The Streets - Debt 26

Gago 2018

“WeStrike” - argentine feminist action - the strike as a process not an event. Revoutionary potentia llives in the organising, conversing and collective imagining, not just the single day of action. Transversiality - strike produced political language connecting local struggles across Latin America and Europe- against difference rather than ‘despite it’. Body as territory, as a site of extraction, and therefore a site of disrupiton. Expands revolutionary subject from just the waged male factory worker to the sex worker, informal economy worker, incaserated, migrant worker.

del Rio 2024

Develops financial counter-topographies. A methodology drawing on Katz 2001 that maps how finance connects people’s lives across space, identifying resevoirs of collective power and envisioning alternative geographies. Paper shows how resistance movements (e.g. PAH Spain, Ni Una Menos) operate at the intersection of objective limits (biological depletion of life by financial extraction) and subjective limits (the political moment when people collectively refuse). Through looking at compound inequalities, argues resistance must be as geogrpahically sophisticated as financialisation.

Calhoun 2023

Occupy Wall Street operated as a prefigurative politics: it modelled an alternative social order (general assembly decision making, re-commoning of Zuccotti Park) rather than building toward concrete political demands or durable organisational infrastructure. Productive tension against McKee who celebrates this, asks questions of the lack of direct confrontation and whether the ‘strike-as-process’ is helpful for real progress.

Tilly 1978

Repertoires of collective action: how movements build, escalate, sustain, and lose momentum. For the Streets lecture, Tilly functions as background structure rather than foreground argument; use him to situate why the question of organisational form matters

Montgomerie + Tepe-Belfrage 2019

Existing accounts of debt’s power either treat scale as a fixed heirarchy (body to household to community to nation-state to global financial system) or dissolve scale into networks and subjectivities. Argues neither explains why debt moves so fluidly across scales, or how that fluidity is the source of its power. 3 key contributions:
(1)Debt has kinetic energy: it does not just circulate within existing scales but actively reorganises social relations wherever it appears. (2) Debt's power is only visible when public and private debts are analysed together: national debts materialise in local hospital budgets; household debts are shaped by national austerity. The body, household, community, municipality, state, and global financial system are simultaneous sites. (3) Resistance also emerges multi-scalar: individual acts of repayment or refusal both unsettle financial structures, because securitised assets depend on predictable payment flows.

Bolivia 2001

Debtors occupied the Superintendent of Banks with dynamite, aiming to burn all debt records. The most direct instance of physically destroying the infrastructure of debt obligation. (G + C, 2021) (what country and year)

de Andres et al 2015, PAH Spain

The platform used direct action to block evictions and created hybrid spaces fusing physical occupation with digital networks, spreading to 160 cities and stopping over 1,135 evictions by 2014 (citation + org)