Just as in the past, access to state-guaranteed mortgage loans enabled the rise of a middle class that owned small suburban bungalows, today, access to credit has reversed into a kind of trap. This trap effectively prevents people from achieving the standard of living they consider desirable or legitimate.
My name is Jean-François Bissonnette, and I’ve been a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal since 2018. But I’m not originally trained as a sociologist; I earned a PhD here at the University of Ottawa in political thought, so my background was more in philosophy. What led me to become interested in the topic I’m discussing today—debt—was a significant event in Quebec’s contemporary history: the 2012 student strike. That movement brought the issue of debt to the forefront, a topic that students vehemently rejected at the time, but which also pointed to a widespread and often trivialized phenomenon. In that sense, protesting debt was somewhat novel, and that piqued my curiosity. And here I am, 12 years later, still intrigued by this subject—it’s essentially become the focus of my academic work.
What interests me most is private debt, and that’s what I mean when I speak of trivialization. Public debt is often discussed in the public sphere, but household debt is rarely addressed. That’s partly because it has been normalized and is also somewhat taboo. Few people speak comfortably about their personal finances, so it’s neither a common topic of conversation nor public debate. It’s also been trivialized because it has become a completely normal way of life. If you look at statistics on household debt in Canada, for example, it has nearly doubled since the 1990s. Today, on average, households owe the equivalent of 175% of their disposable income—or even more. That means for every year of income, they owe nearly one and three-quarter years’ worth. This lifestyle has become relatively banal—it’s the price one pays to live a “normal” life.
There are several political conditions that created or contributed to this new situation of indebtedness. Debt is therefore a social and political phenomenon, perhaps even more than an economic one. Yet we tend to understand it purely as an economic issue—credit, debt, money in general are seen as part of economic reality. This view stems from the typical anthropology of economics, where people act based on rational self-interest, weighing costs and benefits. In that view, if people go into debt, it’s because they find it advantageous—it serves their utility. A credit relationship is thus seen as mutually beneficial, where both lender and borrower act out of enlightened self-interest. And from this perspective, why worry? If people are in debt, it’s their own doing, so there’s no need to feel sorry for them.
But if we look at debt from a more sociological perspective—as a relationship that has moral and political dimensions—it appears in a very different light. I’m not the first to say that debt is a power relationship. This became a prominent theme in the early 2010s when I began studying the topic, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Movements like Occupy Wall Street in the U.S. and the 2012 Quebec student strike picked up on this.
So why is debt a power relationship? There are several ways to understand this. One could look at the dyadic relationship between borrower and lender: lenders impose conditions that benefit them and, in doing so, partially control the lives of borrowers. One could also adopt a more structural view—analyzing society in terms of class. Who needs to borrow? Who depends on credit? Credit is made available by those who have capital to lend or hold decision-making power, like banks. That leads to a classic reading of contemporary society in terms of class struggle, something Marxists have discussed since the 19th century. Back then, class struggle was between employers and workers, capital owners and laborers. But today, in an increasingly financialized society, we might reinterpret class struggle in terms of who holds capital versus those who live in financial dependency. This gives us another lens to understand power dynamics in society.
At first, I viewed the debt system as entirely exploitative, something to be opposed. But I later realized that access to credit can also provide resources otherwise unavailable—resources that can improve one’s condition. So, it can also be beneficial. That’s why I say it’s deeply ambivalent. To express this, I like using a concept from philosopher Jacques Derrida: the pharmakon—an ancient Greek word from which we get “pharmacy” today. It means both drug and poison—something that can heal, but does so through its toxicity. So, it’s something profoundly ambivalent.
I believe that, when it comes to debt and money in general, we can see them too as pharmakon: deeply ambivalent, capable of both the best and the worst, and impossible to judge in absolute terms.
