- My insecurity is not just my fault.

It's a product of these larger political and economic conditions.

Is the welfare state really the biggest threat to my security?

Like, I don't think so, but that's what we've been told.

We talk about freedom of speech, we talk about the right to peaceably assemble, the free press, but we never talk about the fact we have a right to security.

Insecurity is not an unfortunate byproduct of our economic system but actually central to it.

- Coming up on "The Laura Flanders Show," the place where the people who say it can't be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Are you feeling anxious?

How could you not?

Consumer debt now stands at $17.29 trillion, with the average American household owing more than a hundred thousand according to the New York Fed.

Medical bills, credit card charges, and unusually high interest rates are enriching some people while debilitating a whole lot of the rest of us.

Meanwhile, climate changes are being felt all across the US and the world.

Our food supply, our mental health, and democracy itself all seem to be teetering on a brink.

So how did we get here and how can we get out?

My guest this time is Astra Taylor, a writer, documentarian, and activist who has spent years thinking about debt, insecurity, and the way our feelings about both are manipulated by powerful institutions and profiteers.

As co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors, Taylor helped organize people to disrupt that narrative and demand fairness, and in some cases, debt cancellation or abolition.

Now, the last time I talked to her, which was about a book titled "Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss it When It's Gone," our conversation ranged all over.

So when I heard she was out with a new book, I suggested we meet on a couch, which we did, thanks to the good people at the studios of CUNY TV in New York.

There we talked about her latest book, which is called "The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart."

And I share an edited version of that conversation next.

I'll be back at the end with some thoughts about language and disruption.

You're watching "The Laura Flanders Show."

Thanks for joining me.

Astra Taylor, I'm so happy to welcome you here to this exciting couch situation.

- I'm excited to be here with you.

- And even though we're talking about "The Age of Insecurity," your beautiful new book, which is based on your series of Massey Lectures for the CBC, Canadian broadcasters, I'm feeling quite secure Canadian broadcasters, I'm feeling quite secure that this conversation is gonna take us into all sorts of places that are familiar territory to our audience but also new.

What was it that took you to this subject for those lectures in this book?

- Yeah, this is one of those projects where it emerged out of an invitation.

So they invited me to give the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures.

And so, I wanted to speak to a condition that felt universal.

And I certainly feel insecure.

I feel insecure about, you know, saving for retirement.

I feel apprehensive about climate change.

You know, I feel worried about war and violence.

You know, sometimes I feel insecure on a more banal level.

We all do.

And I just felt that there was something there and that this was something that is widely felt but also transcends the personal and the political, that my insecurity is not just my fault, it's a product of these larger political and economic conditions, and that this concept actually would allow me to sort of zoom in and zoom out from the micro to the macro, the emotional to the economic, the psychological to the political.

And I just felt there was something there worth exploring.

And ultimately, I think, you know, it actually provides a new lens through which to understand our broader economic system.

- You start way back in the era of enclosure in the UK.

Talk about that transition that historians like Peter Linebaugh have written about.

- This book weaves together lots of different things.

So it has a sort of history of capitalism that is told through different lenses throughout the essays.

It's also got some memoir aspects.

It's got some myth.

It's got some philosophy.

So it does weave together a lot of different things, you know?

But what what I'm trying to show in the history of the Enclosure Movement and the history of the commons, which is really the genesis of capitalism and market society as we know it, is that insecurity is not an unfortunate byproduct of our economic system but actually central to it.

And this happened through thousands of acts of parliament that privatized millions and millions of acres.

And the people who had lived on those lands, depending on those lands, were commoners, right?

And they had what were considered customary rights.

Those people were kicked off those lands.

They could no longer provide for their own subsistence.

They were made insecure.

They lost the security of the commons.

And then they had nothing to sell but their labor.

So that's when they become wage laborers, the mass migrations into the cities, the urban slums, and the rise of industrialism as we know it.

And, you know, I have some quotes from some of the enclosers, the landlords, and they say, when you're enclosing with hedges, with trees, don't plant a tree that bears fruit, because you don't want folks to have free food that they can eat.

And it's very conscious that what they're gonna do is make people insecure to make them more pliable workers.

This resonates today, you know, two centuries later when we have, you know, I write about a memo written by Janet Yellen, who's treasury secretary, where she says, you know, insecurity on the job will make workers more desirous of pleasing the employer and less likely to shirk, to slack, to strike, and essentially more controllable.

- So, like, there might be somebody watching or listening who's thinking, yeah, but, you know, sure, that's all true, but is ambition, you know, innovations, the striving I mentioned before necessarily bad?

Are these bad qualities that we're trying to make more money, get more things, support ourselves better, be more secure?

- Yeah, I don't think it's always bad.

