Category Archives: debt

It’s The Social Connections That Are Being Broken

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Last night, ironically enough, I should have been participating in a panel called Nightmare on Wall Street: the One Percent and the Ecological Crisis. Today with great fanfare, the wretched Stock Exchange reopened, powered by a polluting generator, even as all around the power was out and people with different mobilities were stuck in buildings. Goldman Sachs remained powered up throughout the storm, no doubt having its own generating system. Meanwhile, people in NYC were forced to take holidays to cover the days lost if on salary, or were simply unpaid if not.

Crime Scene–the tape is about right

Downtown has been abandoned to fend for itself. The legions of wait staff, creative economy people, freelances and other precarious labor, who keep downtown what it is, are not working and so are not being paid. In high-rises below 34th Street, people with mobility issues are stuck. On the floor where I usually live–the 14th–there’s an elderly woman with a walker, a young woman in a wheelchair and a man with an electronic chair. Another man has heart issues and really should not be walking up 14 flights. And that’s just the people I know. Water is being restored to city housing by generators but that leaves tens of thousands without. The statistics about cell phone service are wildly different to the experience of trying to make a call. The social connections are being broken, not just the electrical circuits.

Further the climate disaster is being followed by a disaster for the climate. Generators are running everywhere, people are driving who would normally use mass transit and so on. The “climate” is an abstraction and so is the “economy.” In modernist practice, there was a division of mental labor designed to elucidate what was “really” happening. Whatever the name for our current condition, this separation no longer helps. All our grievances are connected. The social hangs together by a series of such connections, which can be broken as easily as water entering a fusebox. Once down, such connections are much harder to restore.

In relation to this idea, Peter Rugh’s essay at Waging Nonviolence has a rousing meme that will motivate all of us trying to connect climate work to political activism:

we’ll need an environmental movement as radical as reality itself.

For those of us still struggling to come to terms with the material impact of Sandy–no power, no water, no phone–this is not yet the moment for long essays in response to the motivating force of Pete’s call. But I hear it.

And it makes me think about the way that Strike Debt has been able to address the reality that so many of us experience–debt–and has thus made it possible to radicalize it. To follow the example in Pete’s essay, the Black Panthers supplied free breakfast for children that needed it and offered health care for those who could not afford it. If there is to be more than a green-washing moment after Sandy, we’ll need to be able to do those two things: first, find a way to identify the impact that biosphere destruction is having in people’s everyday lives in order to even think about alternatives; and second, offer mutual aid and sustainable alternatives, just as so many are doing in the streets of New York right now.

It’s about finding the connections and then finding the way to make them visible and sayable. So, as I have been saying, a debt strike is also a climate strike. Debt abolition is climate change mitigation. Because the way that debt is “repaid” is by more growth, which inevitably means more carbon emissions. Abolish debt, abolish those emissions. The Jubilee is not just a liberation of human misery but a breathing space for the biosphere.

But just as debt abolition can only be the first step to the end of the system that creates debt, so must a pause in emissions lead to systems of social connection that don’t rely on the oil-coal-steel-auto-defense nexus of the military-industrial complex. That’s the abstraction. The reality is what’s happening in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, West Virginia and everywhere touched by the disaster.

Today we learned that it would have cost about $10 billion to install floodgates at the entrances to New York Harbor. Not by coincidence, that is also the estimate of what it will cost to restore mass transit. They “couldn’t afford” the first, so now we all have to pay the second via higher transport costs. And so on.

Take a small step. The People’s Bailout on November 15–recovery permitting–intends to raise money to abolish debt. $5 will abolish $100 of someone’s debt. You can be part of the awareness raising by donating your Twitter account once a day to retweet a Strike Debt tweet. No other changes to your account will follow, just once a day, your followers will see a Strike Debt tweet retweeted by you. Join the resistance.

This is the movement

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Here’s why we do Strike Debt. A day in the life of the debt movement. I look at the news over breakfast. The New York Times is editorializing about rescheduling private student loans. These are $150 billion but only 15% of the total. I worry for a moment that this might be how the process co-opts the debt movement but then I remember that Congress never passes anything so it scarcely matters.

Email. People are sending in text for the packet we’re putting together for Strike Debt groups that are starting up across North America–Nova Scotia, Toronto, Portland, Tampa, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and others. Actors write in about the excerpt from Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay that we might do at the People’s Bailout.

Meetings. A gathering organized by Marina Sitrin to introduce people from Strike Debt to Alex, an activist from the Athens Assembly movement. The network of neighborhood assemblies he describes is very impressive, drawing in older people, stay-at-home mothers and other non-activist types. Actions include days at hospitals where cashiers strike and allow people to get health care without paying. Although doctor visit co-pays are still low at €5, in a country with 25% unemployment, it’s still too much for many.

