Eleni: We often find in our work that people act as though they have taken a version of this oath: They are willing to walk themselves into the jails, whether or not the jail should be there. That’s the fundamental organizing project we’re engaged in: trying to tell people, “You don’t need to promise to dispossess yourself, you don’t need to pledge to imprison yourself, imprison your future, imprison your money.” The Rivash maybe offered this as a little loophole, but I think the majority of people today—even people who are consciously aware that their loans are usurious, who are unable to pay them back, who are planning to go on a debt strike—even these people will oftentimes say, “I would pay it back!” They want to be seen as abiding in good faith negotiations.
Sparky: I can kind of see the needle the Rivash might be trying to thread. But that whole first section about the fact that it’s both forbidden and unreasonable to restrict people’s freedom for not paying back a debt—it’s hard for me to understand coming back around to be like, “Maybe if somebody agrees with that, it’s okay.” It creates fake agency, because the reality is, if you tell people that the only way they can get money to pay their bills is to swear an oath to put themselves in jail if they can’t pay it back, they’re gonna do it. We see this often now with health care debt, student debt, utility debt, transportation debt: There are all these structures that make it seem like you’re making choices, but in really looking at the material circumstances, it’s not actually a choice.
Allen: I feel a lot of appreciation for the Rivash here. He is caught between a rock and a hard place. He has his community, he has the Christian government, and he has his conscience—plus his personal experience of a year in prison. Also, the sources themselves, as he’s noting, are not always crystal clear. What comes up for me is, is it possible and practical to live in a society that takes the Rivash’s initial vision seriously, that is not founded upon some form of coercion in borrowing and lending money? What would that even look like?
Sparky: I’m tempted to take that back to Graeber. The thing that’s particularly bothersome for me about these systems is the degree to which they have overrun everything else. If we were living in a far more egalitarian society—one in which people had the ability to provision themselves with their basic needs, and your creditor went to your synagogue as opposed to your creditor being Citibank—I would feel less worried about coercion. Some form of reasonable coercion, some form of restrictions that you can place on yourself—this is just the basis of contracts, in that you commit yourself to something in the future. The place where it goes off the rails is where you start getting into situations where the power is imbalanced between creditors and debtors, just like the power is imbalanced between workers and bosses.
Eleni: In this text we don’t know exactly what the debts are. But we presume that they’re financial, that it’s about money. We opened with questions like, what actually is a debt? And it feels much more important to me to say that we have a debt to history, we have ecological debts, we have ancestral debts. With the financial ones, one of the things that is so different now is the securitization of claims: One person’s debt is another person’s millions.
Sparky: And still the conversation in this text sounds so familiar! Creditors pushing the bounds of collection tactics, the shame dynamic, the same arguments about how more debtor protections will reduce “access to credit”—it’s all here. Maybe we are just doomed to keep having the same debates over and over.
Eleni: What feels somewhat different in the text is that there’s someone who does have a moral pillar, someone pointing to an authority and saying, “Maybe debt doesn’t need to be a license to coerce.” If a hired worker can walk off the job halfway through, then the oppressed are licensed to resist by violating the terms of an agreement. I want more of that.
