Credit reporting is a pervasive but overlooked form of financial

surveillance that investigates and commoditizes individuals

Josh Lauer, doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg
School for Communication, April 2008, Technology and Culture Volume 49 Number
2, From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial
Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v049/49.2.lauer.html
The textualizing of bodies for the purpose of social control is intimately
connected to the rise of the modern nation-state. Passports, identity
cards, anthropometry, and rationalized systems of criminal identification
all brought citizens under the purview of state authority as visible
subjects. Not surprisingly, then, emerging scholarly interest in the
historical development of surveillance is largely devoted to state
practices.1 This perspective, however, overlooks one of the most totalizing
and invasive systems of surveillance to emerge anywhere in the
nineteenth-century world: the American commercial credit-reporting
agency, or "mercantile agency."2 Beginning [End Page 301] in the 1840s, these
private-sector agencies brought thousands of U.S. citizensmerchants, traders,
manufacturers, and artisansinto a massive network of social monitoring designed
to facilitate safe business relationships in a world increasingly inhabited by
strangers.
This article describes the development and operation of the nineteenth century
mercantile agency in the interest of illuminating a pivotal though neglected chapter
in the history of modern surveillance practice. As the author of a 386-page diatribe
against these agencies fumed in 1896, "The history has not yet been written of the
American Inquisition."3 In addition to challenging the primacy of the nationstate in the evolution of American mass surveillance, this article also
underscores one of the mercantile agency's most consequential effects:
the invention of disembodied financial identity.
The model for these early credit-reporting agencies was established in 1841 by
Lewis Tappan, an evangelical Christian and noted abolitionist who ran a silk
wholesaling business in New York City with his brother Arthur.4 Emerging nearly
bankrupt from the panic of 1837, an economic crisis precipitated by a cascade of
defaulted debt, Tappan launched the Mercantile Agencya name that became
generic for such institutionsto implement a national system of credit checking.
"This Agency," he announced in an 1843 advertisement, "was established . . . for
the purpose of procuring by [End Page 302] resident and special agents, information
respecting the standing, responsibility, &c., of country merchants. . . . It is not a
system of espionage, but the same as merchants usually employonly on an
extended planto ascertain whether persons applying for credit are worthy of the
same and to what extent."5 As one agency advocate explained in 1858: "False and
fraudulent representations by a purchaser are mercilessly exposed by the Agency;
plausible swindlers are detected; the weak and incompetent trader described, and
the extravagant checked."6

The mercantile agency, like the nineteenth-century nation-state, sought to

render the individual legible.7 Such legibility centered upon texts:
handwritten reports, correspondence, ledgers, notes, and, later, printed
reference volumes and newsletters that compressed an individual life into
a brief statement of creditworthiness, ultimately represented by a
numerical value. At the core of Tappan's reporting system was a library of
imposing ledgers in which all known businesses in the United States were
documented, along with detailed reports on the personal character, financial
means, and local reputations of their proprietors.8 This information was tightly
controlled. Until coded reference books appeared in the late 1850s, subscribers
wholesalers, merchants, bankers, and insurance companiesreceived it only in the
offices of the Mercantile Agency, and only as read by discreet clerks who
summarized the contents of the ledgers; copies were not available, and no written
traces other than the subscribers' notes could leave the premises.
After Tappan relinquished his stake in the agency in 1854, his system was continued
by several associates, including Robert Graham Dun, who took over in 1859 and ran
the firm as R.G. Dun and Company. Tappan's agency was the first to achieve wide
success, but it was not the only one in existence. Its chief rival was the Bradstreet
Company, founded in 1849 by John M. Bradstreet, a former dry goods merchant and
attorney based in Cincinnati. In 1855, Bradstreet moved his base of operations to
New York City, and the two companies competed aggressively until 1933, when they
merged to form Dun & Bradstreet, one of the preeminent commercial credit-rating
firms in the world today. [End Page 303]
The American mercantile agency system represented a radical new
technology of institutional surveillance. Credit reporting served a different
purpose than other forms of bureaucratic centralization and communication that
emerged during the mid-nineteenth century, notably those associated with the
railroad and telegraph.9 The mercantile agency's raison d'tre was to collect
information about people. In the absence of certified financial statements, the
basis of corporate credit assessment today, nineteenth century commercial credit
reporting was a study of individuals rather than faceless organizations. As
nineteenth-century businesses were typically sole proprietorships or small
partnerships, commercial credit reporting entailed investigations into the integrity
of these particular people. Moreover, the information processed by these agencies
was not primarily for internal recordkeeping or administrative use, but for
commodification and distribution.10

The credit-based financialisation of everyday life is a form of

neoliberal control that replicates the competition of the work
space.
Alex Law, teaches sociology at the University of Abertay Dundee, 31 Aug 2009,
The Callous Credit Nexus': Ideology and Compulsion in the Crisis of Neoliberalism,
Sociological Research Online 14(4)5, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/5.html
3.1 Following the mass resistance to the Poll Tax a shift to a war of position becomes
evident. Working on the intermediate institutions of civil society to supplement

