In his 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” sociologist C. Wright Mills chastised those “clinging” to the working class as the only possible agent of revolutionary change. Today’s workers, he argued, were screw-ups asleep at the switch. Pacified by the welfare state, they were no longer able to lead anticapitalist struggle. In their stead, Mills proposed the vibrant “cultural apparatus” of radicalized intellectuals and touched off a long search in post-Marxist theory for other replacements. The New Left looked to national liberation movements; Fanonites of the same era elevated the role of “the underclass.” In the past decade, academics have responded to the casualization of work by coining a new term, “the precariat,” — leaving behind boring, old Lenin to embrace boring, new Lena Dunham.

Occupy activists carried this trend further by staging a general strike reimagined as a “day without the 99%.” The move to expand resistance into everyday life — “no school, no shopping, no banking” — reflects in part the diminishing possibilities for workplace action. As the factory floor has given way beneath traditional models of left organizing, it’s unclear who might take the mantle from the industrial proletariat. “The people,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari once proclaimed, “are missing.”

Strike Debt has set out to find them, proclaiming debt the “tie that binds the 99%.” The Occupy offshoot’s first communique gestures to an “invisible army of defaulters”: those who, already unable to pay their debts, could form the base of a new mass movement. Though some Marxists have given short shrift to secondary forms of exploitation such as credit, they’ve been key to capital’s recent advances. And though many critics have noted that “debt” is an imperfect gloss for “capitalism,” Strike Debt has rightfully identified an issue that touches nearly all working people.