical 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.