Student loan forgiveness is being taken seriously right now by the bourgeoisie.
The Federal interest rate going near 0% has led to a massive boom in housing construction. Student loan deferment has led to many people saving up for a down payment on a house. The housing market is carrying the US economy right now.
If student loan deferment ends, this space that Capital found for expansion will disappear. There will be an immediate crisis.
Also, the effort to privatize student loans has been a failure. Betsy DeVos has been the Secretary of Education most dedicated to privatization. She killed the Perkins Loan, which has led many new students to private loans.
Although, after her reign, 92% of public student loan debt are still held by the Department of Education. It is unlikely that the Biden SoE will be more successful at speeding up the process. Capital is in crisis now.
Forgiving public debts is a method of privatization in America, where a culture of indebtedness exists. They want everyone with public student loans to take out private mortgages, owned by JPMorgan, Citigroup, etc.
I’m not saying student loan forgiveness is good or bad. It is good for me. But it serves a purpose that we should understand.
If people cannot buy homes the housing market will collapse again. The immediate need is less about maintaining any self-conscious allegiance to capitalism and more about saving a specific market.
Can’t say I fully agree with you. The European comparison is important, and I think the market would be fine with a switch to a more rent-focused model, but that change would need to be slow. That sort of change has to be a long term, intended change, in the same way that housing market was quite consciously shifted to focus on home-ownership as the suburbs were built post WWII. It’s similar to the crisis we had in 2008, I think. A lot of homes with people who can’t really afford them and a housing/financial market built around mortgages.
It doesn’t matter how much wealth or power or cops they have if the majority of the proletariat turns against them. Automation requires engineers and mechanics, police forces require food, supplies, ammunition, etc. You can’t maintain a power structure if a massive portion of the overall population doesn’t want it to exist and is willing to tear it down themselves.
Capital can only continue to survive if it keeps a fair chunk of the population invested in capitalism. If the entirety of Gen Z and Millennials decided they wanted socialism tomorrow morning, they’re up shit creek without a paddle.
They need people to buy their shit. There is an over-production of houses right now.
I think we on the left have a tendency to underestimate how scared of us the Bourgeoisie really is. We had massive violent uprisings all over the country this summer, uniting working class people of all races in opposition to the Bourgeoisie’s tool of enforcement. Police precincts being burned down, people shooting each other, and long term sustained and even organized clashes with the police in Portland. Sure, they didn’t win anything but still that scares the shit out of the porkies. Even though there was bombings and shit in the 60s we didn’t have thousands of young folks, particularly young white folks gearing up in armor and gas masks, forming street phalanxes and pushing the police back for literally months. The hippies definitely were out in the streets but their ideology was inherently nonviolent. Young leftists today believe violence is a useful tool and are clearly willing to use it.
Also, while China is obviously not the USSR, they are a serious threat to US hegemony. They would much rather focus on countering China without worrying about domestic unrest. They understand that external conflict plus domestic unrest is a recipe for disaster. They are doing well with the anti-China propaganda but in the age of the internet its going to be hard to control the flow of info from east to west. Eventually people will start wondering where the mass Uyghur graves are, and start to question the narrative. And even if they don’t, it’s basically impossible to conceal the fact that China is doing better and better while we are doing worse and worse.
True I guess that wasn’t entirely accurate, just that we didn’t achieve our main demand.
I think it was a pretty big victory for the Proletariat in general to show that there can be broad based cross-racial solidarity in a militant movement. If I had to guess, the Bourgeoisie will attempt to chip away at that solidarity over the next few years because it scares the shit out of them.
