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Social Movements and the Politics of Debt: Transnational Resistance against Debt on Three Continents
It would have been hard to miss the pivotal role debt has played for contentious politics in the last decades. The North Atlantic Financial Crisis, Global Recession and European Debt Crisis - as well as the recent waves of protest that followed them - have catapulted debt politics into the limelight of public debates. Profiting from years of fieldwork and an extensive amount of empirical data, Christoph Sorg traces recent contestations of debt from North Africa to Europe and the US. In doing so, he identifies the emergence of new transnational movement networks against the injustice of current debt politics, which struggle for more social and democratic ways of organizing debt within and between societies.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 1, 2025
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December 14, 2025
This book, which I came across through an interview of author Christoph Sorg by Joshua Davila, a.k.a. 'The Blockchain Socialist', draws from the trajectories and fortunes of three major case studies: Eurodad (European Network on Debt and Development), CADTM (English: Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt), and ICAN (International Citizen debt Audit Network).
The drawing of links between NGOs and direct action movements helps to make a powerful case for diversity of tactics, while highlighting the shortfall of reliance on something like, for example...Syriza.
There are three pillars explored in this book's analysis of debt:
1. Transparency of national budgets: The practice of "citizen debt audits" offers a prefigurative framework for democratic decision-making about social prioritization of resources and rejection of "illegitimate, odious debt" (read: debt incurred without popular consent and/or shaping policy that does not serve a democratic public interest, ranging from debt accumulated under Ben Ali in Tunisia to debt's wielding as a cudgel against European states' social programs).
2. Popular pressure: While taking the typical Western Left stance regarding centralization or a dictatorship of the proletariat/currently exploited classes, Sorg makes one crucial acknowledgement: the need for democratic convergence of anti-austerity (and pro-"Jubilee") forces in order to reach a critical mass for effective action. Sorg seems skeptical of centralized coordination in favour of bottom-up spontaneity, and in my view failing to adequately respond to concerns about the weaknesses/limitations of Occupy-esque tactics (If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution). Sorg's concept of "virtuous cycle of mutual appropriation" in which new organizers bring new ideas while veteran organizers leverage their existent networks is helpful, maybe more so if unimpeded by a "tyranny of structurelessness" implicit in the forms of organizing he idealizes here.
3. State-level responsiveness: Social Democrat capitulation to austerity politics is by now an old story and there's certainly plenty of reason to emphasize avoiding reliance on professionalized 'institutional actors'. That said, there is conversely plenty to be said for the need to go beyond the national level on the 'global stage' (see Sankara's tragic speech to the then Organization of African Unity urging solidarity in rejection of IMF debt) and this requires a scalability of action that demands sustained, organized coordination. In short, beyond highly-localized spontaneity putting pressure on national-level reformism, it seems clear instead that a differently-motivated form of states coordinating globally is necessary.
To the author's credit, he acknowledges a need for North-South solidarity given the scale of supply chains (Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain). The workability/scalability of that kind of action declaims against parochial reformism---but coordination between localized direct actions is not merely a matter of sustained activity putting on popular pressure on for U.N. programs of debt 'forgiveness'.
Sorg ends as follows:
There's some solid work out there on the potentials and challenges of cyber-socialism (Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain, Paul Cockshott's lectures, and more). But we're still at a stage, I would argue, in which a state has a role in sustaining the social/technical infrastructure for the capacities for those experiments in new ways of managing our collective resources. Not that Sorg denies as much, yet to that point, it can't be merely the current kind of state but with a new, more authentic Syriza, extra-frequent popular rallies, and more co-ops. Re-conceptualizing debt, by rejecting what Sorg rightly disdains as "debt fetishism", requires problematizing ideological assumptions about what debt is. This means acts of resistance-by-refusal, but also means seizing control of its portrayal in: education, the media, and all other components of the Ideological State Apparatus. Transnational resistance against debt demands a bloc of national worker-controlled states (reorganizing production/distribution/consumption based on broadly-conceived needs).
The drawing of links between NGOs and direct action movements helps to make a powerful case for diversity of tactics, while highlighting the shortfall of reliance on something like, for example...Syriza.
There are three pillars explored in this book's analysis of debt:
1. Transparency of national budgets: The practice of "citizen debt audits" offers a prefigurative framework for democratic decision-making about social prioritization of resources and rejection of "illegitimate, odious debt" (read: debt incurred without popular consent and/or shaping policy that does not serve a democratic public interest, ranging from debt accumulated under Ben Ali in Tunisia to debt's wielding as a cudgel against European states' social programs).
2. Popular pressure: While taking the typical Western Left stance regarding centralization or a dictatorship of the proletariat/currently exploited classes, Sorg makes one crucial acknowledgement: the need for democratic convergence of anti-austerity (and pro-"Jubilee") forces in order to reach a critical mass for effective action. Sorg seems skeptical of centralized coordination in favour of bottom-up spontaneity, and in my view failing to adequately respond to concerns about the weaknesses/limitations of Occupy-esque tactics (If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution). Sorg's concept of "virtuous cycle of mutual appropriation" in which new organizers bring new ideas while veteran organizers leverage their existent networks is helpful, maybe more so if unimpeded by a "tyranny of structurelessness" implicit in the forms of organizing he idealizes here.
3. State-level responsiveness: Social Democrat capitulation to austerity politics is by now an old story and there's certainly plenty of reason to emphasize avoiding reliance on professionalized 'institutional actors'. That said, there is conversely plenty to be said for the need to go beyond the national level on the 'global stage' (see Sankara's tragic speech to the then Organization of African Unity urging solidarity in rejection of IMF debt) and this requires a scalability of action that demands sustained, organized coordination. In short, beyond highly-localized spontaneity putting pressure on national-level reformism, it seems clear instead that a differently-motivated form of states coordinating globally is necessary.
To the author's credit, he acknowledges a need for North-South solidarity given the scale of supply chains (Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain). The workability/scalability of that kind of action declaims against parochial reformism---but coordination between localized direct actions is not merely a matter of sustained activity putting on popular pressure on for U.N. programs of debt 'forgiveness'.
Sorg ends as follows:
Either way, I would argue that the social forces necessary to push towards green new deals under capitalism should aim not to re-balance capital, but to overcome it towards a more democratic and sustainable way of organizing life, work and social relations with nature. Such projects necessitate the delayed democratization of the economy in the form of worker-controlled cooperatives and the planned (and democratic) intervention of producers and consumers into the economy on a global scale. They also require the dispossession of large shareholders and replace competition in the market with democratic (and hopefully decentralized) forms of economic and financial planning from below.
There's some solid work out there on the potentials and challenges of cyber-socialism (Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain, Paul Cockshott's lectures, and more). But we're still at a stage, I would argue, in which a state has a role in sustaining the social/technical infrastructure for the capacities for those experiments in new ways of managing our collective resources. Not that Sorg denies as much, yet to that point, it can't be merely the current kind of state but with a new, more authentic Syriza, extra-frequent popular rallies, and more co-ops. Re-conceptualizing debt, by rejecting what Sorg rightly disdains as "debt fetishism", requires problematizing ideological assumptions about what debt is. This means acts of resistance-by-refusal, but also means seizing control of its portrayal in: education, the media, and all other components of the Ideological State Apparatus. Transnational resistance against debt demands a bloc of national worker-controlled states (reorganizing production/distribution/consumption based on broadly-conceived needs).
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