I don't think striving is always bad.

I mean, you know, in this mad rush to find security, my point in the book is that the conventional channels through which we're told to find it ironically kind of undermine it, right?

So, you know, yes, go to college and get a degree so you can be upwardly mobile, but what I see so much in my work is that people are saddled with this unpayable student debt that actually undermines their economic wellbeing and their psychological wellbeing as well.

And, you know, again, the example of, you know, find security through investing in your 401k, but actually so many investments in it are destabilizing the planet, poisoning communities, you know?

And also, there's that, you know, inherent volatility of the market that I mentioned, so you're always on shaky ground.

- You speak about economics as a mechanism of control and debt specifically as a mechanism of control in a film that you did with the wonderful artist Molly Crabapple for The Intercept.

It's called "Your Debt is Someone Else's Asset."

Take a look.

- [Narrator] A significant amount of the $770 billion of credit card debt sloshing around is medical bills, ambulance rides, doctor's visits, and surgeries paid for with the swipe of a little plastic card.

Then there's the additional $140 billion of medical debt and collections, combined with an estimated $50 billion in back rent and 1.4 trillion in auto loans.

Much of this debt didn't exist a few generations ago.

Consider the 1.8 trillion in student loans this country now holds, which wasn't a problem in the 1960s, when college was often free, or close to it.

Ronald Reagan helped change that.

He made his name by demonizing protestors on the University of Berkeley campus.

In 1967, as governor of California, he pushed the university system to start charging students tuition so they would, quote, "think twice about whether they wanted to pay to carry a picket sign."

There are people who are really attach to the idea that there has to be some kind of insecurity in order to motivate folks, right?

Right.

That's what we're always told about.

A guaranteed minimum income, for example, people that just sit on their backsides and not work at all.

- Right, and- - Not at all true.

- Right, not at all true.

And so, the enclosers, who I just quoted, thought that, you know, many leading economists and scholars still promote that idea, but research, for example, of a guaranteed annual income shows the opposite, that actually people are still very productive, and that when they do work less, it's because of things like they're spending time taking care of their families or they are pursuing higher education for the first time.

We are constantly being told that if people are too secure, that society's gonna collapse and that we can't afford to invest in other folks.

And I really wanna challenge that idea.

- So that gets to the question of, well, how else might we organize things and the question of rights.

And you talk about how, at the very period that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was getting written up, there was another convention being proposed, or more rights being considered as part of what we're, as it were, entitled to by virtue of the fact that we come together in society.

You mentioned a guy I'd never heard of, John Humphrey, a Canadian who played a big role and could have played a bigger one.

- So activists like myself, we talk about freedom of speech, we talk about the right to peacefully or peaceably assemble, you know, we talk about the free press, but we never talk about the fact we have a right to security.

And so, John Humphrey was a Canadian, he was a Democratic socialist who was radicalized by the Great Depression.

And so, he was part of the left-wing social movements that laid the groundwork for the Canadian welfare state.

And then after World War II, he became the lead author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And he managed to persevere against resistance from various camps to ensure that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had both positive and negative rights written into it.

This was a really important chapter, and that we should pick up the gauntlet from Humphrey and his allies and say, no, actually we deserve and are legally entitled to security in this robust, constructive, positive sense.

- And how different might we feel about our states, our societies, our governments if we saw that they were actually providing any of those things.

- [Astra] I think we'd feel a lot different about it.

That's for sure, right?

- Instead of having this fight around freedom from government, et cetera.

- Right.

And that's the thing.

You know, is the welfare state really the biggest threat to my security?

Like, I don't think so, but that's what we've been told.

And, you know, again, we've been told that other people's security is a threat to our security.

And I think that that's, you know, it's just absolutely bogus.

And, you know, we've been told that imagining that this right might have a bigger meaning, a positive meaning, is totally naive.

Well, the historical record says otherwise.

- Let's talk about how we make this real.

You say in the book that insecurity is also an opportunity.

How so?

- Yeah, that's what I think the heart of this, right, is that fundamentally we are insecure.

There's this existential insecurity.

And then there's the way the economy is structured to generate these other kinds of insecurities and to profit from them.

But if we go back to that first kind, our shared vulnerability, there's actually a kind of power in that.

And this to me is really real because of my organizing with the Debt Collective.

You know, inspired by feminist consciousness-raising circles, we host things called debtors assemblies, where the first step is just sharing your story, right?

Talking about something, you know, your financial situation, something that causes you a lot of shame and stress.

And through that shared vulnerability, building the bonds of solidarity.

And starting to think about, okay, well, actually how do we overcome this together?

What can we do to help each other?

Insecurity can cut both ways, though.

