Every 5 minutes someone is made bankrupt or insolvent. 105,000 people a year. Half the population of Kensington & Chelsea.   Last year average household debt (including mortgages) was £53,786. Enough to heat and power the same house for 45 years.   Every hour 4 properties are repossessed. 35,000 a year. Half the population of the UK’s largest town, Northampton. [...]

The first signs of a UK movement focusing on debt emerged during a session organised by the OT at the Up the Anti conference on 1 December 2012. Titled ’Are “debt strikes” the future of anticapitalist resistance?’, the session utilised a more participatory format than others during the day. Following an introduction from Michael Richmond of the OT and comments from David [...]

Why Strike Debt? Because today most debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. We are forced to go into debt simply in order to live. ‘We also oppose debt because it is an instrument of exploitation [...]

Excerpt from interview between Michael Richmond and An Italian blog, 404: File Not Found. VC: In one of the newspaper’s last issues, you talked about the Strike Debt movement in New York. Can you explain in plain words what’s it about? MR: Strike Debt is a movement that arose out of a number of horizontal conversations between Occupy Wall Street [...]

Every single one of us holds the key to power – debt. Just as coal miners in England used their access to coal to flip the balance of power, so debtors can use their access to credit by declaring a ‘debt strike’, to force a revaluation of the bank stranglehold on the economy. Forget petitions. Forget protests. Forget parliamentary inquiries. [...]

When we arrived at 7.30am, the NYPD had already locked down much of the centre of New York’s financial district. This prevented some of the more set-piece actions from taking place, such as the “human wall” to block off access to the New York Stock Exchange. Many of us were kettled at various intersections and entry points, and the police’s Catch-22 [...]

After the May Day action, which brought 50,000 people to the streets of Manhattan, OWS activists met to consider their next steps. As powerful as May Day had been, it did not shape a narrative for the future. So “Occupy Theory”, the working group that publishes Tidal (http://occupytheory.org), convened  a series of assemblies in Washington Square Park. Unlike the General [...]

It’s a shameful thing to be in debt. Once you’re in debt, you’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s your fault. You borrowed too much. You must accept the consequences of your immoral actions, after all, no one forced you to take out that loan. Lenders, on the other hand, can claim the moral high ground. We lent this [...]