Christoph Sorg, PhD CandidateBGSS Berlin / COSMOS Florence

“You are not a loan”Financialization, debt-related grievances, and social movements

Introduction......................................................................................................................................2Finance and debt under capitalism...................................................................................................3The financialization of capitalism....................................................................................................5Financialized actors and institutions................................................................................................6The history of the anti-debt movement since 1979........................................................................12Two anti-debt currents at the eve of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis.......................................14The North Atlantic Financial Crisis as a critical juncture..............................................................15Social movements appropriate new opportunities from below and above....................................17ICAN and Debt Audits...................................................................................................................19Summary........................................................................................................................................23Bibliography..................................................................................................................................24

Note: To say that this is an unfinished paper would be a tremendous understatement. Personal andacademic developments have delayed what I thought would be a relatively finished paper at thispoint. The following lines thus constitute a preliminary structure filled with unpolished empiricalobservations. In particular, I have not managed to illustrate developments with more observations,interview excerpts, or primary textual material. The final part needs to be reorganized once dataevaluation is finished and properly structured. In addition, the length of different parts is notadjusted yet as I sometimes probably went into too much detail for things more important to mygeneral PhD project than this paper here. Finally, the language is not polished and bibliography notfinished (I have sometime included a couple of references, but not all of them, so it mightoccasionally look like I'm just writing stream of consciousness or rely on fewer references than isactually the case).

However, I'm optimistic that this text will be enough to ensure a fruitful debate and criticalfeedback. I'm particularly interested to hear if you think the combination of heterodox economicsand social movement studies has somewhat worked (and / or how I could improve it), if my use ofsocial movement studies is too superficial, which outcomes you feel I should further develop, andmost importantly, if (or: how do) you think I could develop a sound line of thought and paper out ofthis text.

Thank you very much for having me, I really appreciate it. Best,Chris

Introduction

The North Atlantic Financial Crisis and European Debt Crisis have catapulted debt politics into thelimelight of public debates in the Global North. These crises entailed new debates centered onsocietal and economic justice: While states used enormous public funds to bail out failed banks,countless individuals faced and face evictions, poverty, or decades of indebtedness due tomortgages, unemployment, lack of healthcare, or student debt, among others. After using publicfunds to save financial sectors, states eventually face debt crises themselves, which have beenperpetuated by years of recession due to austerity programs.

These debates are not new to many regions of the Global South. Southern governments andsocial movements have struggled with access to cheap credit and increasing debt burdens fordecades. High interest rates strained budgets for social spending and IMF and World Bank tiedfinancial relief to neoliberal reforms. These included financial and economic liberalization, whichrendered Southern economies even more vulnerable to economic and financial crises, thusprecipitating a downward spiral of debt, crisis, and austerity. At the same time, increasing amount offinancial capital seeking less and less profitable investment possibilities and income streamstargeted especially the poor and women in various Southern contexts via micro-credits, thusintegrating them into global financial markets in highly exploitative ways. The lesson that debtconstitutes a social relation embedded in economic, political, and cultural power relations has nowtraveled North, with financial markets and creditors disciplining noncompliant governments such asin Greece or commodifying and financialization the poor via payday loans, for instance.

Academics were rather slow to theorize debt relations, although a growing literature hasemerged in recent years, the highlight of which may have been the debate initiated by DavidGraeber's “Debt – The First 5000 Years”. These studies of debt have not been paralleled by researchon resistance against debt, which remains enormously under-theorized as well as untouched byrecent academic debates. Most of the little research there is has refrained from going far beyondempirical description of single or multiple anti-debt campaigns. Ruth Reitan (2007, 2013) and JeanSomers (2014) have produced notable exceptions and connected their empirical research to some ofthe theoretical insights of social movements scholars. However, their accounts do not include thetremendous transformations of debt politics since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, nor do theyaim to theorize specificities of debt struggles vis-à-vis other fields of contentious politics. Any suchattempt would need to engage with insights and knowledges from heterodox economics, politicaleconomy, economic sociology, and economic anthropology, as these highlight the field of debtpolitics and performatively shape contentious discourses themselves.

Curiously enough, both social movement studies and critical political economy haverecently autonomously initiated debates longing for reducing the large gap separating these twoacademic communities, important exceptions of interdisciplinary research notwithstanding. Whilesocial movement scholars have criticized the “strange disappearance of capitalism” (Goodwin &Hetland 2009) from their field, critical political economists have lamented a tendency to focus ondomination and stable structures in the European crisis and beyond, thereby excluding disruption,resistance, contradiction from the academic gaze (Huke & Clua-Losada & Bailey 2015). Socialmovement studies has since the 1960s formed as an autonomous academic community in oppositionto both structural-functionalism and economist-determinist Marxism (della Porta & Diana 1999, 6).Psychologizing narratives perceived contentious action as related to psychological anomaliesrelated to feelings of deprivation and aggression (della Porta & Diana 1999, 7). Orthodox Marxist

accounts, on the other hand, could not grasp the multiplicity of social stratification beyond theworking class and often suffered from (economistic) determinism: Grievances do not necessarilytranslate into collective action, as the former are often present without the latter (della Porta &Diana 1999, 6). Over decades, social movement scholars have developed various concepts in orderto solve these puzzles, from political opportunity structures to mobilizing structures and framing.These explanatory paradigms will be touched upon in the theory chapter of my PhD; suffice it tosay here that social movement studies has emerged as an autonomous discipline, which couldbenefit tremendously from a closer exchange with recent theorizations of capitalism (notable recentcontributions on this topic include della Porta 2015; Barker & Cox & Krinsky & Nilsen 2014, Ciniet al Unpublished).

The central idea of this paper (and my PhD research) is to trace the co-evolutionarydiffusion of financialization, debt-related grievances, and contentious politics since the NorthAtlantic Financial Crisis. I will present a brief history of movements and campaigns againstillegitimate debt in the Global South from the 1970s to the 2000s, and then mainly focus on thediffusion of these to Europe and North Africa since the financial crisis and the 2011 movements. Iwill argue that these spatial dynamics are interrelated, despite the fact that Southern experiencestend to get erased from Northern discourses. In doing so, I will focus on circulations across theMediterranean in particular, which are embodied in the International Citizen Debt Audit campaign(ICAN).

In the first part I will review relevant literature from heterodox economics, politicaleconomy, economic sociology and economic anthropology on the diffusion of financialization anddebt-related grievances and discourses. In the second, more extensive step I will discuss myempirical data on various social movement organizations and networks against said grievances,thereby observing how grievances were (or were not) translated into collective action. Data for thismulti-sited (Marcus 1995) and “global” ethnography (Burawoy et. al. 2000; Burawoy 2009) wasgathered via two years of participant observation was as ongoing qualitative interviews and framinganalysis. Unfortunately, I did not manage to present as much of the data as I wanted to, but I'mhappy to answer questions of interest or scepticism.

My project will hopefully contribute to existing research by adding to above-elaboratedexchange between political economy and social movement studies, highlighting recenttransnationalizing tendencies of protest and providing new empirical data on the anti-debtmovement. The paper presented here will summarize (preliminary) findings of my fieldwork anddiscuss these against the background of theoretical literature.

Finance and debt under capitalism

Debt is a social relation preceding money; a social relation capitalism has transformed from aninformal, communal, imprecise social construct into one that is mathematically calculated andviolently enforced (Graeber 2011). It can be defined as a social construct linking a creditor anddebtor, a social relation embedded in larger structures of market-based or personal exchange,exploitation, and asymmetrical power relations - from micro-credit bondage to the global financialregime (Roberts & Soederberg 2014).

Finance and debt are two inherent features of capitalism, although subject to historicaltransformation. Any account of anti-debt movements thus has to start with an analysis of the

historical trajectory of social relations of finance and debt, which created broad debt-relatedgrievances and thus the foundation for contentious debt politics to intervene in processes of socialtransformation. The recently growing literature on financialization constitutes a useful departurepoint.

