22. The Ethical Deadbeat: Countering Arguments on Why you “should” Pay Back Your Student Debt

As I’ve written here before, the student debt crisis has revolutionary potential.

As global capitalism spreads its tentacles across the globe and invades every aspect of our lives, both personal and collective, we have no choice but to fight where we stand.

For me, this means resisting student debt, which for myself and millions of others is the biggest way capitalism has oppressively restrained my hopes, dreams, and ambitions.

Among the struggles of those of us mired in the snare of usurious, life-crushing debt, is the scorn and derision heaped on us by those who still believe in the system. Anytime a post is made about the Student Debt Crisis or (gasp!) the decision to resist, the reactionary commentators come out in full force to blame the victims.

Growing tired of this, I’ve written a sort-of “Devils Advocate” piece in which I outline the common arguments made by those who believe that student debtors are to blame for our plight, rather than the mechanisms of a fundamentally destructive and unjust economic system.

I’ve written responses designed for the reader to have a deep understanding of the issues in hopes that they will strengthen your counter-argument. Feel free to copy and paste any part of what I write (one of my goals being that we should create a “copy and paste” bank that we can use with go-to arguments against reactionaries).

But here, I try to write in depth so that we can have a foundational understanding of what the Student Debt crisis is really about, and why it’s so important that we resist both in our material, personal lives, and against the reactionary internet guardians of the status quo.

Again, feel free to copy and paste whatever you want to use with your own arguments. I’ve also provided links to “respectable” mainstream sources like the New York Times and Forbes to help strengthen our position.

I hope you will find this useful!

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Argument 1: Students knew what they were getting into when they took out the loans.

It’s true that students should know that they would be required to repay the loans, that’s pretty obvious. However, students were also told that paying back the loans would be possible because of the higher wage jobs that would be available to them due to earning a college degree. For those of us struggling to pay back our loans with our minimum wage jobs (the same kind we were threatened with if we didn’t go to college), this has obviously not been the case.

In truth, the only thing students “knew” when they agreed to take out the loans was the propaganda that they had been subjected to under years of compulsory public school indoctrination. Contrary to the myth spouted by the reactionary right that public school is a hotbed of left-wing anti-Americanism, the message to students (both explicit and implicit) is that the capitalism system is capable of limitless expansion and that middle class wages and jobs would always be available for those who worked hard to educate themselves.

I’ll elaborate below on exactly how and why this propaganda was nothing but a myth that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Argument 2: You promised to pay them back, you should pay them back.

Here it’s important to emphasize the idea of “decontextualization.” In other words, the above statement (essentially, that a person should pay his debts) must be considered within the context of the situation. The above argument represents a “textbook scenario”, an oversimplified moral “word problem” that is considered out of the context of the real world.

The scenario of student debt is much more complex than a simple moral aphorism, and we have to consider it that way.

It’s important (tactically) to concede that yes, in general, a person should repay their debts. Whenever I borrow money from friends or family, I consider it very important to pay them back. Not doing so is, indeed, dishonorable.

However, the situation of student debt is different for a number of reasons. Again, it’s important to consider the context.

The first is that a major difference between borrowing money from a friend and from a bank, is that a bank is able to effectively create money by lending it due to fractional reserve lending. If you aren’t familiar with this concept, I highly recommend getting familiar with it. You can watch “Money as Debt” or the Zeitgeist films (although I don’t recommend the first) in order to familiarize yourself with how this outrageous scam actually works. The important point is that a bank isn’t out any money when it creates a loan (or, more precisely, it’s only out 10 percent). However, if I borrow 100 dollars from my Grandma, that’s 100 dollars that my Grandma doesn’t have to spend. If Grandma lends me 100 dollars, she is effectively 100 dollars poorer until I pay her back. Again, this is not true with a bank.

Argument 3: But you agreed to pay back that money, you should do it no matter what.

Here the arguer is trying to pit a narrow, individualist moral imperative against greater systemic realities. This argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Again, it’s important to consider the context: Does a contractual agreement always trump all other considerations?

So for example, let’s say, I am a German citizen in the 1930’s and I join the armed forces, pledging an oath of loyalty to the German government….a pretty serious contractual obligation. Let’s assume I’m no Nazi, I’m simply a good citizen who wants to help serve his country and defend his people. I go into the service with the best of intentions (naïve though I may be). And let’s say that I get assigned to guard duty at a concentration camp. Pretty soon, I come to realize the horrors of what I’m participating in. Am I obligated to continue perpetuating a genocide because I “signed a contract.” Does “keeping my word” trump the moral necessity of resisting such an evil action?

If I were to say to a friend, “I’m thinking about deserting. I think the right thing to do is run away from the camp. I can’t participate anymore.” Would a friend be right in saying “But you agreed to serve our country. You agreed to follow orders. You signed a contract saying you would.”

The above example is, in some ways, extreme. You may also accuse me of “decontextualization” but actually the above scenario was very real. And it happened a lot. During the Nuremberg Trials the most common defense of those who perpetuated war crimes was “I was just following orders” which is essentially saying “I was just upholding my end of the contract.”

