Debt—and the shame that surrounds it—is the tie that binds the 99 percent.

A Student Debt Strike Force Takes OffCan young people reimagine it as something productive, rather than a tool for profiteering?

“ONE, we are the zombies! TWO; we are indebted! THREE; this occupation is… om-nom nom-nom…”

Playfully infusing a familiar Occupy Wall Street chant with the mindless noshing of zombies, last month around 100 costumed protesters undertook a small but significant “Night of the Living Debt” march around the New York University campus and Washington Square Park. The event was organized by All in the Red, an initiative of student activists which grows out of the nocturnal marches that began last month in solidarity with the massive popular mobilization in Quebec against austerity-related tuition hikes. Equipped with an arsenal of felt red squares, red banners, red balloons, red confetti, and pots and pans, the young organizers—recent graduates of the OWS Summer Disobedience School training program—undertook the first coordinated march in New York to translate student-specific struggles surrounding tuition and education debt into a broader discourse concerning the perpetual condition of indebtedness in which the 99 percent currently finds itself. With its necromantic pop-cultural reference, the march suggested that zombie-like servitude to Wall Street creditors is a basic condition of life for the majority of the population—a point driven home with a cathartic “debtors’ die-in” at the conclusion of the event.

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