David Graeber (2009) has recently pointed out that debt precedes credit, which in turnprecedes money. The hegemonic “metallist” or “commodity” narrative on the origin of money,credit, and debt goes like this: Once upon a time, human beings used to barter. Over time, humansrealized that trading with each other would be much more convenient if there was a singlecommodity, which could be exchanged for every other one and they thus invented money. Chartalistapproaches, on the other hand, see “money as a creature of the state” aiming to calculate and governeconomic and social relations (Knapp 1924, Lerner 1947). Empowered by empirical evidencestrongly pointed towards the latter theory, Neo-Chartalists have recently pushed state theories ofmoney (Graeber 2014b, Hudson 2003; 2004): states have historically created money in order tofund wars and create markets. In modern history, states have endowed central banks with themonopoly to print money and hand it out as debt to private banks, which in turn lend it toindividuals, corporations, and governments for profit. Governments then tax private entities to fundits expenditures and thereby validate money as legal tender.

This does not mean that money and debt contain some sort of universal-ahistorical essencenot subject to historical-cultural variation. In fact, money takes on specific features undercapitalism, as pointed out by Marxian approaches. The latter centrally focus on the history of capitalaccumulation, i.e. the process of turning money (M) into more money (M’), with M’ > M, and thedifference between M and M’ being the profit (Marx 1887). During periods of capitalist normalcy,the owners of capital (“capitalists”) use M to purchase means of production and hire workers, whoin turn produce commodities (C). C is then sold to obtain M’, which must be high enough toreproduce workers and means of production. The remaining capital higher than the costs ofreproduction is surplus-value, which the capitalist can use to expand and repeat the whole cycle,thus constituting the endless accumulation of capital (Marx 1887).

The bulk of economic activity follows the elaborated paradigm: M-C-M’, but capitalists canalso turn M directly into M’ via interest-bearing financial transaction. Money does not merelyconstitute a means of circulation, but functions as potential capital, i.e. money employed to make aprofit (Demirović & Sablowski 2013, 6). Hence, money is lent for interest and thus becomes acommodity itself. This financial circuit (M-M’) is beneficial for the productive circuit (M-C-M’) indifferent ways. First, credit enlarges productive capital, thus creating the possibility to furtherincrease accumulation (Marx 1887). Furthermore, with machines and factories only slowlyamortizing themselves via the sale of commodities, capitalists need reserve funds and may faceliquidity bottlenecks. At the same time, capitalists receive liquidity via sales they are sometimes notable re-invest right away, thus providing “it to other capitalists in the form of interest-bearingcapital and, as such, tak[ing] part in the process of valorization (Demirović & Sablowski 2013, 7).Along these lines, productive and interest-bearing capital also share a conflictive relationship, as thepayment of interest rates reduces total profit.

These processes generate another form of capital: fictitious capital. Fictitious capitalemerges when stock companies are created or when creditors’ claims are re-sold again, i.e. viasecuritization (Demirović & Sablowski 2013, 7). It constitutes "accumulated claims, legal titles, tofuture production" (Marx Capital III) and is fictitious in the sense that it is not grounded in presentvalue, but in the value generated by future valorization. Fictitious capital can in turn becommodified into derivatives, which represent claims on previously established claims. The value

of derivatives is derived from the performance of the underlying equity and can be used asprotection against price variations (Demirović & Sablowski 2013, 7). However, investors can usethem to speculate on price fluctuations of fictitious capital and thus as capital themselves. TheMarxian argument is that these processes, structures, interrelations are permanent features ofcapitalist economies, but their specific configuration always remains subject to specific locations intime and space. From the perspective of the varieties of historical materialist approaches, then,“financialization” or “finance-dominated capitalism” is the dominant model of accumulation inrecent decades, in which interest-bearing capital, fictitious capital, and derivatives constitute thelion’s share of profit-making.1 The next part shall further elaborate this idea.

The financialization of capitalism

Debt has become more important in recent decades since financialization has drastically expandedthe size and reach of financial structures relative to overall economic activity. Similar to otherpopular macro-concepts such as neoliberalism and globalization, scholars adopt quite differentdefinitions and conceptualizations of financialization. Some scholars identify financialization withthe ascendancy of shareholder value (Epstein 2005), i.e. the hegemony of modes of corporategovernance arguing that the primary objective of a company should be to maximize the wealth of itsshareholders (e.g. Fligstein 1990; Fligstein & Shin 2007; Boyer 2011). Another popular definitionbroadly sees financialization as “the increasing importance of financial markets, institutions andmotives in the world economy” (Epstein 2005). Greta Krippner (2005, 173) more specificallyperceives of financialization as a “pattern of accumulation in which profit making occursincreasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production”. Thisperspective combines the increasing share of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector ofoverall GDP on the one hand (figure 1), and the increasing role of financial profits for nonfinancial2

corporations on the other (figure 2; Krippner 2011). All of these definitions have their merits andshortcomings, and I would thus like to synthesize them in the following way: Financializationdescribes a continuous and uneven process of social transformation, during which social institutionsbecome re-organized around the primacy of profits via financial channels. This process isconstituted by shareholder-value and agency theory as dominant modes of corporate governance,and the increasing importance of financial structures for everyday life, corporations and states.Financialization has thereby transformed non-financial corporations, financial institutions,households, states, and the international realm.

In the years after WWII, Fordist-Keynesian regimes in the Global North andDevelopmentalist projects in the Global South linked expansionary production to popularredistribution and statist intervention. However, these economic policies entered a period of crisissince the late 1960s. Orthodox Marxist accounts argue that Japanese and German corporationsfinally caught up with their US counterparts, thus tremendously decreasing profit margins (Brenner2002). More interesting from the perspective of social movement studies, Autonomist Marxists

1 Marxians might differ somewhat in their concrete elaboration of finance-dominated capitalism. Some follow more orthodox readings (e.g. Lapavitsas), others are inspired by Gramsci, Poulantzas, and regulation theory (e.g. Demirović & Sablowski), still others offer a heterodox reading of different traditions of radical economics (Sweezy, Foster, Magdoff, Brenner).

2 Ito be inserted: explaination of “non-financial“ instead of “productive“

(Hardt & Negri 2000) and world-systems scholars (Arrighi & Silver 2011) stress the role ofcontentious agencies in these processes, arguing that the profit squeeze was (also?) a product ofcounter-hegemonic forces demanding social rights, such as workers', women’s and nationalliberation movements (Hardt & Negri 2000)3. Workers' movements demanded increasingremuneration, while women's movements resisted unequal pay and being forced to take care ofunwaged or semi-waged and externalized reproductive tasks, among other things. Anti-racist andnational liberation movements in turn struggled against their hierarchical integration into theunequal social and international division of labor, internally and externally of the colonizing states,respectively.4 Additionally, the existence of state socialism illustrated the continuous threat of socialrevolution and thereby increased the willingness for social compromise among Western elites(Graeber 2014a).

Capital thus found it increasingly difficult to locate profitable investment possibilities.Accordingly, corporations channeled surpluses into financial investment and became increasinglydependent on financial profits (Magdoff & Sweezy 1987). Other ways to overcome the systemicprofit squeeze included the destruction of unions, social security, and workers' rights in general toreduce labor costs. Marxists thus see neoliberalism and financialization as the outcome of ahistorical class project from above (e.g. Brenner 2002; Harvey 2011). Increasing inequalityprecipitated both the need for debt-financed consumption for the poor, and the necessity to generateinterests on increasing savings of the wealthy, similar to (Post-)Keynesian perspectives. Along theselines, finance-dominated capitalism recently entered a crisis, when levels of debt and the drive forsuccessively risky investment became increasingly unsustainable.

According to Autonomist Marxist accounts, critical scholars should not focus only on thesupposedly complete success of neoliberal transformation, but also on the limits of itsimplementation due to subaltern resistance. From such a perspective, debt and financializationwould then be a product of class struggle and hegemonic regulation, as dominant forces reduceconsumption power but are limited by subaltern resistance. “[P]ressures to increase productivity,and reduce real wages, living standards and the wage share” were soothed by collective action andindividual resilience (Huke & Clua-Losada & Bailey 2015, 15-16). The refusal to dramaticallyreduce popular living standards entailed increasing debt-financed consumption in order to maintainliving standards and reduce growing wealth inequality (Huke & Clua-Losada & Bailey 2015). Theinternal contradictions of this process became apparent in the recent crisis, and precipitatedstruggles over who pays the bill.