coercive state authority, a sustained attempt was made to consolidate, deepen and
entrench market fetishism as an abstract form of social compulsion (Mszros,
1995). Inside the workplace, labour is disciplined by abstract controls
alongside more direct hierarchical ones, directed by information technologies,
numerical targets, internal competition, bonus culture, performance
management, and stringent accounting measurements (Mooney and Law, 2007).
Outside the workplace, abstract control operates through the credit-based
financialisation of everyday life, which reciprocally conditions practices
within workplaces. Where the value of wages is degraded relative to the
costs of social reproduction, goods and services essential to a culturally
tolerable style of life are made available on the basis of personal
creditworthiness. In the phase of roll-out neoliberalism, record levels of
personal indebtedness were enforced through mortgages, personal loans,
credit cards, mail-order catalogue accounts, and so on (Law and Mooney,
forthcoming).
3.2 More so than ideology per se, coercive commodification accounts for the
neoliberal repositioning of agents in social space. How neoliberal
commodification alters the network of social relations is therefore of primary
significance. The coercive logic of capital was deepened by exposing
greater swathes of society to commodification through the credit-led reconstruction of market forces and its managerialist surrogates in the
workplace. Financialisation as a style of life was rooted in the value structure of
political elites, corporate boardrooms and the higher strata of the new middle class,
strikingly different from the ascetic morality of the traditional petty bourgeoisie or
the post-war corporate reorganisation of the propertied classes. Managerentrepreneurs were rewarded not only with substantial salaries but also,
increasingly, financialised incentives like financial performance-related pay and
stock options. Shareholder fundamentalism conspired to demand that organisational
and personal change become a way of life through the spontaneous regulation of
the self as a flexible, adaptable and available neoliberal subject.

Creditworthiness is assessed on the basis of race and gender

African American and Latina women are dispropritonately
assessed as subprime because they fail to meet social norms.
Deemed exotic assets, now toxic assets, women of color are
told to pay up their debts.
Cooper and Mitropolous 9 [Melinda Cooper, Assoc. Prof. Sociology and
Public Policy @ Univ. of Sydney, and Angela Mitropolous, writer and activist based in
Australia and author of Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia, 27 May
2009, In Praise of Usura, Mute, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/praiseusura]
Insofar as the agenda of the incoming administration is to restore the integrity
of the US dollar as the global reserve currency, it will also, necessarily, entail a
more or less violent reinscription of the oikos. It is the North American
household, after all, that most unassuming of categories in the budget itemising of

economic theory, which has played the role of the world's consumer of last resort
for the past decade or so, coupling the economies of China and the US in a creditordebtor relation from which, it seemed until recently, there was no way out. More
than this, the North American household had been targeted as an emerging
consumer market for a proliferating range of new financial risk products,
many of them designed to finance the everyday life of people who had long
replaced the deferred gratification of the Keynesian wage with the borrowed
time of the credit card. The evaluation of risk is not, of course, an exact
science and relies much more on the psychology of confidence, trust and indeed
moral judgement as on any probabilistic calculation of mathematical chance. This
much was again confirmed by retrospective enquiries into the subprime debacle,
which show that the creditworthiness' of borrowers (prime, semi-prime and
subprime) was more often than not calculated on the intangibles of race,
gender and marital status as on net income, credit histories, and assets.
What is known is that the greater proportion of subprime was composed of
women, and African-American and Latina women in particular (most of
those demographed as single parent' households or living in nonnormative arrangements'). What is also clear is that the interest rates and
contractual conditions of the subprime market were more exacting than in other
loan markets - in some instances, those women were relegated to subprime
loans even when earning as much as their white male counterparts. When
the deceptively homogeneous category of the household is scrutinised then, it splits
open to reveal a Koch's curve of deflections from the norm. For while it may be
true that we are all subprime now' (in that the Keynesian ideal of life-long
stable employment is the exception rather than the rule), in practice the
pricing of risk is overtly contingent on the more or less normative
(familial, sexual, racial) status of the borrower. Esteemed to embody the
least exotic and least profitable of risks, the white male borrower was also
offered the safest of mortgage contracts. Other contractors were assigned
to the volatile fortunes of the variable interest rate. It was these risks,
deemed to be the most exorbitant on offer, which would be repackaged into the
more ostensibly exotic mortgage-backed securities, promising to render
profits as vertiginous as their dangers - threatening also, at some point, to test
the limits of market confidence in their long term investment quality. In the
meantime what were once casually referred to as exotic financial
instruments, by virtue of their incalculable promise, are now just as
blatantly renamed toxic assets, which everyone wants to purge from their
balance sheets. As Keynes explains in the General Theory, the pricing of risk in
the capital markets is comparable to a beauty contest in which investors assign
their votes not so much on the basis of real or fundamental aesthetic value', but
rather on a continual, nervous assessment of other peoples' judgements. While the
housing boom momentarily offered a kind of renewable redemption contract
for the erstwhile Welfare Queen and other undesirables of the US economy,
the very terms of the subprime contractual arrangement meant that these
minority contestants would be the first to suffer the consequences of
declining investor confidence. Pushing beyond the limits of normalisable risk,
the specificity of late 20th century financialisation is the expansion of

