On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Doug Henwood wrote:
> You know, I suspect that one reason that debt jubilees and the like are
> not spoken of now as compared with earlier periods might have something
> to do with the greater economic importance of debt. If debts are not
> central to the functioning of the real economy, they can be wiped away
> with little impact. Not so today.
I think it's closer to the opposite. The reason you had debt jubilees in the age of literal debt-slavery was because you had to precisely because it was a matter of the state's survival. Unchecked, it led inevitably to civil war and abandonment of the land.
If you want to sum up this huge then/now distinction in one phrase, I think it would be closer to the truth to say that what distinguishes modern from ancient times is that today the ruling class is much more hampered by state regulation in their exploitation, so their depredations of general populace don't lead to the brink of civil war so quickly -- and regularly, since after the jubilee, you were usually in the status quo ante. (Only in exceptionally rare moments, like after Cleisthenes in Athens, was a whole new system set up that protected the general populace from the aristocrats. Which was, of course, democracy.)
It might seem outrageous to say that what makes the modern rapacious rich different is that they are so restrained. But we are talking about the really longue duree here. Ancient aristocrats literally had the power of life and death over their workers. Tony Soprano was restrained compared to them.
Michael