Basic Necessities

An Abolitionist Approach To Debt

October 19, 2024 Chrystin Ondersma, Next City. Strategize! Basic Necessities, Debt, Human Rights, Legal System

When individuals cannot meet their basic needs without turning to debt, they face threats to their human dignity. Survival debt — debt that individuals incur to survive and live a life with dignity — is inherently intimidating and degrading. A person does not have the freedom to obtain a standard of living consistent with human dignity if the only means of acquiring housing, transportation, food, medical care or an education is to incur debt. Many indebted households can barely survive, much less vivir sabroso. Those who incur debt to meet basic needs must work, despite knowing that the fruits of their labor will be diverted to repay debt — while they still struggle just to meet basic needs, let alone accumulate the necessary resources to weather future emergencies or to build savings for retirement.

Tell The People That The Struggle Must Go On

August 20, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Organize! Basic Necessities, Brazil, Hunger, Pandemic, Police violence, South Africa

Young children marvel at an obvious contradiction in capitalist societies: why do we have shops filled with food, and yet see hungry people on the streets? It is a question of enormous significance; but in time the question dissipates into the fog of moral ambivalence, as various explanations are used to obfuscate the clarity of the youthful mind. The most bewildering explanation is that hungry people cannot eat because they have no money, and somehow this absence of money – the most mystical of all human creations – is enough reason to let people starve.

After The Pandemic: A Ten-Point Plan For The Collective Provision Of Basic Needs

April 23, 2020 The Foundational Economy Collective, Resilience.org. Create! Basic Necessities, COVID-19, Global Recession, New Economy

This manifesto is an intervention by a Europe-wide group of academics – the foundational economy collective – who have for several years in books and articles argued that policy makers need to balance concern with jobs and wages with more attention to essential goods and services like housing, food, utility supply, health, education and care. The provision of all of these things relies on the collective organisation of much larger systems; if group provision breaks down, citizens cannot buy their way out through individual consumption. This foundational economy is often invisible, buried within the abstract idea of the economy and neglected by policymakers who focus on high tech and tradeable sectors. But during this coronavirus pandemic it has become highly visible because societies are shutting down everything except those parts of the economy providing essential foundational goods and services.

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