credit of all kinds to the riskiest of at risk' populations including, it would

seem, undocumented migrants. Now that the manic phase of credit
creation has lost its nerve, the subprime class in the US is exhorted to live
within its means in a virtuous gesture of belt-tightening - that is, to return
to the ranks of race, sex and class. As the exotic sours into toxic, the
expansion of investor confidence, ecumenical, liberal and even daring in its tastes,
suddenly demands the immediate redemption of all debts.
Viewed in this way, the political calculus of Obama's rhetoric of faith household, work and confidence - assumes its full complexity. Obama's
familial politics incorporates a moral discourse on the African-American
household which is - for the moment, at least - benevolent rather than punitive,
restorative rather than disciplinary and (perhaps most notably) directed more
toward the African-American father than the welfare mother. This much
distinguishes Obama's rhetoric from that of his predecessors. It remains, however, a
moralising rhetoric. One which responds in very astute terms to the combined
predicament of the subprime household and the faltering US dollar. Vowing to renew
America's promise and redeem the trustworthiness of the US currency, Obama
locates the foundation of this promise in the North American household - with a
particular focus on its African-American incarnation. If the future of this household
has been gutted by the subprime crisis then the solution offered by Obama is first of
all a re-normalising one, most notably by restoring all fathers, black and white, to
their position of responsible paternal figures. As stated in his campaign publication,
Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama believes that of all the rocks upon which
we build our lives, family is the most important. Fathers are critical to this
foundation, but since 1960, the rate of American children without fathers in their
lives has quadrupled, and more than 25 million children live without their biological
fathers today. [...] Barack Obama believes [in] promoting responsible fatherhood
and supporting families Yet, in the absence of a credible bail-out directed at
the subprime household, the discourse remains purely moralistic, a more or
less veiled imputation of guilt through overconsumption (too much fun has
been had, not pointing any fingers) which finds its counterpart in Black Nationalism
and may some day be radicalised by more overtly nativist, survivalist and
white supremacist elements in American political life, precisely those that have
been reinvigorated by the groundswell of white working class opposition to Obama's
election. Dion Dennis, writing for CTheory, astutely traces the history of
prohibitionism through the time of Roosevelt's New Deal, suggesting that this finds
one of its most recent expressions in an escalation of the war on filesharing and
remix cultures.3 To his account, it might be added that the Great (Livejournal)
Strikethrough of 2007 was as much a conflict over the norms of the sexual contract
as it was the mark of that conflict's limit in digital labour's contractarian imaginary these mechanisms presuppose the limit of the border construed as frontier, beyond
which all forms of violence are permitted.4 In other words, this prohibitionist
impulse makes its way through every possible formulation of identity (class, race,
gender, citizenship, sex, generation, and so forth) on the basis of a morally radiating
distinction between counterfeit and authentic, seeking the demarcation of zones
and acts of illegal (re)production and, more significantly, reconstituting the powers

to decide these distinctions (which is to say, to bring a legitimated, if not entirely

naturalised, violence to bear). Karl Marx's ambivalence on the question of the labour
theory of right - an ambivalence that continues in the divergent legacies of socialist
productivism and the refusal of work - is no more cause for hesitating in the face of
these repatriations than can his critical remarks on the attachment of rights to
production be set aside for the sake of conforming with the rise of a seemingly
inexorable neo-Keynesian consensus. Indeed, when it comes to discussing usury, in
the third volume of Capital Marx refers to it as the occult property' of interestbearing capital, insisting that it exploits the conditions in which it finds itself but in
no way should be considered as having created them.5 For him, usury lives in the
pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space
between worlds'. He goes on to say that the usurer knows no other barrier but the
capacity of those who need money to pay or to resist.' These reallocations - whether
rendered as the liquidation of that which is toxic or (in the recent Italianate) a
clearing away of the rubbish - seek to restore the borders, the filters and walls,
between those who need money to pay and those who need it to resist. Here,
violence is made rightful on the ground of the labour theory of right. As George
Caffentzis puts it, If the rentier, through his/her right of exclusion, disrupts the
productive development of a profitable industry, then there is a right of the "more
productive" to lay claim to the right of exclusion'.6 And what counts as labour is that
which might, simply put, be counted, exchanged, made indifferent. Put
schematically, the rentier lays out fence lines - within which there exists a monopoly
on violence, including that which secures the legitimacy of the currency - can
command labour to be exerted, guarantee contracts and so on. The rentier shifts
from being a good (finance) capitalist to a parasitic usurer when they lend to those
who cannot (or will not) repay. But the question for those of us who do not concern
ourselves with balance sheets is how this ostensible conflict between good and bad
capitalism unleashes a redemptive, morally sanctioned violence to, as Obama
remarked, put people back to work' or, on the other hand, declare them
superfluous, parasitic or simply a barrier to more productive pursuits. Whether this
legitimated violence unfolds in the form of what Tatjana Greif (in Reartikulacija) has
referred to as the New Inquisition (against unproductive sex and gender
indeterminacy) recently announced by Pope Benedict XVI in his pre-2008 Christmas
address to the Roman Curia or, as with the emergence of the welfare state last
century, in the expansion and proliferation of wars more officially declared and
undertaken, the question is of the domestication of the crisis. There is no such thing
as a non-violent counter-cyclical. For Marx, the restoration of limits and
boundaries does not mark the resolution of capital as such (as the moral
critique of capitalism always imagines), but rather the retraction of credit
which occurs once the expansive phase of capitalist debt creation has
ceased to be profitable. Capital oscillates between the poles of credit
expansion and credit retraction, and is maintained in tension between the two
poles in a dynamic that is neither dialectical nor progressive. As such the restoration
of boundaries of all kinds is a periodic necessity of capitalist accumulation, as
intrinsic to the capitalist dynamic as the expansive production of credit. Yet while
Marx acknowledged that the moment of restoration, in its abstraction, can take on
any number of geographical, contractual and productive forms (from the enclosures

to the wage contract to the creation of the poor houses) he was unable to perceive
the dynamics of restoration in its most intimate operations. In other words, in
those moments when it claims to reimpose proper boundaries on the sexual
transaction, to reconfine production within the household economy of
familial reproduction, and sexual transit within the genealogical limits
prescribed by the race, people or nation.