Other actions center on preventing those unable to pay their electricity bills from being cut off. The government has added substantial extra taxes to the bills for the purpose of repaying their loans, nothing at all to do with the utility. So many people who simply can’t pay face losing power. Today yet more cuts were announced, including devastating redundancies to civil servants and a mass lay-off of associate professors at universities. Fully 85% of the new loans that come in exchange for these cuts go directly to the banks and there will be no advantage to the population at large. American politicians say we must not become Greece. The point is rather that austerity policies supported by America have created this new “Greece.” All power to the resisters.

The Trouble is the Banks

On to meet with an editor of the new book The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street. This is a collection of letters posted to the popular Occupy The Boardroom website. Writers presented their stories about dealing with banks or what they think of the banks, their outrage, their wit and their hopes for the future. It’s great stuff and you can get a copy for only $10. Do consider adding a small donation if you can afford it. The meeting discussed presenting the Occupy The Boardroom project to activist groups in Spain who are now taking on Bankia, Santander and other failed Spanish banks. I’m going to Spain next month so I can meet with people in 15M and see what they think.

This was a good prelude to the next stop, a meeting in the NYU Library in support of the Cost of Knowledge campaign. Organized by a group of mathematicians, the campaign protests the extortionate prices of for-profit academic journals published by Elsevier and Springer. These journals price themselves at rates on average ten times higher per page than very similar journals published by learned and scholarly societies. Further, they compel libraries wanting to subscribe to popular, well-used journals to get them in large “bundles” that include extensive subscriptions to far less popular publications. In short, the free labor of academics adds up to an astonishing $3 billion annual profit for Elsevier, taking money out of university and library budgets.

The mathematicians have withdrawn from Elsevier journals in tranches, ranging from total boycott to a minimum refusal to publish there. As of today, over 12,000 have joined the campaign. The other side to this campaign is open access, meaning that anyone, not just people inside universities, should have access to publications. Knowledge is the commons of the information society, the basic tool of immaterial labor. Anyone thinking that maths wouldn’t be a part of such a discussion should have seen the crowd taking Occupy Algebra at the Free University last year.

This is the movement: from activists and organizers to mathematicians and librarians, people have decided that enough is enough. If the capitalist machine insists on eating itself, we have to refuse to participate and find other ways to do what we want. A day like this sounds tiring as I write it down but it was in fact more energizing to feel this wave building.

How and Why to Refuse Debt

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Strike Debt Portland #N3

Everyone knows that the slogan “we are the 99%” changed political discourse worldwide. With even mainstream media now filled with debt stories, it’s only a matter of time before Strike Debt, debt refusal or debt jubilee becomes a meme. The news is all about debt. In Europe, the social movements are laying the way towards a major debt refusal.

Look at what’s in the news just today. The Federal government is finally going to begin overseeing the actions of debt collection agencies. Debt assemblies are filled with stories of people receiving phone calls from these agencies in the middle of the night, about their harassment of family members and friends and the open threats made of physical and even sexual violence. In a foolish loophole, companies doing less than $10 million a year in collections (about 37% in terms of the total dollar amount) will be exempt from these rules.

Following the conviction of banks for mortgage fraud in Nevada, the Federal government is finally joining in here too. Nevada sued the Royal Bank of Scotland for hustling people into mortgages that did not require initial full payments and had a low start-up interest rate. Such options kept the casino of house prices going. However, borrowers who took these options saw a rise in both the principal and then the interest rate after a brief period. And now 60% of mortgages in the state are underwater. Nevada won $42.5 million in damages, $36 million of which will be distributed among homeowners: debt abolition by another name.

Today, too late, the Federal government filed a suit for $1 billion in damages against Bank of America for similar fraudulent mortgage practices. The hustle here was to move the bad mortgages off B of A’s books to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bank made its money on fees and percentages, while the taxpayers got stuck with the bill. Bank of America? Bad for America. Shame that this suit wasn’t filed two years ago so that the administration could have something to show people going into the elections–if Romney wins, the whole thing will disappear of course.

This kind of thing is everywhere:  Illinois today announced that its whole provision of state services has been damaged by debt repayment, resulting:

in decrepit commuter trains and buses, thousands of unsound bridges, 200 hazardous dams and one of the most inequitable public school systems in America.

To sum up: everything we have been saying in Strike Debt, and that I have been writing here about debt, is not the wild delusion of extremists but the increasingly mainstream view of the debt society.

