Debt Archives - Public Seminar

Higher Ed

The Best Student Debt Forgiveness? Discharge Loans Already Paid

But to do that, the Department of Education would have to release its data

September 21, 2022 • by Susan F. Feiner

Today, in some states you can even lose your driver’s license due to unpaid student debt. Senior citizens on Social Security can have their monthly checks garnished by student loan debt collectors without a court order, an authority that is unique. Other borrowers have had wages, alimony, or IRS tax ...

The Best Student Debt Forgiveness? Discharge Loans Already Paid

Politics

Battle of the Budget

What happens when the Republicans filibuster a necessary measure to keep the government operating?

September 29, 2021 • by Heather Cox Richardson

On September 27, the Senate considered a bill to fund the government until December and to raise the debt ceiling. The Republicans joined together to filibuster it. Such a move is extraordinary. Not only did the Republicans vote against a measure that would keep the government operating and keep it from ...

Economy

Why We Need to Forgive Pandemic Debt

In a “Force Majeure Global Catastrophe,” we need to take extraordinary steps

October 22, 2020 • by David McClean

The way economies have weathered the pandemic, so far, has been through very muscular interventions by the world’s central banks. To address the economic damage done by COVID-19, governments have borrowed, in the aggregate, trillions of dollars from central banks, using the money to do everything from prop up falling asset ...

When Debt Matters

Argentina’s new debt trap and the return of the IMF

September 18, 2019 • by Juan Matías De Lucchi

Because of its long-term effect, one of the most important negative effects of Macri’s failed policy has been the dramatic rise of the relevant public debt, which is debt denominated in foreign currency and held by the private sector and international organisms. This debt has gone from 73 to 172 ...

Education

Accumulation by Education

White Property and Racialized Debt

June 14, 2019 • by Iyko Day

A key loophole that perpetuates both legal and illegal corruption is the outsized role that varsity sports play in the admissions process, widening the path to acceptance for predominantly white athletes in lacrosse, sailing, tennis, crew, water polo, and other “white sports.” Despite the perception that Black students are the face of ...

Feature

(Sur)real Estate, Speculative Capital and Housing Displacement

An interview with Cassie Thornton

May 22, 2019 • by Cassie Thornton

A visitor approaching Dream Farm Commons, a small storefront gallery in downtown Oakland, California will find themselves faced with two doors. On the right is a clean, bureaucratic and hip business, labeled Desperate Holdings Real Estate Agency. In full real estate drag, the art gallery holds a desk with an ...

(Sur)real Estate, Speculative Capital and Housing Displacement

Feature

Debt: A Lever of Dispossession

Case Studies in Resistance

May 22, 2019 • by Iolanda Fresnillo

“Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa” Thomas Sankara “In modern times, debt has become a key means of capital accumulation. Ubiquitous, it has taken on a new function, as the most general category through which exploitation is organized” Silvia Federici The 2008 crisis burst and debt rang our doorbell. Spain, together with ...

Feature

The Violence of Abstraction

From debt to race and back again

May 9, 2019 • by Alberto Toscano

I mention this weird vignette, because I associate it with my intellectual preoccupation around that time, when I was exploring the myriad contemporary meanings of a dictum encountered in Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions whereas earlier they had depended on one another’. Societies that were bound together by ...

Education

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

Towards a Genuine Collaboration

April 22, 2019 • by Ann Larson

What if the president of the United States, along with Congress, cancelled student debt and made public college tuition free? Just a few years ago, these goals would have seemed like the pie-in-the sky dreams of a marginal sect. Today, free public college is supported by major presidential candidates, including ...

Academia, Grassroots Organizations, and Debt

Feature

Artist-as-debtor, Debt-as-Creator

The unseen debt sustaining the art market

April 15, 2019 • by Noah Fischer

This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Is there a better place to glimpse the logic of capitalism than at art fairs, those ultra luxury trade shows ...

Feature

Art, Research and Action Against Debt’s Digital Empire

An introduction

April 4, 2019 • by Max Haiven, Enda Brophy and Benjamin Anderson

This article is the introduction to a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Throughout the history of capitalism, debt has been a key weapon of colonialism and imperialism. Examples include the ruinous ...

Art, Research and Action Against Debt’s Digital Empire

Feature

Life and Debt under Capitalism

An excerpt from Elettra Stimilli’s The Debt of Living

November 23, 2018 • by Elettra Stimilli

From the beginning, capitalism has established an intimate connection with individual lives, formerly based on the exploitation of specific skills in the form of work. The real change is that today at stake are not only specific services, but the whole of life and the very capacity of human living ...