Credit scoring disproportionately targets Hispanics and African

Americans who are calculated as financial risks
Preeti Vissa, Chief Operating Officer of The Greenlining Institute, 12/15 2010, How
Credit Scores Disproportionately Hurt Communities of Color,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/preeti-vissa/credit-scores-and-the-for_b_797148.html

To most of us, credit scores are an obscure subject, something to think about only when
we're applying for a loan. But they're deeply tied to the foreclosure crisis and the cloud of
gloom surrounding the housing market and the economy generally. They have contributed
to the disproportionate effect of the foreclosure crisis on minorities, and have the potential
to create a vicious cycle that will pound communities of color even further.
Case in point: Last week, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition filed a
discrimination complaint against twenty-two lenders, charging that they were
discriminating against minority borrowers by denying FHA-backed mortgages to applicants
who met the FHA requirement of a FICO score of 580 or better. The lenders, NCRC
charged, were insisting on FICO scores far higher than the FHA demands.
And there's plenty of evidence that credit scoring as it's now done puts borrowers of color at
a disadvantage.
FICO scores (from the Fair Isaacs Co.), for example, are based on the following: payment
history, including bankruptcy or foreclosure status (35 percent), level of outstanding debt
and debt utilization (30 percent), length of credit history (15 percent), new credit and credit
inquiries (10 percent) and types of credit used (10 percent).
While some details vary at other companies providing credit ratings, the essential
components are similar -- and what's missing is important. Credit history -- mortgages, car
loans, credit cards, etc. -- is included in these models, but other types of bill-paying are not.
Much information, such as payments for rent and utilities, is not reported to credit agencies.
This puts those who have little experience with credit but a long, stable history of on-time
payments of rent, utility bills, etc. at a huge disadvantage. Because credit scoring models
consider mortgage payments but not rent, there is a built-in advantage for whites: 74.7
percent of whites now own their own homes, compared to rates of 47 percent for Latinos, 45
percent for African Americans and 57.3 percent for other races. Clearly this contributes to
the fact that people of color on average have lower credit scores than non-Hispanic whites.

Another thing credit scores don't do is account for changes in individual or neighborhood
circumstances that may temporarily cause an otherwise responsible borrower to miss
payments. And several indicators suggest that the current recession has had a
disproportionate impact on minority communities.
As of November 2010, the unemployment rate for whites was 8.9 percent, accordingto the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 13.2 percent for Latinos and 16.0 percent for
African Americans. And an impact index released last year by the Center for Social Inclusion
found that states with higher percentages of people of color were hit harder by the recession
overall -- with Florida, which has a large Latino population, hit hardest of all.
As I've noted before, there is evidence that blacks and Latinos with high credit scores were
more likely to receive high-cost subprime mortgages than whites with comparable scores.
Add this to the likelihood that these borrowers have artificially low credit scores due to
factors that have nothing to do with their willingness to pay their debts, and you have a sort
of double jeopardy.
And it could get worse. Millions more homes are in danger of foreclosure. Many of these are
due to circumstances that have little or nothing to do with the borrower's long-term
creditworthiness, such as misleadingly marketed and predatory loans or recession-related
job losses.

Credit and debt are inseparable which is axiomatic in creditdebt relations

Gustav Peebles, Special Adv to Prov & Assoc Prof of Anthropology at The New
School, October 2010, Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 39: 225-240, The
Anthropology of Credit and Debt,
http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/9GKtmKGiv5jMPGJiYgAC/full/10.1146/annurevanthro-090109-133856
When one surveys decades of anthropological literature on credit and debt, an
astonishing consistency shines through much of the ethnographic data. Seemingly
everywhere that credit and debt are discussed, we find many informants who
enunciate a moral stance that credit is considered beneficial and liberating for the
creditor (e.g., Nugent 1996, Truitt 2007, Zelizer 1994), whereas indebtedness is
more likely to be seen as burdensome and imprisoning for the debtor (e.g., Howe
1998, Lowrey 2006, Taussig 1987). According to this frequently voiced opinion, the
former is productive and the latter destructive, which sits in striking contrast with
Rabelais's almost Maussian celebration of indebtedness in the epigraph above.1
This hierarchy between credit and debt is so pervasive that Maine (1866) noticed
long ago a deep and sustained favoritism directed toward creditors in many legal
systems. In short, a near universal crystallizes out from ethnographic reports, in
which local populations describe credit as power and debt as weakness.
Long ago, Mauss (1954) examined the ubiquity of this common belief, and his
research led him to develop his now axiomatic paradox regarding credit and debt
relations. In The Gift (anthropology's foundational text on credit and debt), Mauss