Where we part ways with The New York Times and Co. is over solutions. It’s past time to push matters towards debt refusal. In Europe, they’re planning exactly how to do that. A group of Italian organizations–Attac Italy, Centro Nuovo Modello di Sviluppo, Re: Common, Rivolta il debito, Smonta il debito–have issued a call for a New Public Finance to be debated at the Europe-wide Firenze 10+10 convergence in November.

Their key tactic is a citizen’s audit of the debt. This audit will establish what aspects of public and private debt are “odious” (debt-speak for illegitimate) and therefore to be abolished or rescheduled. Such audits are planned across Europe. The strength of the tactic is that it reverses the morality question. Rather than it being “immoral” not to repay one’s debt, it will be seen to be immoral to issue fraudulent loans of the type made by Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of America. Further, by initiating a public debate on debt via the audit, the movement can win popular opinion before any debt refusal. That refusal would then seem logical, fair and necessary.

Here’s how they put it (their translations which I have not modified):

The creation of the debt was to the benefit of the few and not the majority of people. The non-taxation of financial income, the lack of genuinely progressive tax reform, and the corrupt use of public spending for social control, have benefited a restricted class of people, and the gap between rich and poor in our country has become more profound.

A public and participatory audit – both at national and at local authority level – is necessary for assessing which debts are illegitimate and therefore not to be recognized, and which should be rewarded instead by restructuring the debt composition through an immediate freezing of the payment of interests and a fair, democratic and transparent renegotiation with the creditors.

This proposal will be modified, expanded and developed in Florence but the outlines of the project are clear and powerful.

How would you carry out such an audit? It requires a nationwide debt refusal movement, organized in local chapters, with local autonomy but consistent with an overall set of principles. Such a movement exists in Spain. We’re building it here. It’s happening.

 

Mapping Strike Debt

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Lately everyone has been telling me how tired I look. In part, that’s the cold that everyone in New York seems to have. Partly, it’s a way of saying that I am middle-aged. It’s also that Strike Debt is in full gear and it has been throughout so everyone is, in fact, wiped out. But it continues to be interesting and provocative so we keep doing it.

Over the course of two long discussions yesterday and today, one within Strike Debt and the other at Occupy University, the figure of Strike Debt as a set of intersections arose. It’s not “just” about the debt in other words. It’s about using debt to open new conversations and new approaches that make it possible to organize and conceptualize differently.

So the figure of Strike Debt above is both a map of how debt and debt resistance plays out, and a configuration of how the group might be organized. There are four poles: mutual aid and resistance form one axis, while the local and the (inter)national forms the other. Each site and each axis is in itself a place of intersection and none exists independently. Debt itself, after all, is a set of agreed or compelled relationships. It allows us to explore questions of human interaction, as well as the interface of the human and non-human.

Sets of related terms arise as a result of the interplay across the axes.

Cluster one: Modes of Engagement

Mutual Aid/Jubilee/Gross Domestic Product/Growth/Abolition/The Commons/ Bankruptcy/Refusal/Resistance.

These are different ways of configuring relationships to debt, credit, interest–in short, mediated human interaction in terms of value. They are not linear but reconfigure according to which term in the cluster you stress (like mind-mapping software if you get the geeky reference). So if you stress bankruptcy, it might be as refusal or resistance but it might also have to do with GDP. It might be a way of talking about Jubilee. Growth becomes a question rather than a solution. It might not be growth in conventional terms but growth of leisure time or social services.

Cluster two: Politics of Affect

Calm/Love/Radicalism/Encouraged/Healing/Smile/Feminism/Trust

These are all terms used by participants at the end of the OccU session on Debt and Climate this evening. They are not words often associated with either debt or climate change. The ways in which people worked together to see intersections and commonalities, as well as emerging tactics to engage with these issues, generated this positive sense. Just as it has been crucial to make people feel better about being in debt by talking about it, so does climate change need to seem scaleable. Presenting debt abolition and climate change mitigation as mutually reinforcing solutions–because debt cancellation reduces the need for growth and allows for lower emissions–was more successful than dealing with the two issues separately.

Cluster three: Tactics

 Mapping/Aesthetics/Organizing/Social Cost Accounting/

Stop Shopping/Countervisualizing

Some of these terms might be interchanged with Modes of Engagement and vice-versa: they are intersecting. Mapping, though, emerged repeatedly as a key tactic for debt resistance and climate change mitigation. In short, it’s a fundamental mode of countervisuality. Aesthetics, both in the formal sense relating to artworks, and the generalized sense of bodily perception was also something we wanted to reclaim from the banner to the performance and the street action.

Want to see what this intersection looks like? Check this video promoting the 14N International Strike in Europe:

Austerity Fails

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This is not a headline I expect you will see in many US papers tomorrow, which will be consumed with whatever gaffe, zinger, or body language is supposed to have determined the “debate.” Sadly, facts and ideas have no place in these bizarre performances that increasingly revolve around the unspoken axis of racial tension.

