Credit Substitution, Labour Rebinding, and Stabilisation Through Fragilisation

This Version 1.0 preprint develops a theorem-driven structural account of credit substitution and labour rebinding under conditions of declining collective buffering and concentrated household responsibility. The paper examines how access to continuity-critical life infrastructures — such as housing, education, mobility, and long-horizon security — may become increasingly mediated through household debt when collective forms of provisioning, buffering, or risk absorption weaken. Rather than treating debt primarily as a behavioural choice, macro-financial variable, or isolated financial instrument, the paper conceptualises debt as a load-transfer mechanism through which systems preserve access while relocating risk, timing pressure, and recovery obligations downward to households. The argument begins from a minimal structural sequence: erosion of collective buffering; concentration of responsibility at the individual or household level; substitution of credit for access; rebinding of labour through fixed repayment obligations; and short-term stabilisation through redistributed long-term fragility. Under these conditions, debt-mediated access may allow participation in core life domains to continue while making continuity more dependent on uninterrupted labour income, compressed recovery margins, and private capacity to absorb disruption. From this sequence, the paper derives a theorem architecture concerning credit substitution, access preservation, labour rebinding, exit compression, household fragilisation, and cross-domain spillover into adjacent areas of social reproduction. The developed theorem family specifies observable implications, negative implications, temporal-ordering expectations, challenge conditions, boundary conditions, and downstream empirical instantiation logic. The contribution is structural and diagnostic rather than moral, macroeconomic, behavioural, or policy-prescriptive. The paper does not claim that all debt is harmful, that all credit is substitutive, or that household debt is always the primary mechanism of burden transfer. Instead, it specifies the conditions under which debt can function as a substitute for weakened collective buffering, preserving visible access while relocating fragility to households and tightening dependence on continuous labour-market participation. Within the wider research programme, the article functions as a support and bridge theorem text connecting structural viability, household carrying capacity, social burden transfer, economic everyday pressure, debt-mediated access, labour dependence, and the distinction between visible continuity and underlying fragility.