OCCUPY STUDENT DEBT CAMPAIGN

The Debt-Prison System
Nicholas Mirzoeff
NYU

Debt is prison. Few debtors, whether dealing with students loans, credit cards or mortgages, would disagree I imagine. By this phrase I intend not a metaphor but a description: debt is a systemic way to limit options, impose unfreedom and sustain the unfree labor market on which capitalism depends. In the United States, this debt-prison system is necessarily intertwined with what Angela Y. Davis calls the post-slavery prison-industrial complex. Resisting debt servitude in this country is a central part of extending and completing the Civil Rights movement.

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The Illegitimacy of Student Debt

David J. Blacker
University of Delaware

Stadtluft macht frei (“city air makes one free”) was a medieval German motto reflecting the legal situation of many serfs.[1]  If one fled to the city—dare we say “occupy”?—and survived for a year and day then one was considered liberated from the feudal bonds that had legally tied one to a lord’s estate.  Rural serfs were expected to engage in agricultural production, including the customary yielding of a percentage of one’s harvest and/or husbandry to one’s lord.  Increasing sophistication in banking and trade allowed labor-hungry cities to begin asserting themselves against the nobility, in large part because of the latter’s chronic thirst for liquidity.  This was a key internal contradiction within feudalism:  landed nobles’ need for cash, causing them to become dependent on urban bankers and their ilk, which helped accumulate the capital that preconditioned modern capitalism itself.  Meanwhile, as per the motto, arising from within the interstices of the feudal contradiction was an enlarged set of liberties for the erstwhile tradition-yoked serfs, formal freedoms which in turn generated their own contradictions. Read the rest of this entry »

Plato’s Republic and Student Loan Debt Refusal

by
Prof. George Caffentzis
Department of Philosophy
University of Southern Maine

November 25, 2011
Everyone would surely agree that if a sane man lends weapons to a friend and then asks them back when he is out of his mind, the friend shouldn’t return them, and wouldn’t be acting justly if he did.
–Plato, Republic 331c.

Over the last few weeks I have been speaking in support of those who have pledged to refuse to repay their student loan debt once a million others have also pledged to do so (under the rubric of Occupy Student Debt Campaign). In the course of giving a number of presentations concerning this campaign I received many queries and criticisms. The queries were most often practical, e.g., “what about co-signers, what will happen to them if I refuse to pay when I become the million and first student loan debt refuser?” The criticisms were also practical, ranging from “why not organize people to refuse all debt?” to “if you refuse to pay student loans debt, wouldn’t the Federal Government stop supporting the student loan program at all and hence you would harm future students?” I was prepared to deal with these practical questions and criticisms on their own terms, with empirical evidence and political argument. Read the rest of this entry »