Meanwhile, it has become clear that the austerity policy of our global hegemons is a failure even on its own terms. The Eurostat agency today reported on the economic condition of the Eurozone and the full membership of the European Union. Short story: despite a minimal decline in budget deficits, government debt is up all over the region.

Details:

• Eurozone government debt: €8.22 trillion in 2011, up from €7.833 trillion in 2010

• Eurozone debt/GDP: 87.3% in 2011, up from 85.4% in 2010

• Eurozone deficit: 4.1% of GDP in 2011, down from 6.2% in 2010

• EU government debt: €10.433 trillion in 2011, up from €9.826 trillion

• EU debt/GDP: 82.5% in 2011, up from 80.0% in 2010

• EU deficit: -4.4% of GDP in 2011, down from 6.5% in 2010

It’s interesting to note that the budget deficit in the U. K. is almost as high as in Greece and Spain at 7.8% and fourth highest in the EU overall, yet there are no urgent IMF missions to London, presumably because the Old Etonian government there is already sufficiently hostile to benefits and social investment. Even Germany exceeds the ridiculous target of state debt being 60% of GDP as if this number had any bearing on reality.

However, the Franco-German leadership of the EU has hinted to Ireland that a “retroactive recapitalization” of Irish banks to the tune of €64 billion may be forthcoming–but no promises. This is the “reward” to Ireland for being a model for how to accept austerity so as to save banks over people. Strangely, the Irish, suffering through mass unemployment, recession and collapsed housing markets, are still not celebrating.

In the vocabulary of Goldman Sachs, we are all “muppets,” unsophisticated clients who do not realize how even apparently beneficial deals being presented by the bank in fact generate high levels of profit for the lender. It is some kind of final acting out of hostility that the one clear commitment made by the Republican candidate has been to abolish Sesame Street and its muppets.

Occupy Goldman Sachs

In more news you won’t have heard, a group of occupiers has set up a new Occupy outside the residence of Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The action follows the O13 mic check at 15 Central Park West, where Blankfein lives. Although there was one spurious attempt to evict them by claiming that the sidewalk was in fact in the park, although it is clearly on the far side of the avenue from the park, the small group of occupiers have held on for several days so far.

The People’s Bailout and the Rolling Jubilee

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Here’s an exciting new initiative from Strike Debt: the Rolling Jubilee. This project will raise money by means of a benefit and other donations to buy back debt in default: and abolish it. Whereas the traditional Jubilee has been a gift of the overlord to the subjugated, the Rolling Jubilee is mutual aid by and for the 99%. The project is set to launch at the People’s Bailout on November 15 at Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street, New York (tickets are not yet on sale).

The event casts light on a shadowy area of American financial markets, where banks and other lenders sell debt in default at very low rates between 5 and 10% of face value. The purchasers are normally debt collectors, who then try to extract some percentage above what they paid out of these most destitute of people. A couple of home truths emerge from the very existence of such markets.

Banks and other lenders do just fine with such a return because all debt is a way of creating new money. By getting a return of 5%, the bank has that much more new money rather than having lost the 95% not repaid by the debtor, as we might imagine. Next, as a society, we traffic in this misery. 15% of Americans are now being pursued by debt collectors. The Rolling Jubilee will buy what it debt it can on these markets: and abolish it.

The Bailout will be an evening of guest performers doing music, comedy, and variety together with speed teach-ins and debt-related performances. Local community groups and Occupy workgroups will be there as well and it promises to be an amazing night. It will be livestreamed, so it’s also a Telethon. On the night, there will be ways to donate to the Jubilee, and all money so donated will be used to abolish debt. The target is $50,000 which would abolish an amazing $1 million of debt.

That’s a drop in the ocean of debt, of course. It’s just a beginning, both to the Jubilee and to the awareness of how debt operates in this society. If we collectively decide to be active both in abolishing debt–$5 abolishes $100 of debt!–and in opening a new discussion about the kind of country that makes money selling debt, then the Jubilee will be rolling.

Questions will be asked about how exactly the abolition will be carried out and I don’t as yet know the answers to them but I’ve been told that once the mechanism has been fully prepared, it will be announced. Already, it does seem clear that it’s not really possible to target any one person’s debt for abolition. I did a Google search myself and quickly came up with a company called LoansMLS, who are willing to sell me debts as varied as $30 million of second mortgages in California at 10% of face value or a $36,500 home improvement loan at 8%. But you can’t find out specific information about the debtors and that’s presumably the last vestige of privacy they/we have left.

