Overview
Over centuries, popular uprisings and indebted poor people have advocated for the abolition of debt and won. At a time when billions of people are harmed and oppressed by debt, the time has come for an international “jubilee” of debt forgiveness.
All too often, lenders shirk their responsibilities and exploit those who need to borrow.
— Jubilee Debt Campaign
In most mature capitalist societies, people are required to go into debt in order to access basic education, housing, and healthcare. Borrowers become beholden to lenders, who then use debt obligations to control and coerce whole communities. The same process that happens on a community and individual level also happens at national and global levels. Wealthier nations wield debt obligations over poorer nations, compelling them to sell public utilities to private companies, slash social services, and enable the exploitation of their natural resources.
Today, global debt equals more than 3.5 times the value of the entire global economy, and it is growing.Yet history shows us that unjust debt can be abolished.
Movements calling for the cancellation of debts are growing. After the 2007–2008 foreclosure crisis and recession in the United States, a group called Strike Debt (now The Debt Collective) organized a “Rolling Jubilee,” which raised donations by crowdfunding, bought $32 million in outstanding debt for a fraction of its value, and forgave all of it. In recent years, mass protests against systemic racism and police brutality have led to calls to buy back debt in Black communities. During the 2020 global pandemic, social movements worldwide called for a mass cancellation of rent.
These movements have deep roots. The idea of periodic debt forgiveness appears in many religious traditions—most famously the Hebrew Bible’s “jubilee,” a law stipulating that all debts be canceled every seven years. Islamic law has long held that charging interest on debt is immoral, and it strictly forbids usury.
The tactic of buying back debt can yield results. By 2019, the group behind the Rolling Jubilee won $600 million in student debt discharges for 28,000 former students of Corinthian College through its debtors’ union. The Debt Collective found that these debtor organizing tactics to dispute and ultimately cancel debt were highly effective at making meaningful change in debtors’ lives.
Sonya Renee Taylor, a Black author and activist in the United States, spearheaded the #BuyBackBlackDebt initiative in July 2020. This decentralized mutual aid campaign is a way of “mending the relationship between Black people and white people,” she said. “It is about ending the relationship of extraction and benefit at the detriment of Black people’s lives, opportunity, wealth, and resources. It is about balancing karmic debt, spiritual debt, energetic and relational debt—so that we can figure out how to be in a right relationship with one another.” The mechanics of the project are simple: Taylor calls on white individuals to reach out to Black friends, colleagues, and family and offer to buy back some or all of their debt. To date, the project has bought $100,000 in debt through the participation of nearly 200 contributors.
Political movements are also aiming to challenge the global inequities created and sustained through debt. One grassroots effort, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, calls on the Global North and powerful global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to support a debt amnesty that would eliminate debts owed by countries in the Global South, especially those whose wealth was stolen through colonization. This campaign recognizes that exploitative policies by institutions and nations that benefited from colonization have continued to oppress post-colonial countries by subjecting them to predatory indebtedness.
The Jubilee 2000 movement took important steps to shed light on one of colonialism’s current manifestations: the injustice of high-interest debt owed to countries and corporations in the Global North by countries in the Global South. Between 1998 and 2015, the campaign won $130 billion of debt cancellation for 18 lower income countries, including Ecuador, Burkina Faso, the Philippines, and Argentina. Already, those countries and others had resisted paying the debts owed to the IMF and World Bank for decades, and audits later revealed that much of the debt was illegitimate and violated international law.
What does abolition mean for people and countries forced to live with the burden of debt? The urgent health and economic crisis caused by COVID-19 pushed countries in Latin America and Africa into impossible decisions: pay back debt owed to the Global North or provide healthcare for their populations. People in the US faced similarly dire choices, often forced to decide between paying off their mounting debt from medical bills and education or affording food and housing.
Debt isn’t just about money. Debt is a power imbalance— often along racist and classist lines—that can mean the difference between life and death.
