The problem with attempting to build a politics of debt resistance is that our crisis of personal indebtedness isn’t really about debt. It’s about neoliberalism, the inequality it reproduces, and the borrowing it necessitates. This isn’t to say that debt itself is irrelevant. A generation of college students and subprime mortgage holders can testify otherwise. It is, however, intended to suggest that mitigating the anxiety and material hardship that debt is inflicting on increasing numbers of us will require focusing less on the fact that we owe loads of money and more on why we owe it. And the reason we owe so much isn’t that we’ve borrowed excessive sums, it’s that we can’t afford the things we need without borrowing.
Our success in ending the nasty social impact that crushing levels of personal debt now effects will thus hinge on our ability to build a movement around access to basic necessities—jobs with a living wage, housing, education, healthcare, transit, childcare—so we don’t need to rely on credit to get by. Instead of a politics against debt, that is, we need a politics for a social wage.
A historical perspective helps to clarify this point. Personal debt really began to balloon in the 1970s, when inequality started to increase after a generation of reasonably distributed economic growth. As historian Louis Hyman has noted, the key change in the 1970s was that, for the first time since consumer credit had become widely accessible in the years after World War II, people found themselves unable to repay what they owed.
Between 1948 and 1973, real wages for the average worker grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent, almost as fast as productivity improved during that period. This rising income enabled working-class Americans to secure the credit needed to purchase homes, automobiles, and all those household amenities, like televisions and washing machines, that were previously out of reach.