asserts that credit and debt greatly contribute to the building of hierarchy
and dominance, but they are also the keys to building group solidarity.
Malinowski's (1922) evidence that the handing over of wealth is the
expression of the superiority of the giver over the recipient goes hand-inhand with building a cohesive and peaceful trade network still stands as the most
famous ethnographic example of this paradox (p. 177). Simmel (1907) made the
same point, a contrario, by speaking with such enthusiasm of a future society
constituted more by a supposedly freer direct exchange, which would thereby be
less colored by the inherently binding domination that he saw in credit and debt
relations.
In the years since Mauss's opening salvo in favor of the benefits of debt, careful
ethnographic work has lent credence to his notion that credit and debt
stand as an inseparable, dyadic unit. As he writes, [t]he nature and intentions
of the contracting parties, the nature of the thing given, are all indivisible (1954, p.
60, see also p. 36). Thus, because debt is always already a dyadic relation
that requires its opposite, I henceforth refer to credit/debt rather than
trying to distinguish the two, except when working to disentangle the
dyad for specific reasons. Although popular understandings of the relationship
between credit and debt, as documented by the ethnographers cited here, rely on a
hierarchy between the two, anthropology's contribution to this field of inquiry has
been not so much in avowing or disavowing the potential legitimacy of this folk
theory, but instead in engaging its effects. In some instances, perhaps creditors
are socially powerful usurers and debtors are their weak targets, but on
other occasions, debtors can be enormously powerful too, as the American
Insurance Group revealed to the global public in late 2008. Ethnographic inquiry can
hope to clarify such matters, which may be viewed differently by different social
parties at different times; indeed, scholars such as Dunn (2004) have even shown
us that the same economic resource can be seen as a credit by one owner, but as a
debt by a new owner to whom it is transferred.

Debt exacerbates and makes it almost impossible to get out of

poverty
Yvette Hartfree( research fellow university of Bristol) and Sharon Collard(
professor of personal finance n the True Potential Centre for the Public
Understanding of Finance at the open university) , Poverty, debt and credit: An
expert-led review Final report to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, March 2014
The consequences of problem debt, as outlined above, can exacerbate poverty and
increase the risk of remaining in poverty. As found by Berthoud and Kempson
(1992), once low-income families got into difficulties with debt it was almost
impossible to get straight again unless there was a dramatic improvement in their
circumstances. However, overall there is limited (recent) evidence on the extent to
which problem debt makes it more difficult for people to move out of poverty.
The evidence refers to a 'debt trap': a cycle in which people service their debts (i.e.
they pay the minimum repayment amount and other charges 15 that are owed), but

are unable to pay off the capital they originally borrowed (Ellison et al., 2011). It is
also used to describe the negative psychological impacts of having problem debt
where people feel too overwhelmed by their financial circumstances to be able to
address them (Dearden et al., 2010; Disney et al., 2008). There are no figures
available on the number of households in this position. Qualitative evidence reports
that adverse impacts of problem debt on people's mental health, well-being and
self-confidence may also undermine their ability to seek employment (Dearden et
al., 2010; Civic Consulting, 2013) which is a key route out of poverty. In one study
qualitative evidence found that being in arrears was a barrier to work due to
peoples fear that creditor forbearance (in the form of reduced repayments) would
end and creditors would demand increased or full repayments when they moved
into employment. However, this was not identified as a barrier to work in the survey
data (Kempson et al., 2004). 16 R

Debt is used to justify violence and violence based relationsthe perpetrators of violence makes it seem as if the victim is
doing something wrong
David

graeber,

(anthropologist, anti globalization activist, and professor at the

London school of economics) debt the 1st 5000 years, may 2011, Melville house
publishing
The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is
the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way
to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem
moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt -above all, because it
immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something
wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For
thousands of years, violent [people]men have been able to tell their victims that
those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives " (a
telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.
Nowadays, for example, military aggression is defined as a crime against humanity,
and international courts, when they are brought to bear, usually demand that
aggressors pay compensation. Germany had to pay massive reparations after World
War I, and Iraq is still paying Kuwait for Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990. Yet the
Third World debt, the debt of countries like Madagascar, Bolivia, and the Philippines,
seems to work precisely the other way around. Third World debtor nations are
almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by
European countries-often, the very countries to whom they now owe money. In
1895, for example, France invaded Madagascar, disbanded the government of thenQueen Ranavalona III, and declared the country a French colony. One of the first
things General Gallieni did after "pacification," as they liked to call it then, was to
impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the
costs of having been invaded, but also, since French colonies were supposed to be
fiscally self-supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways,
bridges, plantations, and so forth that the French regime wished to build. Malagasy

taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, highways,
bridges, and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were
built.1 To the contrary: over the next half century, the French army and police
slaughtered quite a number of Malagasy who objected too strongly to the
arrangement (upwards of half a million, by some reports, during one revolt in 1947).
It's not as if Madagascar has ever done any comparable damage to France. Despite
this, from the beginning, the Malagasy people were told they owed France money,
and to this day, the Malagasy people are still held to owe France money, and the
rest of the world accepts the justice of this arrangement . When the "international
community" does perceive a moral issue, it's usually 6 DEB T when they feel the
Malagasy government is being slow to pay their debts.

Credit is risk society, it is a calculation that categorizes

groups based on risk and sustains neoliberalism. Risk society
is intertwined with surveillance. Fear causes people to seek
more privacy which requires more surveillance. This only
worsens trust.
Richard Victor Ericson, Professor of sociology at the Universtiry of Toronto, 1997,
Policing Risk Society, pg 6
Part II provides a broader theoretical discussion of the risk society context in which
policing takes place. Risk society operates within negative logic that focuses
on fear and the social distribution of bads more than on progress and the
social distribution of goods. Collective fear and foreboding underpin the
value system of an unsafe society, perpetuate insecurity, and feed
incessant demands for more knowledge of risk. Fear ends up proving itself, as
new risk communication and management systems proliferate. The surveillance
mechanisms of these systems create profiles of human populations and
their risks to ascertain what is probable and possible for those
populations. People are fabricated around institutionally established
norms: risk is always somewhere on the continuum of imprecise normality.
Risk communication systems are entwined with privacy and trust. The
more that foreboding and fear lead people to withdraw from public
involvement, the more they value privacy and withdraw into privatized
lifestyles. The greater the privacy, the greater the need for surveillance
mechanisms to produce the knowledge necessary to trust people in
otherwise anonymous institutional transactions. Paradoxically, these
mechanisms intrude on privacy and are a constant reminder of the
uncertainties of trust. Yet is only in a framework of trust that patterns of
risk can be adequately institutionalized and form the basis of decisions.
Privacy, trust, surveillance, and risk management go hand in hand in
policing the probabilities and possibilities of action.

