I didn’t expect a book about debt to feel like a balm, but Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay held me in a way few books ever have. As someone currently crushed under various kinds of debt, I’ve spent years believing that weight was mine alone to bear—a private shame I just had to endure. This book shattered that illusion and offered something I didn’t know I needed: permission to fight back.

What moved me most was its central argument—that debt is not just a personal hardship, but a political condition. The idea of organizing around indebtedness felt revolutionary. I'd never considered my debt as something I could leverage for collective power, only something to quietly suffer. But the authors argue that debt connects us—not in failure, but in shared exploitation under capitalism.

The book’s analysis is both sharp and expansive. It clearly shows how debt compounds other crises—housing insecurity, unemployment, mental illness—not by accident, but by design. I was stunned to learn that student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy in the U.S., and that even COVID stimulus checks were seizable to pay debts. That cruelty is staggering, and yet, it’s the logical outcome of a system that treats poverty as a moral failing.

What really lingered with me was the way the book broke down concepts like financialization, neoliberalism, and municipal debt without losing clarity or urgency. From the racialized roots of credit scoring to the brutal aftermath of the Flint and Detroit water crises, the authors reveal how debt is used to punish the already marginalized. And still—they insist that resistance is possible. That defaulting can be an act of revolt. That redistribution is not only necessary, but achievable.

I closed this book feeling cracked open and galvanized. If we want liberation, we must be willing to reject the debts that were never ours to begin with. This book isn’t just theory—it’s a blueprint for the solidarity we desperately need.

📖 Read this if you love: anti-capitalist manifestos, accessible radical theory, and the works of adrienne maree brown or Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

🔑 Key Themes: Debt and Social Control, Neoliberalism and Austerity, Racial Capitalism and Carceral Economies, Collective Power and Debtor Organizing.