Red Emma’s

As wealth continues to concentrate among a small handful of people, most of us are forced to take on debts to make ends meet. Low wages and limited social services make it necessary for us to borrow money to cover the costs of basic necessities like health care, housing, transportation, education, heat, electricity, and more. Even incarceration has become a form of financial extraction, with escalating fines and fees for everything from court appearances and probation costs to “room and board” for those incarcerated.

These debts are drivers of social, racial, and economic injustice. They trap us in cycles of poverty, limit our freedom, constrain our imaginations, foreclose on our futures. They’re some of the most concrete ways we experience a fundamentally unjust economic system in our everyday lives, and they often go unquestioned as a feature of contemporary life. But these debts are also something we can refuse to live with.

Debt constrains us, but it also creates the conditions for new forms of political organization and power. Debtors’ assemblies are spaces where this power can begin to grow. When we come together in solidarity to share our experiences of debt and consider its social and economic functions, we begin to see our collective potential to challenge the systems that exploit us. Debt is experienced by most people as a form of individual financial struggle (ridden with shame, stress, feelings of isolation), but together we can transform these individual experiences into a project of organized resistance.