The class politics of debt

If you are interested in challenging class inequality, you can do a lot worse than to look at (and potentially re-evaluate) how people at the sharp end of inequality are struggling against it. This blog is about three things: (1) How debt contributes to class inequality, (2) How working-class people resist the inequalities of debt – and, more specifically, (3) Why ignoring debts can sometimes make them go away.

Photo by Graeme Truby of the art work ‘Big Bang 2’ by Daniel Edelstyn and Hilary Powell

My research, published in an open access book titled The Personal Life of Debt (Bristol University Press, 2025), looks at debt in poor parts of England. The places I study are highly stigmatised. They are stereotyped in the media as full of ‘chav’ families who spend too much money on TVs or defraud the benefit system. To conduct my research, I lived for eighteen months on a housing estate on the outskirts of a city in southern England, where most residents have low incomes. I got to know many housing estate residents as friends. I also volunteered for 6 months at two debt advice charities.

We need a better understanding of debt because the UK’s recent cost of living crisis has led to a rapid growth in over-indebtedness. Household debt levels are now greater than during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. According to Debt Justice UK, almost 13 million people are struggling to pay bills or finding their debt repayments a heavy burden.

Debt plays a role in both the economic and cultural dimensions of class – not only the exploitation that drives inequalities of wealth and income, but also snobbery, stigma and notions of ‘good taste’ which subtly reinforce class hierarchy. In terms of how debt contributes to economic domination, one man I worked with told me he had borrowed £1000 from a doorstep lender called The Provident. Doorstep lenders operate primarily in lower income areas and lend money irrespective of someone’s credit score. The man said he was having to pay them £3000 because of interest. Many people end up worse off through borrowing. There’s a tendency (though not an absolute rule) for household lending to channel wealth upwards from households towards financial institutions and their shareholders. This happens through the charging of interest and penalty fees. And the poorer or more precarious you are the higher the interest you pay. This is known as a poverty premium. This is a slightly different picture to what Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels wrote about in C19 Britain. When Marx and Engels wrote about class in industrial capitalism, they focused on the relationship between factory owners and the workers they exploited. Today economic inequality arises from exploiting people not only as workers but also as debtors. So economic domination today also takes place outside the world of work.

Thinking of the cultural dimensions of class, debt contributes to class stigma. When I volunteered in debt advice charities, some debt advisers told me that everyone who sought advice for their debt problems spent all their money on massive TVs, tobacco or alcohol. Actually a few residents explained to me a home entertainment system was a more affodable alternative to pubs, cinema, or football matches. Other debt advisers told me that people get into debt because they lack financial skills. This sounds kinder but it still implies the source of debt problems is located in the individual and not in lending practices or the wider economy. If you look at the bigger picture, debt is a structural feature of our economic system. For more and more people, work does not pay enough to make ends meet. People do not always have much choice not to borrow money. One woman told me her Provident doorstep loans agent had always been there for her, and she had no one else to rely on. In a debt economy, debt transforms economic structures into matters of individual moral fault, where those who do not pay are blamed for their economic circumstances. We see stereotypes of sink estate residents spending money on things they can’t afford. We see stereotypes of feckless borrowers who flout their supposed responsibilities. [But those responsibilities are defined in a way that upholds class inequality.]

So how do people at the sharp end - working-class people - resist the inequalities of debt? There are some cases of organised collective political resistance to debt – for instance in Spain, Croatia, and the US. However millions of indebted people resist the power of debt all the time already in their everyday lives – by refusing to pay what debt collectors are demanding even though the debt collectors threaten to take them to court. One man told me he was living on the never-never, meaning he would try to avoid being taken to court but had no intention of paying what his lenders were demanding. The existence of a debt collection industry is proof of this everyday debt resistance. If people didn’t try to resist way debt extracts wealth and attributes moral fault, there would be no need for any debt collectors.

In my research one practice really stood out. This was when people ignored their debt collectors, for instance by leaving envelopes unopened, throwing them away, or hanging up telephone. One man I knew had the same response every time he received a letter from his lenders: “Well they can fuck off,” he said, and threw the letter in the bin. In an extreme example of this, a female debt advice client told me, “I barricaded myself in the house when bailiffs knocked on the door”. In public conversations about debt, ignoring debts is nearly always described as ‘burying your head in the sand’. This implies ignoring debts will always be in vain. Some psychologists even call it financial phobia. However in practice ignoring debts sometimes works, enabling people to avoid complying with debt collectors’ demands without being taken to court. Research on debt collection shows that because of court costs, debt collectors cannot afford to take debtors to court even a tiny fraction of the time they threaten it. What is more, debt collectors tend to give up on ‘non-performing’ debtors (i.e. those who pay nothing).

Ignoring debt collectors and avoiding repayment is a key way people resist the inequalities of debt – both refusing to make exploitative payments and subverting the notion they are personally to blame for their economic circumstances; and so a key part of contemporary class struggle. The assumption that ignoring debts will always be in vain inadvertently stigmatises those who are actively challenging the inequalities of debt. Recognising it as debt resistance can at least stop casting blame on those who are struggling against inequality.