The Mortgaging of Our Future: A Manifesto for Young Comrades on Financial Bondage and the Credit Card

Young comrades,

The figure placed before us—individual credit and credit-card debt exceeding 7 trillion lira—is neither a mere "economic indicator" nor, in the shallow analyses of bourgeois economists, "society's lack of financial literacy." Viewed through the lens of dialectical materialism, this number is a position won by late capitalism in the class struggle; it is the tonnage of the modern chains fastened around the necks of the working classes.

To understand the system is the first step toward transforming it. That is why we must lay out, stripped of illusion and in naked reality, how banks, credit cards, and these immense mountains of debt are constructed.

The Dialectic of Indebtedness: Capital's Insoluble Contradiction

Young comrades, when we examine the laws of motion of capitalism, the first truth we encounter is this: The system is incapable of resolving the fundamental contradictions upon which its own existence rests; it merely changes the form of these contradictions or seeks to postpone the moment of explosion.

The phenomenon of indebtedness is the most developed, most dangerous, and most dialectical instrument of this historical mechanism of postponement. Without grasping the crisis dynamics and the role of finance capital that Karl Marx insists upon in the third volume of Capital, we cannot understand how the plastic cards in our pockets have been transformed into apparatuses of class oppression.

Let us break this logic down step by step through a dialectical process analysis:

The Fundamental Dialectical Contradiction Between Production and Circulation

The capitalist mode of production is, by its very structure, caught between two opposing poles:

1. Pole: The Process of Production (Capital's Inner Drive): The capitalist must protect and increase the rate of profit amid global competition. To achieve this, he must drive down production costs and reduce to a minimum the share allocated to variable capital (that is, the wage paid to the worker). The principal aim here is to maximize the rate of exploitation of labor (the rate of surplus-value).
2. Pole: The Process of Circulation (The Realization of Value): For the commodities produced to be converted into profit, they must be sold on the market—that is, "value must be realized." Yet who constitutes the main consuming mass in the market? The working class, whose wages are continually suppressed and who are driven into impoverishment!

The structural locking-point of the system is precisely here: In the process of production, capital must pay the worker as little as possible; yet in the process of circulation, it expects that same worker to spend as much as possible.

When the real wage in the worker's pocket is insufficient to purchase the mountain of commodities on the market, capitalism confronts a typical crisis of overproduction / underconsumption.

The Intervention of Finance Capital and Fictitious Capital

To prevent this systemic explosion, the system makes a dialectical move: Setting the Credit System in Motion.

The credit system injects an "artificial purchasing power" into a working class whose real purchasing power has been destroyed. Yet this operation is not a magical touch; it is the expropriation, already in the present, of labor yet to be created in the future.

The Mortgage on the Future: When the bank extends you credit, there is as yet no real value produced. What the bank creates is, in Marx's definition, fictitious/imaginary capital. The bank produces a claim (a bill of exchange) upon the necessary labor-time you will perform over the next 10 years, 5 years, or 12 months.
Capital's Bending of Time: Capitalism spreads across time the crisis it cannot resolve today. It tells the worker: "You cannot live on the wage you earn today—no matter; I grant you the 'privilege' of spending today the money you will earn in the future." Credit is an apparatus for postponing the moment of crisis into an indefinite future.

The Passage from Quantitative Increase to Qualitative Dependence

The dialectical development of indebtedness accords perfectly with the law of the transformation of quantity into quality:

Stage 1: Quantitative Accumulation Inadequate Wages ➔ Luxury/Discretionary Credit Use ➔ Cumulative Debt Increase

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Dialectical Leap (The Crossing of the Threshold)

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Stage 2: Qualitative Transformation Compulsory Indebtedness for the Necessities of Life ➔ Existential Financial Bondage

First Stage (The Illusion of Luxury/Privilege): Indebtedness is initially presented as a means for durable consumer goods or for "raising" living standards (quantitative accumulation of debt).
Qualitative Leap: As wages erode in the face of inflation and the burden of debt crosses the critical threshold (the 7-trillion-TL line we see in Turkey today), indebtedness completely alters its purpose. Debt is no longer an instrument of living standards; it becomes the sole means of access to the basic necessities of life—food, rent, utilities—indispensable for the reproduction of labor-power.

