Every 5 minutes someone is made bankrupt or insolvent.

105,000 people a year.

Half the population of Kensington & Chelsea.

Last year average household debt (including mortgages) was

£53,786.

Enough to heat and power the same house for 45 years.

Every hour 4 properties are repossessed.

35,000 a year.

Half the population of the UK’s largest town, Northampton.

Every day last year the interest payment on personal debt was

£165,000,000

Half as much is spent running the NHS every day.

Full Size Image – Link

Originally Printed in The Occupied Times

The first signs of a UK movement focusing on debt emerged during a session organised by the OT at the Up the Anti conference on 1 December 2012. Titled ’Are “debt strikes” the future of anticapitalist resistance?’, the session utilised a more participatory format than others during the day. Following an introduction from Michael Richmond of the OT and comments from David Graeber (Strike Debt), Nick Mirzoeff (Strike Debt) and Jonathan Stevenson (Jubilee Debt Campaign), the session broke into a number of discussion groups involving the speakers and their audience.

Graeber spoke to the nature of debt, its prevalence and impact on so many people’s lives, its stigmatisation and its place in the prevailing system of financial capitalism. Why are debt promises deemed as more sacred than other promises? How can we mobilise and bring people together around a subject which many consider shameful? How can we turn a ‘poor person’s movement’ into something which commands attention?

Ten million people in the UK are struggling with debt, living in the fear of the threat or real consequence of bailiff action and home repossession, those who can least afford it are paying back grossly inflated sums.

Nick Mirzoeff described how Strike Debt grew in America. Realising that debt could be a powerful tool of resistance to the status-quo, a small group formed out of public assemblies after May Day 2012. The US network developed ‘debt assemblies’ where people gathered to tell their personal debt stories and hear the debt experiences of others, encouraging the motif ‘You Are Not A Loan!’. Those involved in developing the Strike Debt US movement worked hard, collaborating on the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. We in the UK, with our different laws and regulations, perhaps need to mobilise around and draw up something similar.

Jonathan Stevenson highlighted the relevance of sovereign debt explaining the situation in Argentina which accumulated debt after purchasing weapons – from the UK – during the Falklands War. Argentina is still paying off this debt, opening itself up to debt restructuring in 2004, after defaulting. One vulture fund with an estimated holding worth $1.3 billion belongs to Paul Singer, a prominent  sponsor of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns. Singer, a hedge fund CEO, has aggressively pursued Argentina in courts across the world, allowing no opportunity for re-negotiation.

The discussion groups were asked to focus on a variety of topics: debt and its context in the political economy, debt awareness, debt resistance and other tactics to resist the injustices of a system which continually extracts more than we can give.

In the ‘debt and political economy’ group, Strike Debt, as a concept, was praised for its anarchic practice and approach. Marxists taking part saw value in the movement and its potential in mobilising the identity of the debtor as a new subjectivity, folding in ideas of wage stagnation and reliance on debt. There was some debate around this point relating to work and debt being the only two ideological tools that the ruling classes retain.

Different forms of debt were examined, sovereign and consumer debt, debt as credit, and how debt, in some sense, may be necessary. Credit unions were raised as an example. These types of financial institutions may resemble banks, but the manner in which they are run and organised are profoundly different. As credit unions are local financial co-operatives working on the common bonds of their account holder members, interest rates can be significantly lower (the law sets an APR no higher than 26.8%) than high street banks.

The nature of the Rolling Jubilee in the US – that is, fundraising for money to purchase debts from the secondary market and terminate the debt at a fraction of the cost – was also raised. There was a lengthy discussion about the capacity of the Jubilee to provide mutual aid and to build something larger, something with momentum and concrete effects. The limitations of the Jubilee were highlighted by many in the group since, by its very nature, a Rolling Jubilee is unable to change the debt system from the bottom up and is ineffective against market forces.

In the breakout group exploring actions around debt, participants expressed different ways of creating spectacle whilst scoping out the long term effectiveness and longevity of direct actions. Nick Mirzoeff spoke of how Strike Debt in the US launched soon after the May Day protests, when public angst, and sentiment, was at its most compelling.

People focused on the significant increase of payday loan stores now scattered along our high streets, the abusive practices of the companies behind them, and the absence of proper regulation by the Office of Fair Trading, the Ministry of Justice and the Financial Services Authority in relation to rampant interest rates and pre-loan checks. Wonga’s recent bad press exposing its manipulative and misleading advertisements, which the Advertising Standards Authority is responsible for investigating, was also raised as an interesting case study.

Several people in the group elaborated on possible action around sport. A number of football clubs and competitions have sponsorship arrangements with payday loan and other debt based companies. The class-based nature of this sponsorship was made clear: a payday loan company’s logo would not be splashed across a Formula One car. The imminent G8 summit in Northern Ireland was also noted as a possible event to highlight mobilising around debt. For this to happen, a great deal of careful advance planning and mobilisation of different groups would be necessary.

Turning to more practical aspects of Strike Debt UK, the group explored the technicalities of building a Strike Debt here. Can we, for example, buy discounted debt on the secondary debt market? Do we want to do this? What is the procedure? What are the relevant laws in England and Wales? Do we need a Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual here? Many of the questions raised in the group highlighted the need for people to come together, do the research, and share their findings in an accessible way. It also became very apparent that debt is becoming a popular tool in the resistance of capitalism, and as defaulting becomes more commonplace, we need to establish processes which will protect people, rather than financial institutions.

Strike Debt UK is a recent initiative. It can be found at www.strikedebtuk.com and @strikedebtuk. If you are interested in getting involved, please contact strikedebtuk@gmail.com.