Financialized actors and institutions

So what changed? My argument is that financialization transformed corporations, banks,households, and the interplay of states and the world market. These processes produced newpossibilities for opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framings to be appropriated by contentiousactors.

As elaborated above, corporations faced a tremendous profit squeeze since the late 1960s.They consequently outsourced production, reduced wages as far as possible, and lobbied for

3 World-systems scholars tend to stress a combination of both explanations, whereas Autonomist Marxists highlight the role of subaltern classes.

4 These movements evidently had important cultural demands as well, but I'm primarily focusing on political-economic claims and their effects on the profit squeeze here.

deregulation, lower taxes, and subsidies. Additionally, they channeled capital into the financialsector and in the process developed significant financial skills, as financial deregulation nowallowed non-financial firms to enter financial markets. They capitalized for financial activities byretaining their profits and additionally raising funds on open financial markets, thereby becomingrelatively independent from banks (Lapavitsas 2011). Accordingly, corporate financial income fromdividends, interest, and capital gains has increased from below 10% to above 40% in US from the1960s to the 2000s (figure Krippner).

[figure Krippner 2011]

Parallel to these material transformations, knowledge production saw the rise of shareholdervalue and agency theory. Both suggested new answers to the “problem of ownership and control”,i.e. conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders. Shareholder value theory argue alongthe lines of agency theory that corporations should be run in the interests of their owners(shareholders), but managers control company governance, face different incentives, and are hard tomonitor. Consequently, CEOs received stock options and were thus incentivized towards increasingstock prices, take on more risk, financial engineering, and short-term profits on financial marketsvis-à-vis their traditional profits via commodity production (sources). Shareholder value did notsucceed to dis-empower managers, but as an unintended consequence actually contribute to CEOs'remuneration exploding (Boyer 2011). With richer individuals consuming a smaller relative share oftheir income and saving more, shareholder value thereby contributed to increasing amounts of

financial leverage seeking returns in a context of relatively slow economic growth.With non-financial corporations acquiring financial structures and skills and thereby

becoming more independent from banks, the latter have focused on lending to households and otherbanks (Lapavitsas 2011; 2012). At the same time, real wages for the majority of people stagnated(figure) and governments slashed social welfare institutions (education, health, unemploymentbenefits, subsidies for popular consumption products etc.) in many countries. Households thereforerelied on debt-financed consumption to finance their expenditures (figure). At the same time,workers' assets (housing, savings, pensions etc.) have served as financial assets for banks, whosegovernance transitioned from “originate-to-hold” policies to an “originate-to-distribute” paradigm.Instead of commercial banks holding loans until maturity (“originate-to-hold”), large institutionalinvestors securitized loans and re-selling them quickly instead of holding them (“originate-to-distribute”), thus drastically increasing the volume of financial transactions (Davis 2009, 116). Thestructural roots of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis lie in this precarious configuration: Banksborrow in the money markets to fund loans for (increasingly risky) mortgages, and then securitize avariety of very differently rated mortgage loans to make profits by selling mortgage-backedsecurities (MBS). Securitization proved extremely profitable for banks, with FIRE sectors (finance,insurance, real estate) capturing larger and larger shares of GDPs (figure). However, the tremendousincrease of inter-bank trade also rendered risk systemic: Once more and more MBS failed, thefinancial crisis diffused quickly along dense banking interrelations.

[figure Krippner 2011]

[figure Demirović & Sablowski 2013]

[figure Demirović & Sablowski 2013]

Financialization thus does not equal the control of “productive” capital by “parasitic” banks, asfinancialization cuts across sectors and should therefore be rather perceived as a systemictransformation of socio-economic relations. Neither does financialization (or neoliberalism) meanthat the state disappears or loses control over market or finance. On the contrary, state policies are at

the heart of financialization, as neoliberal reforms drove financialization via financial deregulationand increasing income inequality.

When looking at state policies, we can also introduce spatial differentiation to complementthe more abstract and structural perspectives on financialization as a transformation of banks, non-financial corporations, and households elaborated above. Giovanni Arrighi (2007, 122 ff.; 149 ff.)traces to roots of the rise of finance to the crisis since the late 1960s and 70s. In doing so, he therebyspells out an empirical observation made by both Marx and Braudel, namely the “continuoussignificance of national debts as means of transferring surplus capital from declining to risingcenters of capitalist accumulation” (Arrighi 2007, 85). Marx (Kapital I, 698-99 German Version)observed the historical recurrence of formerly dominant political-territorial formations becomingthe financiers of newly rising economic powers, from Venice/Genoa to Holland, England, and theUS, the rise of the latter to hegemony he would not live to see. Braudel saw the same process andtheorized:

“In Genoa as in Amsterdam, the extremely low interest rates show that capital was no longer finding employment at home through the usual channels. The over-plentiful supply of money in Amsterdam was being loaned at 3 or even 2 per cent, just as in Genoa in 1600. England, after the cotton boom of the early nineteenth century, found herself in precisely the same position: there was too much money about, and it was not bringing in enough, even in the cotton industry. It was at this point that English capitalists agreed to invest massively in the metal industries and the railways.” (Braudel 1984, 246)

“The accumulation of capital on a scale beyond the normal channels of investment” in a leadingpolitical-territorial container thus occasionally significantly drives down profits and precipitates aperiod of finance taking over “all the activities of the business world” (Braudel 1984, 604). Alongthese lines, Arrighi theorizes that the history of capitalism saw the rise and fall of several dominantpolitical formations allied with newly innovative business organizations, which dominate the worldeconomy and inter-state system for a certain period. Their dominance produces a “materialexpansion” of increasing trade and commodity production, during which profits are re-invested intoproduction and trade, thus creating a virtuous cycle of expansion across different regions. Once therate of profit falls, however, “capitalist agencies tend to keep in liquid form a larger proportion oftheir incoming cash flows. The stage is thus set for the change of phase from material to financialexpansion” (Arrighi 2007, 232). As a consequence, governments face reduced revenues andfinancialization ”created highly profitable market niches for financial intermediaries capable ofchanneling the expanding supply of liquidity into the hands either of governments and populationsin financial straits, or of public and private entrepreneurs intent on opening up new avenues ofprofit-making in trade and production” (Arrighi 2007, 232).

In this reading, US companies and state apparatuses become powerful agents advancingfinancialization since the 1970s. Encountering rising competition due to their German and Japaneserivals successively catching up, and due to increasingly militant subalterns, US non-financialcorporations operating abroad increasingly channeled liquidity into euro-currency and otheroffshore money markets (Arrighi 2007, 157). At the same time, the failure of the US in Vietnamseverely damaged US regime credibility on the one hand, and the costs of war escalated both abroadand at home (Arrighi 1994, 331 ff.). A crisis of profitability thus met a crisis of US hegemony.Increasing US trade and public budget deficits eventually precipitated a run on the dollar from 1968onwards. Said excessive offshore liquidity provided the leverage to bring down the gold-dollar-

standard, which the Nixon regime ended in 1971.The breakdown of Bretton-Woods accelerated financialization, as increasing amounts of

private liquidity competed with state actors over the production of money. In addition, oil-exportingstates felt empowered by the US defeat in Vietnam to increase the price of oil and thereby protecttheir exports from Dollar devaluations. This increase exacerbated the global crisis of profitabilityand produced a large amount of petrodollars, which in turn even increased the sum of liquid assetslooking for investment possibilities. When the chaotic situation later precipitated a run on the dollarin 1979, the US response was to drastically increase interest rates. This reversed the flow of globalcapital: instead of the US constituting the main provider of capital, the US now turned into thebiggest debtor (numbers to be added).

Arrighi’s perspectives allows for the analysis of state policies, later refined by Krippner(2005; 2011). It also provides interesting perspectives on space. The diffusion of financializingpolicies rerouted global capital flows and financed the huge US deficit on the one hand; but on theother it precipitated the Southern debt crisis. East Asian states saw still other developments: theywere able to exploit their comparative advantage and increasing US demand by exporting cheapindustrial products. The related income of currency reserves was re-invested in the US, East Asiathus becoming the largest lender to the US. Without the necessity to curtail public spending in orderto maintain gold reserves, US governments could now drastically expand fiscal policies, whereaslarge parts of the Global South were starved to cheap credit.

