The story of Athens and the story of Exodus have been key points of reference in the struggle for political freedom down the ages. Faith in the power of the people and faith in the power of God have frequently combined to provide the energy and vision to resist the idolatry of money. The idolatry of money is nothing less than the over investment of faith in the power of money to deliver the good life so that everyone and everything becomes for sale, nothing is priceless and what is sacred is profaned.

But of late, we have lost faith in the power of people and the power of God and have come to believe there is no alternative to debt as the mechanism for achieving the good life. Contemporary capitalism is built on the idea that debt is a means of salvation: financial debt and the globalized, disembedded flow of credit money are posited as the means through which to achieve human fulfilment, however conceived and at whatever scale. The tragedy of Greece – both for the European creditors and the Greek debtors – is driven by this faith in the power of money.

Unlike in ancient Athens, in the contemporary context, personal and national debt are not seen as threats to good citizenship and political order. Instead, the citizen is often conceptualized as a consumer and the economy, not civic life, is demarcated as the sphere of free, uncoerced relations. Modern ideas of citizenship tacitly envisage debt as the condition of good citizenship as debt sustains the dominant political order and its analogue – a mortgaged, highly speculative and debt-driven economy in which social relations are mediated and represented through consumerist modes of common action and identity formation. And other than in a diminishing slice of Western Europe, debt is a necessity for most people to sustain a life. Housing, education and healthcare, for example, increasingly require taking on debt. In the process, we mortgage our future – literally, make a death pledge with it – so that both our personal and collective work now and to come is in bondage to the banks.