This article explores how Zambian mine workers used the courts and a protest campaign to resist predatory lending by Stanbic Bank. Given that debt repayment was done directly from their salaries, these workers were not necessarily advocating debt refusal or default. Neither did they expect the courts to rule in their favour. Rather, they sought to resist the bank’s arbitrary changes to the terms of the loan by naming and shaming the bank, highlighting the precariousness of their employment and taking advantage of the ruling party’s desperation for miners’ votes in order to advance their claims on the state. The article shows how debt resistance and citizenship claims upon the state can be combined by indebted workers in their struggles against finance capital. It draws on 36 months of ethnographic research conducted among miners and their families in Mufulira and Kitwe on the Zambian Copperbelt between 2016 and 2021.

本文探讨了赞比亚矿工如何利用法庭和抗议活动来抵制斯坦比克银行的掠夺性贷款。鉴于债务是直接从他们的工资中偿还的，这些工人不一定主张拒绝或违约债务。他们也不期望法院做出对他们有利的裁决。相反，他们试图通过点名羞辱银行来抵制银行任意改变贷款条款，强调他们就业的不稳定，并利用执政党对矿工选票的绝望来推进他们对国家的要求. 这篇文章展示了负债累累的工人在与金融资本的斗争中如何将债务抵抗和对国家的公民身份要求结合起来。