Risk dissolves distinctions non-risk based distinctions. When a

group is deemed a risk, such as minorities are by credit
agencies, the groups other features disappear and the group is
marginalized
Ulrich Beck 09 (sociologists, professor at the University of Munich and also held
appointments at theFondation Maison des Sciences de lHomme (FMSH) in Paris,
and at the London School of Economics.) Ulrich beck 2009 Critical Theory of World Risk
Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision
First there is its boundless thirst for reality: the category of risk consumes and
transforms everything. It obeys the law of all or nothing. If a group represents a risk,
its other features disappear and it becomes defined by this risk. It is marginalized
and threatened with exclusion.
Classical distinctions merge into greater or lesser degrees of risk: Risk functions
like an acid bath in which venerable classical distinctions are dissolved. Within the
horizon of risk, the binary coding permitted or forbidden, legal or illegal, right or
wrong, us and them does not exist. Within the horizon of risk, people are not
either good or evil but only more or less risky. Everyone poses more or less of a risk
for everyone else. The qualitative distinction either/or is replaced by the
quantitative difference between more or less. Nobody is not a risk to repeat,
everyone poses more or less of a risk for everyone else.
Existent and non-existent: Risk is not the same as catastrophe, but the
anticipation of the future catastrophe in the presence. As a result, risk leads a
dubious, insidious, would-be, fictitious, allusive existence: it is existent and nonexistent, present and absent, doubtful and real. In the end it can be assumed to be
ubiquitous and thus grounds a politics of fear and a politics of prevention.
Anticipation necessitates precaution and this obeys, for example, the calculation:
spend a cent today, save a Euro tomorrow assuming that the threat which does
not (yet) exist really exists.
Individual and social responsibility: Even in the smallest conceivable microcosm,
risk defines a social relation, a relation between at least two people: the decisionmaker who takes the risk and who thereby triggers consequences for others who
cannot, or can only with difficulty, defend themselves. Accordingly, two concepts of
responsibility can be distinguished: an individual responsibility that the decision
maker accepts for the consequences of his or her decision, which must be
distinguished from responsibility for others, social responsibility. Risks pose in
principle the question of what side effects a risk has for others and who these
others are and to what extent they are involved in the decision or not.
Global space of responsibility: In this sense global risks open up a complex moral
and political space of responsibility in which the others are present and absent, near
and far, and in which actions are neither good nor evil, only more or less risky. The
meanings of proximity, reciprocity, dignity, justice and trust are transformed within
this horizon of expectation of global risks.

 Risk communities a kind of glue for diversity: Global risks contain in nuce an
answer to the question of how new kinds of risk communities, based neither on
descent nor on spatial presence, can evolve and establish themselves in the
cacophony of a globalized world.1 One of the most striking and heretofore least
recognized key features of global risks is how they generate a kind of compulsory
cosmopolitanism, a glue for diversity and plurality in a world whose boundaries
are as porous as a Swiss cheese, at least as regards communication and economics.

The market functions as a carceral technology. The slavery of

the past is the ontological and economic equivalent to modern
punishment. Under neoliberalism, the market and prison are
structured by anti-blackiness
Dillon 12 [Stephen Dillon, Asst. Prof. Queer Studies @ Hampshire College, 2012,
Possessed by Death: The Neolbieral-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the
Afterlife of Slavery, Radical History Review, Issue 112 (Winter 2012) doi
10.1215/01636545-1416196, p. 113-5]
For Shakur, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state
possessed life in ways that rendered the free world an extension of the
prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal
technologies produced a symbiosis between the de-industrialized
landscape of the late-twentieth- century urban United States and the
gendered racisms of an emerging prison-industrial complex. Diffuse
structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a
cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the entanglements
between the living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into
the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like
nineteenth-century chattel slavery: We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All
restless. And we are all freezing.2 In the essay, affect continually forces the
past to open directly onto the present.3 Frozen skin speaks in a way that
words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked
like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she
understands herself as a twenty-first- century runaway slave, a maroon woman.4
Although Shakurs essay does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as
a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its
emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered
restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States from
the perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes. Written
by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text
names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet
erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that
prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its
mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of
the state. By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit
theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and

implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects

an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also
links the contemporary prison to chattel slavery an institutional,
affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Daviss phrase,
From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.5
The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and
between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.6
Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed
and extended Shakurs analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring
what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery.7 By centering racial
terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand the
barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as
spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern
punishment that have haunted their way into the present.8
If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slaverys production of social and
living death, then Shakurs text also hints at another connection that has garnered
less attention slaverys haunting possession of neoliberalism. If slaverys
antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live
on in the operations of the market? In this essay, I examine the ways that
Shakur theorizes the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population,
and the body. I consider how the necropolitics of slavery inhabit and drive the
biopolitics of neoliberalism. I argue that under neoliberalism, the market
which, along with the prison, is structured by antiblackness functions as
a carceral technology. Further, I argue that Shakurs text helps us to understand
the ways that slaverys logics and technologies not only haunt but also possess the
present. If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the
living the present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there
is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you otherwise then
possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold. Possession is
when the ghost inhabits and controls. The spirit of slavery does more than
meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and
animated contemporary formations of power. Possession names the ways
that the operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies
are sometimes beyond the self-possessed will of the living. Something
else is also in control, something that may feel like nothing even as it
compels movement, motivates ideology, and drives the organization of life
and death. In this way, slavery is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the
room rather, its spirit animates the architecture of the house as a
whole. The past does not merely haunt the present; it composes the present. As
Toni Morrison writes, All of it is now, it is always now.9