Originally Printed in The Occupied Times

Why Strike Debt? Because today most debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. We are forced to go into debt simply in order to live. ‘We also oppose debt because it is an instrument of exploitation and political domination. Debt is used to discipline us, deepen existing inequalities, and reinforce racial, gendered, and other social hierarchies’ (Strike Debt Principles of Solidarity).

How to Strike Debt? We don’t know for sure. Debt resisters all over the world, in diverse contexts, are trying to figure it out. We have no choice but to experiment. Since indebtedness involves areas of experience outside the ‘political,’ debt resistance will too. Understanding how debt has become entangled in our everyday lives — our social relationships, our hearts, psyches, and souls — is critical. If we are to challenge the institutions of the debt system, which divides us and benefits from that division, we must become conscious of how we have internalised its rules and assumed its values. Fundamentally, debt is a promise about the future. It shapes our collective imagination; it funnels our desires. Before we can even envision alternate possibilities, we need to survey the damage already done: We need to talk.

In New York City, clusters of the ‘Occupy Wall Street diaspora’ and others began gathering at regular open assemblies, which evolved into what we call ‘Debtors Assemblies.’ The basic idea is to come together and speak out about debt. Sharing our ‘debt stories,’ we come to understand life under debt and to imagine life after debt, building trust in the process. In the tradition of consciousness-raising groups, a guiding strategy of second-wave feminism, the gatherings are a space for learning and unlearning; processes with cognitive and affective dimensions. The Women’s Movement, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Gay Liberation Movement showed how in Western patriarchal culture emotions are a site of social control as well as resistance.

Titled ‘SILENCE = DEBT,’ an important talk on the student loan crisis by educator and organiser, Brian Holmes, reminds us of the catalysing role of emotion in the movement around the AIDS crisis. Well before individuals ‘united in anger’ to form ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in March 1987, the ‘SILENCE = DEATH’ logo was wheatpasted onto walls around New York City. The poster-bombing was the work of the SILENCE = DEATH Project, a group of men who, according to Laraine Sommella author of This Is about People Dying: The Tactics of Early ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers in New York City, ‘needed to talk to each other and others about what the fuck they were they going to do, being gay men in the age of AIDS?!’ . While these gatherings did not produce a detailed strategy for change, they cultivated a shared vision. And the group acted to get others to see things the same way, to see that ‘ACTION = LIFE’ and ‘IGNORANCE = FEAR’ and to ‘Turn anger, fear, grief into action’.

Getting others to take action on what was known as the ‘gay men’s health crisis’ must have seemed like an impossible task at first. People with AIDS were being blamed for their disease. They were stigmatised, as were gay men more broadly. ‘Coming out of the closet’ as gay or as a person with AIDS was a challenge in itself. Emotion and education came together in a range of movement activities, including militant research (in biology, clinical medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, the regulatory structure). Activists became experts in order to expose the lies of the establishment. At the same time, they helped each other survive the plague ravaging their community by listening to, grieving with, and caring for one another.

In the current face-off with finance, making the crisis visible, and exposing its immorality, injustice and unsustainability remains a challenge. Debt, as Holmes describes, is ‘part of the fabric of false promises and hyper-individualised coercion that we call neoliberal governance.’ Student loan debt and credit card debt, hovering at around a trillion dollars each, ‘are part of a continuum that begins with payday loans, moves through the concealed robbery of the stock markets and ends in the [US] Treasury’s extortion of trillions of dollars from the rest of the world to pay for bloody useless wars.’ The damage wrought by financial capitalism stretches across space and back in time. As Silvia Federici observes, neoliberal restructuring has been going on for over three decades, moving from the peripheries to the centre of the global economy.

It’s the same crisis that has brought women from the global South to the US, where they work as nannies, maids and sex workers, mostly informally, part of a subordinate population without rights. Women in North America and Europe who have been working an unwaged ‘second shift’ in the home have been living the crisis as well. Increasingly, second, even third ‘shifts’, have been insufficient to make ends meet. Relying on credit to make up the difference, households are now drowning in debt. Today, many college graduates, even those with advanced degrees and high incomes, fear they will never be able to repay their debts. Following the dominant cultural script, many think it is their own fault.

As Dr. Joanna Moncrieff describes: ‘The social catastrophe produced by neoliberal policies has been washed away and forgotten in the language of individual distress.’  Neoliberal assumptions about human nature and behaviour permeate mainstream culture, framing the news and virtually all public discussion on the ‘economy.’ While financial predators go on stealing our possessions and our futures with impunity, we are scolded for poor financial planning. When the subject is debt, the main concern is ‘moral hazard’ (often erroneously attributed to individual debtors rather than structural conditions). If the story involves people, it is in caricature: the ‘deadbeat,’ the ‘loser,’ the ‘entitled kid,’ etc. The mantra – ‘One must pay one’s debts’- usually goes unchallenged. The rules of the financial system still appear inviolable and natural to many. But the truth is that debt is a social arrangement, which can be altered, and is altered all the time for those ‘too big to fail.’

The debt system relies on our thinking about indebtedness as a moral failing on the part of individuals – something to be ashamed of, kept in the closet. Breaking the silence through public testimony is a form of resistance to the rule of debt. Telling our stories helps to expose the brutalising influence of the debt system, which commands us to always be calculating and compels us to compare the incommensurable. In valuing unique lives, people are already doing what is considered impossible and continue to demonstrate that ‘You Are Not a Loan.’

