A critique of the moral framework of debt:

Michael Hudson: …and forgive them their debts

Clean Slate debt cancellations (the Jubilee Year), used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty, first appear in the Bible in Leviticus 25. Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim it. This message – more than other religious claims – is what threatened his enemies, and why he was put to death.

This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors). On the contrary, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers, allowing creditor elites and oligarchs the leverage to take over societies and privatize their public assets, especially in hard times.

Historically, no monarchy or government has survived takeover by creditor elites and oligarchs (viz: Rome). In a time of increasing economic and political polarization, and a global economy deeper in debt than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, …and forgive them their debts shows what individuals, governments, and societies can learn from the ancient past for restoring economic and social stability today.

Michael Hudson interview: Debt and Power

hits bong

coughs loudly for an uncomfortable period of time

Duuuuuuude what if like your future self was a distinct person who shouldn’t be bound by a previous incarnations will? You’re just signing away the consent of an individual yet to exist.

/ends bit

Serious response: I don’t get the issue? You’ve already realized that it’s a tool to enforce one individuals will upon on the other should they try and back out of a prior arrangement. Under capitalism this has obvious flaws, and under socialism it was very very different. There is legal scholarship comparing American and Soviet contract law if you’re interested in seeing what was kept and what wasn’t. A solid chunk of it goes over my head though so I can’t break it down well.

On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.

If you have to participate in wage labor to not suffer and die, then there is no free association of peers via a contract. This can be applied to most kinds of contracts under capitalism. Mutual Aid is the antithesis of this.

If you have any other specific sticking points, lay them out and hopefully we can resolve them.

Our existing frameworks for consent aren't very good, probably for these reasons. It's tough to draw the line between inducements and coercion. Contracts are OK if they're a fair agreement, but unless the two agents have an equal power balance they're not going to sign a fair contract. For instance, a job contract will take surplus value for the employer. Presumably, it's better to approach this by eradicating class than at the individual level of tweaking how contracts work.

Contracts are there to bind you to the production apparatus in both time and space. At least that's the case if I read this week's reading for the Foucault seminar I'm taking close enough.

On contacts:

Only a slim majority in Congress recognized that the freedpeople needed substantial assistance and were willing to grant it under the general welfare clause of the Constitution. The bureau had four divisions: Land, Educational, Legal, and Medical. The ex-slaves were sick and needed care; they were largely illiterate and needed education. Health and literacy seemed obvious requirements for contract freedom that would involve negotiating the sale of bodily labor. The Legal Division would supervise the contracts the freedpeople negotiated with their ex-owners

With Johnson having blocked the redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s Bureau put enormous pressure on the freedmen to enter into contracts. Agents regarded labor as the quickest way to wean the freedmen from dependence on the government, to resurrect the Southern economy, and to teach the freedmen the lessons of free labor. Contracts, as Howard put it, were not only a mark of freedom but a form of discipline: “If they can be induced to enter into contracts, they are taught that there are duties as well as privileges of freedom.” By signing contracts black people would prove that they “deserved” freedom

Actual labor contracts, however, varied widely and were often hard to mistake for freedom. There were standard bureau contracts, but there were also contracts written by the employers. And there were oral contracts. In some places, such as the sugar fields of Louisiana, slaves would use contracts to their own benefit. The bureau hoped to supervise all contracts, but white Southerners often had the contracts executed before a local magistrate. Given the discrepancy in the power and status of those making the contracts, the illiteracy of many ex-slaves, and white Southerners’ resort to violence and coercion, the possibilities of abuse were manifold.62 The first labor contracts negotiated by the Freedmen’s Bureau certainly seemed evidence that the new order differed only in the details from the old. In South Carolina, Charles C. Soule, a white officer in the black Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, described how he talked to thousands of whites and blacks, explaining to the whites “the necessity of making equitable contracts with their workmen, of discontinuing corporal punishment and of referring all cases of disorder and idleness to the military authorities.” In this, he seemed a messenger of a new order. But to freedpeople he also said, “Every man must work under orders … and on a plantation the head man who gives all the orders is the owner of the place. Whatever he tells you to do you must do at once, and cheerfully. Remember that all your working time belongs to the man who hires you.” Soule told the freedpeople “you will have to work hard, and get very little to eat, and very few clothes to wear,” and husbands and wives on separate plantations would not live together. The new freedom might seem reminiscent of the old slavery. But, “remember even if you are badly off, no one can buy or sell you.” Soule thought, “only actual suffering, starvation, and punishment will drive many of them to work.” It was no wonder that many ex-slaves initially regarded men like Soule as “rebels in disguise.”63 Contracts could produce exactly the kind of subordinated labor force ex-slave owners desired. The bureau’s fear of black dependency often created black dependency by driving freedpeople into contracts that impoverished them and made them reliant on their old masters. Bureau agents were right in thinking that the mere fact of a contract forced the white employer to recognize the black employee as his legal equal, but this triumph was purely nominal and yielded only marginal benefits to black laborers. At their extreme, contracts were little more than slavery under another name. In South Carolina in the immediate aftermath of the war, William Tunro in South Carolina asked his former slaves to sign a contract for life. Refusal led first to the expulsion of Robert Perry, his wife, and two others from the plantation, and then to their pursuit and murder by Tunro’s neighbors.64 Contracts could replicate conditions that the freedmen thought emancipation had ended forever. In many areas of the South contracts ran for a year. The freedmen agreed to labor “for their rations and clothing in the usual way,” which is to say the same way as they labored under slavery. Many often received very little beyond this. The New Orleans Tribune, the most consistent advocate for the rights of the freedmen, attacked the idea that an annual contract was compatible with free labor. Why, it asked, was it necessary for freedmen to have to sign yearlong contracts when northern workers could quit their jobs and take another at any time? Answering its own question, it said the aim of the contracts was to replicate the old system and tie the laborers to the plantation.

This is from The Republic For Which It Stands