What matters here are not so much the technicalities of this process as the debate it needs to open about debt as a commodity. For all the rhetoric about the morality of repaying debt, banks don’t seem to need more than these small percentage returns to be ahead. A debt abolition on a general scale would be the greatest stimulus to the economy imaginable, as people who had hitherto scraped every penny together they had to send to banks that don’t even need it, would now be able to spend that on goods and services. That’s 15% of the entire population that could be helped, even before we get to underwater mortgages, Federal student loans (which are not resold) and high-interest credit-card debt.

Beyond even that benefit, it’s time to talk about what kind of a society we really want to live in. Have we so little imagination that the only possible discussions are whether or not to cut taxes for the wealthy, or who said the word “terror” when? Are we not better than that? Clear your calendar for the People’s Bailout, an evening a year to the day after the mean-spirited and illegal eviction of Occupy Wall Street, when we look ahead to our better futures.

The Art History of Debt

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Here’s the outline of an art history told from the point of view of debt. I devised this for a session of Occupy University held in an art gallery and at first it was just a bit of a joke but it came to seem that you really can tell the history of canonical Western art as a story about debt and commodification.

This painting by Perugino is typical of the transformation of pictorial space created during the Italian Renaissance, which is when the classic “Renaissance to Modern” art history survey class begins. Perspective depends on drawing all lines to a vanishing point, in this case located in the door of the church. This visual element reinforces the meaning of the painting in which Christ anoints Peter as the leader of his “church” to come. Visually, it depends on a space of nothingness, the vanishing point.

At the same period, this nothingness came to be drawn as zero, using the Arabic numeral ‘0’ for the first time. During the Middle Ages, zero was considered immoral precisely because it represented nothing, whereas God was everywhere and so there could not be a space of nothing. By the same token, interest, money that comes from nothing, was immoral. Zero was then instrumental both to the system of visual representation and the emergent capitalist banking system based on debt that paid for it.

Pieter Klaesz, "Still Life"

Pieter Klaesz, “Still Life”

Jumping ahead as we do in these rapid surveys, here’s a classic seventeenth century Dutch still life by Klaesz. It represents a debt financed economy on a set of levels. First, it depicts a group of commodities, including exotic imports like olives and lemons from the South of Europe. The pocket watch represents both advanced technology and the new importance of accurate time to commerce. Second, the audience is taken to be those people who know what these things are for and how to use them–even today proper use of cutlery and glassware in fine dining restaurants is very intimidating. So it reinforces the cultural as well as finance capital of the painting-owning class. The painting is itself a commodity, of course, and it indicates the patron’s refinement that he can afford this level of technical skill. In short, the painting creates a reality-effect in which speculation and the commodity are taken as the material basis of the concrete.

Audubon, The Yellow Cuckoo

John James Audubon, the ornithologist, by contrast turned from debt to natural history. Exiled from Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) by the 1791 revolution, Audubon later started a mill in Kentucky but went bankrupt during the financial panic of 1819 and was imprisoned for debt. On his release, without any money, he decided to travel down the Mississippi and draw birds. Audubon had then gone through the collapse of two economic systems before learning how to sustain himself in the emerging knowledge economy of the nineteenth century.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of Theodore Duret

The history of modern art is nothing but the history of debt: indebted artists desperate to sell work, bankers and financiers becoming their dealers, other bankers and financiers buying the work. Above is a portrait by the independently-wealthy Manet of the banker-turned-art-dealer Duret. There’s a little miniature still life at bottom right as an acknowledgement that the painting depicts the new world of commodities and capital, in its mix of seventeenth-century Spanish Absolutism (via Velazquez, the grey background, the painterly style) and the painting of modern life (via Baudelaire, the depiction of modern dress and the bourgeois).

Degas, Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873

Here’s Degas, son of a banker, painting his uncle the cotton speculator in his New Orleans office during Reconstruction. The people in the room are in debt because they lent money to the Confederacy during the Civil War. They’re about to rise up in support of “Redemption,” meaning white supremacy and the end of Reconstruction. Fittingly, the scene is dominated the white whiteness of the cotton itself, for which so much blood and tears were spilt.

John Singer Sargent 

Sargent paints the wife of a banker. A scandal ensues. Not for the first or last time, a woman becomes a debt-financed commodity.

Paul Cézanne, Portrait of his Father

Here’s Cézanne’s portrait of his father, a banker, reading the newspaper to see how his affairs are going. Patriarchal debt-financed authority here literally enabled the avant-garde.

Matisse, Souvenir de Biskra

Finally, a place where it all comes together. Matisse said of his work that he wanted it to be

an armchair for a tired businessman.

