(Panel) The vengeance of unpayable debts: Racial capitalism and the reclaiming of debts from below

* Hannah Appel (UCLA/Debt Collective) * Max Haiven (Lakehead) * Denise Ferreira da Silva (UBC) * Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia) * Facilitator: Catherine Cumming ~~~~~~~~~~ DESCRIPTION ~~~~~~~~~~ - How do debts function, yesterday and today, as racial capitalim’s revenge? - Can debt be a grounds for emergent solidarities, today and tomorrow? - What are the oppressed owed? -How might those debts be reclaimed? As the late David Graeber’s bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years taught us, unpayable debts have long been a tool that the powerful used to subjugate the oppressed. No less today when, as Denise Ferreira da Silva shows, the weight of debt disproportionately falls on the shoulders of those already encumbered by the burdens of racialization. But da Silva also encourages us to recognize the kinds of unpayable debts we owe to one another, to ancestors and to common struggle that might be the grounds of (re)emergent solidarity. Likewise Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s investigation of Puerto Rico’s colonial unpayable debt reveals that artists, activists and intellectuals are seizing the moment to ask profound questions of who really owes whom what. Likewise, the activist group Debt Collective is seeking to organize otherwise isolated debtors into a union of collective refusal and reinventing solidarity along the way. Can such efforts truly challenge a form of global racial capitalism that appears, as Max Haiven argues, to be taking a kind of nihilistic revenge on the planet? More information: https://reimaginingvalue.ca/The-vengeance-of-unpayable-debts-Racial-capitalism-and-the-reclaiming-of-debts-from-below-efffbe8fcab24298adf5d6ef2a2263e5