With government budgets being increasingly strained, many states in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, as well as West and South Asia were forced to turn to World Bank andIMF for economic and financial help. The diffusion of neoliberal knowledge production and theinterests of the international financial institutions' powerful main stakeholders in the Global Northunleashed economic recession on the these regions. Access to credit is tied to structural adjustmentreforms, which call for reduced taxation, unilateral trade and financial liberalization andderegulation, slashing social subsidies to poorer classes (and thus hurting aggregate demand), all ofwhich aggravate instead of remedy excessive debt burdens. In the Global North, government debtsalso increase for various reasons, but often due to reduced taxation, excessive military spending(e.g. US and Greece), expensive government projects (e.g. PPPs), and sluggish economic growth.Increasing debt burdens turned into fiscal debt crises when governments responded to the bankingcrisis by transferring public credits to failed banks. The crisis diffused from the US to other regionsof the Global North via dense inter-dependent banking networks. Once the financial crisis turnedinto a recession, it spilled over the large parts of the Global South, as Southern states weredependent . The bulk of the crisis, however, remained in the US and Europe, where anti-austerityand anti-debt movements now encountered scenarios similar to Southern experiences of the lastdecades.

To summarize, financialization re-centered different apparatuses, institutions, and actorsaround the primacy of financial profits. Non-financial corporations developed internal financialsectors and skills, retained large parts of the their profits, and channeled them into financialmarkets. Banks thus expanded credit creation, capitalized the assets of households and thenexcessively lent to households and other banks. Households, who faced stagnating real wages andreduced social welfare, financialized their assets and increasingly depended on credit financeeveryday consumption. States assisted these transformations and slashed social expenditures andderegulated financial sectors. The US spearheaded this process in order to solve its political andeconomic crises since the late 1960s Krippner (2011). Ending Bretton Woods and establishing afree-floating exchange rate system with dollar as the main reserve currency after 1971 meant that

the US could print money without maintaining significant gold reserves. Once these policiesprecipitated inflationary pressures, the FED dramatically increased its interest rates in 1979(“Volcker Shock”) and thereby (as an unintended consequence?) attracted huge amounts of globalfinancial capital seeking high returns and funding ever increasing US deficits. The US could nowtap into the world's financial reserves and companies channeled capital into high-interest financialactivities. Once these corporate financial strategies were put into practice, the FED returned toextremely low interest rates and flooded markets with cheap capital. As a consequence offinancialization, households and states became increasingly indebted and especially many Southernstates faced debt crises due to their precarious position in global financial markets. Financializationalso entailed the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, these debt crises diffused to Northern states, whosaved their bankrupt banks with public funds, as well as to households, who were threatened withbankruptcy, poverty, and homelessness.

The history of the anti-debt movement since 1979

As elaborated above, social relations of debt have a very long history and, little surprisingly, so doesresistance against debt. David Graeber (2011) recently popularized Moses Finley's (1973, 80)assessment of “the perennial revolutionary program of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute theland, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class.” With the globalizing destruction of pre-capitalist livelihoods and the creation of “productive” sphere of formally free wage labor (in Marx'sdouble sense) and a “reproductive” sphere of care work, reciprocal relations as temporary relationsbetween formal equal entities expanded drastically. In market societies, debt were now excessivelycalculated and violently enforced along unequal power relations. Not paying one's debt thuspotentially meant losing said formal equality until the debt was re-payed.

The history of debt under capitalism illustrates this transformation, from debtors' prisons tocolonial conquests justified by debt, e.g. British rule in Egypt after 1882. It also reflects that debt isa social relation negotiated under unequal power relations, as rich and powerful people, institutions,or states face fundamentally different circumstances, which London Agreement on German externaldebt or the socialization of banking losses since 2007 have strikingly illustrated. Accordingly,debtors' claims have to struggle with hegemonic moralities of debt, they have to deconstruct debtfetishism and re-construct debt as economically inefficient or unsustainable, morally unjust, orsystemically problematic and divert the discourse from debtors' practices to creditors' practices.

Along these lines, debt politics has been a field for redistributive and anti-colonial/anti-imperial claim-making. The roots of recent anti-debt movements can be seen in the resistance to theSouthern debt crisis and structural adjustment programs since the 1970s and more intensely sincethe 1980s. Little empirical research on related movement networks and campaigns has attempted tohistoricize and theorize recent contentious politics in the field of debt politics from a transnationalperspective. As one of the notable exceptions Jean Somers (2014) has suggested three periods.

First, from 1976-1990, transnational links emerged between different groups resistingincreasing Southern debt grievances and the diffusion of neoliberal transformations and discoursesin the final period of the Cold War. She chose 1976 as a starting point because of the protestsagainst the Peruvian and Jamaican debt crises, which precipitated international solidarity (Donnelly2002). As elaborated in the last chapter, the Volcker shock and subsequent worldwide recessiontremendously exacerbated Southern debt grievances and led to the Mexican debt crisis of 1982.Somers (2014, 13) perceives of the latter as formative of later debt struggles, as Mexico – unlike

Peru or Jamaica – constituted a large country, the bankruptcy of which could pose systemic risk.Initial resistance to debt mainly centered on Latin American debt owed to commercial banks and“took the form of national protests against the austerity programs which were a condition for debtrelief, contentious mobilizations at IGO summits, and the emergence of national campaigns“(Somers 2014, 13). Contentious politics created first transnational links, albeit in the absence ofrecent breakthroughs in information technology and long-distance travel. Framings often centeredon unequal power relations between Global North and South, linking claims to discourses on theNew International Economic Order (Somers 2014, 211). Creditor institutions and the G7(inadequately) responded by introducing Brady Bonds to deal with commercial debt, i.e. dollar-denominated bonds linked to either partial debt write-off or interest rates fixed at below marketvalues.

Somers (2014, 132 ff.) argues that 1991-1996 saw a deep transformation of contentious debtpolitics. The defeat of really existing state socialism seemed to confirm the neoliberal teleology ofrepresentative democracy and capitalist property and market relations as the final or natural form ofhuman civilization. Many debt campaigners thus reconfigured their strategies away fromtransgressive tactics towards closer engagement with creditors and governing state apparatuses andless frequently used anti-systemic framings in favor of more technical discourse (Somers 2014, 14).Since the final years of the 1980s, debt campaigning had increasingly focused on Sub-SaharanAfrica, where debts were mainly owed to Northern governments and multilateral institutions andclaims thus now mainly targeted IMF, World Bank, and the Paris Club instead of commercial banksand the London Club (Adedeji 1990). IMF and World Bank responded to institutional advocacy byintroducing the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative in 1996, which tied debt relief andlow-interest loans to structural adjustment reforms, for up to 41 designated countries (Somers 2014,15). Contentious actors differed in their perception of the HIPC Initiative, with some seeing at as asuccessful first step, while others perpetuating unequal North-South relations.