It can be a conduit to empathy, and solidarity, and organizing, if you do the work, right, and you try to channel it.

But we also see the way that insecurity can cause people to want to cut themselves off, to feel defensive, to think, okay, I've gotta, you know, I'm afraid, I've gotta go it alone.

We need to talk to people about how they're feeling, not just about statistics, (laughs) not just about facts, talk about feelings, and then channel that in this more solidaristic example that challenges these reactionary ideas of security and these market-driven definitions of security.

- So to give people an example of the kind of conversations that you're talking about and the kind of work you're talking about, here's a clip from another film you made for The Intercept, this one narrated by Nina Turner.

- I owe over $120,000 in debt.

And I basically, I didn't talk about it.

And anytime I did, I automatically feel ashamed.

- I am probably about $80,000 in debt.

And up until recently, I think my word was shame too.

But while you were talking about it, I was actually like, you know, it's regret.

- I decided to go to college because, like, I'm a nerd.

I love education.

I love school.

And I thought to myself, well, it doesn't matter how much it costs, like it's going to pay off.

- Like, I had to go to school.

I'm from a family of educators.

They were like the first generation in their family, you know, in our family, so it was like, you have the opportunity, you're going to college.

- I was really adamant on moving towards my career goals.

And so, I just like pushed myself into this master's program without thinking, how am I gonna pay for it?

- [Nina] A lack of intergenerational wealth and other structural inequities force women, and Black women in particular, to borrow at disproportionate rates.

And wage discrimination makes it that much harder to escape.

For every dollar white men make, Black women earn 61 cents, a lifetime loss of almost $1 million.

- You gather people together.

- Yeah.

- They talk about what they're going through and they address the shame, or at least share it.

- [Astra] Yes.

- Then what do they do?

- So, you know, creating a place for there to be emotional catharsis, connection, and then it's like, okay, but what are we going to do together to address this?

So the Debt Collective is committed to using every kind of power we can muster.

So we, you know, try to challenge the conventional narratives.

You know, we don't ask for debt forgiveness because we don't believe that student debtors, or medical debtors, or rent debtors did anything wrong.

We demand debt cancellation and abolition, so organizing debt strikes, and then using the law where and when we can.

So this is why the issue of rights is important to me, because they're all imperfect, but debtors have some rights.

We've got some rights, and they're being trampled because- - Mostly, they're too complicated for us to understand.

- 100%.

So the Debt Collective is committed, we've made a series of tools to dispute student debt, dispute rent debt in California.

We have a new tool called the Student Debt Release Tool, where we take these rights and we try to create a digital interface essentially so people can petition to have those rights respected, petition to stop an eviction, for example, or to have the Department of Education cancel their debt.

But we don't just rely on the law alone.

We then also organize people so that they are making collective demands around those rights, you know, and leveraging the power of their collective voices.

We can't afford to leave power on the table.

And so, every strategy we can figure out, we try to do, but really committed to this idea that we need mass participation.

We need everybody to get involved and to fight for each other.

So we need medical debtors fighting for student debtors, fighting for rent debtors.

And for people who don't have debt, to also recognize that they would benefit if people broadly had more economic security, right?

That actually we all win from a world where folks are not financially precarious and overwhelmed, because, you know, what the debt crisis does in part is it's not just about all the millions of people who have negative net wealth, it's about the fact that those, you follow those chains of debt up and you realize it's enriching investors and financiers and, you know, helping inequality to spiral.

And that's not good for any of us.

- Where does the Biden-Harris debt forgiveness plan stand right now?

- Well, you know, the Debt Collective, we did our best leading up to Biden's announcement of his debt relief plan in August of last year to push the administration to be more bold and to cancel debt automatically.

It's not just student debt cancellation, but every progressive cause is facing a judicial system that has been captured.

And we need to recognize that we're on different terrain and fight more aggressively.

So, you know, it's far from over.

To date, the Biden administration has canceled $130 billion of student debt.

That would not have happened without an uprising of debtors fighting to make this an issue.

Part of what keeps me going as an organizer is actually always having that historical sense, saying, okay, people have fought before and, you know, taking inspiration from them.

And actually being part of that long trajectory, to me, is really meaningful.

- So there is some historical wind at our back, if only we knew, if we're debtors rebelling in this way.

The fact that the administration, Biden-Harris, has taken action is important because of the scale that we're talking about.

We can all gather with colleagues and make a difference, as you have with the Debt Collective, but the scale of the problem is huge.

Where do you think we are on the clock of the universe?

- Yeah.

(laughs) I mean, the scale of the problem is huge, but the solution is so simple, and it's cancel it all, right,?

And so, you know, you mentioned the jubilee, which is the tradition of erasing of debts and actually a restoring of land and resources to the people, you know?

