Debtors’ Unions: Countervailing Power and Abolitionist Presence in the Age of Finance

Hannah Appel
Anthropology
UC Los Angeles

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 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, debtors, in theory, own the bank. But in practice, this is a complex provocation that poses questions about political economy, social movements, and contemporary capitalism. Drawing on ten years of participatory action research with the Debt Collective—the nation’s first debtors’ union—this book attempts to answer those questions. In merely a decade, the Debt Collective has won billions of dollars in debt abolition and transformed the national narrative around household debt. But the potential of debtors’ unions is far from realized, and the underlying strategy and possibility underappreciated. Household debt leveraged collectively is a critical front in the fight for countervailing power, and this book lays out the how, the why, and what can be done about the situation.