Debt Collective: a very brief youtube history
On Wednesday this week, the Debt Collective is organizing a national action in Washington, DC called FUND EDUCATION NOT GENOCIDE. I’ll be headed there on the free bus they’re chartering from New York City. You should come too!
In honor of the event, I’m sending along a brief history of Debt Collective’s work in youtube videos.
I taught a class this semester on higher education, power, and privilege. I focused on student activism and one of the main themes was the history and struggle around student debt. The thesis of the class was that activism can take up and take on dominant ideologies to change the status quo on campus and beyond.
To illustrate that thesis, I compiled a very brief youtube history of the Debt Collective, a movement group that’s been fighting to abolish student debt since Occupy Wall Street. I’ve been a fellow traveler of the group from the beginning, so drawing from my memories I found videos of some of the many events, accomplishments, and tactics the group used over the years. I showed the videos to my students.
Last week I ran into Astra Taylor, one of the Debt Collective’s core organizers (in addition to being a writer, filmmaker, and overall leading light on the left). She and I met back in the Occupy days and I mentioned the youtube history I put together. She said I should write it up and send it, so what follows is an annotated series of links I showed my students during that class.
As a disclaimer, the below is limited to my memories of the movement, my contributions to it, and what I could find on youtube. There’s so much more out there, but I think these videos tell a quick and engaging version of the story, taking us from a fake graduation ceremony where activists wore garbage bags in Zuccotti Park to that same group influencing a presidential administration.
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As a preface, I showed my students an illustrated video published by the Intercept that Astra narrated (drawn by Molly Crabapple), which sets the scene for the debt organizing. It gives pretty good background for actions and tactics to abolish student debt starting in 2011.
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In November of that year, just a couple months after Occupy Wall Street began, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign launched. Activists put together a farcical graduation ceremony and held it at Zuccotti Park, the site of the original occupation. The campaign’s central tactic was a petition: if a million people signed the petition, then every person who signed it promised to stop paying their student debt. People filmed themselves talking about signing the petition.
Ultimately, only a few thousand people signed the petition. But it made waves. At that time, no one talked about the student debt crisis at all. But the group’s organizing changed all that.
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One of my favorite memories from those early days was when Occupy University—an institution meant to carry the flame of the original occupation, offering free classes around the city—held a course on student debt. A group of us went into the NYC subway and sang songs, handing out flyers advertising the course. A friend filmed us.
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When student debt reached $1 trillion nationally in April 2012, organizers held actions all over NYC, including marches and protests outside of banks. Then, in September, organizers drew from antiwar movement tactics and burned their student debt bills in an act of defiance.
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In one of its more memorable actions, the group (which had changed it name to Strike Debt) put together what they called a Rolling Jubilee. A lot of student debt is bought by debt collectors for pennies on the dollar. There’s a whole industry around it.
So Strike Debt decided to set itself up as a debt collector in that market. It raised money through a telethon event with music, lectures, comedy, and all kinds of fun stuff, and then used the funds raised to buy student debt on the secondary market. Once it owned these debts the group abolished them, sending debtors a letter in the mail telling them not to worry about paying it back. It worked and it was amazing. (See if you can spot me playing banjo in this promo. I performed a song about debt wearing a tan t-shirt with a red balloon design over a striped shirt. My glasses are terrible.)
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One of the things I contributed to the movement was music. I played a lot of banjo back then, and actually wrote and recorded an album of music about the movement, student debt, etc.
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Fast forward a few years. What was once the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which had become Strike Debt, changed again into the Debt Collective. One the group’s major victories was helping former students at the for-profit college called Corinthian get justice for the grift that institution committed. They were successful in getting those students’ loans cancelled, and this set the stage for a larger campaign to cancel all federal student loans.
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In its most recent iteration, Debt Collective zeroed in on that goal. Organizers did legal research and discovered language in the Higher Education Act that permits the Secretary of Education, as directed by the President, to cancel federal student loans. They pressured Joe Biden to do this and Biden, in a moderate and limited way, actually tried.
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Biden’s executive order to cancel some federal student loans was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court. Loan collectors had sued the administration, taking issue with their enactment of a policy that they argued should come from an act of congress rather than the executive branch. SCOTUS found in favor of the collectors.
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There’s so much more to tell, but that’s what I put together for my students. It showed a powerful arc over time, tactics, and organization, with some cringey recordings of me playing banjo.
By way of conclusion, my students found all this pretty amazing. Many of them hadn’t heard of Occupy Wall Street at all, much less the Rolling Jubilee or the Corinthian 15. Watching these videos gave them a sense that you can actually change things, that working creatively in groups can take up and take on big injustices in the status quo. The slogan “you are not a loan” became a refrain in the class.
I told them that I remember this history when I get down about how terrible things are, and I think they came away feeling a bit better and even excited about getting to work.