Recently, the Biden administration announced the cancellation of student loan debt for millions of Americans making under a certain amount of money per year and extended the moratorium for payments until the end of the year, which was started during the previous administration as America shut down in the face of the pandemic.
The decision sparked outrage from people who had paid off their loans, who never had a loan and paid for college outright, or those who fear there will be a huge economic fallout as universities raise tuition or convince students it will be okay because their debts will be forgiven anyway.
As someone who owes a huge amount of student loan debt, the debt forgiveness announcement came with great relief, because I make a lot less than $150,000 per year and even with the three-year deferment of payments brought about by the pandemic, the interest continued to accrue. Even if I pay $50 per month, I will be paying on the student loan for 30 years, despite the fact that I graduated from college in 1988, because, like many Americans, I defaulted on that loan within the first three years after graduating.
In October 2011 Jeff Madrick wrote a dispatch from Zuccoti Park for New York Review of Books. Three weeks after protesters had first converged there under the banner “Occupy Wall Street,” he found that the movement - initially mocked in the media for its youth and unseriousness - was coming into its own. “It is likely their direct influence on the nation’s lawmakers and the media is underestimated,” Madrick noted, speculating that they would eventually “develop specific demands, or perhaps a set of desired reforms” - reforms like “more equal educational possibilities, and student loan relief.”
At the time, calls for student loan forgiveness seemed destined to end in compromise. Two weeks after Madrick’s essay was published, President Obama ordered that, “starting in 2014, borrowers will be able to reduce their monthly student loan payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income.” The Occupy activists persisted - forming the Debt Collective, a union of debtors; launching debt strikes; and buying up millions of dollars of debt and cancelling it. And in 2020, Astra Taylor, one of the founders of Debt Collective and a veteran of Occupy, wrote a qualified endorsement of Joe Biden for president, observing:
Under pressure from activists - with whom lines of communication are at least open - he has made concessions on a range of issues, including the Debt Collective’s demand for student debt cancellation. (He has committed to $10,000 of student loan forgiveness per borrower and promised bankruptcy reform in favor of debtors, a striking reversal for the former senator from Delaware, the nation’s credit card capital.)
And so, recently, President Biden announced a plan for the Department of Education to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student debt for anyone making less than $150,000 a year.
“Responsible citizens did not like Occupy,” wrote the artist Molly Crabapple in September 2021, observing the tenth anniversary of the protests in New York Review of Books. “At a moment when cops were gleefully cracking skulls, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show devoted an entire segment to mocking the occupiers. We were stupid, dirty hippies.... We had iPhones and drank lattes, like hypocrites. We knew nothing. We didn’t want to work. We did not participate sufficiently in electoral politics. We did not make proper demands.”
Like Taylor, Crabapple had been a regular in Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011. In her reflections on the experience of the protests (accompanied by some of the art she made there), she recalls the romance and beauty of the movement, weighed against the devastation of being “outflanked, outlasted, or bloodily crushed” by the police. But in an interview for a “Brief Encounters” series in New York Times, Crabapple elaborated:
If one views success as the existence of Occupy-branded protest camps across the world ten years later, Occupy certainly failed. But issues that Occupy championed, such as student debt forgiveness, bans on evictions, single payer healthcare, an end to the murderous war on terror, are no longer fringe. They are mainstream. This is Occupy’s success.
“There is a growing feeling,” wrote David Graeber in his essay "Against Economics" in the December 3, 2019 issue of New York Review of Books, “among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.”
A planner and facilitator at Occupy Wall Street’s earliest moments, Graeber was an economic anthropologist and anarchist who wrote about historical social inequality and the persistence of debt. “Against Economics” challenges the prevailing notions that printing money will cause inflation or falling unemployment will drive up wages, ascribing these theories to a sclerotic school of economic thought convinced that its equations are “universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.”
Graeber died suddenly in September 2020, aged fifty-nine. The New York Review of Books published a collection of tributes from his friends and colleagues, including Marshall Sahlins, Debbie Bookchin, Astra Taylor, and Molly Crabapple. “David changed my life, and he did it without my realizing it,” wrote Taylor.
In August 2011 there was a series of planning meetings of what would become Occupy Wall Street. I watched the coverage on the first day of the protest. Over time, there developed an initiative that became known as “Strike Debt.” One of the opening salvos was a propaganda video featuring a dozen people in balaclavas dancing around a burning trashcan igniting their debt notices; David can be spotted amongst the throng and wrote the voice-over. Those were the early days of a project called Rolling Jubilee - David named the effort - that bought portfolios of debt in order to abolish them, erasing tens of millions of dollars of overdue medical bills and payday loans belonging to tens of thousands of people.
In a 2013 review of Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Robert Kuttner found a fitting epigram: “[Graeber] quotes the classical historian Moses Finley as saying that in the ancient world all revolutionary movements had a single program: ‘Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.’”
That seems a fitting program for the world in which we now find ourselves.
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