Thus we advocate the USFG should prevent surveillance on its

citizens for credit scores which sustains the system of debt.
We get rid of debt. This will relieve a great amount of suffering
and remind us that money is not ineffable and paying ones
debts is not the basis of morality
David

graeber,

(anthropologist, anti globalization activist, and professor at the

London school of economics) debt the 1st 5000 years, may 2011, Melville house
publishing

In this book I have largely avoided making concrete proposals, but let me end with
one. It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee:
one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be
salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering , but
also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not
ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality , that all these
things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the
ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. It is significant, I think, that
since Hammurabi, great imperial states have invariably resisted this kind of politics.
Athens and Rome established the paradigm: even when confronted with continual
debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening the impact,
eliminating obvious abuses like debt slavery, using the spoils of empire to throw all
sorts of extra benefits at their poorer citizens (who, after all, provided the rank and
file of their armies) , so as to keep them more or less afloat-but all in such a way as
never to allow a challenge to the (1971 - T HE B E GINNING ... ) 391 principle of debt
itself. The governing class of the United States seems to have taken a remarkably
similar approach: eliminating the worst abuses (e.g. , debtors' prisons) , using the
fruits of empire to provide subsidies, visible and otherwise, to the bulk of the
poulation; in more recent years, manipulating currency rates to flood the country
with cheap goods from China, but never allowing anyone to question the sacred
principle that we must all pay our debts.
At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns
out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be
more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our
accustomed morality, and start again. What is a debt, anyway ? A debt is j ust the
perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence . If
freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the
ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and
women make to one another? At this point we can't even say. It's more a question of
how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that
journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has
the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

Impossible demands are good they only appear unrealistic

within the ideological and discursive context the demand
addresses. Our demand shifts the discursive terrain and
prefigures a different world made possible through our
challenge
Weeks 12 [Kathi, Assoc. Prof. Women Studies @ Duke, The Future is Now:
Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope, https://libcom.org/library/futurenow-utopian-demands-temporalities-hope]
In the current political climate, the demands for basic income and shorter hours
could of course be dismissed as "merely utopian." Rather than waste time on
impractical and untimely demands, so the argument goes, feminists and
others should conserve their meager energies and set their sights on more
politically feasible goals. This familiar logic makes it easy to write such
demands off as unrealistic, and therefore as potentially dangerous
distractions from the necessarily modest and small-scale parameters of political
reform. That is, the supposed utopianism of these demands is often
considered a ftal flaw. One could perhaps contest the claim that these demands
are aptly designated utopian in this time and place, and certainly I have tried to
point out their practicality in relation to current economic trends. But there is
another way to respond to the critique. What if the utopianism of these demands
is not a liability but an asset? 'What if we were to respond to the charge of
utopianism not with embarrassment or defensive denial but with recognition and
affirmation? And what might such a utopianism without apology look like? Rather
than deny the applicability of the appellation "utopian" to escape its pejorative
connotations, in this chapter I want to accept the label, reconsider utopianism as a
distinctive mode of thought and practice, and explore what a utopian demand is and
what it can do.
Of course, part of what is in dispute here is the status of the term. The definition of
"utopia" in this chapter is broadly conceived, including not just the more traditional
list of literary and philosophical blueprints of the good society, but also, as I will
describe, a variety of partial glimpses of and incitements toward the imagination
and construction of alternatives. One of these more fractional forms, the "utopian
demand" - as I use the phrase - is a political demand that takes the form not
of a narrowly pragmatic reform but of a more substantial transformation
of the present configuration of social relations; it is a demand that raises
eyebrows, one for which we would probably not expect immediate
success. These are demands that would be difficult - though not impossible to realize in the present institutional and ideological context; to be
considered feasible, a number of shifts in the terrain of political discourse
must be effected. In this sense, a utopian demand prefigures - again in
fragmentary form - a different world, a world in which the program or policy
that the demand promotes would be considered as a matter of course
both practical and reasonable. It is not, however, just the status of the
program or policy that is at stake; as the proponents of wages for

housework recognized, the political practice of demanding is of crucial

importance as well.