Finally, debt activism entered a new period with the establishment of Jubilee 2000 in 1996.The name related the 2000th anniversary of Christianity to the biblical concept of “jubilee”, i.e.years when debts are forgiven, slaves freed, and land redistributed. Along these lines, the campaigndemanded cancellation of debts payed by world's poorest countries. The religious framingsucceeded in mobilizing transnational religious networks and their vast resources and numbers offollowers. Similar to the alter-globalization movement of movements, indeed, in close interrelationwith it, anti-debt networks further transnationalized via diffusion and brokerage, increasinglycoordinating local action and forming actually transnational networks (vis-à-vis lose internationalcommunication of different national campaigns) (Reitan 2007). The contentious repertoire ofJubilee 2000 included both non-confrontational and slightly more transgressive tactics, fromcontinued institutional advocacy, popular education, and trans-/international petitions to largemobilizations at international summits, e.g. a large human chain surrounding Birmingham CityCentre during the 1998 G8 Summit (Reitan 2007, 81). Activists won more concessions in the 1999Cologne Debt Deal, which further increased debt reduction of the HIPC Initiative and slightly (!)eased structural adjustment policies. Northern and more reformist groups cautiously framed the dealas a partial victory, whereas Southern and more radical groups perceived “the offer being too little,too late, and with too many strings attached“ (Reitan 2007, 66). Many Southern groups andindividuals thus broke away from the coalition to form and autonomous Jubilee South networkoriented more towards direct social justice activism than institutional reform advocacy and with amore radical framing of current debt structures as immoral and illegitimate, with Southern stateshaving paid their debts several times over (due to high interest rates, dollar seignorage etc.). This

split did not constitute a definite break, however, but more of a contentious evolution (Somers2014). Latin American, African, and Asian groups realized that autonomous organization wasneeded, which could then be complemented by Northern solidarity networks. South-North dialoguecontinued via established transnational channels and especially during international (counter-)summits, e.g. World Social Forums. The reconfigured Jubilee networks remained active throughoutthe 2000s and observed further small victories when the Norwegian government (unconditionally)canceled illegitimate debts of Egypt, Ecuador, Peru, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone in 2007, and whenEcuador rejected part of its debt in 2010 (the Argentinian state had struggled with its creditors since2001 but later agreed to pay part of its debt).

To summarize, the current anti-debt movement emerged out of resistance to the Southerndebt crisis, itself a process related to specifically the Volcker Shock of 1979 and more broadly thefinancialization of capitalism. Early networks responded to structural adjustment policies and therise of neoliberalism with popular mobilization and confrontational tactics. With the increasingsuccess of neoliberal policies and discourses, and with the defeat of state socialism, new groupsproposing institutional advocacy gained momentum. Transnational networks took shape andpressured creditor governments and international financial institutions to restructure debts via broadmobilization and non-confrontational tactics, but only gained minor debt write-offs linked toneoliberal structural reforms e.g. under the HIPC Initiative and the Cologne Debt Deal. Increasingtension arose along radical-reformist and Southern-Northern dividing lines, with autonomousSouthern networks being eventually set up.

Two anti-debt currents at the eve of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis

Along these lines, the field of contentious debt politics is constituted by a plurality of groups,tactics, and framings responding to the financialization of capitalism, who despite their diversityagree that there is a relatively autonomous field of debt politics constitutive of debt-relatedgrievances. Said grievances are mostly framed as excessive public debt entailing austerity andthereby producing poverty, unemployment, slashed social welfare, and loss of political sovereigntylinked perpetuating post/colonial structures. Private debt such as grievances related to micro-credithas received some attention, but groups mainly focused on public debt.

Within the field of contentious debt politics, two very lose and often overlapping formationsemerged along above-elaborated divides: proponents of institutional advocacy versus proponents ofpopular mobilization and transgressive tactics. Regional “debt and development” (DAD) networkssuch as Afrodad, Latinddad, Eurodad, and the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt andDevelopment / Jubilee South Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development (JSAPMDD)constitute the main umbrella networks for institutional advocacy and have incorporated many of thepivotal actors of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, from the Jubilee platforms to religious groups. Thesenetworks tend to be registered NGOs themselves, with institutional funding from participatingNGOs and religious groups, and with permanent staff, general assemblies, and executive boards.They selectively work with UN institutions (e.g. UNCTAD) and UN associated individuals (e.g.UN Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt Cephas Luminas), centre-left and left-wingparties and think tanks, as well as religious institutions and networks. Their diagnostic framingoften constructs financialization as failed policies stemming from flawed economic theory, financialderegulation, and sometimes income inequality. These erroneous policies then lead to crisis andgrievances. Having constructed failed policies as the root of the problem, prognostic framingconsequentially suggests a set of related economic reforms: Restructure unsustainable debt in fair

dialogue, create an UN-led (not IMF and World Bank led) multilateral framework to restructurefuture sovereign debt crises, regulation of lending and financial markets, tax justice. These ideasrelate to a variety of Keynesian discourses and framings, and publications indeed often cite Newand Post-Keynesian scholars such as Gerald Epstein, Robert Pollin, or Engelbert Stockhammer (e.g.Eurodad et. al. 2010; Eurodad 2015). The repertoires of contention focus on institutional advocacy,petitions, and knowledge production, while shying away from more transgressive tactics in order tonot alienate institutional allies.

The most important example of a more radical network is the Committee for the Abolition ofIllegitimate Debt, formerly known in French as Comité pour l’annulation de la dette du TiersMonde (CADTM). CADTM was founded in Belgium in 1990 and now features 36 radical anti-debtplatforms, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin American, but also in North Africa, Asia, andincreasingly in Europe. Regional networks share relative autonomy, with regular world assembliesproducing guidelines, and an international secretariat shared by the Moroccan and Belgianplatforms coordinating participation and internal communication. They mainly work with otherprogressive movements (e.g. different Attac groups in the Global South or the Indignados in Spain),radical academics, as well as leftist and radical left parties (e.g. Front Populaire in Tunisia or PAISAlliance in Ecuador). Somewhat unlike the moderate framings elaborated above, CADTM oftenconstructs financialization as an outcome of capitalist crisis and class struggle (e.g. Fattorelli 2013,Toussaint 2015). Diagnostic framings thus focus on capitalist institutions such as private banks andcompetitive pressures towards capital accumulation. Along these lines, CADTM (2007) texts arguethat “cancellation of debt is not an end in itself”, but a necessary condition towards structuraltransformation. The head of CADTM Eric Toussaint (2015) suggests that radically regulatingfinancial markets and redistributing income and wealth would be desirable (other Marxist framingsoccasionally argue that such policies are not feasible), but that the colossal failure of privatebanking (in the long-term) necessitates socialization of the banking sector and placing it under thecontrol of democratic producer-consumer associations. Such suggestions relate more radicalKeynesian framings to Autonomist and Marxian discourses, with publications quoting SilviaFederici, Costas Lapavitsas or David Harvey (and these intellectuals themselves often interactingwith movements). Contentious actions include participation in transgressive protests, populareducation (especially during international counter-/summits), and citizen debt audits, i.e. civilsociety audits of public debt to identify illegitimate debt to be abandoned.

Transcending this radical-reformist divide was and is crucial for broad mobilization.Participant observation and interviews have indicated that individual brokers are pivotal, as they canmaintain collaboration via personal relationships and despite theoretical disagreements. Broadcollective actions frames are also helpful, with identity construction focusing on contentiouspractices instead of theoretical debates, as shared contentious experiences and joint organizationfacilitate creating joint identities. The 2006-09 North Atlantic Financial Crisis transformed the fieldof debt politics and created the foundation upon which to construct new contentious alliances.

The North Atlantic Financial Crisis as a critical juncture

As outlined earlier, the financialization of capitalism transformed the practices of non-financialcorporations, banks, households, and states. With non-financial corporations developingautonomous financial sectors, banks capitalized on financial markets as well the assets ofhouseholds, and subsequently securitized these assets to lend heavily to other banks and

households, who increasingly financed consumption via debt. When the housing bubble started toburst in 2006, poorer households and especially African-American and Latin households were thefirst struggling to refinance and thus faced eviction. As housing prices started to fall, demand formortgage-backed securities disappeared completely. With the subsequent collapse of the investmentbank Lehman Brothers, the subprime mortgage crisis turned into a North Atlantic banking crisis,which diffused quickly as banks had become highly interdependent due to large inter-bank lendingmarkets. Massive government bail-outs eventually prevented a complete collapse of global finance,but many households had lost their savings, collapsed financial markets and weakened aggregatedemand precipitated economic recession, and governments were now deeply indebted themselves.

In Europe, the GIPS (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) countries failed to refinance publicdebts or bail out their banks and thus had to ask for assistance by the Troika, i.e. IMF, EuropeanCommission, and European Central Bank. GIPS now experienced the structural violence faced bySouthern states for decades: increasing debt payments burdened fiscal budgets; new loans were tiedto structural adjustment policies, the governments thus losing political sovereignty; austeritypolicies increased the debt burden instead of soothing it. In Greece, for instance, government debtderived mainly from the banking crisis, and to a certain extent due to excessive military spendingand low taxation of the rich. Nonetheless, the Troika forced Greek governments to slash socialwelfare and the public sector, except for the military.