Here’s a relevant quote from Adolf Eichmann, one of the foremost war criminals in the Nazi hierarchy (italics are mine):

I cannot recognize the verdict of guilty. . . . It was my misfortune to become entangled in these atrocities. But these misdeeds did not happen according to my wishes. It was not my wish to slay people. . . . Once again I would stress that I am guilty of having been obedient, having subordinated myself to my official duties and the obligations of war service and my oath of allegiance and my oath of office, and in addition, once the war started, there was also martial law. . . . I did not persecute Jews with avidity and passion. That is what the government did. . . . At that time obedience was demanded, just as in the future it will also be demanded of the subordinate.

As we see here, Eichmann’s main defense was that he was simply keeping his “oaths.” In other words, it was okay that he perpetuated genocide against millions of people because he was upholding his contract.

This is not to say that paying back student loans is the same as perpetuating the Holocaust (although, depending on how you feel about the actions of the Federal Government and the fact that student loans help fund it, it’s not that far-fetched), it simply serves to demonstrate that “keeping your promise” is not automatically an effective argument.

Obedience to authority (be it a person or a contract) is an extremely poor basis for acting ethically. Obedience is not a virtue in and of itself. Again, as demonstrated above, blind obedience has been a tool for convincing otherwise good people to do horrible things.

Moreover, what might seem moral or ethical from a narrow , individual point of view (which individual obedience is so often considered to be), may not always be ethical in the context of greater social or systemic realities.

The point is, human beings have an obligation to act according to their conscience, not according to a contract. A contract does not trump ethical obligations, so therefore, simply repeating “But you should uphold your contract” is a weak argument.

Myself and my fellow debt resistors are opposed to paying back student loans on ethical and moral grounds, that they are unjust and do damage to our society, ourselves, and our future. It’s not simply that we “don’t want to pay.”

Depending on the person’s intelligence or level of indoctrination, it’s likely that they’ll continue to repeat their mantra of “personal responsibility” regardless of how much reason or evidence you throw at them. Try not to get frustrated and don’t cast your pearls before swine. Again, the purpose of this isn’t necessarily to convince individuals (who are unlikely to change their mind about the system until they too feel the brunt of its injustice). Instead, it’s to raise a general consciousness and to provide a voice for justice, against the dogmatic and inane “personal responsibility” arguments.

Argument 4: But nobody forced you to take out these loans.

Again, if you consider the student debtors plight within the context of reality, it’s not true that “nobody forced [us]” to take out the loans, although it’s probably true that nobody pointed an actual gun at our heads and forced us to sign the dotted line.

Again, we have to understand the individual and systemic perspectives. One of the ways that capitalism maintains its stranglehold over our lives is that it indoctrinates us into viewing the world through a strictly individualist lens.

We are taught and trained to see our problems as individual failings, and we are blind to the greater systemic realities. An example of this is the common idea among supporters of capitalism that poor people are poor due to some moral failing or lack of work ethic. Proponents of capitalism preach that all it takes is hard work and determination for success. If you work hard enough, are smart enough, and have just a little luck, you will succeed. The flip-side to this argument is that if you are poor, you must not have worked hard enough.

Of course the reality is quite different. We understand that in a capitalist system, by necessity only a few people are able to succeed. After all, we can’t all be billionaires, that would just be inflation.

Again, it’s not necessarily worthwhile to get into this argument on the internet. Those who earnestly believe the asinine “bootstraps” argument are unlikely to be convinced by rational arguments or evidence (since the belief is a dogma, and immune to reason and usually upheld by mere ego-preservation). The only thing that will convince them is a direct experience with the injustices of the world (which is, after all, what likely convinced us, my fellow debt-deserters!)

But let’s return to the original argument. It’s true that direct, violent coercion did not likely take place when students agreed to take out loans. However, just because there was no direct threat, doesn’t mean that the students had complete and utter freedom to choose whether or not they went to college. When students agreed to take out the loans, they were acting under the influence of various oppressive cultural and economic restraints. Here it might help to understand Marilyn Frye’s example of the “birdcage” as an example of how oppression works. It’s a simple argument of “freedom from…” and “freedom to….”. Of course students were free from direct coercion in their choice (this individual bar of the birdcage may seem easy to get around.), but it doesn’t mean that they were had freedom TO choose their path in the future (with other restraints acting together as the other bars that force us into taking out debt to finance our education).

What are these other influences and restraints? I’ll begin with the very real, very material economic influence in the decision to take out a student loan: avoiding poverty. The fact is, a college degree remains more necessary than ever as a stepping stone into the “middle class”. Some social commentators have even called the bachelor’s degree a new “high school diploma”. Again, most students chose to attend college as a means of avoiding poverty. And if you don’t consider avoiding poverty a coercive motivating factor, than you obviously have never actually lived in poverty (as seems likely among those who are arguing against student loan debtors).

In other words, for those choosing not to go to college, they were effectively choosing economic suicide.

Argument 4: But what about learning a trade? Skilled labor provides one of the highest paid wages available!

