The idea life of money and poststructural realism
Comment on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Swimming in Debt: Student Loans and the Fight to Save a Generation
In 2010, student loan debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time in US history. Default rates have increased following the Great Recession. Yet student debt, unlike most debt, is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, leaving those burdened by loans unable to move on with their lives. Hundreds of alumni from the private, for-profit Corinthian Colleges Inc. have proclaimed a debt strike, refusing to pay off their student loans. They assert they were defrauded by aggressive recruitment and specious promises about jobs, while Corinthian profited from federal loan funds. The seeds of this debt resistance movement, sown in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, are growing. The activism described in this chapter raises questions about the provisioning and financing of higher education in the neoliberal era.
THE CURRENT CRISIS : A SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE
In the first of the forum articles, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue that the state’s interventionist role in today’s financial crisis should “once and for all rid people of the illusion that capitalists don’t want their states involved in their markets.” The authors stress the active role of the US state in promoting financialization on a global scale, while, at the same time, acting as lender of last resort to try to contain financial volatility. They also locate one of the roots of the current crisis in the defeat of American labour and public expenditure cutbacks, which led so many people to be drawn into the credit markets that fuelled toxic asset-backed securities. Panitch and Gindin conclude by arguing “for the renewal of the kind of radical politics that advances a systemic alternative to capitalism. It would be a tragedy if a far more ambitious goal than making financial capital more prudent did not come back on the agenda.”