[...] Think of the example often cited by Thomas Friedman: the California farmworker earning $14,000 a year who acquired a mortgage for a house worth $720,000. Instead of sniffing, as Friedman does, that such people should not be living in such houses, we should ask, “Why not?” In the absence of any comprehensive housing policy, and in light of the manifest inequalities traversed by the circuits of credit, why is the farmworker’s leverage any more outrageous than the deals struck on Wall Street every day? Instead of trying to regain some prudent sense of proportion that once again excludes the wrong sort of people from borrowing, shouldn’t we aim for a future in which nobody is, as Deleuze put it, “too poor for debt”?

Jubilee served as a fundamental touchstone for seventeenth-century English radicals and the eighteenth-century Atlantic working class. It provided a readily available language for a range of antinomian positions

A politics of indebtedness thus poses a basic dialectical problem: how can the constructive and constitutive force of indebtedness be affirmed without erecting an appropriative and destructive apparatus?