Re: <nettime> Debt Campaign Launch

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 11/21/2011 11:30 AM, Sascha D. Freudenheim wrote:

> this feels less like a protest of and for the 99% and more like
> "entitlement" under another name.

Sascha, you may or may not be interested in a radical change of the 
system we live under, but consider the views of someone who is.

Student loan debt, like home mortages, is is now an enforcer of the 
American Nightmare. Under this system, you work, not only to kill 
yourself, but to destroy the entire planet. To pay your student loan, 
you must work for a corporation and therefore abdicate all politics 
except that of compliance. To live in your suburban house you must have 
an automobile, and to afford for both of those you must rise through the 
corporate ranks. The job no longer covers your bills plus your debt so 
you must always borrow more. Those who are able to make such a lifestyle 
work (relatively few, in fact) are taken as the norm by a media 
oligopoly that numbs your mind and senses with incitements to consume, 
and therefore borrow. By abdicating all politics, accepting the dulling 
of your imagination and sensorium, and spending all your time working 
and driving in the car to pay back your loans, you participate in the 
system that leaves you void inside, generates deadly pollution in the 
air and water, and makes war for oil and other resources all over the world.

The greatest indignity is that they call this nightmare "the American 
Dream." Tellingly, some Republican senators even denatured the so-called 
"Dream Act" for the legalization of immigrant children with a clause 
that would allow those children, when they reach young adulthood, to 
gain American citizenship either by going to the university for two 
years or by going over to the Middle East and killing innocent people. 
This modification of the proposed legislation makes it crystal clear 
that the ticket to the American Dream and the functional equivalent of a 
college education is a gun in the service of empire.

Of course is not necessary to actively participate in the American 
Nightmare, and some have been able to largely avoid it. However, please 
do look at this story from the point of view of the people actually 
involved, who go to "public universities" that charge up to $10,000 a 
semester, plus all the other expenses. At the age of 20 everyone is told 
that going to college is exactly what they should do So they take the 
offered loans. After finishing, everyone who has done well is similarly 
encouraged to go on to grad school. So, with a good deal more 
nervousness, they take the offered loans. Until very recently everyone 
was constantly assured that college is the single most secure investment 
in your future (until you can afford a home, of course). Gary S. Becker, 
one of the high priests of neoliberal economics, even claims to have 
proved it. Therefore this system has reproduced itself at rising levels 
of self-contradiction, with the average sum of loans getting higher and 
higher and the compulsion to join the rat race getting firmer and 
firmer, while our entire culture has become a dog-eat-dog world of 
hyper-competition, frenetic Republicans, oppportunistic Democrats, 
predatory bankers, and always another boom, always another war, always 
another crisis.

Only after living through a decade with a fascist president and then 
electing a reformer who turns out to have much the same politics, while 
at the same time watching the ruling class ("the 1%") brazenly steal 
from the poor to give to the rich, have any significant number of people 
come to realize that they are "buying in" to a system that will make 
them "pay out" until they are just a withered husk of a meaningless 
life. In fact it begins making them "pay out" with usurious interests 
rates immediately upon graduating, especially if you happen to miss a 
month. Oh, and by the way, throw in the sheer impossibility for most 
people of ever getting a job that matches one's qualifications, or at 
this point, of ever getting a decent job of any sort, and there are 
really a lot of good reasons for not paying that loan.

Now, it is true and I do agree with you that the proposal to opt out of 
this system is often framed as something of little consequence: Just 
don't pay! You'll get off easy! But in reality, there will be great 
consequences. The refusal to pay is the refusal to be integrated to the 
American Dream Machine; and therefore, the beginning of a season of 
chaos here in the United States. 'Cause how can the Dream continue if 
everyone wakes up? There is a nascent understanding of these 
consequences, and it should be encouraged. It was said until two months 
ago that young people would never again revolt as they did in the 
Sixties, because there is no draft anymore and so the system does not 
affect them personally. But it turns out that unpayable debt affects not 
just students but also huge amounts of other people, very personally 
indeed. And when they go out to raise some questions about it in public 
space, the policeman's club and pepper spray and the ride in the paddy 
wagon where they are essentially told they have no rights also affects 
them very personally. So it looks as though this season of chaos, like a 
kind of political Indian Summer, is set to go on creating tumult for a 
while. When banks fail because students massively default on their 
loans, the economic crisis will deepen and more people will be out on 
the streets. It will become very important to decide which side you are 
on - and to have some influence on the side where you find yourself.

What I am trying to say, Sascha, is that this proposal for people not to 
pay their student loans is maybe something worth supporting, because 
rather than being about individual entitlement (entitlement to what 
exactly?) it could be part of a game-changing proposal for all of us. 
What's brewing in this "season of chaos" looks quite likely to be a 
disturbance of business-as-usual on the scale of the Sixties, but under 
much darker conditions, with climate change advancing and no option to 
believe in a new wave of industrial production and technological 
salvation. If you try to stop the process of social change because it 
oversteps the bounds that you consider normal and decent (as so many 
right-thinking liberals did in the Sixties) then you end up on the side 
of that "Silent Majority" in whose name Nixon unleashed incredible 
repression and outright class and race hatred, creating the conditions 
for the rise of the neocons who have done major damage to this country 
and the rest of the world. Instead of joining or even just silently 
condoning the conservative reaction which clearly will not be long in 
coming, why not think about the possibilities for actually changing the 
system? Why not work on positive proposals, not to keep people in their 
place, but to create new places, new life chances, a new and better 
organization of society? Why not encourage people to a revolt that can 
get us all out of the American Nightmare?

I understand your perplexity and that is why I am asking what I believe 
to be real and serious questions. I think this is a major crisis, and 
once again, the system has to change -- debts and all. The question is 
whether once again, everything will change so that everything stays the 
same (that was called neoliberalism), or whether we can actually solve 
some of the problems that were inherent in the American Dream.

best, Brian Holmes


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org