By Nicole Hala

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Originally Printed in The Occupied Times

Excerpt from interview between Michael Richmond and An Italian blog, 404: File Not Found.

VC: In one of the newspaper’s last issues, you talked about the Strike Debt movement in New York. Can you explain in plain words what’s it about?

MR: Strike Debt is a movement that arose out of a number of horizontal conversations between Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists and others in Washington Square Park last May. It was during a lull following both the eviction of their camp in November 2011 and Mayday protests in the Spring of 2012 and some activists began discussing the all-important question: What next?
Discussions kept coming back to one thing: Debt. Everyone there (and the majority of us all) was and is drowning in debt: Student debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt, personal debt on unsecured, high-interest loans. Not to mention discussions of national and public debts or debt as a social and power relation being at the very heart of neoliberal capitalism and therefore affecting us all.
Strike Debt emerged as a repudiation of the morality of debt. It is a critique of the entire system, an attempt to awaken the ‘debtor subject’ in all of us and a call for us to take collective action against a system that holds us all in chains.

It is by no means the first time that people have organised around the issue of debt. In the last two decades, popular debt resistance movements have had some success in Latin American countries including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador. And if you were to read the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s seminal book, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, you’d see that ever since the first recorded debt system in the Sumer civilisation in 3,500 BC, debt has been at the heart of social, economic and political relations and many of the key uprisings throughout history.

VC: The Strike Debt idea comes from the States, where debts have actually ruined an entire generation. To what extent do you think debt is a core issue for Europeans too?

MR: Debts haven’t just ruined a generation – which suggests that it may be just the young who suffer. Debt is the basis for the entire system, it underlies our everyday social relations and defines those who have power and those who do not. Household debt (that held by individuals in the form of mortgages, credit card bills, etc.) and public/sovereign debt are devastating millions of people across Europe. The Strike Debt rationale would be: Why should the majority of people suffer the fallout of a popped debt bubble when it was inflated with nihilistic hedonism by a minority of financial institutions who now go on looking for the next bubble? The vast majority of household debt isn’t the result of greed or profligacy, it isn’t down to personal responsibility. The system needs it. Capital is accumulated through it.  So much of the ‘value’ created by the modern capitalist economy is dependent more on our debt than our labour as it is our debts that are used as leverage for gambling in the surreal world of the global derivatives market which is ‘worth’ more than ten times the entire world’s GDP. This ‘value’ is fictional, notional promises of future credit, debt and exchange but it has a bearing on the power relations of today.

In the last forty years wages have stagnated but credit has been let loose by those who control the economic levers of power. This has led to many people using credit and debt to finance basic needs like buying food and, in the US and now countries like Greece, paying for medical treatment. Things like education and housing, aspects of human society that should never be commodified, have been turned into products for us to consume on a market. We all know that toxic mortgage derivatives like CDOs were central to the 2008 crash. Well, student debt could be the next big bubble. It’s already reached $1trillion dollars in the US and with the UK’s higher education policy becoming more and more like America’s over the last two decades this financialisation trend looks to be firmly entrenched.

Europe as a whole faces the spectre of debt every day as countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal have the screws of austerity tightened ever harder on them by their puppet governments, forced to do so by the Troika. And why? Because the bond markets, credit ratings agencies etc., accountable to no one, decide whether countries (people) stand or fall, live or die. This has to be challenged. And not in some supplicant manner where we beg forgiveness for our debts, but by repudiating the very basis of the debt economy. By saying “This debt is illegitimate. Why should I pay?” And the debts run up by a crony government? Surely these are “Odious debts” like those of many dictatorial regimes of the past. Why should an entire population be held responsible for debts run up by a government like the Greek one before the crisis who were practically controlled by Goldman Sachs for a decade leading up to the crash?

VC: The OT’s article on the Strike Debt movement promotes an anti-debt culture, arguing that “this morality of debt that says paying one’s debts is more important than anything else” is not actually a morality. You therefore suggest not to pay the debt back at all. Do you think that this is a concrete and possible counter-policy to put forward?

MR: I wouldn’t say it was concrete or that it was a “counter-policy”. Is it possible? Who knows? One of our biggest problems was summed up by Fredric Jameson when he said: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” This is something we all have to break through.

The idea of striking on debt cannot claim to be concrete because it is a proposition dependent on mobilising a huge global mass of people to (eventually) refuse to pay their debts. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially when you consider all of the forces ranged against your attempts to do such a thing and the potential consequences/reprisals for those involved. However, it’s not impossible. Examples like the Poll Tax riots in Britain, the aforementioned El Barzon movement in Mexico, the refusal to pay the Household Tax in Ireland and the public sector workers in Spain and Greece who are refusing to carry out the moral imperatives of state and capital on ordinary indebted people all point towards “the possible”.

The reason I say it’s not a counter-policy is because Strike Debt isn’t discussing so much the institutional party politics of the nation-state, it is challenging, as you say, the morality of debt and how deeply that morality pervades every aspect of the global economic system and human life as we know it. It is a debt resistance movement that proposes the possibility that human beings can find a way to live without the boot of the debt system standing on our necks.

One of the best writers in this area is one of your countrymen, Maurizio Lazzarato, who wrote The Making of the Indebted Man. Lazzarato writes of the morality of debt: ‘The “moral” concepts of good and bad, trust and distrust here translate into solvency and insolvency. The “moral” categories by which we take the “measure” of man and his actions are a measure of (the) economic reason (of debt). In capitalism, then, solvency serves as the measure of the “morality” of man.’ We are so much more than our individual credit rating. We owe nothing to the creditors who have defrauded us all. It is only the fact that they own politics that means we are coerced into paying them.

