PROSPECTS FOR CHANGE:
JOIN THE RESISTANCE!
The chapters of this manual (The Debt Resistors' Operations
Manual, link on homepage) highlight various forms of debt injustice. Hopefully
reading them has made you angry. Debt can be isolating and demoralizing. The
most common emo- tion associated with debt is shame. We hope to transform that
shame into outrage—and that outrage into action.
In writing this manual we’ve struggled to balance advice that you, the
reader, can use to survive under this debt regime with a structural analysis
of the system that put you in debt. The reason you have tens of thousands of
dollars of student loan debt or medical bills that you cannot pay is because
we live in a society that refuses to make education and health care accessible
and free to all. You didn’t make some horrible mistake to get into the
situation you are in. You are not a failure, and millions of people are in similarly
dire straits. To again quote one of Strike Debt’s early slogans: You are
not alone/You are not a loan.
There is strength in numbers. Individually our debts overwhelm us; collectively
our debts can overwhelm the system. There are ways of fighting back and reclaiming
our lives and our communities from the current state of affairs. We are not
looking for debt “forgiveness”; what we seek is the abolition of
debt profiteering and its replace- ment by a society that nurtures the common
good.
We should be clear: we are not against all debt nor are we against credit. Rather,
we call for new, fair arrange- ments that help us exceed the boundaries of the
present (as credit does) without burdening the future in chains of
compound interest.
THE RESISTANCE IS GROWING
All around the world, debtors are rattling the chains
of debt. We are seeing debt for what it is—a form of dom- ination and
exploitation—and we are collectively rising up
against it. From Chile to Québec, students have combined massive waves
of protests with organizational initiatives to challenge the debt bondage that
results from corporatized education. Countries like Spain and Greece are experiencing
massive popular uprisings against austerity. Their governments have prioritized
paying back foreign bondholders over providing for the peo- ple, and the people
have had enough.
Students in Québec have popularized the symbol of the red square to signify
being financially “squarely in the red” amid tuition hikes, cuts
in social entitlements and the specter of spiraling student and consumer debt.
In Eu- rope, where elites tried to pass on the costs of their sovereign debt
crises to the most vulnerable populations—the young and the poor—protesters
have shouted, “We won’t pay for your crisis!”
Occupy Wall Street is another incarnation of this global uprising. Since the
fall of 2011, it has helped expose the double standards that have al- lowed
the oligarchs to maintain their rule even as they ravage the economy. Nowhere
are these double standards more apparent than in Wall Street’s re- lationship
with debt. Every month, the 99% dutifully make debt payments under conditions
set by the 1%. Like an ancient tribute payment to the em- pire, we pay our mortgages,
student loans, credit card, car and medical debts, and Wall Street gobbles up
the profit. If an individual refuses to make these payments, the banks and the
government have the means to ruin their life. In the years since the financial
crash, the disparity between the generosity shown to Wall Street (more than
three trillion dollars of public money spent already, with an additional 12.2
trillion committed by the U.S. government) and the blatant lack of relief for
household debtors and bankrupted municipalities has made it quite clear whose
debts are expected to be honored and whose will be written off.
One person’s debt is another’s profit. While Occupy Wall Street
has been an encouraging sign that outrage around these issues is mounting, somehow
the conversation about debt in the United States is still dominated by right-
wing pundits. They place all the blame for our nation’s mounting indebted-
ness on irresponsible individuals. Businessmen-turned-politicians tell us over
and over again that we must slash social spending and entitlement programs because
of this deficit. It is time to set the record straight.
As we have shown in this manual, millions of us are the victims of preda- tory
lending. And we understand that government debt is nothing like personal debt.
Around the world, debt is used to justify the cutting of basic services. The
problem is not that we are broke but that our public wealth is being hoarded.
We need a new social contract that puts public wealth to equitable use and enshrines
the right to live without the requirement of lifelong debt servitude.
This is the beginning of a radical debt resistance movement, and we need you
to be a part of it. There is a long and important history of debt re- sistance—a
history that is as old as it is revolutionary—for us to learn from.
