The citizen-debtor has replaced the citizen-worker as iconic political subject.

Evidence

Throughout this book, I have taken a view of finance that seeks to do justice to its multifarious speculative imagination and to the dynamic ways in which it suffuses society from the ground up. … These forms of financial activism are emblematic of a new political subjectivity in which the “citizen-debtor replaces the citizen-worker as the iconic figure of late twentieth-century capitalism” (Krippner 2017, 3). Its many forms include the neighborhood activism of “reinvestment” examined in Krippner’s work: tactics deployed by communities of borrowers in marginalized neighborhoods to collectively reclaim credit ownership from financial institutions and to re-assert direct control of resources and assets such as bank deposits; or the debtor activism and mass debt refusal, seen for instance in the ongoing anti-student-loan movement in the United States; or, still, the campaigns for mortgage clemency, the “collective politics of insolvency” discussed in the important work of David Graeber (2014) and Maurizio Lazzarato (2015). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘citizen-debtor’ concept central to bottom-up financial activism.
• XREF: Connects to Graeber’s Debt and Lazzarato’s work on indebted man, and to the reader’s framework of homo speculans as migrating subjectivity.