VC: Does the Strike Debt movement refer to any alternative economic theories that are not being taken into consideration by governments? If so, would you mention them?

MR: The movement is about raising awareness of the role debt plays in society, encouraging people to resist this and building towards a collective fightback and so, as such, the people involved do not have a single economic or political ideology. Many Strike Debtors hail from the anarchist tradition, as do many of the concepts that the movement espouses. A particularly prominent one of these is mutual aid i.e networks of solidarity and exchange which operate for the mutual benefit of those involved, outside of the functions of either capital or the state. Policies such as a debt jubilee and a massive reduction in working hours have been floated as ideas or transitional demands, especially by David Graeber. One direct action that Strike Debt have taken in New York has been the “Rolling Jubilee” in which they’ve crowd-sourced over half a million dollars (at the time of writing) and used it to buy up and erase strangers’ medical debts on the secondary debt market. As debts can be purchased for five cents on the dollar (ordinarily by private debt collectors looking to make a killing) Strike Debt have been able to cancel over $11m worth of personal debt. The reason it’s called a “rolling” jubilee is that the hope is that it will continue with a momentum of its own, where those whose debts were cancelled will then kick back in out of solidarity. No-one has or could claim that this direct action is any challenge to the overall debt system but it is nevertheless both a significant act of propaganda and a practical show of solidarity to several people being suffocated by debt. Undoubtedly, the Rolling Jubilee has been contentious and is the cause of much debate among those on the radical left.

The Italian Version of this interview was originally published on 404: File not Found. Interviewed by Viola Caon.

Every single one of us holds the key to power – debt. Just as coal miners in England used their access to coal to flip the balance of power, so debtors can use their access to credit by declaring a ‘debt strike’, to force a revaluation of the bank stranglehold on the economy.

Forget petitions. Forget protests. Forget parliamentary inquiries. If people really want to stop being ‘bankered’, there’s a better way: debt.

In the finance-first economy built over the last 30 years, our debt has become the weapon over elites that our labour once was. To understand why, we have to rewind 130 years to the insight discovered by coal miners striking in Manchester.

“The possibility of a gigantic and ruinous labour conflict is open before us,” screamed the New York Times about their unrest. Why? Because the miners realised their product – coal – was the key to Britain’s economic fortunes. The industries clustered around the mines were the country’s economic powerhouses and, by cutting off the supply of coal, the miners could close down the economy overnight. Swiftly, concessions were granted.

Their action sparked a wider labour movement along the canals, railways, and docks that linked the country’s industries together. These choke points were an outcome of the flourishing economic model of the time – manufacturing – and the primary energy source of the age – coal. Together, they created the conditions that the strikers used to deliver the democratic rights that the majority of people now enjoy.

Today, it’s difficult to see where labour strikers could find such sources of power. The big manufacturers have died and the main energy source – oil – flows well out of the reach of labour disturbance. The result is that we are left sacrificing our livelihoods to keep champagne flowing in the City. We’re told upsetting the City risks wreaking interest-rate hell on our economy. The reason? Because, in our post-industrial wasteland, Britons don’t make things; we buy them. And the fuel that keeps the consumer engine running is credit.

This financialised model that began with Thatcher and flourished under Labour has, however, created a new choke point. As the bankers found, much like those miners many years before, control over the economy’s fuel gives you power. That’s why banks can rig the market, ignore the government, and pay themselves huge bonuses in the midst of a recession.

However, this is only half the story. For every creditor there must be a debtor and both are necessary. While the creditors – the banks – have realised their power, the debtors – everyone else – haven’t. A glance at the level of private debt reveals just how much potential there is.

Student debt now stands at an estimated £40.3bn, while a combination of stagnant pay and high living costs has left Britain’s average family with unsecured loans worth £7944 each – a staggering total of £210bn of unsecured debt. It is a severe drag on an already knackered economy. Suppose, though, if people refused to repay.

Rather than channelling falling incomes back to the banks that scripted the recession, they simply reject repayment. Immediately, there would be a union of debtors capable of clawing power away from financiers. The old cliché would kick in: ‘Owe the bank £10,000 and the bank owns you. Owe the bank £10,000,000 and you own the bank’. Like those canals and railways of industrial Britain, the credit cards and student loans of financialised Britain give people leverage over elites. The difference is that it now takes debt strikes, and not labour strikes, to harness this power.

The idea of debt write-offs is not even that unfamiliar. In David Graeber’s history Debt: The first 5000 years, he shows how debt jubilees have been common since the debt slates were wiped clean in ancient Mesopotamia. More recently, we’ve had debt cancellation for developing countries and, right now, the Jubilee Debt Campaign is calling for a similar solution for countries like Greece. Yet, unless they are forced to listen, today’s bankers will ignore all pleas for ‘forgiveness’. A debtors’ strike is about using the power that debt gives to people to demand concessions.

There are, however, obvious difficulties. To begin with, the stigma that debt holds must be overcome. The idea of refusing to repay a loan seems offensive. If you sign a contract, it’s your moral – not to mention legal – duty to pay it back. However, this misses the fact that debt is a political, and not a personal, issue.

Climbing private indebtedness is the outcome of a deliberate strategy on the part of banks and a wilful impotence on the part of government. Banks developed, sold, and lobbied against the regulation of corrosive debt instruments. They cannot, then, demand that the rest of the population bleed so they can maintain their practises. When the creditor-debtor relation is seen properly, as a socio-economic arrangement, negotiation becomes a fact, as well as an economic necessity.

