Debt

In recent years, household debt has become a major topic of public debate in Argentina like never before. In our work A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021), we called attention to women’s high rate of indebtedness, and how it is associated with the conditions of structural adjustment as part of the agreement Argentina signed with the International Monetary Fund in 2018: debt is what trickles down, reaching households. We also identified a change in why debt is taken out, increasingly going toward paying for basic goods and services for social reproduction. This is what we have termed “going into debt to live.” The process of feminist politicization – especially since 2017 and feminism’s take-off on a mass scale with the feminist strike – has greatly contributed to raising awareness of this indebtedness as a public problem and area of state intervention.

The NiUnaMenos slogan “We want ourselves alive, free, and debt free!” in 2017 puts forth a triangulation in which the question about freedom is inseparable from a demand for non-punitive justice (that includes diverse demands ranging from responses to the inaction and impunity of institutions – against the violence embodied in femicide and travesticide – to the horizon of other forms of non-patriarchal justice). In this way, the mobilization defies hegemonic notions of security at the same time as it illuminates the violence articulated with civil war and police management of the social field, displacing the question of what makes life possible in those conditions.

We propose a feminist reading of debt that connects concrete bodies and narratives of its operation in opposition to financial abstraction. In neoliberal approaches, finance boasts of being abstract, of belonging to the sky of mysterious quotes, of functioning according to logics that cannot be comprehended by common people. It tries to present itself as a true black box, in which decisions are made in a mathematical, algorithmic way about what has value and what does not. 

By narrating how it functions in households, popular (largely non-waged), and waged economies, we defy its power of abstraction, its attempt to be unfathomable. Researching debt allowed us to detect how processes of financialization are currently seeking to advance over spaces of social reproduction, transforming them into “spheres of accumulation” (Federici 2014). This is a concrete form of “colonization of social reproduction” (Federici 2014; Cavallero and Gago 2021). 

This image of colonization is not metaphorical, because it draws a connection with, in historical terms, dynamics of colonization that are renewed again and again, and also because it is important to remove the abstraction of finance and analyze it as an apparatus of colonization where is embedded the violence of neoliberalism, specially against certain racialized and feminized bodies and certain territories. As Denise Ferreira da Silva argues in their text Unpayable Debt (2022) analyzing the 2008 crisis, racialized populations when indebted and swindled exhibit that their poverty produced by colonial dispossession becomes a financial asset, actualizing the colonial temporality of debt as permanent extraction.

Today financial colonization takes the spaces of social reproduction and accelerates different types of extractivism. This allows us to clarify a definition of neoliberalism, of how it develops by removing public and common resources from spaces of social reproduction, to the point that one’s income is not even enough to guarantee social reproduction. 

Debt is a concrete mechanism that forces small agricultural producers to become dependent on agro-toxins. Debt is an expression of the rising costs and financialization of basic services. Debt is an apparatus that connects the inside and outside of prison, while prison itself is shown to be a system of debt. Debt is what you incur when abortion is criminalized. Debt is what drives popular consumption when exorbitant interest rates cause domestic life, health, and community bonds to explode. Debt is what enables illegal economies to recruit workers – especially young and racialized – at any price. Debt incurred by young people, even “before” entering the labor market or in hyper-precarious jobs (since they are given a credit card along with their state benefits and first paycheck), appears as an apparatus of capture and precarization of those very incomes. Debt is what provides basic infrastructure for life: health services that are inaccessible, supplies for when a child is born, purchasing a motorcycle to be able to work in food delivery. Debt is a way of guaranteeing access to housing. Debt is the resource that appears when one is faced with emergencies and confronted by the loss of other support networks. Debt is a mechanism of generalized dispossession of migrant and Black populations. Debt is what ties together dependence on violent family relations.

Debt is linked to violence against feminized, racialized, and impoverished bodies. Drawing on concrete narratives of indebtedness, the link between debt and sexist, racist, and colonial violence becomes clear. Debt is what does not allow us to say no when we want to say no. Debt is what ties us to a future of violent relations from which we want to flee. Debt forces us to maintain broken relationships, which we continue to be locked into because of medium or long-term financial obligations. Debt is what impedes economic autonomy, even in feminized economies in which women play leading roles. At the same time, we cannot ignore its ambivalence: debt also enables certain movements. In other words, debt not only fixes in place; in some cases, it enables movement. We can think, for example, about those who go into debt in order to migrate. Or those who take out debt to start their own economic project. Or those who take out debt to flee. But one thing is clear: whether as fixation or as the possibility of movement, debt exploits an availability to future work; it forces you to accept any type of work due to the pre-existing obligation of debt. Debt compulsively makes one have to accept more flexible labor conditions and, in that sense, it is an efficient apparatus of exploitation. Debt then organizes an economy of obedience that is nothing more or less than a specific economy of violence.

Based on diverse feminisms, a method of struggle emerged that corresponds to the current composition of what we call work, including migrant, precarious, neighborhood, domestic, and community labor. That movement also produced elements for understanding waged labor in a new way and transformed how unions themselves organize.

Adding the financial dimension allows us to now map flows of debt and complete the map of exploitation in its most dynamic, versatile, and apparently “invisible” forms. Understanding how debt extracts value from household economies and non-waged economies, those economies historically considered not to be productive, shows how financial apparatuses operate as true mechanisms of the colonization of the reproduction of life. It also demonstrates how debt enters into waged economies and subordinates them. Additionally, it allows us to understand how debt functions as a privileged apparatus for laundering illicit monetary flows, and, therefore, as the crucial link between illegal and legal economies.

Finally, we propose, as a practical method of reading, to take debt out of the closet. To take each individual’s, each household’s, and each family’s debt out of the closet, first we have to talk about it. It means narrating it and conceptualizing it in order to understand how it functions; investigating how it is interwoven with different economies. It means making visible how it extracts value from certain forms of life and how it intervenes in processes of production and reproduction of life. It means asking: In which territories does it gain strength? What types of obedience does it produce? Taking it out of the closet means making it visible and situating it as a common problem, de-individualizing it. Because taking debt out of the closet involves challenging its power to shame and guilt and its power to function as a “private issue,” which we can only face by managing our accounts alone. It also means showing the differential way in which debt operates for women, for lesbians, and for trans people. It requires inquiring into the differential of exploitation that is created when the indebted – those of us who spend all day managing accounts – are women, housewives, female heads of households, informal workers of the popular economy workers, sex workers, migrants, inhabitants of the villas or favelas (informal settlements or slums), Black and Indigenous women, travestis,1 campesinas-peasants, or students. Both moves – visibilizing debt and showing its sexual and gender difference – are ways of removing its power of abstraction.

• 1. In Argentina, travesti is used as a form of self-identification and collective mobilization. The travesti movement in Argentina has publicly organized for decades through organizations such as the Asociación de Lucha por la Identidad Travesti-Transsexual, founded in 1997, and has achieved key victories, such as the “Gender Identity Law” passed in 2012 and generally considered to be one of the most progressive in the world due to its lack of barriers for officially changing one’s gender identity. However, travestis primarily refers to a political identity. As Argentine travesti activist and thinker Lohana Berkins argued, in Latin America, the travesti community has organized itself in a context both materially and discursively distant from the North American academia and medical procedures (N.T by Liz Mason Deese).