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Arabica Robusta

I cite: Is debt the connective thread for OWS? - 0 views

jdeanicite.typepad.com/...onnective-thread-for-ows-.html

economic adjustment structural neoclassical theory crisis social neoliberalism debt jodi dean

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • An emphasis on debt could be politically promising -- particularly as it helps people understand the trap of capitalism, the way the system feeds off them, the way it relies on debt at multiple levels and establishes terms of credit and debit for the benefit of the capitalist class. A politics of debt seems especially posed to reach a middle class that compensated for its declining income with credit (that said, household indebtedness has declined since the beginning of the great recession even as part of that decline can be attributed to mortgage defaults). 
  • there seem to be some challenges or potential drawbacks to a political strategy based on debt:
  • It is difficult to overcome the individual dimension of debt: the individual quality of debt (credit card, mortgage, student loan) presents a collective action problem.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Focusing on student loan debt too easily slides into the language of attacking higher education already prominent on the right.
  • The construction of debt as a problem can easily elide with right-wing attacks on deficits, the national debt, too much government spending, etc. The mistake is to treat government debt as the same thing as individual and household debt, and vice versa. 
  • when we contrast debtors with proletarians: the former consume, the latter produce. Admittedly, in the face of CDOs, debts become a kind of production--but it's fake, empty, a ponzi scheme, production without production. 
  • The most pressing common issue in the present is climate change. This affects everyone. The rich are currently dispossessing the people of our collective wealth, positioning themselves so that they are mobile, comfortable, defended, impermeable.  The rest of us will face the ravages of weather, drought, flood, famine, shortages, disease. The only way to deal with any of this is collectively -- beginning from the premise that food, shelter, health, and knowledge belong to all in common. Anyone who thwarts this is an enemy of the people.
  • A politics that focuses on debt seems to treat people as failed capitalists -- even if debtors are not shopaholics or spendthrifts, that is, even if debt is a matter of self-investment, or purchasing in order to benefit one's self, children, household, the model seems too close to the one that treats people as human capital, the homo economicus of liberal and neoliberal theory.
  • Arabica Robusta on 16 Jul 12
     
    An emphasis on debt could be politically promising -- particularly as it helps people understand the trap of capitalism, the way the system feeds off them, the way it relies on debt at multiple levels and establishes terms of credit and debit for the benefit of the capitalist class. A politics of debt seems especially posed to reach a middle class that compensated for its declining income with credit (that said, household indebtedness has declined since the beginning of the great recession even as part of that decline can be attributed to mortgage defaults). 
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