The next problem is building a movement big enough. A one-man debt strike is as useless as a one-man labour strike, but the quest for a mass debt strike may actually be more plausible. Britain’s service economy has fragmented the workforce as powerfully as the manufacturing economy once harnessed it; it’s only across public sector unions where there is any coherence. Debtors, however, are much more concentrated. Personal finance is dominated by the five big high-street banks, and student loans even belong to a single company.

The most significant issue, though, is that in the era of securitised finance, the debts of one bank are the assets of another. Because of that, forcing a debt write-down could well throw a pension fund into trouble. Yet that need not be a bad thing. It would shine a torch on the murky behaviour of institutional investors who serve themselves far more effectively than they do their savers. It would also force governments into a position where they have to bail people out before banks. Successive governments have used Quantitative Easing to gift cash to the banks; the same strategy could be used for restoring people’s pensions instead.

Ultimately, the political economic reform Britain desperately needs is less a question of policy and more one of power. No amount of moral outrage will change that. If people really want change, they are going to have to find ways of taking power – and debt strikes are one way.

This piece was first published on  Open Democracy.

By Sahil Dutta (@sahildutta)

When we arrived at 7.30am, the NYPD had already locked down much of the centre of New York’s financial district. This prevented some of the more set-piece actions from taking place, such as the “human wall” to block off access to the New York Stock Exchange. Many of us were kettled at various intersections and entry points, and the police’s Catch-22 tactic of arresting anyone in the street and then arresting people for “blocking the sidewalk” had begun in earnest.

The action was split into four themed groupings – education, environment, debt, and the 99% – all of which had their own planned actions and affinity groups. Elsewhere, throughout the morning, motorways were blocked, bank lobbies were turned into glitter parties, and high class restaurants were invaded and mic-checked. Many who were blocked off split into smaller groups and began circling the cordoned perimeter looking for openings to where they thought the action was taking place, but the NYPD had sewn this one up. Large scale direct actions all over the world are continually coming up against highly militarised police forces, automaton shock troops standing as the first line of defence for a crumbling status quo. This weekend of action in New York saw over 180 arrests without a hint of violence, or even property destruction, on the part of protesters.

In OT16, the comedian Stewart Lee wrote a satirical piece that is as true a piece of analysis as we’ve printed, about how modern protest actions seemed to him like “bows and arrows against the lightning”. He wrote: “Global capitalism has moved beyond space and time into a theoretical abstract region unfettered by the laws of either physics or common decency.” How much effect would it have had even if we physically blocked the NYSE or indeed the London Stock Exchange, when millions of transactions would continue to digitally flit around the globe, trading futures in North African wheat prices or betting big on some new internet trend?

This isn’t to say that it’s all pointless, or that Occupy is a failure; the one year anniversary should be a time to celebrate achievements first of all. A change in discourse (to what extent and for how long remains to be seen) is rightly often credited to the actions of occupiers stubbornly pitching their tents in a thousand cities worldwide. Inequality, a lack of political agency, and economic and environmental injustice have been pushed higher up the agenda. Occupy has also had more imperceptible consequences. In the US, it has enlivened a slumbering, non-institutional left into a genuinely radical movement acting as a big tent for various causes. And a very big tent it is, with a far greater spread across age, gender, class and race than any other political group. (though they would themselves admit that there’s still some way to go on that front.)

Occupy Wall Street does spectacle better than anyone. This was there for all to see on the night of S17, when Zuccotti Park was reoccupied for several hours. A three person-operated model of the Statue of Liberty holding a sign which read: “all our grievances are connected,” did battle with the hulking figure of Bane from the new Batman movie and his fearsome “boulder of debt.” A troupe dressed in a near-identical uniform to that of Major League Baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, came to the party as the “Tax Dodgers”, accompanied by two women with hula hoops as the “Loopholes”, while others performed street theatre satirising the absurd violence of the NYPD.

The now infamous OWS drum circle kept an intoxicating beat as capoeira players played, while others chanted “All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street!” An amputee in a wheelchair had an electronic ticker attached overhead with messages like “Charge your cellphones here,” “tax deductible donations welcomed,” “Cancel all debt,” and “The Ten Commandments are evil and un-American” scrolling across on a loop. This is important because it is creating commons: reintroducing the idea of public space to places where neoliberalism has extinguished the very concept. New York City, where strangers play chess with one another in every park and artists perform on subway trains, has stubbornly maintained aspects of a culture of common ownership, but it feels more like a remnant when it needs to be a harbinger.

In Britain, a political culture with more well-established left activist groups and infrastructure, Occupy has nevertheless provided an open platform to debate all the issues facing the left, even if at times that platform has been used simply to critique where people think Occupy has gone wrong. This is useful in itself; everyone knows that people within the movement have disagreed massively and destructively on all manner of issues regarding both process and principle. This first birthday shouldn’t lead to self-indulgence or the fetishising of all things “Occupy”; instead we should be continuing to reflect, to challenge and critique ourselves, because undoubtedly we could be so much more.

A key flaw is that, as Slavoj Zizek warned and so many have said, Occupy fell in love with itself. It fetishised its processes and how inclusive they were, but on September 17 a 500-600 person general assembly was held up because one woman wanted everyone to sing “Imagine.” The movement is too self-referential: Everything has to be branded Occupy this or Occupy that. A temporarily effective tactic has morphed into a seemingly permanent prefix.

Amidst the backbiting and puerile media froth there is genuine analysis, but quite how hard a task it is for any group to take on the established order is rarely mentioned. To overthrow the current order within just one year (often the criteria by which Occupy is judged) is to ask too much. Besides, those who pointedly pose the challenge “what is your alternative?” are people entirely disinterested in alternatives or the need for them and are instead solely concerned with reinforcing the seeming impenetrability of the existing paradigm.

