036: Debt Abolition: A Battle Plan For The Future

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If aliens could beam to our shores with recording devices, a savage irony would immediately and immaculately light up their antennas: not only does our global society fail to provide The Golden Square to every person on Earth, humans are increasingly forced deeper and deeper into debt for those fundamental rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education. The debt-staircase has become grossly absurd and toxically tragic—a ruinous prank laid upon us at an ever-accelerating rate since the dawn of neoliberalism. From cradle to grave, we’re trapped on a noxious treadmill of Debt Achievement Goals: School Lunch Debt, College Debt, Credit Card Debt, Auto Loan Debt, Housing Debt, Medical Debt, and more. And even after death, debt collectors hound our family members and moralize about unpaid balances. As David Graeber once said, “As it turns out, we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts. Only</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">some</span></em> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">of us do.” And who is that “some of us,” exactly? Well, certainly not the 1%; rather only the rest of us—the great unwashed 99%—as we resign to rumination and self-blame for not being entrepreneurial enough. As capitalism forces us to pay for our own existence (while it indiscriminately tears through the Earth’s remaining ecologies), we must seriously question the moral plea to “pay all debts.” And as it turns out, there is another path that leads us away from Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS). Forged from relationships built during the prefigurative struggles of Occupy Wall Street —The Debt Collective has published an urgent and instructive new manifesto tackling the emergency of now:</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">In this episode, Matt</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">&</span></em> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">Jesse consider the emancipatory ideas of this importa