And there were rulers in the ancient world who did this, the wiping of the slate, the jubilee.

- It's a Jewish tradition, every seven years- - Every seven years, you know?

So this is a religious tradition with historical precedent.

And that's what we need to do.

Debt cancellation would enable farmers to go back to the land or would enable young lawyers to go be public defenders instead of going to work for ExxonMobil, or Goldman Sachs, or something like that.

We would all benefit in direct ways from liberating people from these unjust debts.

And then I think we would be better situated to fight other fights, you know, to fight the climate fight, to fight for racial justice, to fight to actually achieve something approaching a democracy down the road.

But, you know, the people who are trying to keep the status quo are very direct.

And one interesting thing about all the lawsuits against student debt cancellation is they just said the quiet part out loud.

So some of this litigation said, we don't like student debt cancellation because it narrows the racial wealth gap.

Hi, we're a libertarian think tank, but we don't like student debt cancellation because it will encourage our employees to move on to other jobs.

We don't like student debt cancellation because it will be harder to recruit poor people to the military, right?

So we know what this is about.

And, you know, it's totally odious.

- I have been struck in the news coverage, since the attacks of October 7th, by how many Israelis refer to having a safe room.

And sometimes their safe rooms help them, sometimes they didn't.

But living with a safe room seems to be one version of our future, that if we have the resources, we can build ourselves a safe room.

- Yeah.

- You instead call for something else.

The subtitle of the book is Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.

That seems like the opposite of depending on our own individual private safe room.

- Yes.

Yeah, in the beginning, I talk about the trend of billionaires building these bunkers, right?

So kind of security through the bunker, security through the safe room instead of security by recognizing our shared vulnerabilities, the fact that we're actually, you know, all fearful, and that a better solution is to figure out how to actually take care of each other.

You know, the word security, you know, I think needs to be reclaimed and that we need to start thinking about more collaborative, cooperative, sustainable forms of security, because the impulse is understandable.

I wanna be safe, right?

And I empathize with people who are feeling fearful.

But what we're doing is not working.

- How do we make the changes that you're talking about?

- Yeah, I mean this is the organizer me.

Organize, organize, organize.

You know, I think debtor organizing is one lever, labor organizing is another lever, tenant organizing, and starting to put on the agenda that actually housing shouldn't be a commodity, it should be a right.

All of these movements together, I think a common thread through them is actually that we're trying to present a different idea of security and that we're addressing the conditions that are making people feel vulnerable and manufacturing that insecurity we discussed.

And so, there isn't just one solution, right?

There isn't just sort of one fix to all of the crises that we're facing.

But definitely the answer is to not go towards that bunker, to go out, to find people who are trying to engage constructively, to move from the personal to the political, to move to that political change.

And I think, you know, the Debt Collective, again, it's just one example, but I think it's a good one of just a small group of folks, under-resourced, with an idea that was laughed at and scorned when we started saying it.

And we said, we're gonna make the government cancel debt, you know?

We're gonna put free college on the political agenda.

I mean, we were mocked in the mainstream press.

And now everyone takes the idea that debt cancellation is legitimate for granted.

So I just think people should start their little initiatives, start their projects.

You know, start dreaming and scheming even if it sounds nuts, because that's actually how we're gonna get out of this mess.

- Astra Taylor's book is "The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart."

Astra, thank you so much for joining me.

- Thanks for having me.

- It's been such a pleasure talking with you.

(bright music) Financial language does a lot to obscure what█s really going on.

And for more on that you might be interested in our conversations on this program with Marjorie Kelly In her book on wealth supremacy she talked about how this she talked about how this language of security, and insurance, and stability, and equity masked a whole lot of exploitation and dangerous practices going on.

Well, so too, Astra Taylor says, maybe we need to think twice about the word disruption.

While markets and businesses like security, disruption has brought us most of the changes we care about today.

At the end of her book, she says that she fears business as usual more than she fears anarchy.

She writes, "We have the right to vote, weekends and minimum wages, laws against sexual harassment and racial discrimination, and basic, although inadequate, environmental regulations, because ordinary people caused what the powerful took to be mayhem, like the disabled activists who stopped traffic with their wheelchairs to demand accessibility or the indigenous organizers who blockaded pipelines to protect their water and air."

I'm gonna resolve to think more positively about mayhem in the weeks ahead and perhaps to investigate my fears of disruption.

Can we embrace the kind of insecurity that just might shake things up in a good way?

If you wanna find my full conversation about that with Astra Taylor, you can through subscribing to our free podcast.

In the meantime, stay kind, stay curious, and thanks for joining me.

For more on this episode and other forward-thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full, uncut conversations.

We also have a podcast.

It's all at lauraflanders.org.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)