What it shows is a woman from the North African town of Biskra, a French colony, who we are supposed to think was a sex worker. So calling her a “souvenir” has the usual bought object connotation and the sense of a fantasized memory–the real woman did not have hips like that, for example. It’s colonial speculation at work–business–interacting with the sense of entitled play and commodified heteronormative desire to create the new normal of the imperialist world-view.

These paintings are not “just” about debt or just explicable by debt, of course. There is nonetheless a coherent way to tell the story of Western art from the zero of perspective to the emergence of the debt-financed dealer and today’s speculative global art market that is informed by the rise of the debt society. I wonder if anyone’s going to teach it?

Remember Sankara: Abolish Debt

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Today is the 25th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso. His killing came a few months after he had called for African nations to go on debt strike against multinational lenders. That’s not a coincidence. So as part of the global week of action on debt, the Spanish 15M movement has called on us to remember Sankara’s message today. Of course, the best legacy we could offer would be to accomplish debt abolition.

Thomas Sankara

So, first, hit the link and get Fela Kuti’s amazing tribute to Sankara playing in the background. Now let’s review the basics. The 15 M statement reads:

Thomas Sankara was president of Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987. Sankara, a soldier, came to power via a coup, but unlike other presidents whocame to power by the same means, he always prioritised the welfare of the people of Burkina Faso. He nationalized land and distributed it among the peasants, nationalized minerals, launched immunization and literacy campaigns, banned genital mutilation and defended by all means equal rights for women… and confronted the dictatorship of debt.

This is what he said at the Conference of African Unity in 1987:

The debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure. Those who led us to indebting ourselves had gambled as if in a casino. As long as they had gains, there was no debate. But now that they suffer losses, they demand repayment. And we talk about crisis. No,…, they played, they lost — that’s the rule of the game, and life goes on.

Now we might wish that we had a President who talked in this fashion. Sankara’s analysis saw debt as a continuation of colonialism into a new form:

Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before…Debt is neo-colonialism in which the colonizers have transformed themselves into a form of technical assistant….Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa.

Sankara went so far as to call this form of debt a “financial slavery.” Since Strike Debt and the other debt resistance movements have gained attention, there have been those who have wanted to criticize them for making this analysis. The critics take upon themselves the name of the (neo)colonized but ignore this African legacy.

Such internal squabbles are irrelevant. The important point is this. Just as the Haitian Revolution drove the French Revolution into its radical phase; just as the Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions produced the Euro-American wave of 1968; so now the debt abolition movement is implementing decolonial politics in the metropole. In short: throughout the colonial era (since 1492), there have been successive waves of radicalism, from the colony to the imperial “center.” This is not surprising because it is in the colony that imperial power is practiced and exercised.

The “neo” in neo-liberalism thus comes from using such colonial techniques in the regions of that “center” that are now deemed dispensable. After the financialization wave swept through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries in the 1970s and 80s, the banks turned their attention to Heavily Indebted Poor People in the late 90s and 2000s. With the crash of that tactic in 2008, extraction is now concentrated on those regions of Europe that were considered “Oriental” in the nineteenth century (Greece, Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal), as well as people of color in the United States.

And as Sankara said, it seems that

the crisis gets worse each time that the popular masses get more and more conscious of their rights against exploiters.

So Sankara proposed that, against the G7 (as it was then) and the Club of Rome, African nations should form their own “club,” a united front against debt. He stressed that European and African masses were not antagonistic but were rather being exploited by the same people. Unity was essential, he noted, adding that if Burkina Faso was the only nation not to pay, he would not be there for the next conference. As indeed he was not.

Sankara memorial

The final message in Sankara’s speech was the necessity of African mutual aid. Rather than exporting raw materials to the developed world and importing finished goods, Sankara called for an internal African market. Such a market would still be huge but it would allow for disarmament and development. This point is crucial: debt abolition was not, in Sankara’s terms, a “provocation” but a crucial first step towards a sustainable regional economy that was not centered on war.

It has not happened. Yet. Perhaps the wave of refusal spreading across South Africa against these same, unchanged conditions will become Sankara’s legacy. Let’s do what we can to make it happen.

 

The Global Day Against Debt

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On this global day of debt action, OWS had what most people involved thought was one of the best days of action for a while, in terms of targets hit, lots of funs and no arrests:) Oh, and two banner drops at Columbus Circle and Rockefeller Center and a fun afterparty at Times Square.

Debt Is the New Colonialism

The convergence was at 4pm and almost at once a banner was dropped from the current installation surrounding the Columbus statue. It read: “Debt Is the New Colonialism.” It was not up for very long but it was photographed by many of us and far more tourists and passers-by. A session on the “Future Without Debt” from Free University followed and at 6pm an Assembly celebrated the Global Day of Action. I had the fun experience of mic checking the French call for today’s action– in French! The crowd gamely followed and cheered when we got to la resistance.