From this stage onward, the worker is transformed into a "modern slave" who is qualitatively dependent not only upon the employer but directly upon the finance-capital system as a total mechanism.

Contemporary Illusions: Poverty Masked by Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence

Today's bourgeois economists and media organs use modern technology and financial products as instruments of mystification to conceal this naked reality:

"Buy Now, Pay Later" (BNPL) and Contactless Transactions: The concealment of money's concrete texture behind digital screens and algorithms is a commodity fetishism that screens off the truth that what is being spent is "labor-time." Digital wallets transform the relation of exploitation into a painless entertainment that occurs without being felt.
Algorithmic Scoring: The credit scores developed by banks are not a measure of an individual's financial health, but an ideological grading of how flawlessly one is integrated into the system and how amenable one is to exploitation.

The Leap-Point of the Contradiction: The Inevitability of Ruin

Dialectical thought teaches us that no mechanism of postponement can endure forever. Future labor is not infinite; human beings have physiological and psychological limits.

When the surplus-value produced in the real economy becomes incapable of satisfying the compound interest and mountain of debt demanded by finance capital, the mechanism of postponement collapses.
When the entire future labor of the working class has been mortgaged, the system reaches the point at which it can no longer expand (saturation).

In conclusion, comrades: indebtedness is not the genius of capitalism; it is the portrait of its desperation. Unable to resolve its own inner contradictions, the system, by dragging society into a mass quagmire of debt, accumulates its own explosive dynamics. Our task is to grasp that this debt order is neither a "fate" nor an "individual failure," but an inevitable march of the system—and to organize class consciousness upon this contradiction.

The Credit Card: The Plastic Shackle and Modern Slavery

Young comrades, in the virtual world of the bourgeois order, the plastic card in your pocket is packaged as a "symbol of freedom," a "technological comfort," or "a payment instrument that makes your life easier." Yet when objective reality is viewed with a dialectical and materialist eye, the credit card is the most refined, most invisible, and most disciplining instrument of class control developed by late capitalism.

Historical materialism teaches us that the means of production and the forms of exploitation evolve over time. We must break down this evolution of exploitation and the place of the credit card in the ecosystem of modern slavery along these fundamental dimensions:

The Formal Evolution of Slavery: From Ownership of the Body to the Mortgaging of "Future Labor"

When we look at human history along a dialectical line, we see that relations of dependence undergo qualitative change:

Historical Period	Dominant Form of Exploitation	Mechanism of Control / Coercion
Ancient Slavery	Direct ownership of the slave's body	Physical whip, shackles, legal status
Feudalism	The serf's dependence upon the land and the lord	Landed property, corvée, religious dogma
Classical Capitalism	The worker's sale of daily labor-power	The threat of hunger, factory discipline
Financial Capitalism	The mortgage upon the worker's entire future labor-time	Credit-card debt, digital scoring, foreclosure

In antiquity, the slave-owner purchased the slave's body and was obliged to bear the costs of feeding and housing him. Modern finance capital has developed a far more cunning method: It leaves you legally "free," yet purchases your future labor of 12, 24, or 36 months through indebtedness.

The bank no longer seizes your body; it seizes the value you will produce in the years ahead, the sweat and time you will expend. You walk the street as a legally free citizen, yet economically you are the invisible rentier of a bank branch.

Digital Commodity Fetishism and the World of Illusions

When Marx defines commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital, he says that people perceive the social relations among the products they themselves have produced as a mystical relation among the objects themselves. Today's digital capitalism has carried this fetishism to its peak:

The Annihilation of Money's Concreteness: Payments made with contactless cards, mobile wallets, and smartwatches strip money of its character as an objective measure of labor. The psychological bond between the labor you surrender when a concrete banknote leaves your pocket and the diminution of digital figures on a screen is severed. The truth that what you spend is hours stolen from your own life (labor-time) is screened off.
Gamified Exploitation ("Points," "Bonuses," "Installments"): Banks mask the relation of exploitation with techniques of gamification. The "points" and "bonuses" you earn as you spend with your card are not a favor bestowed upon you by capital; they are small crumbs of bread cast to draw you deeper into the cycle of indebtedness.
The "Buy Now, Pay Later" Illusion: This mechanism is a destructive manipulation by capitalism of our perception of time. The pleasure of immediate possession of the commodity is foregrounded, while the truth that your future is being sacrificed in exchange is made to be forgotten.

