When students can see their interests aligned with people with mortgages who can't pay them, or people with credit card debt who can't pay it, or people exploited by pawn shops or payday lenders - that's where you get the basis for a real political movement that isn't just on the campus, isn't about cultural protest, but a movement about economic justice.

Writer Annie McClanahan explores the rise of debt as the defining economic feature of American life, and explains how the mounting crises of 21st century capitalism provide a site of possibility for the indebted to reject the moral obligations and political machinations of the financial industry's intrusion into all aspects of society.

Annie is author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture from Stanford University Press.