On the Occupy/Strike Debt "Debt Resistors'" Manual | Next New Deal

People have been talking a lot about the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. There is special interest with the movement's turn to organizing around the idea of debt as a "connective thread" for the 99%. The most recent issue of The Nation has two articles on the topic, with Astra Taylor witing "Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt" and David Graeber writing "Can Debt Spark a Revolution?"

There's a Strike Debt/Occupy Wall Street group, and they have put out a Debt Resistors' Operations Manual, which is embedded here at the end of this post and available at that link as a pdf. You can pick up a hard copy of the document tomorrow, Saturday, in Washington Square Park from 10:30 a.m. till 7:30 p.m. and at Judson Church from 7:30 p.m. till 9:30 p.m.

Reading it, I agree with Yves Smith's assessment that it "achieves the difficult feat of giving people in various types of debt an overview of their situation, including political issues, and practical suggestions in clear, layperson-friendly language." You should read her review in its entirety, and check it out for yourself. I want to talk a little bit about it from a different angle, noting how each half of the book builds out a new direction for Occupy.

 

Over the summer, Jodi Dean argued that debt would be a difficult connective thread to pull off for a political movement. It's too individualized, too prone to viewing people as failed market agents, too moralized, and it can mimic unhelpful reactionary arguments against the welfare state and the government. I know people involved in organizing homeowners, especially underwater and deliquent homeowners, and I can say that these are all very accurate problems. Beyond that, nobody likes their identity as a struggling debtor. People can take pride in their role as workers, as citizens, and as numerous other things organizers can build on, but debt is a real challenge. The failure part runs deep.

 

So there's a couple of interesting things in the Strike Debt booklet that I think are useful as a political statement. The first half of the book is about the major types of consumer debt -- medical, housing, education, and credit card -- as well as the credit scoring agencies. And the book places runaway consumer debt in the context of larger institutions that are failing to meet the needs of the population.

 

via www.nextnewdeal.net