The Occupy Student Debt Campaign Could Force Positive Change

ACED believes that citizen action is the key to positive social change.  Thus, we concluded in our Blueprint for Change that people should not rely exclusively on existing mechanisms for change, but should also “devise new strategies to change our political system and to create a more just society.”  One important example of this is the Occupy Student Debt Campaign.

The Campaign’s “goal is to restore free public higher education in the US through… student debt refusal.”  Participating student debtors “pledge to stop making student loan payments after one million of us have signed.”  The pledge is a “nonbinding promise to withhold loan payments after a critical mass of refusers (1 million) has signed on.”  The Campaign’s website also allows Faculty and other non-debtors to pledge their support.

When one considers the amount of money owed in student loans, it is obvious that refusing—or the threat of refusal—to pay has the potential to become a powerful bargaining chip.  The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that America’s student loan debt is around $870 billion (in comparison, Greece’s total debt is less than $500 billion) in the hands of 37 million borrowers.  Assuming that one million borrowers make the pledge and follow through with it—and that they each carries the average amount of debt—they would withhold over $23.5 billion, not including interest that would accrue over time.  $23.5 billion would give the federal government a lot of incentive to impose regulations that ease the burdens on student debtors and reduce the cost of education for future students to make the participants agree to pay off their debt.  Through a creative, collective action like the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, then, people’s debt can be a tool for reform and not just a personal burden.

Of course, refusing to pay one’s debt is a decision that may have serious personal consequences, which the Campaign recognizes.  The Campaign even encourages people to consider seeking independent advice before making any final decision.  However, it is a social justice campaign, and successful movements for social justice will always demand some risks and sacrifices.

On the one hand there are systemic risks, such as seizure of assets and/or a bad credit rating.  On the other hand, there are social consequences that people may face for having the courage to participate in the Campaign.  In some ways, it is this social pressure to re-pay that is the most challenging to overcome.  Professor George Caffentzis of the University of Southern Maine has found that a key reason that prior debt-abolition movements have failed is the shame many debtors feel about their situation.  The shame “is profoundly anti-political because it turns the collective problem of debt repayment into an individual issue to be dealt with one person at a time.”  Thus, it is no wonder that there is such strong social pressure to repay, just as there generally is a strong social pressure to conform.

The tendency of social norms to extinguish political movements speaks precisely to one of the most important aspects of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign – that it “offer[s] debtors a collective alternative to suffering the consequences of debt and default on their own.”  Nearly everyone is challenged to stand alone, even for what they believe is right; the Occupy Campaign shows participants that they are not alone – and that is incredibly empowering.

Moreover, participants can take heart knowing that the system of debt they are fighting is unjust.  There is no inherent obligation to repay a debt.  This has been understood for millennia.  Plato in his Republic showed that justice sometimes requires the repudiation of debt, observing, “Everyone would surely agree that if a sane man lends weapons to a friend and then asks them back when he is out of his mind, the friend shouldn’t return them, and wouldn’t be acting justly if he did.”  Accordingly, after reviewing the effect of the student-debt system on our society and the public interest served by repudiating it, Professor Caffentzis concluded that refusing to repay one’s student debt “is in principle as just as one’s refusal to return a borrowed loaded gun to a maddened friend who intends to murder and then commit suicide with it.”

Professor David Blacker put it this way:

“[E]ducational debt repudiation is in principle justified because educational debt is in principle illegitimate.  Sure, it is legitimate within the context of hyper-financialized capitalism and the monopolist rent collectors who are kings of that particular hill.  But why should those at the bottom accede to such an unjust topography?  It is time to reject the network of assumptions that make student borrowing seem ‘normal,’ ‘a good investment,’ in short, as a one-way obligation of borrower to creditor in which the former makes a ‘free’ choice to purchase a commodity for which she must now pay—and pay and pay.

Indeed, for some people paying their student loans equates to accepting a fundamentally unjust system in which the powerless many serve the powerful few.  For them, repudiation is right.  It is also smart.  If enough people threaten the powerful few with a refusal to pay off loans, they might obtain the power to force a change.

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