When the Situationists challenged people in 1968 to: “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible,” they probably could not have imagined how much more impossible that realism we seek could seem. The realism that we have now sees it as normal for an elderly woman to be sitting in the shadows of Wall Street’s towers, with bin liners filled with junk all about her, peeling back a makeshift bandage on her leg to reveal an open, infected wound – the mark of the uninsured, a punishment for poverty. This is a realism that sees healthy food sold more expensively, and a supposed measurement for progress (GDP) that values car crashes more than a parent caring for their own child or a family growing their own food. And still now, the realistic consensus dictates that we must expand airport capacity to meet the demand of the dozens of global business centres that have sprouted across the growth economies of China and India, in complete denial of climate change.

Surely part of demanding the impossible is to make ourselves, our families, our friends, our colleagues and our neighbours believe that another world really is possible, that it is possible to maximise human wellbeing rather than profit, to protect our environment not our privilege. What we are fighting for is to change reality itself, not just what the world has come to mean. To win the right to form a new reality, we have to expose this capitalist surrealism for what it is: a planet-devouring system that will burn our world and our hopes at the altar of ‘efficiency’ and false freedom.

With that in mind, by far the most exciting development within Occupy Wall Street is the emerging focus on the issue of debt. In the aftermath of the May Day actions, various activists from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and the theory and strategy journal Tidal began to build a narrative around debt being central to the crisis, forming a new group called Strike Debt. Their thinking is that medical debt, mortgage debt, student debt, municipal debt, and money being created as debt are systemic issues that directly caused the crisis and affect us all – across class, race and even political hue. Everyone except the 1%, that is.

Here is a point of unity to organise around, a practical issue that can lead into larger questions about why there is so much debt and what can be done about it. They have published The Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual, which contains practical advice about how people can resist their debt, but the overall aim is to build a large scale debt strike or “Rolling Jubilee”, to begin working collectively towards liberating people from the debt peonage that they find themselves imprisoned in, usually through no fault of their own.

This is one of the key things that they highlight: with debt, as with mental illness, the most powerful inhibitor to action is the debtor’s own shame. Strike Debt has begun to hold ceremonial “debt burnings” and talks where people share and reveal their own debt stories in a fashion not dissimilar to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, an original Wall Street Occupier and author of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, has himself been influential in this decision to zoom in on debt.

In a recent article in The Nation, he writes of how central debt is to modern American capitalism and therefore to Occupy: “As a member of the team that came up with the slogan ‘We Are the 99 Percent,’ I can attest that we weren’t thinking of inequality or even simply class, but specifically of class power. It’s now clear that the 1% are the creditors: those who are able to turn their wealth into political influence and their political influence back into wealth again.” He ends by underlining the centrality of debt: “Occupy was right to resist the temptation to issue concrete demands. But if I were to frame a demand today, it would be for as broad a cancellation of debt as possible, followed by a mass reduction of working hours – say to a five-hour workday or a guaranteed five-month vacation.”

This brings us back to contemporary notions of what is realistic. What kind of morality is this morality of debt that says paying one’s debts is more important than anything else? We are seeing a regression back to Victorian times when debtors were criminalised, jailed and branded with a stigma that couldn’t be erased. And yet, everyone is in some kind of debt because the system is built on it, none more so than the entire financial sector which can only survive on public bailouts.

Stewart Lee is probably right that capitalism can cope with people camped in parks and outside churches. It can live with sporadic marches on their patch and spectacular direct actions in their banks every so often. But could it cope without two things that it does still need us for: our tacit consent to its notion of reality, and our dutiful obeisance to pay our debts and taxes? In a world of disappearing surplus value and growth opportunities, it is increasingly our debt that Wall Street and the City of London use (and need to use) to inflate their new bubbles with derivatives like asset-backed securities on our mortgages and student loans.

In Ireland, over half of the population continue to boycott a new household tax levied to pay for the elite’s bailout. “I Don’t Pay” movements have sprung up in Sweden, Spain and Greece over the last two years where citizens are acting together to refuse to pay rising public transport fares, and in Greece in particular, there has been avoidance of paying road tolls and a widespread refusal to pay hiked electricity bills. The authorities can’t send everybody to prison. Not if enough people stick together, as they did with the Poll Tax. The next question becomes the most important: can you build a large enough movement for it to have a real impact? The first step is education, another thing they’ve started to get right in Occupy Wall Street.

In the week following S17, the Free University of New York put on five full days of lectures and seminars in Madison Square Park on a wide range of topics, completely free of charge. Talks were well attended, fully inclusive and attracted dozens of passersby, including a retired Wall Street executive who began as a heckler but became a regular attendee.

When anarchists talk of the ‘propaganda of the deed’, it means employing direct action as an example that you want others to follow. Reclaiming public spaces, even temporarily, for the purposes of radical education, and building toward a collective withdrawal from the 1%’s debt trap, are the best ways forward. At the moment, large one-off actions are good for spectacle and symbolism, but not much else.

By Michael Richmond (@Sisyphusa)

Originally Printed in The Occupied Times

After the May Day action, which brought 50,000 people to the streets of Manhattan, OWS activists met to consider their next steps. As powerful as May Day had been, it did not shape a narrative for the future. So “Occupy Theory”, the working group that publishes Tidal (http://occupytheory.org), convened  a series of assemblies in Washington Square Park. Unlike the General Assembly, which no longer meets, these assemblies were open and horizontal discussions about the choices confronting a smaller but more focused movement.

