BEING in debt and being unable to pay it off is one of the recurring nightmares for so many people and it has been the basis for many tragic lives in novels — most famously in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.

In David Copperfield, the clerk Wilkins Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison after failing to meet his creditors’ demands. His long-suffering wife Emma stood by him, despite his financial exigencies that forced her to pawn all her family’s possessions.

Micawber’s name has become synonymous with someone who lives in hopeful expectation but is always financially on the edge. This has formed the basis for the Micawber Principle: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

Dickens’s novel was set in the Victorian era, but today we appear to be returning to that era with a vengeance, even if we no longer have specific debtors’ prisons anymore.

More and more individuals and families are falling into debt, being evicted from their homes and placed under enormous stress, leading to mental health problems. And this is happening despite a continued rise in living standards.

The late anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber in his book, Debt, The First 5,000 Years, argued that debt is at the root of the capitalist system.

A major argument of his book is that the informal indebtedness of “human economies” is only replaced by mathematically precise, firmly enforced debts through the introduction of violence, usually state-sponsored violence, by military forces or the police.

He also argues, contrary to standard accounts of the history of money, that debt is probably the oldest means of trade, with cash and barter transactions being later developments — although this assertion has been challenged by many economists and historians.

Graeber stated that “markets are founded and usually maintained by systematic state violence,” though he goes on to show how “in the absence of such violence, they ... can even come to be seen as the very basis of freedom and autonomy.”

While it might smack of conspiracy theory, it is undoubtedly true that as far as the capitalists are concerned, having someone in debt to them is a sure way of keeping the latter subservient and beholden, so the more people who are in debt, the more malleable and controllable they become.

If you are worried about losing your home, your car and other belongings, the last thing on your mind will be joining demonstrations or campaigns to end this vicious cycle.

This was clearly the logic behind Thatcher’s policy of turning everyone into a property owner. If you remember, she forced councils to sell off all their housing stocks at knockdown prices to those who wanted to buy their own homes. Her reasoning was that property owners are more likely to vote Conservative.

In addition, most home-buyers wouldn’t actually own the houses and flats they lived in outright, as most would be obliged to take out mortgages in order to pretend that they did. In this way, they would be firmly locked into the capitalist debt system.

Once you are locked into having to pay off a mortgage each month — a variable amount that can rise or fall, but always seems to rise — you are trapped. If you fail to pay the regular monthly interest instalments, you can be kicked out onto the street, so the pressure to keep paying is a strong one, and workers will be less likely to take strike action as they would fall behind with their repayments.

To previous generations, such indebtedness affected working adults and families, but not the young. Today’s students also find themselves locked into debt right from the beginning, before they even begin to earn a living. After taking out loans — which everyone not from a wealthy family is forced to do — they will begin their working lives already with a huge debt hanging around their necks.

Apart from the economic burden itself, debt can be instrumentalised to suppress student dissent and protest. You won’t be too willing to boycott lectures and take time off to demonstrate on the streets if it is going to cost you money (increased debt), possible expulsion from college, or being blacklisted in the jobs market.

Some bright spark will undoubtedly say: “Well Marx was always in debt but that didn’t stop him from fomenting revolution!” While that is true in Marx’s case, he had someone, namely his friend Engels, who was wealthy enough to bail him out. Without Engels, Marx himself may have ended up in a debtors’ prison and we would have had no Capital! Most students don’t have that luxury.

The debt phenomenon is not just found in the housing market and the student loan business, but everywhere you look. Capitalists depend on selling ever more products; if they can’t sell, they make no profit. That is why we are urged to buy ever more consumer items by slick advertising and seductive publicity.

The system depends on selling, even if the items it is selling are not really wanted or needed. It does this by spending huge sums on advertising. Never mind if you don’t have the money now, just buy, buy, buy on the never-never (hire purchase). We are told we can have what we want and pay for it later, encouraging more indebtedness.

The terrible implications of indebtedness can also be seen on an international level. Many of the less developed countries have found themselves amassing huge debts by taking out loans from the IMF or World Bank and by purchasing expensive weaponry.

They then find themselves tied into a subservient, client relationship with the big lenders who can and do dictate these countries’ political and economic policies.

The recent establishment of the Brics group of nations, and the flexing of muscles by a number of these indebted countries which found themselves in a neocolonial trap, is an encouraging sign that this use of debt to maintain imperialist global domination is perhaps coming to an end.