With Northern economies falling into recession, the crisis spilled over to the Global South,where economies are often dependent on exports to the high-income countries. West Asian andNorth African economies, for instance, suffered from plummeting oil prices, which are pivotal tothe regional division of labor via export earnings and regional remittances (Farsoun 1988, Rivlin2009, Sorg 2014). Maghrebi economies are particularly dependent on exports to Europe, with 70%of Moroccan and 80% of Tunisian exports traveling across the Mediterranean (Achy 2009).Economic growth slowed down substantially, the balance of payments deteriorated, andunemployment increased. In 2010, food prices spiked severely, due to a combination of mainly foodspeculation (financial capital was now desperately looking for new investment possibilities) and theincreasing use of biofuel (Lagi & Bertrand & Bar-Yam 2011), a situation exacerbated by climatechange (Johnstone & Mazo 2011). Increasing prices for basic food prices after years of neoliberalreforms producing poverty, inequality, and unemployment fueled societal tensions across the regionat the eve of the Arab Spring. When protests diffused across the Arab world from 2010 on, thespillover of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis boomeranged back. Protests traveled from mainlyEgypt to Spain, from there across Southern Europe and the US, and finally to the rest of Europe andbeyond (Gerbaudo 2013; Romanos 2013).

The financial crisis thus created new and severely exacerbated already existing grievancesrelated to debt and financialization. Indebted households and states instantaneously plummeted intodeeper debt, while finding it harder and harder to refinance, and thus facing poverty and eviction.Economic recession led to sluggish growth and unemployment, and austerity slashed social welfare,public wages, and public employment, while severely exacerbating public debt and the recession.These effects were not felt evenly across the societal spectrum. Women*, people of color, LGBTQI,and people with disabilities face rampant discrimination, earn considerably less, and are thusdisproportionately affected by poverty and homelessness (Strike Debt 2012). On the other side ofthe wealth gap, the richest 1% and especially the richest 0,1% saw their income growing far aboveaverage since the financial crisis.

Social movements appropriate new opportunities from below and above5

For anti-debt movements, these developments constituted both opportunities and threats toappropriate. The crisis enabled a radicalization of framing, as grievances exacerbated, publicawareness for inequality and systemic failure increased tremendously, and the neoliberal regime oftruth took a hard hit. New economic imaginaries became legible and Keynesian and Marxiandiscourses gained ground. Political elites were associated with corruption or seen as completelyincapable of dealing with the excessive power of economic and financial elites, and bailoutsperceived as highly undemocratic. This in turn increased political pluralism in Northernrepresentative democracies, with left-wing and right-wing alternatives gaining significant ground.In North Africa, autocratic leaders had relied on economic growth to fend off demands for politicalparticipation. When the economic crisis unveiled the fact that their neoliberal growth regimes hadnot delivered sustainable growth, but instead produced huge inequality, they too faced waninglegitimacy. In short: the economic crises produced crises of political participation.

This “opportunity from above” met an “opportunity from below”, i.e. the new anti-austerityand democratization movements since 2011. In Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia, protests challengedauthoritarian regimes, in the latter two cases even overthrowing them. In Europe (and the US), newanti-austerity movements to differing degrees mobilized workers and dispossessed middle classes toresist further neoliberal reforms (della Porta 2015, 2017b). In both regions, popular mobilizationspoliticized societies, produced new movement organizations, contentious imaginaries, and sharedemotions and experiences, the effects of which survived counterrevolutionary attacks and partial de-mobilization.

Anti-debt movements perceived these strategies opportunities opening space for politicalstruggle and as threats for the livelihoods of subaltern classes. At the same time, they contributed toand tried to appropriate new mobilizing structures. Eric Toussaint (CADTM) remembers:

“Yes, the Northern debt was not treated as a key issue in 1990, but I considered it to beso. As for the current situation, when the banking crisis which erupted in the US in2006-2007 engulfed Europe towards 2007-2008, and when a number of countriessocialized their banking losses to save the banks, the public debt rocketed. I wasimmediately convinced, with other members of the CADTM, that it was time to takeinto account the new dimension of the Northern public debt. We did so before it dawnedupon others. We must remember that in 2008-2009, the first reaction of José ManuelBarroso, President of the European Commission, was to propose a policy which lookedlike a neo-Keynesian turning-point. In fact, it simply provided temporary social shockabsorbers because the Northern governments dreaded that the challenge to the systemmight turn into something colossal and dynamic.” (Toussaint Interview)

Jubilee Debt members also tried to successively put Northern public and private debt on the agenda(Jubilee Debt UK Interviewee). While diffusion is often framed as a process of contentiousinnovations traveling from the Global North to the South (Chabot & Duyvendak 2002), anti-debtstruggles clearly show the multi-directional circulation of different practices and discourses.Repertoires of contention and framing strategies developed in transnational spaces in the Global

5 Due to limited space, and the work-in-progress nature of this paper, I will limit myself to delineating to rough lines of observation here. I have not finished evaluating my data, but I'm far enough to foreshadow some of the findings here.

South, intersecting Southern struggles with Northern solidarity campaigns. When the financial crisishit the North Atlantic, contentious strategies and theorizations of debt were ready to travel Northand be appropriated there. Experienced participants of debt audits in Ecuador and other countries,helped set up and coordinate debt audits in Tunisia and Greece, among others.6

Anti-debt movements found fruitful soil in the new anti-austerity and democratizationstruggles. Social movement scholars have identified the precariat as a pivotal social formation forrecent protests (e.g. Standing 2011, della Porta 2015). Working class identities are fragmented dueto flexibilization, transnational migration chains, and the destruction of unions. Bielefeld feministanthropologists and world-systems analysists, among others, have long pointed out that theexperience of (Northern, white, male) proletarian wage labor has never been the universal conditionof capitalist work (Mies 2007, van der Linden 2008, Wallerstein 2004). Along these lines, precarityis not a completely new condition, but the destruction of labor aristocracy and an expansion ofprecarious semi-proletarian work relations. The precariat merges experiences of under- andunemployment, stagnant wages, and lack of security with fading access to housing, education, andhealthcare. These grievances are shared by the impoverished and well-educated youth as well astraditional blue-collar workers and public employees (della Porta 2017b, 24 ff.). The experience ofprivate and public debt complement precarious subjectivities, as household rely on debt forconsumption and young people take on debt for education, while increasing debt burdens, bankbailouts, and austerity seem to destroy the economic futures of entire societies.

In addition, anti-austerity framings and identity constructions related to experiences of anti-debt movements. Whereas Global Justice Movements have constructed their identity as an allianceof minorities, anti-austerity movements responded to perceived neoliberal individualization withbroad definitions of the self: the citizens, the people, the 99% (della Porta 2015). Left-wingnationalisms inclusive of cultural minorities focused on national political containers, but linkedtheir identity to global perspectives (della Porta 2015). Along the lines of a perceived individualistand amoral culture of neoliberalism and corrupt political and economic elites, contentious actorsconstructed small opponents: the 1%, cronies, elites, the regime. Broad collective action frames ofanti-debt movements with often strong moral frames could easily relate to these discourses. Anti-debt movements have often theorized the experience of debt as being one of individual failure, andof isolation. Slogans such as “You are not a Loan” and “We don't owe, we don't pay” reverseframing and problematization: instead of individual failure, entitled lower and middle classes, orracializations of debt (“lazy Greeks”), discourses problematize economic structures and elites.Similarly, neoliberal workfare discourses stress personal responsibility. Such a gaze render socialprotection of subaltern classes hypervisible (in Foucauldian terms), but is blind to public expensesfor military and police (the institutions to police neoliberal dispossessions), subsidies to largecorporations, banking monopolies, tax favors for the wealthy etc. Anti-debt reject the hyper-individualism and social Darwinism embedded in these narratives, but at the same time points outdiscrepancies between discourse and reality: “privatization of profits and socialization of losses”(e.g. CADTM 2010, Eurodad 2012).