The Disciplinary Apparatus That Pacifies the Class Struggle

The credit card is not merely an instrument of financial exploitation; it is simultaneously a perfect apparatus of social pacification (taming).

Consider a member of the working class:

By day, in the factory or the office, he is subjected to over-exploitation, low wages, and mobbing.
Under normal conditions, in accordance with the dialectical contradiction, this situation would be expected to generate anger, a propensity to strike, or organizational consciousness in the worker.
Yet the statement for the credit card in his pocket is approaching. If he cannot make the minimum payment, his card will be closed, his credit score will fall, and foreclosure will come to his home.

Result: The burden of debt obstructs the worker's class radicalization. The indebted person cannot take risks. The indebted worker cannot go on strike, cannot object to the boss, cannot pursue his rights. Through the credit card, capitalism smothers the potential explosive dynamics of the class struggle within the worker's individual anxieties.

The Regime of Dual Exploitation

In the credit-card ecosystem, the working class is subjected not to a single but to a two-stage exploitation:

First Exploitation (In the Sphere of Production): The worker is exploited through the appropriation, as "surplus-value," by the industrialist or service boss of the greater part of the value produced during the day's shift. The worker is paid only a wage sufficient to sustain life (and often less).
Second Exploitation (In the Sphere of Circulation and Consumption): Turning to the credit card for basic needs because of an inadequate wage, the worker is this time exploited by finance capital (the banks) through interest, late fees, card annual fees, and commissions.

The worker enriches the boss while producing goods/services, and enriches the bank while spending in order to survive. The system draws back, through the interest mechanism, even the crumbs it has placed in the worker's pocket.

In sum, comrades;

Those small plastic cards in our pockets are the most refined shackles of the capitalist order. The concrete reality behind this illusion, presented by modern science and the financial world with ornate packaging, algorithmic scores, and promises of "financial freedom," is the mortgage placed upon the class's future, the compounding of exploitation, and the paralysis of social opposition.

To grasp these plastic shackles—to see them not as an "individual preference" but as "systemic coercion"—is one of the first and most vital steps of our class consciousness and our line of struggle.

The Minimum Payment and the Bloodsucking Cycle of Interest: The Unlimited Spiral of Exploitation of Rentier Capitalism

Young comrades, the banking system's most refined manipulation is concealed in the vice of the "minimum payment amount" and "contractual/default interest." The bourgeois media and the finance sector market this to you as an "opportunity to manage your budget flexibly," "a breathing tube in hard times," or a "payment facility."

Yet when we look with a materialist process analysis, the minimum-payment mechanism is a dialectical trap constructed not to liquidate debt, but to eternalize the state of indebtedness.

The Class Character of Interest: From the Exploitation of Surplus-Value to the Expropriation of Necessary Labor

When Karl Marx examines interest-bearing capital in the third volume of Capital, he demonstrates that the source of interest is the surplus-value expropriated from the worker in the process of production. In the classical model, the finance capitalist appropriates, under the name of interest, a portion of the surplus-value that the industrial capitalist has extracted from the worker.

Yet in today's consumer-credit and credit-card ecosystem, the situation has assumed a far more savage character:

The Trap of Double Exploitation: Interest is no longer merely a share taken from the factory owner's profit; it is drawn directly from the limited wage in the worker's pocket—that is, from the equivalent of the "necessary labor-time" required to sustain life.
The Illusion That Money Begets Money (M – M'): Capitalism's purest fetishism is the delusion that money multiplies of its own accord (M > M') merely through the passage of time, without entering the process of production. Yet behind that interest income there is no production of real value; there is only the transfer of the worker's future life-energy—cut from food, rent, and health—onto bank balance sheets.

The Dialectical Contradiction of the "Minimum Payment" Mechanism

The minimum payment harbors a complete dialectical opposition between its formal (apparent) function and its essential (real) function:

Not the Liquidation of Debt, but Its Sustainability: The banking system's greatest nightmare is that the debt be paid in full and closed. A closed debt is dead capital that cannot produce interest. For the bank, the ideal customer is not the one who pays the debt at once, but the customer who, by paying the minimum amount, carries the debt to the end of life.
The Slave's Survival Threshold: The minimum payment is historically indistinguishable from the bowl of feed the slave-owner gave the slave so that he would not die and could be driven into the fields again the next day. It prevents the debtor from falling into foreclosure and dropping out of the system, yet never renders him debt-free. It holds the debtor precisely at the threshold of "drowning," on the surface of the water, converting him into a perpetual milked source of interest.

