Debt is not personal, it is political. The debt system aims to isolate us, silence us, and scare us into submission with the all-powerful credit rating. Now is the time for us to step out of the shadows together in public. Debt is immoral. It is indentured servitude, a type of bondage. We are forced onto a path of endless repayment and are supposed to be ashamed when we can’t climb our way out of debt. We have to sell our time, our souls, working jobs we don’t care about simply so we can pay interest to the bank. Now that debt is so rampant, many of us are ashamed for putting others in debt. Our professions from teacher to lawyer and physician have become means to direct more victims to the loan sharks. So perhaps above all, we strike the fear, refuse the shame, end the isolation. When we strike debt, we are giving ourselves permission to be more than a set of numbers. In a sense, we create the possibility of an imagination. We are not abdicating our responsibility, we are exercising our innate right to refuse the unjust.

Watch the Democracy Now conversation on the new debt resistance movement:

Some background:

“Strike Debt describes itself as a “network of students, artists, academics, and organizers who are sparking conversations about how debt affects us all and what we can do about it. Through militant research, direct action, and mutual support, we are exploring ways that we can break the chains of debt and create new bonds of solidarity.” The goal of the network is strikingly straightforward: to organize and spark a “mass upsurge of debt resistance.”

In her article for The Nation, Taylor writes how activists have increasingly come to realize the potential of debt “to serve as a kind of connective tissue for the Occupy movement, uniting increasingly dispersed organizing efforts around a common problem (debt) as opposed to a common tactic (occupation).” The challenge, in this respect, is to turn the overly moralized and profoundly individualizing everyday reality of debt into a catalyst for collective action.

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According to a report by Yates McKee of Waging Non-Violence, “Strike Debt organizers have strategized all summer about launching a multi-pronged offensive against the predatory debt system, with the eventual goal of sparking a nationwide debt-resisters’ movement that would strike at the foundations of capitalism as a whole.” To this end, it has created “a sophisticated press and propaganda unit” and “seeded” the media landscape with articles and interviews.

One important node in this mediatic offensive is the third edition of Tidal, the Occupy Theory journal, which contains powerful contributions on debt by Graeber and the Strike Debt collective. Under the slogan You are not a loan! the activists call for a debtors’ strike — a refusal to honor debts.”