Society Against Markets. The Commodification of Money and the Repudiation of Debt

Abstract

From anti-debt movements in Mexico, Spain, Poland, Croatia, and Chile to the Occupy movements in the United States, Israel and Canada, organizations repudiating both debt and the centrality of financial markets have proliferated worldwide. In this article, I draw on Polanyi’s work in order to frame the financialization of society and different forms of debt repudiation as a double movement, characterized as a second wave of the commodification of money and the attempts by society to protect itself from the advancement of finance. Relying on a secondary literature and my own ethnographic research on debtors’ movements, I explore the commonalities and differences between diverse forms of repudiating debt through collective action at both national and international level.