Debtors Unite! We Have A World To Win
Astra Taylor is many things: a writer, a filmmaker, an organizer and, occasionally, a touring musician. She’s spent the last decade tackling political questions about the meaning of democracy and the power of debt in the modern world, and helped launch the Debt Collective, a project that organizes people who are in debt. Together, they’ve managed to eliminate about $3 billion in student, medical, probation and credit card debt over the past decade.
Taylor recently published Remake the World, a collection of her essays. The book includes incisive pieces on climate change, technology, migration and elections, mixing current events with theory and ancient philosophy (for more of Taylor’s views on philosophy, see her film, Examined Life).
If there’s anything we need right now, it’s voices that cut through the noise, so I called up Taylor to chat about her new book, her debt organizing and how to form a conspiracy.
You start the book by exploring the notion of “conspiracy.” Tell me why.
The first essay is a meditation on the past, present and possible future of conspiracy. That word, of course, was on my mind because it’s part of the discourse around fake news and disinformation. There’s a lot of alarming misapprehension of the world. And yet it's always seemed to me that the proposed solutions to conspiracy theories – like more fact-checking or improvements to Facebook’s algorithms – were all sort of unsatisfying.
As I was reading a lot of labor history, I was struck by the fact that some of the first colonial laws in what would become the United States were conspiracy laws. And those laws were basically about preventing people from organizing, from forming labor unions.
Then, charges of conspiracy became a major force during the 1900s during the Red Scare. When labor unions were picking up steam in the era of the International Workers of the World and you have industrial unionism trying to find its footing, you see these conspiracy laws cutting down attempts to organize people.
When you read that older meaning of conspiracy against the newer inflection, they're actually related – there’s a misapprehension of power, right? The problem with the conspiracy theories today is that instead of people blaming the 1%, they blame the deep state.
How does that intersect with your thinking about organizing today?
If you think that the problem is the deep state, you actually have no solutions. The conspiracy is just so endless and all-powerful.
Whereas, if you have a coherent theory of capitalism, then you have a theory of power, then you can figure out how to organize, which brings us back to the original understanding of conspiracy. So it just seemed to me that the suppression of the left under the guise of combating conspiracies actually created this vacuum into which the new conspiracies can flourish.
Finally, etymologically, the word conspiracy means breathing together. I was thinking a lot about breath in 2020, as people were gasping for air when they were afflicted with COVID and as wildfires raged across the West because of climate change. And in the protests after George Floyd was murdered, where people were saying, “I can't breathe” – Floyd was basically choked to death.
You write that it’s important to communicate with each other and that comes through in your writing style. You’re also not afraid to incorporate Greek philosophy, though, so you’re clearly not talking down to the reader. I’m curious about how you think about writing. Can communication be truly democratic?
I mean, I am conspiring. My writing has always been politically motivated, and my goal is to create a kind of conspiracy in the sense that I want people to breathe together, to work together in an effort to advance a very left-wing version of social justice. In my vision of social change, you treat people as equals. So my writing is never about sort of beating the reader over the head with my solutions and telling them what to do. I'm always trying to invite people into my process of thinking about things, into my curiosity and, hopefully, into a kind of political analysis that points to action.
I think the response to the paranoid certainty of these conspiracy theories is a kind of epistemological humility. We are situated in a way that doesn't give us the whole picture.
Speaking of action in the face of uncertainty, you’ve been organizing around debt for about a decade now. When you started, you got a lot of pushback. Talk about that a little.
Our organizing was a response to conditions we’d describe now as financialization, or neoliberalism. As the welfare state was eroded in the middle of the 20th century, people were forced into debt to finance many things that should be universal public goods [like health care and education].
But [when we proposed organizing people as debtors], there was a real skepticism from the left because it didn't fit their model of an organizing campaign – it wasn't labor organizing, it wasn’t community organizing.
The first time we had a public protest demanding student debt cancellation and free public college, we were openly mocked by Reuters and NPR. And it's taken a decade, but we have pushed the issue to the mainstream. I'm shocked once a week by someone saying, “Well, of course we should have student debt cancelation! What’s so interesting and kind of humbling about the work is that your goal is to make a change so big you'll never get credit for it. It'll just appear as common sense."
What are your takeaways from 10 years of thinking about debt?
There has been a huge investment in making people feel that if they're in debt, they haven't managed their money correctly. They should be ashamed. They should scrimp and save in order to make their payments. And if you can really encourage people en masse to abandon that stigma and to actually say, “Hold on. Actually I'm not in debt because I did something wrong, but because the system isn't providing me with what I need,” that to me opens up incredible space for all kinds of politics.
That's true for all movements, right? You get a kind of psychological benefit when you go, “Oh my God, I am not alone.” That's the debt collective slogan: “I am not a loan.”
The Debt Collective also has a culture of concern and care for each other. People come to us because they cannot pay their bills. I'm thinking of one person, an older guy, who’s on debt strike with us. His wife died of cancer and that caused his financial reality to collapse – people take on debts for their family members. It’s real. People are looking for an opportunity to connect their personal struggles to something bigger, and there being actual stakes helps the culture.
That's why it’s important to make commitments. It’s important to take these abstract principles or these abstract identities and then actually ground them in community. There's an essay in there about activism versus organizing. You can say, “I'm an activist. I tweet all day about animal rights or I tweet all day about socialism,” but, in my opinion, you can't be a socialist by yourself.
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