Debt jubilees merely treated societal symptoms ...

The following is an extract from the "Volume 2. Modernity" of my series "From Modernity to After-Modernity" that I'm presently editing.

I give this extract as a blog post because it is adding some more substance to the post "Michael Hudson Asks Naked Capitalism's readers... " that I published on 2021-04-15. 

Power-societies were without any doubt instrumental in managing the larger societies that resulted from the abrupt climate warming at the tail-end of the Younger Dryas. But the fact is that power-societies engaged the process that today terminates with humanity’s predicament of "the great convergence of Late-Modernity"

 

 

1. The early men of power controlled the distribution of resources 

In a first step, by controlling the granaries, the early-men of power, and the men of knowledge, controlled the distribution of resources. And by linking the distribution of resources to the output of peoples’ toiling they were able to impose the principle of social inequality that gradually deepened into a two-tiered society. This kind of two-tiered society accompanied the model of power-society until this very day. In other words inequality was a structural part of the cultural continuity of this kind of society.

 

 

2. The stabilization of power-societies led to monetary exchanges

In a second step with the stabilization of their institutions of power over the long haul the men of power introduced the abstraction of money, in the form of gold and silver, over which their institutions had a monopoly of extraction and of conversion in coins.

The stabilization of power institutions had taken some 7,000 years during which societal life was very unstable. Over the whole span of transition chieftains conquerred power over villages and lost it immediately to other chieftains and so on. In other words chieftains did not have the time to stabilize their institutions of power before being over-thrown. Fear was thus ever present and it stuck in the deep recesses of the minds.

During the first two millennia, following the stabilization of power institutions, the memory of these difficulties remained very vivid in the minds of the men of power. This explains their resistance to the rent seeking by a minority that always succeeded to capture the majority in debt bondage. Their resistance against the capture of the majority in debt bondage took the form of a debt Jubilee at the accession of a new king to the throne. Michael Hudson has extensively studied that particular practice of TCA early kingdoms (1) :

"Hudson’s early focus is on Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian rulers for roughly the two millennia from 2500 BC. These periodically declared the cancellation of all agrarian (‘barley’) debts, the release of debt slaves and the return of mortgaged agricultural land – usually soon after the accession of a new ruler, the building of a temple or the fighting of a war. While much of the debt cancelled was tax arrears owed to the central governing authority (and therefore self-imposed), edicts also applied to private debts for grain, but not mercantile debts for money.

The motives of such rulers were both political and economic. The power base of a new ruler amongst the wider populace was cemented by periodic debt cancellation, while their ability to call on the general labour force for military service, public works and the payment of taxes was less encumbered by creditors having forced small-holders into crippling debt or debt servitude. Debt cancellation acted as a periodic reset and safety valve, to limit the ability of the landed class to immiserate the wider workforce and take for themselves agrarian surpluses that would otherwise be taxed or consumed." (2)

At this point a fundamental question arises.

Why did a minority of rent seekers, in the Power Societies of the Tri-Continental-Area, always succeed to capture the majority of citizens in debt bondage ?

Debt jubilees by new kings, or emperors, were merely cutting the symptoms of the societal structural problem of power-societies just like Western modern medicine does with health symptoms which originate in structural causes that are disregarded. Cutting the symptom quietened the minds for a generation and in the meantime the institutions of power could grow their roots deeper in the societal land. The fact of repeating debt jubilees over some 2,000 years was a gift to the model of power societies that allowed it to grow its roots ever deeper in the land and in the minds of some 100 generations! This was amply sufficient for this model of society to be encoded in the minds and perhaps even as deep as in our DNA. What I mean to say is that this amputation, by debt jubilees of the symptoms of societal structural problems, tricked us to accept a model of society that is an economic and social horror which drowns us all in a sea of propaganda that we have been forced to swallow as being art.

In contrast to the amputation of symptoms by Western medicine Chinese Traditional Medicine treats the structural cause of the health problem. If we take the treatment, of the structural causes of health problems by Chinese Traditional Medicine, as an analogy we naturally come to wonder if by any chance China’s societal treatment of inequality in its early power societies was any better than the amputation of symptoms in TCA and Western power societies.

