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Strike Debt's Rolling Jubilee

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Strike Debt's Rolling Jubilee Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee The Promise and the Performativity of Financial Contracts Christian Riley Nagler Figure 1. The People’s Bailout,Strike Debt’s variety show and telethon, 2012. (Photo by Stacy Lanyon) Around the time of the global financial crisis of 2008 relatively few people in North America knew much about the wider economics of student debt. The issue had garnered very little media attention. In the years following the crisis, however, before the news cycle was consumed by the later stages of the election of the 45th president, it was quite the contrary. Every day saw a major national or international news segment about the shocking rise in rates of student debt since the 1980s, featuring many stories of ordinary people “shackled by unpayable debt” (Beach and Chessum 2012). At that time, it became clear to many that there was a severe asym- metry between the .06 percent interest rate they received from their bank savings accounts (not Christian Nagler is a PhD student in Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing has appeared in Performance Research, Art Journal, Filip, Art Practical, and SFMoma’s Open Space. His performances and artwork have been presented at the Tate Liverpool, Oakland Museum of CA, and elsewhere. His dissertation research is about global cultures of speculation and performing the long-term economic future. [email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 62:1 (T237) Spring 2018. ©2018 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00722 by guest on 27 September 2021 enough to keep pace with inflation) and the 8 to 20 percent compounding interest they paid on their loans or credit cards (enough to double the principal in a few years). A strange hydrau- lic seemed to be at work in the credit-abundant world: the poor investing their resources in the security of capital — the banks — and generally losing; and the rich investing their excess capi- tal in the desperation of the poor for an exponential rate of return, essentially renting the gap between wages and the cost of living (and learning). The issue was at high ebb when Bernie Sanders made it a key platform issue of his campaign, which helped disseminate the possibility of education finance reform to wider publics. Loans with high interest rates and inflexible repayment schedules, taken on by students in pursuit of degrees that fail to result in stable employment, have led to the widespread critique of institutions of higher education as “engines of inequality” instead of the “great equalizers” they were conceived to be in the progressive age (Kahlenberg, et al. 2012). It is now a common idea in European leftist thought that the American university has been the model and laboratory for neoliberal governmentality, foreclosing any form of social solidarity and “produc(ing) a specific form of subjectivation,” training students to “consider themselves human capital” (Lazzarato 2013:70; Brown 2015:41). In the midst of all this attention, during the last two years of the Obama administration, the US Congress considered a number of unprecedented bills designed to relieve the debt burden of students in certain demographics. We witnessed the first legally constituted erasure of mass amounts of federal student loans, along with new sets of regulations, due to the bankruptcy and subsequent criminal investigation of the largest chain of for-profit colleges, Corinthian Colleges, LLC. This momentum was not quite sufficient to make the issue of Trump University (or other similar licensing agreements taking the nominal form of edu- cational institutions) into a major rallying point; and now the US has a Secretary of Education unquestioningly committed to opening the education market to competition by cleansing it of the public interest (Barkan 2017; Dayen 2017; Wong 2017). But perhaps the critical energy is just, for now, on reserve. One (such as the editorial board of The Economist) might argue that the momentary polit- ical emphasis on the long tail and everyday ethics of the global debt crisis was an inevitable result of “productivity stagnation” in the education industry, a market adjustment of the fair price of a service that has reached saturation point in a rapidly shifting cultural and technolog- ical landscape (Economist 2014). This argument contends that rising student debt is the result of artificially inflated prices caused by federal subsidies on the one hand (assistance as well as loan money and infrastructural development) and desperation-induced consumer fraud on the other. For-profit schools and educational start-ups struggle to compete with “legacy” institu- tions, whose competitive advantages in the accumulation of prestige were bolstered from early on by access to government benefits. Educational businesses are forced to aggressively recruit consumers (students) in ways that run counter to prevailing educational norms, promising them futures that will never come to pass; it may look like predation but it’s actually — in the language of economization — niche marketing for the knowledge market. What’s interesting, however, is that the leftist political sphere emerging out of the Occupy movement that began with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, shares parts of this diagnosis, but for very different reasons. The question of whether the ongoing “crisis” is the result of a “dis-equilibriated” field of market mechanisms or is instead the consequence of critical attention to the ongoing financialization of education on all levels, both public and private, is a question that describes a political rift; and partly at stake is the role of agency in the performance of resistance. On one side of this rift is the economic prognosis I just summarized and on the other is the sense that a small group of scholars, activists, and artists were instrumental in catapulting the issue of debt from a drearily endured reality into a politically contested state of affairs, one that touches on the very foundations of capitalist reproduction of the social order, or in Joseph Vogl’s words, “a system of mutual obligations in which the temporal structure of financial con- tracts sets the standard for all contractual agreements and for social cohesion itself” (2015:83). Christian Riley Nagler 114 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00722 by guest on 27 September 2021 In other words, through performative practices, debt resisters established a public pedagogy of financial culture at the same time as they revealed tactical vulnerabilities in the capitalist sys- tem’s reliance on a continuous exchange of contracts to reproduce the structures of socially necessary institutions. A group of debt resisters known as Strike Debt initiated a successful and expanding opposition to certain symptoms of debt-financed capital, specifically the circulation- dependent interest cycles of student loans and medical debts, which are decisive factors in push- ing the North American lower-middle-class and working poor into poverty, as studies have shown (Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook 2000). Strike Debt is an organization of artists, activists, and academics originally based in New York, with subsequent branches and affiliated groups all over the world; as of 2017 the larg- est and most active branches are in the Bay Area and Portland. Affiliate branches have acted autonomously, but they share the strategy of building social solidarity among everyday debtors towards the goal of forming a bloc, or union, that might leverage the collective value that their debts represent in the financial system, and to make demands of that system with the threat of a mass strike. The New York branch, organized by members of various Occupy Wall Street working groups in 2011, disbanded in 2014, and some of the original members — Thomas Gokey, Laura Hanna, and Astra Taylor — went on to form The Debt Collective, which has since focused on more legislative and legal strategies for canceling debt and for delegitimizing insti- tutions (such as for-profit colleges, bail bond companies, and payday lenders) that manipulate the availability of credit to evade responsibility to their stakeholders and to target vulnerable populations with high interest rates and opaque contracts (The Debt Collective 2017). Strike Debt’s motto is “You are not a loan” and they aim to challenge finance capitalists’ use of the moral-obligatory power of debt to “keep us isolated, ashamed, and afraid” (Strike Debt 2012). These instrumentalized affective conditions, they claim, are what have allowed the human obligations of kinship, friendship, and community to be displaced by financial bond- age — and they wager that tactical combinations of “direct action, research, education and the arts” can overturn this widespread subjection. Early in the movement’s development, the foun- dational site for all of Strike Debt’s tactics was the Debtor’s Assembly, where people gathered in person to offer public testimonies regarding the quantity of debt they held, how it was incurred, and the ways it had constrained their choices, troubled their relationships, and prevented their flourishing. At these assemblies, a specific type of storytelling emerged, in which speakers struc- tured their life stories according to legacies of debt and the affective conditions surrounding them. Stories of indebtedness often culminated in cathartic climaxes as speakers described the moments when they registered that what had seemed like extreme levels of personal indebted- ness were in fact shared by millions of others across race, class, and gender lines, and that these individual debts were linked inextricably to larger financial forms — municipal and sovereign debts — which impacted their lives in less visible ways and had been used strategically by eco- nomic elites as a primary means of accumulating wealth. Akin to coming-out testimonies, these stories articulated the moments when shame was transformed into solidarity.
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