The intersecting crises of this moment and the political potential of a militant debtor's movement.
Astra Taylor, Nikil Saval, and Lester Spence discuss the intersecting crises of this moment and the political potential of a militant debtors’ movement in Pennsylvania and beyond.
Debtors have been mocked, scolded and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout?
The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place. Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive.
Debtors of the World Must Unite. As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful.
Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event.
Speakers
Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of "What Is Democracy?" and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and the American Book Award winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She is cofounder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and contributed the foreword to the group’s new book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.
Nikil Saval is a father, writer and community organizer, who was the first Asian American to be elected Democratic ward leader in Philadelphia. He’s proud to be raising his son, Ishaan, in South Philly with his wife, Shannon. In 2009, he organized boycotts with UNITE HERE against luxury hotel developers to fight for the rights of housekeepers. In 2013, he won back jobs for 1,000 cafeteria workers and noontime aides who had been laid off because of Corbett’s budget cuts to the Philadelphia School District. In 2016 he was a leader in the Bernie Sanders campaign and he cofounded Reclaim Philadelphia. In 2018, he organized campaigns to fight for change in the Democratic Party and became elected as ward leader of the Second Ward. Nikil is committed to justice for working people, whether white, black or brown. He will fight for a Philadelphia and Pennsylvania that works for the many and not the few.
Lester Spence is a Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in the study of Black, racial, and urban politics in the wake of the neoliberal turn. An award winning scholar (in 2013, he received the W.E.B. DuBois Distinguished Book Award for his book, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics) and teacher (in 2009, he received an Excellence in Teaching Award), he can regularly be heard on National Public Radio and the Marc Steiner Show.
Moderated by Jason Wozniak.
Musical introduciton provided by Tamara Anderson, a multi-talented actor, singer, writer, and director. Anderson has been featured in musicals and plays across the country and in multiple TV, film, and commercials like The Blacklist and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and more. She is an advocate or education, an anti-racism trainer, editor, producer of virtual content, and a single-parent blogger. Look out for her new project, the Gumbo Lab, featuring a virtual platform for Black females, transwomen, and femme solo artists. More info here. Check out her page at www.tamara-anderson.com. Karen Smith, percussionist, will join her.
This event marks the publication of the Debt Collective's urgent new book Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.
Cosponsored by PA Debt Collective and Common Notions.
The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual is a movement-produced handbook for debtors everywhere to understand how this system really works, while providing practical tools for fighting debt in its most exploitative forms. Inside, you’ll find strategies for dealing with credit card debt, medical debt, student debt, housing debt, and an analysis of tax debt, sovereign debt, as well as the relationship between debt and climate. You’ll also find tips for navigating personal bankruptcy, and for protecting yourself from credit reporting agencies, debt collectors, and payday lenders, alongside a vision for a movement of mass debt resistance.
Wages for Students was published anonymously by three activists in the fall of 1975. It was written as “a pamphlet in the form of a blue book” by activists linked to the journal Zerowork during student strikes in Massachusetts and New York.
Deeply in influenced by the Wages for Housework Campaign’s analysis of capitalism, and relating to struggles such as Black Power, anticolonial resistance, and the antiwar movements, the authors fought against the role of universities as conceived by capital and its state. e pamphlet debates the strategies of the student movement at the time and denounces the regime of forced unpaid work imposed every day upon millions of students. Wages for Students was an affront to and a campaign against the neoliberalization of the university, at a time when this process was just beginning. Forty years later, the highly pro table business of education not only continues to exploit the unpaid labor of the students, but now also makes them pay for it. Today, when the student debt situation has us all up to our necks, and when students around the world are refusing to continue this collaborationism, we again make this booklet available “for education against education.”
This new trilingual edition includes an introduction by George Caffentzis, Monty Neill, and John Willshire-Carrera alongside a transcript of a collective discussion organized by Jakob Jakobsen, Malav Kanuga, Ayreen Anastas, and Rene Gabri, following a public reading of the pamphlet by George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Cooper Union students, and other members and friends of 16 Beaver.