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From ancient times to the present, there have been powerful debt resis- tance
movements that have challenged the harsh penalties associated with debt default,
including debt enslavement and debt incarceration. In ancient Athens there was
a practice of enslaving either the debtor or one of their family members if
their debt was unpaid. This practice expanded to the point that civil wars broke
out between debtors and creditors so often that the very survival of the city-state
of Athens was in question. This crisis stimulated a major change in the Athenian
legal system that outlawed the debt enslave- ment of fellow citizens and became
a model for many societies down to the formation of the American republic.
There was still widespread debt incarceration in the United States after the
“American Revolution.” (Even two signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence were later imprisoned!) The first major rebellion in U.S. history after
independence, Shay’s Rebellion in 1786, was against foreclosures and debt
imprisonment. It took many struggles throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century to end the practice of debt imprisonment. The great post-Civil War struggles
against foreclosures on small farmers in the Midwest and South were moments
of insurrection against the rule of the creditors’ logic. During the Great
Depression, urban workers and rural farmers banded together to block home evictions
and farm foreclosures. Workers also orga- nized their own credit and mutual
aid associations to create alternative ways to borrow and lend without the threat
of slavery and torture. Finally these insurrections forced the federal government
into passing “personal bank- ruptcy” laws that limited the “pound
of flesh” some capitalist creditors were demanding from workers who defaulted.
Debt resistance movements have been the driving force behind many of the most
important struggles in the last twenty years. For example, the alter-globalization
movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a broad constellation of social
struggles against paying “odious” national debts to international
banks. The global justice movement that emerged in much of the global south
forced many banks (both private and international, like the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund) to renegotiate the loans by cutting their interest rates, reducing
the principal, and in some cases simply “forgiving” the loan.
Along with these struggles against “national” debts there have been
remarkable recent struggles against personal debt like the movement of El Barzón
in Mexico. In 1994, the Mexican peso dramatically lost value com- pared to the
dollar, which set off a steep inflation that increased the interest on variable-rate
loans and often made loans, including mortgages, that were denominated in U.S.
dollars (as many were) ten times larger. This brought nearly 30% of the people
indebted to banks into default. The El Barzón movement began by claiming
that the loan repayment conditions after the
collapse of the peso were the fault the government and the banks, and that it
would be unfair to hold the debtor responsible. Their slogan was, “Debo,
no niego, pago lo justo” (“I owe, I don’t deny it, I’ll
pay what is fair”). The movement grew rapidly across the country and was
known both for its practical approach (by setting up legal consultation services
for debtors) and its riveting tactics. It forced the government to come to the
aid of the
embattled debtors and had a definitive positive impact on their situation.
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Almost two decades later, Strike Debt, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, emerged
out of a series of open assemblies. It continues to spark conversations about
debt as a global system of domination and exploitation. Debt binds the 99%—although
as we’ve seen in this manual it binds some people (women, people of color,
and the poor) more tightly than others.
Debt resistance can take many forms and Strike Debt is developing tac- tics,
resources and frameworks for generalizing the fight against the debt system.
These initiatives include publishing this manual and hosting debtors’
assemblies; supporting the work of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and their
Pledge of Refusal; launching the “Rolling Jubilee,” a mutual-aid
project that buys debt at steeply discounted prices and then abolishes it (to
learn more, email rollingjubilee@gmail.com); and planning direct actions across
the country, ranging from debt burnings to targeted shutdowns of predatory lenders
of all kinds.
Planning for the slightly longer term, Strike Debt is focused on bring- ing
debt resistors together with the aim of growing the struggle against debt into
a force to be reckoned with. Imagine, if you will, a global Debt- ors’
Union made up of a network of lender-specific sub-unions. For ex- ample, if
someone had a mortgage with Bank of America, tuition debt from Sallie Mae and
Citibank, and credit card debts with Wells Fargo and Chase, when this person
joins the union they automatically join the sub-unions for Bank of America,
Sallie Mae, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Chase. These unions could, eventually,
be platforms for sustained agita- tion, providing support for strategic actions,
including debt strikes, akin to the labor battles of earlier eras.
