Astra Taylor’s latest documentary film, You Are Not a Loan, is a compelling and power story told through a single scene — a room of community organizers, students, and academics discussing debt; how the spiraling costs of higher education are turning learning into a series of transactions; and the collective power that debt holders have.
Organizers with the Debt Collective debated cancelling student debt, making public higher education tuition free, and guaranteeing healthcare and housing as universal rights. I found a few themes particularly compelling:
Abolishing meritocracy: Organizers discussed the possibility of making public college tuition and admission free. A university professor argued that there may be pushback from students on proposals for automatic admission because some students may feel that by granting everyone who applies admission at no cost, the value of their education is diminished. This is a critical point that emphasizes the need for organizers and faculty unions to build solidarity with students. As Taylor notes near the end of the film, “We need plans. We need power. We’ve gone from organizing in a context where we were laughed at, and then starting to win. And now, actually, winning the moral argument, but we still need to figure out where our leverage is and how to move forward.” These discussions reveal how radical proposals—which may seem unbelievable at first—have the potential to reshape not only our concept of debt, but also what it means to pursue education, who education is for, and how knowledge is produced.
Higher education exists in broader socioeconomic contexts: Making public higher education tuition free will not eliminate the systemic and structural inequalities that exist in the broader society, particularly with K-12 public education. Because there has been such a massive disinvestment in public education in the U.S. in the past 50 years, concerns were raised by organizers about how students from under-invested public schools will arrive prepared for college. Addressing these deeper social and economic inequalities must be part of any plan to make public higher education tuition free.
The film is dedicated to anarchist anthropologist David Graeber whose books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018) offer radical theories about debt, universal income, and our relationships with work.
You Are Not a Loan is a thought-provoking film about education and inequality, but its style also made me misty-eyed for the days when we could gather in cramped meeting rooms to debate socialist strategy. As Taylor said in a companion article on The Intercept, she and her collaborator, Erick Stoll, were inspired by 1960s political films that used fly-on-the-wall accounts to show “impassioned meetings and intimate conversations where people share grievances and plan next steps.” Taylor writes:
We wanted to give viewers a sense of being immersed in an activist milieu while showing the ways that these milieus naturally create space to ask big questions, blurring the supposed divide between theory and practice. As the brilliant historian Robin D. G. Kelley once wrote: ‘Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression.
As an organizer says at the end of the film, “I think power is with the people. I think power starts with people… Organized people have the most power. Organized people and collective education creates a powerful people.” Creating powerful people is necessary if activists want to continue pressuring President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to cancel student debt.
As Taylor discussed in an article in The Guardian this week:
Imagine if, instead of defending the status quo, Biden used his platform to articulate the social benefits of cancelling student debt. He could have said that cancelling student debt will support 45 million Americans and provide an estimated trillion-dollar economic boost over the next decade and create millions of desperately needed jobs. He could have spoken about canceling student debt as a way to help close the racial wealth gap, acknowledging that Black borrowers are the most burdened, or talked about how education should be free and accessible to all if we want to expand opportunity and deepen democracy.
Checkout the Debt Collective’s Biden Jubilee 100 — one hundred borrowers are on debt strike, demanding cancellation of student debt within the administration’s first 100 days. Sign the petition and join the union. There is power in the people, but the people are most powerful when they’re organized and educated!
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