[Part two of the text for ‘Yours In Debt! Part One is here]

{The Expert returns onstage, a mess of water and erased chalk. The Assistants are slumped on the ground}

It seems that debt is a bit of a mess. Maybe a word cloud or analysis isn’t the right way to go after all. There are two reasons why that might be so.

First, we need debt. Not as money but as social obligation. It’s what connects us as people. Say I make you a birthday cake. You don’t come round to my house the next day with another cake because that would be weird. Still less do you give me money because that would be rude. So out there is the idea that maybe one day you’ll make me a cake. And that’s nice. Which is one of the ways we stay connected rather than as entirely separate individuals.

Then there’s shame. Debt makes us ashamed, it’s embarrassing. Shame itself is a very complex emotion, like debt. It’s physical. We blush, sweat, find it hard to talk, you might even cry. At the same time it’s external. People say:

“Why did you take out all that debt if you can’t pay it back?”

“What were you thinking?”

“Aren’t you ashamed?”

If actual people don’t say this, we imagine that they do and it is demeaning. It’s odd, though, this association of debt with shame. A debt is a technical contract that says we will lend you X units, which you will return plus Y interest. Of all social exchanges, why does morality apply to this one?

One of the odder things about modernity is the way that it has secularized religious strategies for population care, control and management. So whereas the faithful once went to confession, we in New York now go to therapy and for $150 for a 50-minute hour, we receive absolution. In the Middle Ages, the Church took debt very seriously. Officially, they were opposed to any charging of interest. At the same time, it told its members that certain sins were so serious that they would incur a “debt of punishment,” meaning hellfire for eternity. There was one way out of this. You could, if you were rich, buy something called an indulgence, which allowed you to evade the debt of punishment.

Now that starts to sound a bit familiar doesn’t it? Indulgences for them, shame for us.

Wait a minute, though. It’s too neat, too clever. It presumes that capitalism is an infernal machine, run by some secret Dr. Evil, machinating and manipulating as it goes. This view appeals to the rich themselves. I think they rather like being called the One Percent, it makes them feel important. In fact, one thing we learned during the financial crisis is that they have no idea what is going on. When the credit default system started to go wrong, all they could do was hit ‘Refresh’ on their computers and the algorithm was supposed to resolve the issues. It kept showing something like “you have lost a ton of money.”

Banks still don’t know what’s going on. Spanish banks couldn’t even calculate how much cash they need for a bailout. Somewhere between 20 and 60 billion euros. Those are not only huge numbers, that’s a huge margin of error. Capitalism comes to seem more like a form of sorcery, a spell that works precisely as long as you believe in it. Or it’s the Emperor’s new clothes, where everything goes fine until one person points out the truth that is in fact in front of our eyes.

This is a dangerous moment for the system, then, one in which the possibility of doing things differently begins to arise. We can start to talk about abolition and reconstruction. One hundred and fifty years ago, another financial system was said to be essential for the economy. Without it there would be no way to produce vital cotton, sugar, coffee and other  goods and ruin would follow. This was slavery. When the enslaved got up at the beginning of the Civil War and left the plantations for the North, they began a remarkable experiment called Reconstruction.

During Reconstruction, another way of being was envisaged. The formerly enslaved abolished debtors prison and penalties for debt, even though those in debt at the time were mostly former slave-owners. They knew that debt was central to the system of slavery and it had to be abolished to fully abolish slavery. Next, they created a system of what we might call mutual aid. There was the first free public school system for all. The first state provision for the disabled. And they made it possible for legislators without personal wealth to serve. Today in Washington, not one person is less than a millionaire. Finally, they did borrow money but in order to buy land for groups of the formerly enslaved, a system we remember as “forty acres and a mule.” This was to have allowed for a collective agriculture on what we would now call a sustainable model.

So how come we never hear about any of this? Because in 1873, following a crash on railroad bonds, Wall Street stopped lending money to the Reconstruction. By 1877, white planters were back in power, segregation was beginning together with the erasure of the thirteen years of Reconstruction from national memory. That’s another source of American shame.

My feeling is that just as slavery was abolished by the actions of the enslaved themselves, so too can the shame of debt can be set aside only by releasing ourselves from the sorcery of capitalism, by refusing to believe in the spell any more. To do that we need to admit our vulnerability and complicity with the system.

So: I am not an expert. My name is Nick. I teach Media Studies at a nasty purple university not far from here. Everything I know about debt, I learned from the Strike Debt Campaign. I am jnvolved with it because of the shame in my profession. At my institution people working on degrees graduate with astonishing amounts of debt. But the numbers in themselves, shocking as they are, don’t matter. What matters is that young people can’t pay this debt and it impedes their lives drastically. Graduation, which should be a moment of hope, becomes the beginning of the repayment of a mortgage. I used to say in academia we do very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for the loan sharks.

From all of this we can learn some old truths in new ways.

The personal is political.

The political is collective.

Another world is possibe.

[Expert exits and returns with a cake. The Assistants share stories about being in debt, share cake with the audience and invite them to continue the discussion. There is no end].