Underlying all these projects is Strike Debt’s support for a Jubilee—a
full cancellation of all debts. Civilization after civilization has recognized
that when debt gets unmanageable, it must be cancelled. This has happened many
times throughout history. We should remember that there are conservative as
well as revolutionary jubilees; debt cuts can save the system if what follows
is business as usual. A Debt Jubilee needs to be accompanied by a program of
social transformation.
Consider this call for a global jubilee from David Graeber’s Debt: The
First 5,000 Years:
We are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would
affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just
because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it
would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying
one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are
human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability
to all agree to arrange things in a different way. It is significant, I think,
that since Hammurabi, great imperial states have invariably resisted this kind
of politics. Athens and Rome established the paradigm: even when confronted
with continual debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening
the impact, eliminating obvious abuses like debt slavery, using the spoils of
empire to throw all sorts of extra benefits at their poorer citizens (who, after
all, provided the rank and file of their armies), so as to keep them more or
less afloat—but all in such a way as never to allow a challenge to the
principle of debt itself. The governing class of the United States seems to
have taken a remarkably similar approach: eliminating the worst abuses (e.g.,
debtors’ prisons)*, using the fruits of empire to provide subsidies, visible
and otherwise, to the bulk of the population; in more recent years, manipulating
currency rates to flood the country with cheap goods from China, but never allowing
anyone to question the sacred principle that we must all pay our debts.
At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As
it turns out, we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts. Only some
of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone,
mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again.
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a
promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the
ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real
promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to
one another? At this point we can’t even say. It’s more a question
of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step
in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things,
just as no one has the right to tell us our true
value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.1
We all know that promises have been broken. The 1% have
gambled with our livelihoods. In contrast to their recklessness, those of us
who advocate debt refusal take our collective responsibility very seriously.
By dissolving the bonds which bind us to the 1%, we seek to forge new and equitable
bonds with one another. We recognize that everyone deserves adequate housing,
meaningful work, short hours, fair wages, access to health care and a truly
liberating education. We cannot fulfill these obligations if we continue to
cooperate with the system as it currently exists. Why keep paying our money
to the Wall Street mob? We know our resources could be better spent.
Remember: we don’t owe Wall Street anything, we owe each other ev-
erything. The possibilities of organizing around debt resistance are only be-
ginning to be realized. Strike Debt, like Occupy Wall Street, hopes to inspire
autonomous action. It encourages all to resist. To contact Strike Debt, please
email strikedebt@interoccupy.net or visit strikedebt.org.
RESOURCES:
ARtiCleS And bookS
George Caffentzis, “University Struggles at the End of the Edu-Deal,”
Mute Maga-
zine, April 15, 2010 (tinyurl.com/DROMCaffentzis1).
George Caffentzis, “Workers Against Debt Slavery and Torture: An Ancient
Tale with a Modern Moral,” Edu-Factory, July 2007 (tinyurl.com/DROMCaffentzis2).
Harry Cleaver, Jr., “Notes on the Origin of the Debt Crisis,” Midnight
Notes, 1990
(tinyurl.com/DROMCleaver).
Silvia Federici, “African Roots of US University Struggles: From the Occupy
Move- ment to the Anti-Student-Debt Campaign,” unsettling knowledges,
January 2012 (ti- nyurl.com/DROMFederici1).
Silvia Federici, “The Debt Crisis, Africa and the New Enclosures,”
Midnight Notes,
1990 (tinyurl.com/DROMFederici2).
Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, and Ousseina Alidou (Eds.), A Thousand Flowers:
Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, (Trenton,
NJ: Af- rica World Press, 2000).
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, (New York, NY: Melville, 2011) (tinyurl.
com/DROMGraeber).
Midnight Notes Collective and Friends, Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons,
2009 (tinyurl.com/DROMMidnight).
NOTES
1. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, (New York,
NY: Melville, 2011) (ti- nyurl.com/DROMGraeber), 390–391.
lding relationships that will one day come back to serve
us in our own time of need? Wouldn’t this way of doing business, following
a debt jubilee, make your heart sing?