Responding to crises of political legitimacy, anti-austerity movements selectively mobilizedthe “affected” and created horizontal networks to contrast their contentious practices with theperceived corruption of political institutions (della Porta 2015). Tunisian and Egyptian protesters

6 This is not to say that debt struggles in the Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia have ended. For instance, Argentina is currently struggling with vulture funds, who have cheaply acquired debt the country defaulted on, to sue the government for the full value. In the Philippines, anti-debt groups have moved the government to legislate a debt audit of 20 development projects.

first experimented with the (older tradition of) occupation of popular squares, where citizens weresupposed to experience firsthand the possibility of relating to others in more social and democraticways. The practice quickly diffused beyond the Arab world. Organized actors such as unionists orparty members were invited, but their organizations were not allowed to appropriate popularmobilization. Participants have experimented with participatory and deliberative democraticorganizing and decision-making, while complementing older repertoires of contention such asstrikes or mass mobilizations with more symbolic performances. (della Porta 2016).

ICAN and Debt Audits

[this part is even less finished than the rest of the papers and constitutes a 2 hour free flow writingexperiment without references, but I find the developments very interesting and did not want toexclude them from the paper]

CADTM and smaller anti-debt movement organizations or participatory campaigns were betterequipped to appropriate these new opportunities and mobilizing structures than the more formallyorganized NGO networks emerging out of Jubilee 2000. They had experience with horizontalorganization and provided sophisticated structural critiques of financial crisis and politicaldynamics. Along these lines, activists associated with CADTM and activists from the new anti-austerity structures in 2011 founded the International Citizen Debt Audit (ICAN), a network tocoordinate debt audits in North Africa and Europe. Members from Greece, Ireland, England,Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Poland, Tunisia, and Egypt participated in regularconference calls, events during international summits, especially the World Social Forums in Tunisin 2013 and 2015, and yearly ICAN meetings in Brussels, Florence, Thessaloniki, London, andMadrid.

ICAN reproduced new grassroots formula for successful mobilization, that is participatoryorganizing and a focus more on practice than theory. Debt audits called for grassroots processeswith open outcomes instead of establishing clear political demands before mobilization. Opendiagnostic and prognostic framing thus managed to relatively bridge radical-reformist divides.Where Jubilee groups still existed and maintained close relations with grassroots anti-debtmovements, they supported ICAN. For instance, Debt Jubilee UK and the new Occupy-inspiredcollective Debt Resistance UK collaborate closely due to individual brokerage. In Germany, on theother hand, the German Jubilee group Erlassjahr focuses on religious constituents and institutionaladvocacy and rarely interact with more radical movement organizations, who likewise often do notinvite them to their events. In Tunisia, the radical-reformist split is relatively strong andcollaboration between CADTM Tunisia and the NGO Observatoire Tunisien de l'Economie, whichalso works on debt, remains fragile. However, debt audit initiatives regularly bring the two groupstogether.

Debt audits constitute radical tool for economic, political, and cultural empowerment.Labeling debt as illegitimate questions the fetishization of property and debt relations (in Marxianterms) and instead highlights the social constructedness of debt. It also facilitates concreteredistribution of resources and creates space for economic-financial transformations. Politically,debt audits are a radical participatory process to reclaim popular decision-making and democraticsovereignty. Related, they repudiate hegemonic racializations of debt as well as classist discoursesand instead reverse the gaze on political and economic elites as well as systemic dysfunction. While

Latin American groups have long experimented with debt audits (Fattorelli 2013), the most famousprecedent cases were the Argentinian government unilaterally suspending debt payments to theParis Club in 2001 and the Ecuador government establishing a debt commission to suspend a largeparty of its public debt in 2008, after a year of preparation in close collaboration with centralmovement organizations and NGOs of the anti-debt movement.

ICAN started off dynamically, while more recently slowing down. However, the networkshas remained an important hub for exchange and coordination. The most successful campaign toaudit public debt occurred in Tunisia and Greece.

In Tunisia social movements have organized against excessive public debt burdens fordecades, with Attac Tunis playing a central role. After the 2011 revolution, the odious debt leftbehind by the Ben Ali regime was a hot political issue, similar to Sub-Saharan African and LatinAmerican instances of transitional justice. Due to the revolutionary turbulences, the Tunisianeconomy was starved for investment and the transitional governments successively lost its foreignreserves. International financial institutions offered loans, but in turn demanded a perpetuation anddeepening of neoliberal economic policies. For purpose of illustration, MP Mabrouka M'barek(social democratic CPR Party) remembers siting in financial committees and being presented withnew laws for PPPs written not by Tunisians institutions (reflected by lots of legal mistakes), buteventually finding out that they were produced foreign consulting companies subtracted by theWorld Bank. An interviewee by the German development bank KfW stated that is common practicefor German and European institutions to sell loans to the Tunisian government slightly belowmarket price, and in turn demand a tightening of borders and refugee camps.

After the first elections, social democratic President Marzouki (himself an earlier member ofAttac Tunis) called for debt audit inspired by Ecuador and Norway and stressed this demand whenspeaking in the European Parliament. However, the moderate Islamists Ennahda, who had won theelection and had established a coalition with Marzouki's Congress for the Republic. When thedemocratized ancien regime party Nidaa Tounes won the subsequent parliamentary and presidentialelections, they erased debt audit from the agenda (Germany and Tunisia had in the meantimerestructured some of its debt to Tunisia). However, the left-wing Front Populaire gained 15 seats inparliament, with the head of the debt audit campaign Fathi Chamkhi holding one of them. Acoalition of activists from Attac-CADTM-Tunis, Front Populaire, the Tunisian General LaborUnion, Observatoire Tunisien de l'Economie (OTE), and the Tunisian Forum for Economic andSocial Rights have subsequently politicized debt and it as odious and illegitimate, but not managedto move the governing coalition.

In Greece, debt has been the most important political issue since the sovereign debt crisis.For activists, the election of Syriza opened political opportunity they had themselves helpedconstruct in previous mobilizations. New Prime Minister Alex Tsipras and Finance Minister YanisVaroufakis have long-standing ties to Global Justice and anti-austerity movements, and MP CostasLapavitsas being a leading theorist of financialization. Social movements and movement-leaningMPs convinced Tsipras to establish a “Truth Committee on Greek Public Debt”, which was headedby the Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou, who established CADTM's EricToussaint as scientific coordinator. The members of the committee included established activistsassociated with ICAN, CADTM, and Greek civil society. The committee collected legal documents,audit previous members of Greek governments and international institutions, and eventuallypublished a preliminary report before the Third Memorandum of Understanding, advocatingunilateral suspension of debt payments (Truth Committee on Public Debt, 2015). As the conflictbetween the Syriza-led government and the Troika came to a head, the government decided to hold

a public referendum on whether to accept the bailout conditions. 61% voted against thememorandum, with a voter turnout of 62,5%, but the government faced stern resistance from Troikaand the German government, who were unwilling to compromise. Being faced with the possibilitiesof either defeat or the uncertainty of risking further conflict and thus exit from the Eurozone,Tsipras capitulated and signed the memorandum. Varoufakis subsequently stepped down, Syriza'sleft wing split from the party, and Tsipras called for new election, which saw the formation of newSyriza-led coalition, without the party's left wing. In November 2015, Tsipras terminated themandate of the Truth Commission, which has since continued its work extraparliamentarily.

Syriza is only the most visible outcome of the emergence of new “movement parties” (dellaPorta et. al. 2017a). In this new wave of protest, the return of contentious electoral politics is itself apolitical opportunity emerging out of earlier struggles. Movements have theorized the perceivedshortcomings of the occupation in Europe and the US, with a significant part arguing the new for anew convergence of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. Consequently, movement actorshave strongly supported Bernie Sanders in the US, created Podemos in Spain, pushed Syriza intogovernment, created Memorandum and thus pushed the British Labor Party to the left. In Tunisia,strong social movements and unions overthrew the regime and have since secured formally openelectoral politics and civil society. This has created space for anti-debt actors to organize, whereasin Egypt the increasingly authoritarian and neoliberal measures of the Muslim Brotherhood and itspresident Moursi alienated a majority of society, social movements, and unions, a contestedsituation that was then captured by new old formations of the military and ancien regime actors.Many activists have since been killed or jailed, and social movements and unions struggled tomaintain mobilization.7 In Morocco, the persistence of monarchy and repression did not manage toend anti-debt activism, but local groups have faced backlash. Accordingly, CADTM was forced torelocate some of its activities to Tunisia, for instance when Moroccan authorities refused banned theCADTM's world summit in 2015.