Yo Soy 132 in New York today

People from Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, the Japanese anti-nuclear movement, and Quebec’s student movement reported on actions in their locations and we heard the news from Spain.

The first action stop took the gathering of about 300 people to Goldman Sachs chair Lloyd Blankfein’s residence.

O13 chez Blankfein

Some of us got inside while casseroling and after the police sealed the building, the gathering mic checked the “vampire squid” CEO. Off to a selection of one per cent destinations across the mid-town area, casseroling all the way. We checked in at the Plaza Hotel.

Casseroling at the Plaza

Given a power lift by a passing performance artist, I led a mic check of the global day of debt to the patrons of this prime one per cent venue. New York’s “finest” were not thrilled and used a good deal of force to clear the doorways. So off we went to Tiffany’s, who took one look and closed their security doors (below).

Sorry, Audrey, Tiffany’s is now closed

Perhaps the best received action of the night came when some people managed to hang the Occupy Wall Street banner off the balcony at Rockefeller Plaza, right in front of Rockefeller Center. Sorry the picture isn’t that good, I was on the other side of the skating rink

One of the things that was fun about all this was that, even as stores and restaurants closed their doors, their staff smiled at us, waved support and gave surreptitious thumbs-up. Even at Gucci. It turns out that those who see the one per cent close up have no particular love for them.

So we made our way casseroling to Times Square, where so many gathered last year. A happy afterparty waved at themselves in the Jumbotron and celebrated a successful action that did not put anyone in jail.

If anyone wants to play Where’s Waldo, your correspondent is visible somewhere in this picture.

The easy judgment is that there were of course far fewer people in Times Square this year than during last years O15 mass rally. But if you count it a different way, there were far more. Because people all over the world held rallies and marches today and did so on similar themes and ideas. There were 100,000 in Madrid alone. By way of confirmation, here’s the call from the US, Spain, France and Portugal:

From Strike Debt/OWS

To the financial institutions of the world, we have only one thing to say: we owe you NOTHING!

To our friends, families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

To the people of the world, we say: join the resistance, you have nothing to lose but your debts.

From: Plataforma Auditoria Ciudadana de la Deuda (PACD) España

A las instituciones financieras del mundo, una sola cosa para deciros: ¡No os debemos NADA! A nuestras familias, comunidades, a la humanidad y nuestro entorno natural que hacen nuestras vidas posibles, os lo debemos todo.

A todos aquello@s que habitan el mundo, les decimos: uniros a la resistencia, no tenéis nada que perder excepto vuestras deudas.

From: Democratie Réelle Maintenant! Paris

Aux institutions financières du monde, nous n’avons qu’une seule chose à dire : nous ne vous devons RIEN !

A nos amis, familles, communautés, à l’humanité et à notre environnement qui rendent nos vies possibles, nous vous devons tout.

A celles et ceux qui peuplent le monde, nous disons : rejoignez la résistance, vous n’avez rien d’autre à perdre que vos dettes.

From: Primavera Global em Portugal

Às instituições financeiras do mundo, só temos uma coisa a dizer: não pagamos o que não devemos!

Aos nossos amigos, famílias, comunidades, à humanidade e à natureza que torna a nossa vida possível, devemos tudo.

Aos povos do mundo, apelamos: juntem-se à resistência, não têm nada a perder, apenas as vossas dívidas.

Yes, that’s right: we’re all saying the same thing. We owe you, the financial institutions, nothing. We owe you, our loved ones, friends and communities, everything.

It’s a moment.

Who Occupies the Occupiers?

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How do movements grow? How do they relate to established institutions? Today we had a case in point at the Creative Time summit under the title “Confronting Inequity.” Creative Time, the well-established and regarded arts agency with a social justice mission, has held these events for the past four years. This year’s event incorporated a theme on “Occupations,” involved many social movement activists, but also got itself into an entanglement with Israel. Aside from the issue itself, the ramifications created a form of Rorschach test for how people feel about the movement.

So first the issue. Creative Time (CT) announced that it had a series of “in-depth partners” for these events. One was the Israeli Center for Digital Art. While the ICDA seems relatively progressive by Israeli standards, it is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Sport and the town of Holon. This connection was first discovered by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen, whom I have often written about here, and I was really looking forward to meeting. In a statement that was widely circulated on sites such as Electronic Intifada, Mosireen announced that they could not participate:

The invitation to participate that we recieved from Creative Time initially impressed us with its language, claiming to be a response to “a growing community of cultural practitioners working in the realm of social justice and socially engaged art practice” and exploring “the impact of wealth inequity across the globe as it engenders totalitarianism and undermines democracy.” This language and other similar statements about democracy, equality and revolution were encouraging to us. We believed that the discourse around these topics was finally shifiting from its traditionally unjust and orientalist political coordinates.

