George Caffentzis and Strike Debt Bay Area @ The Green Arcade in SF

At The Green Arcade on Thursday March 20th, join George Caffentzis and Strike Debt Bay Area for a discussion about radical and practical responses to debt and capitalism.

George Caffentzis is contributor to the newly released The Debt Resisters' Operations Manual and author of the recent In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism.

About In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism: Karl Marx remarked that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests, and waters in the sixteenth century. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond its violent origins. Instead of being a period of major social and economic novelty, however, the course of recent decades has been a return to the fire and blood of struggles at the advent of capitalism.

About The Debt Resisters' Operations Manual: A handbook for debtors everywhere to understand how this system really works, while providing practical tools for fighting debt in its most exploitative forms. Inside, you'll find detailed strategies, resources, and insider tips for dealing with some of the most common kinds of debt, including credit card debt, medical debt, student debt, and housing debt. The book also contains tactics for navigating the pitfalls of personal bankruptcy, and information to help protect yourself from credit reporting agencies, debt collectors, payday lenders, check cashing outlets, rent-to-own stores, and more.

Strike Debt Bay Area "is building a debt resistance movement. We believe that most individual debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. Because we are forced to go into debt simply in order to live, we think it is right and moral to resist it."

Over the last thirty years, average household debt has more than doubled, and we are forced to take on debt to meet our basic needs, which has wrecked lives and devastated communities. This reveals an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the many. How does the debt system really work? What does a radical response to the debt system look like? What is the relationship between debt and climate? And, how do we develop practical tools, and a mass debt resistance movement? In this interactive discussion, George Caffentzis and Strike Debt Bay Area will help answer these questions, propose strategies, and much more.

(See event web page)

Also check out the Launch Party for the Debt Resisters' Operations Manual in the East Bay on March 23rd.