Our pedagogy is the most productive for resistance. It

prepares us for a world where the levers of power are
controlled by neoliberals. Only talking about our methodology
of our actions can produce education that enables us to resist
out of round.
Giroux 4
(Henry, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster
University, Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: making the political
more pedagogical, Policy Futures in Education, Volume 2, Numbers 3 & 4, 2004,
http://www.cws.illinois.edu/IPRHDigitalLiteracies/GirouxPublicPFinE2004.pdf)
-thatTheir
The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibility as
public intellectuals cannot be separated from the consequences of the
knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the
ideologies and identities we offer up to students. Refusing to decouple
politics from pedagogy means, in part, that teaching in classrooms or in any
other public sphere should not only simply honor the experiences students
bring to such sites, but should also connect their experiences to specific
problems that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday lives.
Pedagogy in this sense becomes performative in that it is not merely about
deconstructing texts, but is also about situating politics itself within a broader
set of relations that address what it might mean to create modes of
individual and social agency which enable rather than shut down
democratic values, practices, and social relations. Such a project recognizes not only the political
nature of pedagogy, but also situates it within a call for intellectuals to assume responsibility for their actions, to link their teaching to those moral

this task
necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their own
work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the
promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing forms. Of
crucial importance to such a project is the rejection of the assumption that theory
can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life.
More specifically, any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed
notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the
idea of the good society. I think Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that: If
there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much
chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves.[20]
Cultural studies theorists need to be more forceful, if not committed, in linking
their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address
the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just
enough. Such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the
possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which
people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating, and shaping
principles that allow us to do something about human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag has recently suggested.[19] Part of

the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their
everyday lives. At stake here is the task, as the late Jacques Derrida insisted, of
viewing the project of democracy as a promise a possibility rooted in the
continuing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[21] Democracy in this
instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle
itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take
many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important
normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization
that never ends. Such a project is based on the realization that a democracy
which is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches the limits of
justice. By linking education to the project of an unrealized democracy,
cultural studies theorists who work in higher education can make clear that the
issue is not whether higher education has become contaminated with
politics, but rather that it is more importantly about recognizing that
education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At the same
time, they can make clear their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that
reduce it to a methodology like teaching of the conflicts or, relatedly, to simply
opening up a culture of questioning. Both of these positions not only fail to
highlight the larger political, normative, and ideological considerations
that inform such views of education and pedagogy, but they also collapse
the purpose and meaning of higher education, the role of educators as
engaged scholars, and the possibility of pedagogy itself into a rather shortsighted and sometimes insular notion of method, albeit one that narrowly
emphasizes argumentation and dialogue. There is a disquieting refusal in
such discourses to raise broader questions about the social, economic, and
political forces shaping the very terrain of higher education particularly
unbridled market forces, or racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse
groups of students within relations of academic power or about what it might
mean to engage pedagogy as a basis not merely for understanding, but also for
participating in the larger world. There is also a general misunderstanding of
how teacher authority can be used to create the pedagogical conditions
for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of
simply indoctrinating students.[22] For instance, liberal educator Gerald Graff
believes that any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about
its politics and engages students in ways that offer them the possibility for
becoming critical or what Lani Guinier calls the need to educate students to
participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community,
which through taxes, made their education possible [23] either leaves students
out of the conversation or presupposes too much and simply represents a
form of pedagogical tyranny. While Graff advocates strongly that educators create the educational practices that open up
the possibility of questioning among students, he refuses to connect pedagogical conditions that challenge how they think at the moment to the next step

Lipsitz
criticizes academics such as Graff, who believe that connecting academic
work to social change is at best a burden and at worst a collapse into a crude
form of propagandizing, suggesting that they are subconsciously educated
to accept cynicism about the ability of ordinary people to change the
conditions under which they live.[24] Teaching students how to argue, draw
of prompting them to think about changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities. George

on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about

why they should engage in these actions in the first place. How the culture
of argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they
need to fight oppressive forms of power, make the world a more meaningful
and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing in
work like Graffs because this is part of the discourse of political education, which Graff simply equates to indoctrination or speaking to
the converted.[25] Here, propaganda and critical pedagogy collapse into each other. Propaganda is generally used to misrepresent knowledge, promote
biased knowledge, or produce a view of politics that appears beyond question and critical engagement. While no pedagogical intervention should fall to

a pedagogy that attempts to empower critical citizens cannot

and should not avoid politics. Pedagogy must address the relationship
between politics and agency, knowledge and power, subject positions and values,
and learning and social change while always being open to debate,
resistance, and a culture of questioning. Liberal educators committed to simply
raising questions have no language for linking learning to forms of public
scholarship that would enable students to consider the important
relationship between democratic public life and education, politics and
learning. Disabled by a depoliticizing, if not slavish, allegiance to a teaching
methodology, they have little idea of how to encourage students
pedagogically to enter the sphere of the political, which enables students
to think about how they might participate in a democracy by taking what
they learn into new locations a third grade classroom, a public library, a legislators office, a park [26], or, for that
the level of propaganda,

matter, by taking on collaborative projects that ad dress the myriad of problems citizens face in a diminishing democracy. In spite of the professional

.
Students need to argue and question, but they need much more from their
educational experience. The pedagogy of argumentation in and of itself guarantees nothing, but it is an essential step towards
pretense to neutrality, academics need to do more pedagogically than simply teach students how to be adept at forms of argumentation

opening up the space of resistance towards authority, teaching students to think critically about the world around them, and recognizing interpretation

. As Amy Gutmann
argues, education is always political because it is connected to the
acquisition of agency and the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of
power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens.[27]
and dialogue as a condition for social intervention and transformation in the service of an unrealized democratic order

This is a notion of education that is tied not to the alleged neutrality of teaching methods but to a vision of pedagogy which is directive and interventionist
on the side of reproducing a democratic society. Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation.
And it is precisely this democratic project that affirms the critical function of education and refuses to narrow its goals and aspirations to methodological

And it is precisely the failure to

connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides
rationales for pedagogical approaches which strip the meaning of what it
means to be educated from its critical and democratic possibilities.
considerations. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training.