I will stop here and just mention some of the other observations I am working on, in case of interest:

• The role of eventful temporalities and transformative events and processes: I tried to alreadyhint at this in the last part, but I'm considering a more theoretical analysis of transformativeevents.

• ICAN has recently linked itself to a new global network for debt audits, which seems toconstitute an interesting convergence of old and new anti-debt activism, but I will need tolook into more details

• North-South collaboration remains ambiguous. The split of Jubilee North and South seemsto not have prevented recently increasing collaboration, but many difficulties remain.Southern actors are highly skeptical of Northern universalism and power asymmetries. As inall international and inter-regional movements, agenda-setting becomes a huge issue due toinformalized power asymmetries (beyond citizenship): Who has the means and time torepeatedly travel to far-away places and set the agenda, accumulate knowledge, developnetworks etc. ICAN and CADTM are important networks to assemble different formationsand facilitate collaboration and exchange. Their practices of organizations agendas reflectawareness of the implicit problems arising with North-South asymmetries.

• Politics of knowledge and expertise is an interesting field of social movement research andpractice. The field of finance and debt seems to There are several particularities ofcontentious debt politics: debt and finance in general are highly complex issues for

7 The turn of events has forced me to end field work in Egypt to not endanger the lives of interviewees, among other things.

structural reasons: finance is very dense, it's hard to get insights as information are highlysensitive. Some activists are economists or political scientists, most are economicautodidacts. From the example of lender option borrower option (LOBOs) in the UK to in-transparent IMF deals in Tunisia and predatory lending practices in Greece. This entailsproblems for popular mobilization and contentious strategies in general. Truth committeeshave the potential to link together the work of activist experts with creating broader criticaldiscourse and constitute a certain democratic performativity in themselves. A hugepsychological pivot is to change the discourse of a person, social group, state having donewrong and thus being in debt towards problematizing systemic failure, thus the name ICAN.

• Large international events are very important. They allow people to get together andexchange experiences, start common projects, evaluate the situation, create commonsentiments and identities, get an idea of joint dynamics and the amount of people that areactive

• Hegemonic framings of debt are very interesting and I have only hinted at them above.• Unfinished excursion: right-wing movements and debt.

◦ I would argue that social movement scholars tend to focus on progressive movementsand thus also tend to be overly optimistic about movements in general. I would thereforelike to point out that right-wing movements often focus on finance and debt as well andcan be equally empowered by moralizing discourses and moral outrage against dominantliberalism. Varieties of right-wing movement can thrive on perceived grievances frommarketization, demanding a strong leader to put amoral elites in place. Moishe Postone(1986) has elegantly elaborated the way, in which fascist movements have combinedanti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-modern rhetoric with a hatred for the abstract side ofcapitalist modernity, i.e. finance, liberal values. This hatred gets personalized andsubsequently often ethnicized as “Jewish conspiracy”, thus producing what ErichFromm and others termed a conformist rebellion, rebellion against imaginedconspirators instead of domination itself.

◦ Progressive movements can equally adopt overly nationalist frames or fetishize theabstract sides and contradictions of capitalist modernity, overly focusing on bankers vis-à-vis capitalists or capitalist relations in general (financialization and neoliberalism notbeing a conspiracy by bankers, but a complex structural transformation, empowering notonly bankers and banks, but CEOs and large corporations in the “productive” sector).However, progressive movements tend to not ethnicize their personalizations.

◦ There is a selective historical affinity between fetishizations of finance and anti-semitism, explaining occasional anti-semitic events in the context of Occupy, especiallyin combination with the movement's focus on ideological diversity. However, due tohistorical awareness and the pivotal role of inclusiveness in left-wing movements, suchevents do not translate into broader structural features.

◦ Right-wing movement discourses, on the other hands, seem to find anti-semitic tropeswith the certainty of a sleepwalker. For the sake of illustration, the US animation movie“The American Dream” ties all economic misfortune (and the JFK assassination) tofractional-reserve lending (a particular fetish by the libertarian and fascist right)supposedly carried out the “Redshields [sic]” and then mixes this narrative withhypermasculine fantasies of just war and heroism, implying that “Redshields” and otherconspirators have to be killed in order to restore order. Right-wing Islamists in NorthAfrica as well as authoritarian elites similarly often use conspiratorial discourses(against Palestinians, Jews, Israel, the US, or others) to try channel discontent intoconformist rebellion.

◦ For progressive movements, producing emancipatory diagnostic frames requirescontinuous discussion, feedback, experience and is thus a thin line between creating andchanneling experiences of grievances and public outrage against elites and structural

domination, but at the same time avoiding inaccurate personalization and demonization.

Summary

I have argued that while debt constitutes an increasingly important issue allocating life chances,little research on anti-debt struggles exists. In addition, the little research there is does not aim totheorize debt movements, but is very descriptive. I thus started this project with the aim tocontribute to this empirical gap, while engaging with recent debates between critical politicaleconomy and social movement studies.

With the emergence of states and capitalism, states have created money in order to calculateand govern social relations, fund wars, and create markets. Within these markets, capitalists usemoney to make more money. The pivot of this process is commodity production, but in recent yearsinterest-bearing capital, fictitious capital, and derivatives constitute the lion’s share of profit-making. Since the 1960s, non-financial corporations faced a lack of lucrative investmentpossibilities and subsequently developed autonomous financial sectors to make profits on financialmarkets. Because of these, banks borrowed on financial markets and capitalized on the assets ofhouseholds, and then securitized these assets to lend heavily to other banks and households, whoincreasingly financed consumption via debt. Governments deregulated financial markets anddecreased taxes on corporations and the wealthy. The US spearheaded this process, first abandoningBretton Woods and then using the dollar for seignorage due to US companies losing comparativeadvantage.

In 1979, the Volcker Shock produced a Southern debt crisis, with “IMF riots” and firsttransnational connection resisting public debt grievances and structural adjustment policies,especially in Latin America. The hub of conflict shifted to Sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1980s.Under the impression of the fall of really existing state socialism and the spread of neoliberalism,institutional advocacy became the dominant strategy. When advocacy failed to deliver structuralchange despite broad non-confrontational mobilization and increasingly connected transnationalmobilizing structures, two (overlapping and internally heterogeneous) main currents of contentiousdebt politics formed: networks such as CADTM advocating transgressive protests, popularmobilization, unilateral debt suspension and radical transformations of global finance; and the Debtand Development Networks focusing more on lobbying and non-confrontational tactics to reforminternational finance and global governance. The radical-moderate split overlapped with a South-North divide, and collaboration depended on brokers continuously establishing contact and framingbroad collective action frames.

New opportunities emerged when the financialization of households and expansion offinancial markets precipitated the North Atlantic Financial Crisis, which led to a recession spillingover to the Global South. Anti-debt groups attributed this opportunity, appropriated Southernexperiences and expertise diffused to the Global North as well as the new democratization and anti-austerity movements in North Africa and the North Atlantic to politicize debt. Anti-debt framingsresonated well with experiences of precarity, unequal North-South relations, and the creation ofbroad identities and moral framings.

With ICAN, anti-debt actors created their own transnational-horizontal network inspired bythe new movements, which brought together old and new movement organizations in the field ofcontentious debt politics to push for citizen debt audits. Debt audits constitute a participatoryprocess to create transparency, reverse hegemonic discourses, restore popular-local sovereignty, andsoothe economic grievances. Anti-debt movements eventually found new allies in the new popularparties or political allies they themselves helped create, from Front Populaire in Tunisia, toPodemos in Spain, and Memorandum in the UK. While Tunisia received minor debt write-offs,Greece was considered a systemic country, the resistance of which could diffuse to other Europeancountries under austerity. The Syriza-led government authorized a debt audit composed ofestablished contentious debt actors, but ended the project when faced with stern resistance from

creditors.

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