The thesis that I defend, in the following volumes of this series, is that the structural problem, of the Early-Power Societies in the TCA and later in the West, was that the men of power had captured the societal power that allowed them to control the men of knowledge and society as a whole. By their use of power they separated the minority living in privilege from the majority. And the minority further used its privileges to capture the majority in the bondage of debt. In contrast, in the Chinese Early-Power Societies, power was in the hands of the sage animist men of Knowledge.

But how did power handled by men of power differ from power handled by men of Knowledge ? Was there a qualitative difference ?

Let’s start by clarifying that the status of men of power, and of men of knowledge. changed radically from one stage of societal evolution to the next :

• in small bands : power is given by the physical force of the alpha-male who takes all decisions for the group. Knowledge is still an unknown quality of the mind.

• in tribal societies : absence of power. Knowledge sustains the unanimity decision-making by citizens of egalitarian tribes.

• in TCA Power-Societies : power was sustained by brute force + power of conviction. Our brains have been wired over millions of years to act with utter prudence by unleashing fear of uncertainty in our minds and so a strong mental force of conviction is highly attractive to fearful persons. Religious men of knowledge, who promoted institutions of power, did so by filling the minds with the narrative of their creed. 
  In Chinese power-societies : power was sustained by the sage recognized for his higher wisdom by the animist men of knowledge who were respected for their knowledge formation service at the attention of tribes, villages and their inhabitants. Knowledge was pragmatic and answered daily life needs.

• in Western Modernity : Starting sometime around 1,150 “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” gradually imposed its rational outlook to an ever increasing sphere in the domain of life. In Late-Modernity the center of gravity of the economy-world has shifted from the West to the East, with China at the core, and the world enters now in a new historical era. The old paradigm of “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” is dyeing while the new paradigm of “the reason that is at work in the preservation and the complexification of life” has still not emerged.

Having clarified the notion of “men of power” and “men of knowledge” remains now to address the difference in their handling of power. But this is a rather complex matter that relates to, — the formation of knowledge which is the subject of Volume 3 — and Societal governance and societal evolution which is the subject of Volume 5, so the answer to this question will definitely be better addressed in these Volumes. 

 

3. The reason, that is at work in the transformation of money into capital, and the rise of Western Modernity

In the very particular context of the Late-Medieval Period the transformation of money into capital gradually imposed a paradigm shift, away from the traditional belief in spiritual matters, into a belief in the rational which opened the new historical era of Early-Modernity.

But the West was the sole beneficiary of Modernity. It extracted from the non-Western world the resources that financed its industrialization and then the working capital to finance its reign of abundance.  This extraction inflicted a very heavy toll on the rest of the world in the form of civilizational collapses, worldview extinctions, and in the genocide of so many traditional societies. 

 

In light of this reality I feel that Modernity would be more appropriately called a “Western-Modernity” that extracted a heavy price from a non-consenting rest of the world.

I furthermore think that, in the context of “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” which threatens the future of life on earth, this appellation is becoming a necessity to counter the narrative of big capital holders and their servants who preach the ideology of Neo-liberalism in order to try to push through a last gamble of theirs which is a radical worldwide reset of the governance-world that would leave them as the sole decision-makers of a new world order. 

 

Not only is this gamble not taking into account the opinion of the rest of the world. But its formulation is also hiding the responsibility of Western Modernity for “The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity”. We can definitely not let them get away with such a gamble. The West must be held accountable for the accumulation of side-effects by Western Modernity.

Notes

1. About the practice of the "debt Jubile" :
— "...and forgive them their debts", ISLET–Verlag. Dresden. 2018, by Michael Hudson.
— "Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East", CDL Press 2018, by Michael Hudson.
— "The lost tradition of biblical debt cancellations”, originally published by the Henry George School of Social Science (New York City), by Michael Hudson. 1993.
— “Could/should Jubilee debt cancellations be reintroduced today?", Economics Discussion Papers, No. 2018-33, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW). Kiel, by Michael Hudson and Charles A. E. Goodhart. 2018.
— "Reconsidering Debt Remission in Light of the Ancient World", in Continental Thought & Theory. A journal of intellectual freedom. Volume 1 | Issue 2: Debt and Value , by Roland Boer.
— "Debt, Land and Money, From Polanyi to the New Economic Archaeology", in Resilience, by Michael Hudson. 2020-10-22.

2. Quote from "The Jubilee – An Impossible Dream?" a book review by Paul Mills. 2019-08-05.