This is true. But we should begin first by pointing out that learning trades and skilled labor was actively discouraged by public school policies across the country. Most students were discouraged from learning a skill or trade, and that if they were “smart”, they should go to college. Again, it’s Federal policy to encourage students to attend college, and funding for vocational training has been cut drastically in recent years.

So even as it becomes more and more obvious that attending college is not the guaranteed path to economic success that many believe it to be, and it becomes obvious that skilled labor is often a better route to higher pay and stable work, Federal (and therefore local) education policy reflects the exact opposite.

If you really want to see where the bodies are buried, consider the fact that the Federal government profits immensely off of the student loan scam, and even more so when students default. It becomes obvious why the Federal government continues to actively encourage students to attend college, despite the reality of the economic situation.

Argument 5: Well maybe if students didn’t major in something useless like Philosophy or Art History….

Aside from the obvious problems with considering education valuable only for its economic benefit (which is highly problematic in and of itself), this argument doesn’t even hold up to pragmatic, material scrutiny.

The assumption here is that if students were wise, they would have chosen a STEM major. Again, aside from the obviously flawed implication that our society would be a better place if everyone were a technician or engineer (leaving every other aspect of human existence to otherwise be cast aside), even if every college graduate chose a STEM major, we would still be facing the same problem: the number of college graduates far outpace the number of well-paying jobs available. This is made apparent in the fact that despite an “economic recovery” most of the “middle class” jobs that were lost have been replaced by low-wage, unskilled labor.

A huge surplus of labor (even in what are now “well paying” fields like Engineering, etc.) would drive wages in that sector down for those who were lucky enough to find a job.

So the problem isn’t that students didn’t pick the right major. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough well-paying jobs to meet up with demand. The “art history major” argument only serves to place the blame on the individual actors (students who sought a degree and a decent wage) rather than on an inherently exploitive and unjust economic system.

The simple fact is, if everyone had chosen a STEM major, we’d have a millions of STEM majors flipping burgers, and perhaps the reactionaries would be arguing that they “should have chosen something practical, like philosophy.”

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I’d like to end with two counter-arguments.

The first is that education should not be tied strictly to vocation. The true purpose of all education, from the primary level to higher education, should be the development of a human being and the overall development of human society.

Of course, the reality is much different. Public education has become highly political, and has, since its inception held more nefarious purposes of control and indoctrination.

There’s a lot I could say about this, but suffice it to say for now that if our society is to be humane and just, we must take a radical, revolutionary approach towards how we educate our young people.

But for now, we should try to avoid and resist the idea that we were foolish or naïve for following our dreams and majoring in something “useless.” The fact that we, as a generation, chose to major in things that interest us and (hopefully) helped us to develop as human beings, speaks volumes about our motivations as people: simply put, that we want something more than money.

I for one, am proud of those of us who majored in Philosophy, or Art History, or whatever other “useless” degree we chose. Like I just said, it demonstrates that we want our lives (and therefore, our society…our collective life) to extend beyond the cold, sterile, “practical” aspects of a relentless drive for profit and material wealth.

My second argument is a companion to the first.

We must also radically change our society so that every person in the society has access to the basic material necessities (food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, and, to a lesser extent, transportation). I’m not necessarily arguing that these things should be given out for free, but I am advocating that those of us who work should have access to these things. It’s an outrage that in the wealthiest nation in the world, millions of working poor toil at 2 or 3 jobs and still are unable to have access to the basic necessities of life.

There’s a lot more I could say about this as well, but I’ll simply say that capitalism is the crisis. Capitalism (defined as a system where the means of production are privately held in the hands of a concentrated few) requires, by its very nature, that a portion of the population is systematically excluded from the benefits of its production. The myth of capitalism is that it’s a system of unlimited freedom and opportunity. In order to maintain this myth, it’s necessary to justify the exclusion of the lowest classes (who, again, happen to work very hard, and yet still fail to achieve the “American dream”).

Racism was the first myth constructed to uphold the system. People of color were systematically excluded from living wages (starting first in the form of slavery) based on the idea that by nature of their race, they were unworthy of the fruits of capitalist production. Of course, this idea continues today in a much less obvious, and more pernicious form (“Maybe you’d get a job if you’d pull your pants up!”)

The student loan scam is simply the latest in an attempt by the ruling class to cover up the systematic injustice of the capitalist economic system, and instead to blame the individual actors who are stuck in that system. Online reactionaries who tell us to “do the right thing” by paying back our usurious debts are simply parroting the propaganda of those who exploit and rule over them.

I’ll end by saying that this crisis has revolutionary potential. According to some who’ve lived through revolutions and uprisings, we are at a revolutionary moment.

The crisis of capitalism only grows more and more apparent. Student debtors are an army of well-educated, underemployed, and idealistic young people who have the potential to change the world because we don’t operate under any illusions about the value of the system that oppresses us.

I don’t know for sure whether or not we will achieve victory. But I know that as for me, I’ll choose to live my life in pursuit of a better world, and that I’d rather have my existence inundated with meaning rather than mere material or psychological comfort (not that I’m some noble hero, it simply was never offered to me in the first place!)

Student debtors of the world UNITE! We have nothing to lose but our chains!