“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Queer Ecologies on Student Debt

Such a powerful post, all it needs is this link.

2 comments:

Thomas Gokey said...

I'm very interested to see if we can't actually pull of a large scale debt strike. It means taking on a huge risk and requires a ton of coordination to make it work. But it would work if we could pull it off.

cgerrish said...

{take two}

To sign one's name to a pledge to not repay debt puts one in an interesting moral dilemma. The language of morality and debt are inextricably intertwined. On the surface, to be moral, is to pay one's debts. The mechanisms for forgiveness (Jubilee) exist outside the system and are rarely invoked across the classes. As David Graeber notes, the rich are very kind to each other with regard to debt, as are the poor.

I wrote a post back in September about 'Systems of Forgiveness' in an age where computers remember everything:

http://blog.echovar.com/?p=4210

Cheers.