The Abyss Between Exponential Growth (Interest) and Linear Income (Wages)

The mathematical construction of the system is designed so as to make it individually impossible for the working class to escape this spiral:

Capital's Temporal Dynamic (Exponential): Interest, by virtue of its compound structure, grows with exponential momentum. Debt spread over time is transformed into a snowball that multiplies.
Labor's Temporal Dynamic (Linear/Eroding): The worker's wage, meanwhile, erodes in real terms in the face of inflation, remaining at best on a linear trajectory.

To attempt to close an exponentially growing burden of debt with a linear income is dialectically impossible. When the minimum payment is made, nearly the entire amount paid goes to interest and taxes (shares that the state, too, takes in partnership with finance capital, such as BSMV and KKDF). The principal stands still or continues to grow.

The Illusion of Bourgeois Ideology: The Lie of "Financial Literacy"

Bourgeois economists and financial gurus continually deliver the same sermon to youth mired in debt: "Your financial literacy is deficient; you must cut your coat according to your cloth; you must pay the full amount, not the minimum."

This discourse is a typical ideological manipulation that lifts the blame from the system and loads it onto the individual:

The Reality Is This:

For a young person living on the minimum wage or near it, in Turkey or anywhere in the world, to be able to pay the credit card "in full" in an inflationary environment is not a matter of financial intelligence; it is a mathematical and class impossibility.

If the price of food at the market stall, the rent, and the cost of transport have surpassed the worker's real wage, making the minimum payment is not a "choice" or "ignorance," but a systemic compulsion imposed for survival. Bourgeois reason legitimizes exploitation by seeking the cause of poverty not in the relations of production, but in the victim's "budget-management skills."

Conclusion: A Vast Rentier Network and the Inevitability of Ruin

Comrades, the concrete truth that the mountain of debt exceeding 7 trillion lira and the bloodsucking cycle of interest show us is this:

The capitalist order seeks to compensate for the rates of profit it cannot generate in real production by squeezing the lowest strata of society in a financial vise and expropriating, through interest, their future labor-time.

The minimum-payment cycle is a mechanism that renders youth futureless, drives them into despair, and makes them lifelong tenants of the banks. To seek salvation through individual rationality within this order is no different from bailing water from a sinking ship. The solution is to settle accounts ideologically with the understanding that legitimizes these mechanisms of interest and debt, and to take one's place in the organized ranks of the class against this order of property and exploitation.

Tactical Warnings for Young Comrades: How Should Our Relation to the Banks Be?

Young comrades, one of the greatest dangers we face while living under the capitalist mode of production and its financial superstructure is to waver between utopian rejectionism and opportunism that integrates into the system.

On the one side stands the naive, petty-bourgeois moralizing romanticism that says, "I will have nothing to do with the banks; I do not use a credit card in order to protest the system"; on the other stands the bourgeois pragmatism that says, "If this is the system, I must play by its rules and get rich."

Dialectical materialism teaches us to avoid both extremes. In an age dominated by finance capital, banks are not "evil institutions" we can ignore through individual preference; they are objective relations of production that envelop the reproduction of material life.

The question, then, is this: Within this historical parenthesis, how should we establish a tactical relation with the banking system while preserving a revolutionary line?

Abandon Utopian Rejectionism; Focus on Tactical Defense

Withdrawing into the forest to lead a hermit's life is not a revolutionary stance; to abandon the system where it stands is to leave it to the mercy of capital. Protesting the banking system individually does not stop the wheels of capitalism.

Fundamental Principle: Regard banking products (accounts, cards, transfer systems) not as instruments of comfort or power, but solely and exclusively as necessary technical instruments for sustaining your physical and mental existence (your labor-power).
Material Reality: In an order in which wages are deposited into banks and rents and bills are paid through digital channels, establishing a relation with the bank is not a choice but a systemic necessity. Do not blame yourselves; it is enough that you do not transform this relation into an ideological surrender.