It’s true that no money directly came from Israel to New York and a rapid name change to “screening partners” was implemented. Mosireen were nonetheless not arguing about equivalency. Their attention was on the Israeli Center for Digital Art and its involvement with the state:

After the Second Intifada [ICDA director] Mr. Danon said “we started doing projects that were aiming at communicating with artists/curators working in similar conditions in the region (Palestinian authority, Arab states) as well as in the Balkan area.” This inappropriate emphasis on symmetry runs through their work ever since. The deaths of 13 IDF soldiers (4 from friendly fire) during the 08/09 assault on Gaza is not a “similar condition” to the killing of 1,417 Palestinians, of which at least 313 were children.

You might not agree with this argument. There has nonetheless been an ongoing call for “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” since 2004, supported by major US intellectual figures like Judith Butler, as any progressive person must be aware. If I was organizing an event calling “Confronting Inequity,” I would not go anywhere near a partnership with an Israeli group. If for some reason I had to do so, I would surely have wanted to have many Palestinian organizations involved as well but CT missed that call, although there were screening partners in Morocco and Abu Dhabi.

Unnoticed by Mosireen and others, there was also another partner in Israel at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, founded by the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, which seems fully integrated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has had the Prime Minister visit in 2006, and so on. More than the ICDA, this partner seems troubling.

Following Mosireen’s withdrawal in regards to the ICDA, the hip-hop duo Rebel Diaz withdrew in solidarity.

So at the opening of the Summit, CT president Anne Pasternak had the difficult task of announcing these withdrawals  but did not do so in a way that made it clear to the audience what had happened, other than that it was over Israel-Palestine. Curator Nato Thompson followed and said that while CT “get it” about the issue, they wanted “to get everything on the table” and discuss it. Which would entail a screening partner in Palestine, even if you accept that argument.

The issue was widely discussed on Twitter (#CTsummit) but did not make the platform until the editorial team from Tidal, the OWS theory journal that I have again often discussed here, had their moment in the segment called “Occupations.” Amin Husain, a well-known figure at OWS, talked from his own background as a Palestinian. He recalled debates over whether to use the name “occupy” that had been decided in favor of reclaiming the language but not, as is often suggested, without being aware of Palestine. He noted that Israel is an “economy set up to benefit the elite at the expense of the indigenous,” while pointing out from direct experience of the negotiations that nationhood for Palestine has always come with conditions of subscribing to neo-liberalism. Tidal raised the question of the boycott but did not call for people to walk out. They used the remainder of their time to discuss what they had wanted to talk about: the Strike Debt campaign and a video they had made to show, which is below:

In a keynote in the afternoon, Queens Museum curator Tom Finkelpearl tried to intervene into the debate by sniping that if you boycotted a Creative Time event, there was really nowhere left for you to go. There were those who clearly agreed with this sentiment (see here, though, for notes on later presentations that supported the boycott which I didn’t see–scroll all the way down).

Before this view could take hold, it was undermined by the Spanish artist Fernando Garcia-Dory, winner of a prize for Art and Social Change. Garcia-Dory, who has done remarkable work with shepherds, giving attention to the Spanish Federation of Shepherds,  which he describes as

a social system design that allow[s] an excluded community to get together, share worldviews and problem analisys, pose alternatives for action and unite[s] voices to get listened [to].

He further suggested that the assemblage formed by the activist artist working on a social justice project in a given community constitutes the artwork in itself, which has further mutual relations with questions of audience and content. Nowhere present in the diagrams he used to visualize this relation was the art gallery, museum or institution. Such realizations lie behind both the turn to performance and the occupy movement. If we have already seen a vogue for institutionalizing performance, to very mixed effect, we should be cautious about institutionalizing occupation.

That’s not to say that the social movement has to stay literally and metaphorically outside, but that, in the manner hinted at by Garcia-Dory, we have to build our own institutions. How those institutions are funded and networked cannot be treated as matters of convenience, as we have so often done in the past. We should not be preachy about it but we have to consider the much harder question posed to us by Slavoj Zizek in his keynote: what kind of future is that we want? And by Occupy lights, that means we have to act as if the future is now.

In short, it’s not just debt abolition. It’s what does a world without debt look like? How do we start living it? Who should we talk to in this discussion? The real shame of the whole imbroglio at the Summit was that the conversation could not begin there. But it will begin tomorrow across the world with the 13O day of action and week against debt. Get outside.