direct action

Casting out the money changers by Giotto di Bondone, 14th century.

Debt.

from The Student Handjob

I answered my door a couple of weeks ago. It was a guy in a black motorcycle helmet with his visor still down. I thought he was there to shoot me. I started thinking about all the stuff I did that week that could get me killed. By the time I got to the letter C on m list he handed me a letter. Made me sign for it. He left without a word and I opened it. It was a notice about a court case, all the way from Middlesex Country Court in Boston, Massachusetts. J. Lebowski vs. Harvard University. Fuck, I didn't like my chances. For twenty years they've been asking for their loan back. 10 grand. Now they want 25 for their troubles. Jesus, that was twenty years ago. You'd think they would lose the paperwork by now or something. I've lived all over the goddamned world. How did these bastards find me. Do they really expect their money back after all these years?

After all, there's a lot of stuff people lent to me twenty years ago and I don't have it anymore. Bubba Contreras lent me his Husker Du album. Martha lent me her portable Edgar Allan Poe. Fred lent me is hat. I don't see any of them taking me to court.

I know what you're saying. He should set an example for the students and pay his debts. After all he's a professor. He teaches ethics for Christ's sake. He's bringing the University of London into disrepute. Well, it's not that don't want to pay them back. It's just that if it were important, they would not be asking for it back. If it were important, I could not pay it back, and they would not take it back, and anyway no one could calculate it. No one could say how much I owe them and how much the owe me, if it were important. If it were important, this debt would be bad.

Because everything that's worth anything to me, anything important, I got from bad debt. I got and gave, but I never gave back. I never gave back to the creditor. I never gave back to the community. I never gave back what I took, and I never got back what others took from me. They never asked.

And I never would.

Fred taught me why I should give a shit about Shakespeare. Bubba taught me about music. I never gave them anything of this. I don't know what it's worth. It's incalculable. They would never accept anything in exchange. And I went into bad debt with those I loved, a kiss that I could not take back, a look that was never returned.

And out of all this bad debt came connections, not the kind of connection that says oh shit we are all in debt because of capitalism and this should bring us all together. Fuck that. My bad debt, our bad debt already lives beyond capitalism. It doesn't bring us together. It makes us different, again and again. Because nothing equals anything else, and the debt just grows, the connections to all these different bad debts get deeper and deeper, more and more complicit. And when you enter this world of bad debt, this subprime undercommons, you are accepted without question, without price, without credit. You enter the house, the family of bad debt, the house that has to keep moving, the fugitive family.

I'm not telling anyone what to do. Sometimes we need money, we need credit, we want credits, we want to graduate. Bt sometimes we need to study instead, to study together, never graduate, never get credit, never give credit where credit is due, just study together, and get in bad debt to each other, and figure out what's important, figure out what's always different, what's always something else. Just study together til they kick us out, speculate together until they move us along. Kids broke windows and took stuff this summer. They don't plan to give it back. They took what they needed and they took what they wanted and they didn't leave their credit card details. They say these kids were thugs, that they were criminals. Maybe they were, but if being criminal means knowing it's good credit and not bad debt that makes us slaves, then maybe they know something we need to learn. Maybe being in the black means being in the red, and maybe being in the red means being in the black.

Either that or don't open your door.

The Student Handjob: so radical… it's fucking bodacious p.54-5

debt robbery

I was reading a short crime story by Greek author Costas Mouzourakis; it's set in post-crisis (or perpetual-crisis) Athens and I thought the following was really apt.

A successful lawyer explains to our ex bank robber, middle aged hero how the system works:

"...despite common belief, state intervention is crucial in the jungle of the neoliberal market economy. For example, the so called "state injections", are often selective: The government sells out to [private businessmen] underpriced public property, buys expensive money from abroad, and in order to stimulate the economy "injects" it into the banking system, where the [private businessmen] borrow from in order to buy public property, which the government sells out cheap in order to pay back for the expensive money it borrowed, and so on and so on. And everyone is happy - excluding the moron, i.e. the owner of the public property. But that's how it goes; going after the highest possible profit by any means is capitalism's foundational principle. Andrew Young, once a US ambassador to the UN, has said nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it."

Costas Mouzourakis, Oplismeno Skyrodema, p.267

How do they manage? Well, nobody could do it without help from their international cronies. IMF/EU/ECB are against any Greek default. On the contrary, they wish to be able to govern whole economies through the managing of their debt. It's time to start a conversation of what debt is; I just got a hold of David Graeber's book on debt, who poses all relevant questions. One of the main arguments relates debt with violence. I'm still at the beginning, but I couldn't resist posting another quote, of an old vaudeville gag, quoted by Graeber:

"I was walking down the street with a friend the other day and a guy with a gun jumps out of an alley and says "stick 'em up."

As I pull out my wallet, I figure, "shouldn't be a total loss." So I pull out some money, turn to my friend and say, "Hey, Fred, here's that fifty bucks I owe you."

The robber was so offended he took out a thousand dollars of his own money, forced Fred to lend it to me at gunpoint, and then took it back again."

David Graeber, Debt: The first five thousand years, p.7