Edufactory – We, students, teachers, migrant and precarious workers, call for a debt abolition network to organize a global day of action against student debt.

We struggle everyday in movements all around the world against the privatization of the university, the precaritization of work, the new enclosures of our knowledges and for the reappropriation of our commonwealth.

We have identified debt as a primary component in all of these struggles.

Debt is the main instrument of enclosure of our social wealth: education, knowledge, access to healthy food, housing and healthcare. In nearly every aspect of our lives, the access to credit is necessary in order to live our lives.

Debt is a fundamental political question because it is a key component of control of our lives and bodies. This control is exercised as blackmail on an individual level as well as generalized social exploitation on a large scale.

Debt has been used as a management strategy to separate, divide and maintain supremacy over individuals, communities, countries and even entire continents for over 30 years.

Debt is a necessary parasitical function of financial capitalism today. Without continued lending and deeper debt, capital cannot continue to function. The current economic crisis exemplifies this principle.

Debt is therefore an inequitable system that produces profits for the financial industry at the expense of our education and our lives.

Student debt is one of the first forms where of this unjust system is put into practice. As students, we are forced to borrow to have access to education. These predatory lending strategies have created generations whose futures are indentured to banks and financial institutions.

Student debt means the corporatization and financialization of the university. It is the enclosure of our knowledge and passions, and the precarization of our labor and lives.

Student debt is therefore part of a general struggle against the contemporary slavery of credit cards, mortgages, and the international debt system. It is our singular battle in the common struggle for a more just world.

We therefore claim the right to bankruptcy for all and we claim the right to access credit for all. We call for the immediate abolition of debt and we call for civil disobedience against the debt system.

We won’t pay back the debt!

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Links and Resources about Debt:

• The Magic of Debt, or, Amortise This! By Brett Neilson
• Crisis as an allegory of production by Brett Neilson
• In Praise of Usura by Melinda Cooper and Angela Mitropoulos
• Debt Education by Jeffrey Williams
• Speculating on Student Debt by the Committee for Radical Diplomacy
• The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt by Morgan Adamson
• Workers against Debt Slavery and Torture: An Ancient Tale with a Modern Moral by George Caffentzis
• Financialization as Biopower by Stefano Lucarelli
• Financial Logics by Christian Marazzi