After three weeks, the decision was reached to concentrate on questions of debt. Student debt in the US has reached insane dimensions: Tuition levels are rising annually, scholarships are increasingly scarce, and general economic hardship is growing, which means the majority of students are unable to source financial support for their studies from relatives.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the total student debt in the United States just passed $1 trillion. This includes over one million people who owe $100,000[a]; 27 % of these student loans are now  in default. Put all these graduates together in one place and you would have the tenth largest city in the country.  An actress who spoke at the assembly described how she can no longer take acting work because if she does, all her income goes to finance her student debt. She has to work in the black economy after having graduated from one of the top drama schools. Whereas a director decided to emigrate to Eastern Europe to escape his debt and start anew.

The working group moved on to discuss other ways debt has had a destructive affect on people’s lives. Five million homes have been foreclosed in the US, and five million more are in the process of foreclosure.  Outstanding credit card debt has reached $800 billion, but the lenders have had to write off an additional 10% because people are unable to pay. Debt is the price the 99% have paid for the excesses of the 1%. Or, more precisely, debt is what ties the 99% together. It ruins and constrains lives.  Thus was born a new campaign out of OWS: “Strike Debt”.  Strike Debt will call for an end to debt culture and empower an invisible army of people who are already refusing to repay their debts. In effect, we should consider this a debt strike. This campaign is gathering pace and will officially begin in the week of September 17, on the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

Since OWS began, there have been concerted efforts to create a narrative to tie together the themes of biosphere extinction, debt catastrophe and the failure of counterinsurgency. It may be as simple as this: The oil empire built by the US has been challenged by the unanticipated consequences of debt and climate change. There never was a grand strategy, just an application of overwhelming force from a world power that no longer holds sway. No one knows what comes next.

What we do know is that the debt machine at the heart of western hegemony has been exposed as a fake. In London: the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) debt scandal should be the top political issue of our time. LIBOR is the means of setting global interest rates after the polling of 16 leading banks. This process sets the rate for mortgages, credit cards and student loans – internationally. And it has been systematically fixed for years. The manipulations were of the order of five or ten basis points (1% equals 100 basis points), which sounds negligible. But $550 trillion of credit is affected by this rate, and some estimates are as high as $800 trillion. Even tiny changes save or cost the banks billions. Interest rates were never an expression of the “free market” – they were rigged.

Even the banks know there’s a price to be paid. The Financial Times now estimates that fines will reach $22 billion. And for us? For our over-priced credit cards, the interest is on average 16.24%, on money borrowed at 3.25%. For the student loans, interest rates are running up to 15%. Adjustable mortgages keep getting more expensive even as deposit rates dwindle to zero. We expect what we will get: nothing. But we will strike debt.

It’s not just about Barclays, which has paid a minimal fine of $450 million as part of their admission of guilt. LIBOR rates automatically exclude the highest two rates and the lowest two. So to actually change LIBOR, at least six, probably eight, maybe all 16 banks had to be involved. If the mafia had done this, we’d have hundreds of years of prison sentences being handed down under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act. Don’t hold your breath to see a ‘bankster’ do time.

Of course the US government were aware of this. As early as 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was aware of the fix and refused to intervene. In a functioning political system, heads would roll. If they don’t, we’ll know that this empire has no functioning democracy – it has been outsourced to the financial sector.

Why do nations keep supporting the US market? One answer is that other nations buy US treasury bonds because of the prominence of America’s global empire, as David Graeber has argued. Thus, it makes a difference whether that empire can keep order or not. It’s been obvious for some time that global counterinsurgency has morphed into a drone-enabled assassination program, a kind of automatic merger of COINTELPRO (the FBI’s covert Counter Intelligence Programme from 1956 to 1971) and Murder Inc. It is now obvious that it doesn’t work very well.

The US Defence Department budget is so enormous that the $70 billion it would cost to make all public higher education free is equivalent to the amount of money that was lost to management errors in defense spending. They ‘lost’ $70 billion in just two years. But since 9/11, the Defence budget has been almost sacred. If we were willing to shrink it, we could easily strike debt, generate a massive stimulus to the economy, and revive millions of lives.

The global economic hegemony of the US has benefited from the Eurozone disaster. Rumours circulated in 2007 about the disappearance of oil that was priced in euros. Global liquidity has nowhere to go but straight to the dollar. One group of mainstream economists have described the US dollar as being the “oil standard.” According to this view, the empire kept the peace in oil-producing regions and was rewarded with cheap oil that was priced in dollars. Since the invasion of Iraq, however, the connection between a strong dollar and high oil prices has been broken.

It still makes sense to think of the dollar as a petro-currency and of its empire as being boosted by oil. In 2007, it was predicted that the US would produce about 30% of its oil needs in 2010. In fact, it currently produces about 45% of its needs, due to massive exploitation of all available resources and greater fuel efficiency. In 2005, the US wasn’t among the top ten oil producers in the world. Today, it is number three.

As a result, Big Oil is alive and well in the US.  The five largest oil companies made $136 billion in net profits in 2011, with no sign of decreases this year. US representatives receive significant campaign contributions from Big Oil, $150,000 on average. Ironically, the supposed oil man Geroge W. Bush has been replaced by a far more oil friendly regime that consists of the purportedly green-friendly Obamacans. They are supposed to be Democrats, but appear more like Republicans.