Shatter the Bourgeois Lie of "Financial Literacy" with "Class Literacy"

The greatest ideological narcotic that bourgeois economics has of late injected into youth is the fairy tale of "Financial Literacy" and "Budget Management." This discourse is a cunning ideological apparatus that presents systematic plunder as individual incompetence.

Bourgeois Discourse Wage Insufficiency ➔ "Lack of Financial Literacy / Wrong Budget"

▼ IDEOLOGICAL BANKRUPTCY

Materialist Reality Wage Insufficiency ➔ Surplus-Value Exploitation & Real Inflation (Systemic Problem)

The Lie: "If you cut out coffee and manage your budget correctly, you will become a homeowner."
The Truth: That incomes at or below the minimum wage or the hunger threshold generate debt stems not from the individual's improvidence, but from wages being driven below the cost of reproducing labor-power.
Our Stance: Reject the techniques of "managing poverty" offered to you under the name of financial literacy. Instead, learn surplus-value exploitation, the class transfer mechanism of inflation, and the theory of interest. What we need is not financial literacy, but Marxist political-economic consciousness.

The Tactical Boundary: The Reproduction of Labor versus Commodity Fetishism

The line we must draw regarding the use of credit cards and consumer credit is dialectically extremely clear:

Permissible Tactical Use (Reproduction of Labor-Power): To go into debt in order to sustain nutrition, housing, emergency healthcare, education, and revolutionary publishing/organizing activity is a legitimate necessity. This is a tactical step taken for the survival of labor-power.
The Trap (Commodity Fetishism and Conspicuous Consumption): To go into debt in order to access the false needs created by capitalism through media and advertising (the latest-model phone, branded clothing, luxury venues visited solely for status) is to take capital's bait.

Rule: Indebtedness may be used only in order to exist; it may never be used for the desire to appear imposed by the capitalist order. Do not sell your future labor-time for the false glitter of an object.

The Rejection of Digital Finance, Cryptocurrency, and FinTech Illusions

Today's youth are under intense assault from the technological illusions of finance capital. Concepts such as "crypto assets," "contagious stock-market mania," and "decentralized finance (DeFi)" are marketed to young comrades as instruments of exit from the capitalist order or of "easy class ascent."

Dialectical Truth: Crypto exchanges and new-generation FinTech applications are highly abstracted fields of fictitious capital (M – M') that capitalism creates to resolve its crises. These casinos, entirely severed from the process of production, neutralize the energy and class anger of youth with Speculative Dreams.
Our Stance: A young person chasing "bulls/bears" in the stock or crypto markets is transformed into one of the system's most loyal disciples. In an order in which you cannot be the owner of the casino, freedom is not sought at the gambling table. Stay absolutely clear of these digital illusions.

Credit Score: Knowing the Enemy's Arsenal

What the banks call a "credit score" or "scoring" is not an individual's moral or financial success; it is an index of how well one is integrated into the system and how 'exploitable' one is.

If your credit score is high, it means the system sees you as a magnificent "milch cow."
If your credit score is low, it means the system has coded you as a high-risk, hard-to-exploit element.
Tactic: Do not make the credit score a matter of pride; yet because it will confront you in the maintenance of life (when renting a home or drawing a necessary loan), keep this score at a technical level sufficient not to fall beneath the system. Do not confuse a metric from the enemy's arsenal with your own human worth.

There Is No Individual Salvation: Bind Yourselves to Collective Debt Resistance and Struggle

Our final and most vital tactical warning is this: Even if you manage financial mechanisms "perfectly" as individuals, this will not save you from capitalism's general crisis.

The path out of the quagmire of debt is not individual austerity measures, but class and collective struggle:

Debt Resistances and Trade-Union Stance: A single debtor is a helpless victim before the bank; yet when millions of indebted workers stand side by side, the banking system itself confronts crisis. Instead of concealing the debt problem as a source of individual shame, speak of it with your comrades, your union, and your class siblings. Make clear that the problem is a mass one.
Organized Power: What will break the domination of the banks and of capital is not burning the cards in our pockets, but building the organized class will that will socialize the property relations and the financial system that create these debts.

Comrades! The relation we establish with the banking system must be cool-headed, distant, and pragmatic. Use their instruments only insofar as necessary for survival, yet never surrender your mind and your future to their algorithms and shackles.

Raise your consciousness, resist falling into the quagmire of debt, and organize.