Toward a Global Autonomous University: Campaign against Debt

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.

Read the rest of the statement and follow some great links here at www.edu-factory.org.