There are just two tiny problems. The oil is running out, and the biosphere is dramatically transforming. Which is why (here’s problem three) things aren’t going so well. The International Energy Authority, a totally pro-fossil fuel organisation, has been sounding the alarm for some time. According to its chief economist Fatih Birol, “we think that the crude oil production has already peaked in 2006, but we expect oil to come from the natural gas liquids, the type of liquid we have through the production of gas, and also a bit from the oil sands. But in any case it will be very challenging to see an increase in the production to meet the growth in the demand, and as a result of that… the age of cheap oil is over.”

Notably, the big five oil companies are indeed making less oil than they used to do. And then there’s the heat. 3300 temperature records were set or tied in June 2012 in the US. 172 new all-time temperature records were reached. Climate scientists are now able to tie these weather events directly to carbon emissions, while also being able to say that events like the cold winter in the UK in 2011-12 were not caused by global warming. The miserable UK summer is likely to be the result of more moisture in the atmosphere, caused by climate change. Arctic ice is melting faster than ever this summer, and was at its thinnest winter level earlier this year. The eleven warmest years on record all happened within the last thirteen years. Time’s up for pretending that everything will be OK, or that some invention will come along to sort it all out.

The consequence, as the International Energy Authority has shown, is that we have exhausted our carbon account. If we want to limit temperature rises to between 2 and 4.5 degrees over the course of the century, we have already used, or are in the process of using, all the carbon we can.

Climate justice movements speak of a carbon debt that the developed world owes the underdeveloped world. There are 393 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere now. Before the industrial age, that number hovered around 275. The highest level scientists regard as being able to sustain normal conditions is 350. In order to allow for global development, we have to radically cut back, starting yesterday. Empires fall, as any historian can tell you. What happens next? That’s up to us.

Nick Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been involved in Occupy Wall Street since its beginning and blogs about it at http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/ He tweets as @nickmirzoeff

Originally Printed in The Occupied Times

It’s a shameful thing to be in debt. Once you’re in debt, you’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s your fault. You borrowed too much. You must accept the consequences of your immoral actions, after all, no one forced you to take out that loan. Lenders, on the other hand, can claim the moral high ground. We lent this student $50,000 to attend college, it’s not our fault she can’t find a job.

Thanks, in part, to Occupy, this idea – which places responsibility for a failed economy on individuals – is starting to unravel. As activists, citizens, workers and debtors, we are starting to ask if all debts must ultimately be paid off. As a student debtor recently posted on Twitter, “Are you obligated to repay a loan to the mafia?”

Student debt is a particularly striking example of illegitimate debt.

In the US, two-thirds of college graduates leave school with student loan debt, an average of $25,000 each. Debt rates have increased 500 percent since 1999. Student debt, which has passed $1 trillion, will burden students and families for years to come. Many graduates struggling to find well-paid jobs will never be able to pay what they owe. Those who cannot afford to complete degrees, an increasingly likely prospect, will have no choice but to make debt payments for a diploma they never earned.

Why Does College Cost So Much?

The increasing cost of college in the US is partly the result of the wide availability of loans, combined with drastically reduced government funding for higher education. But that is not the whole story. College costs have skyrocketed  because higher education is debt financed, which allows administrators, the government, and Wall Street to profit from student debt. Many executives who manage universities want to raise tuition.

Bob Meister, of the University of California, has explained that US colleges are run like corporations. Administrators use tuition dollars as collateral to improve their institution’s bond rating in capital markets, allowing them to fund lucrative construction projects. Tuition revenue (increasingly funded by debt) is a giant money spigot that college executives use to enrich themselves. This is why it makes little sense to debate the interest rate of a small subset of undergraduate loans in the US Congress, or to lecture students on how best to manage their loan payments after college. These distractions allow powerful people to evade the fundamental issue; the mass impoverishment of students is extremely profitable for the one percent.

How does Wall Street Profit from Student Debt?

Wall Street has its own method for profiting from student debt. The SLM Corporation is a good example. Sallie Mae, which is now a private company, sells student loan payments to Wall Street. Wall Street packages this debt, which is backed by the federal government, into a financial instrument called SLABS – Student Loan Asset Backed Securities – which are similar to the collateralized securities that crashed the US housing market. Finally, Wall Street sells those debt bundles on the global market for a spectacular profit. Malcolm Harris noted that “in 1990, there were $75.6m of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67tn.” From reduced state funding and exploding tuition costs to student loans sold as securities, debt financing of US higher education is inseparable from strategies of capitalist accumulation and exploitation.

What can we do?

In the early days of the Occupy movement, a group of us met near Zuccotti Park and began brainstorming ways to challenge the student debt system through direct action. We created the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which includes a pledge of student debt refusal. Pledgers agree to stop paying their loans once one million others agree to do the same. The pledge is based on the idea that the time for petitioning the government is over. Our elected officials have been bought, paid for by the financial firms that profit from student misery. What incentive could they possibly have for ending the debt financing of higher education that has been so profitable for them?

The pledge is also based on a list of four principles. For example, we believe education should be free (ie publicly funded) as a public good so that future generations do not have to bear the burden of debt.

The student debt pledge continues while the Occupy movement is evolving and expanding. This summer, a series of debtors’ assemblies is taking place in NYC. Most of us are in debt, whether student debt, credit card debt, or medical debt. These assemblies quickly took on the moniker #strikedebt and became a coalition. We are working together on a model that will allow people to challenge the illegitimate debt system in multiple ways, including online pledges, direct action and mutual aid projects. We’re all in this together, and by helping each other, we can begin to live in the kind of world we want to see. That is how we Occupy Wall Street.

Ann Larson is from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and tweets at @AnnLarsonNYC

Originally Printed in The Occupied Times