University of California
Berkeley, Berkeley
CA
Andrew Ross just wrote a “movement book” for Strike Debt – Creditocracy. He has been super active in working against student debt and in Strike Debt NY.
We are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and the historical record shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage. Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system,
From the book blurbs:
In this lucid and accessible book, Andrew Ross argues that we are increasingly oppressed by the rule of credit and that ever more people must go into debt just to access life’s necessities. But Ross not only names the problem; more importantly, he points toward solutions. Read this book and join a debt resistors movement.
From his Wikipedia biography:
Andrew Ross is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A writer for The New York Times, Artforum, The Nation, Newsweek and The Village Voice, he is also the author and/or editor of numerous books. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organization of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labor in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth, has an activist, alternative globalization approach, and emphasizes principles of sustainability.
He has been active in the anti-sweatshop movement since the mid-1990s. From the late 1990s, he has turned his attention to the academic labor movement, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy. In 2007, his co-edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analyzed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC-UAW (The Graduate Student Organizing Committee). A founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, he has helped to organize campaigns to raise migrant labor standards in the United Arab Emirates. An early participant in Occupy Wall Street, he helped found the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and has been an integral member of the Occupy Debt Assembly and Strike Debt—a coalition formed in the summer of 2012 to help build a debtors movement. Strike Debt produced the Debt Resistors Operations Manual and organized the Rolling Jubilee.
He will also be speaking on Monday, the 20th in Oakland.