From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation On the Rise of the “Debt Economy”

reminded us, has a central place in the history of humanity and the class struggle. Debtors ’ revolts were frequent in ancient Athens as early as the sixth century BC, forcing debt cancellations and prohibitions against debt enslavement (Graeber 2011a: 230–31, 427nn 24–25). In Rome, in 63 BC, the head of the populares (the section of the senate that addressed the problems of the urban plebans), Catiline, led an army of debtors against the patri-cians (see Caffentzis 2012: 3). In modern times, public debt has become “one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation, ” as Karl Marx (1976: 919) points out in his chapter “The Gene-sis of the Industrial Capitalist.”1 Shays ’ rebellion of 1786, in western Massachusetts, three years after the end of the War of Independence, targeted debt collectors (see Zinn 1999: 92–93). A hundred years later, the Populist Party expressed the farm-ers ’ rage at seeing bankers take away their farms because they could not pay their debts (Zinn 1999: 284). Also the “penny auctions ” that spread from Wisconsin through much of the Midwest during the Great Depression were responses to the threa