Who dreams of joy and radiance?

This interview with anarchist/anthropologist David Graeber, who has a book about the history of debt coming out, is pretty interesting. In it, he talks about the old practice of jubilee: the forgiveness of debt and the freeing of slaves and prisoners.

Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

I somehow never knew what a jubilee was, but I am familiar with Mesopotamian clean slates. As Graeber mentions, the Sumerian ‘amargi’ is the first known use of a word meaning ‘freedom’, and it refers to the release of debt slaves, allowing them to ‘return to the mother’. Urukagina, who I wrote about here, was the world’s first recorded social reformer, sweeping to power on the promise of releasing the people of Lagash from their debts.

There’s something about jubilees that just fascinates me, though. Not the guilty begging for pardon or the righteous demanding release, but a celebration of forgiveness. An acknowledgement of the inherent forgivability of debt. Perhaps it’s the willingness of those in power to declare the jubilee? As opposed to in Lagash, where it was anti-creditor reformers who took control and changed the system. Surely jubilees were appealing in part because rulers feared losing power to reformers, but they also seem to legitimize debt-forgiveness in a way I’ve not seen elsewhere.

More from Graeber:

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves. Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

It makes you wonder: could we have a jubilee today?

Not “will we” - that seems pretty politically impossible. But if we somehow managed to elect the kind of representatives who might declare one. Would it be a good idea? What would it mean? The forgiveness of all debt, even student loan debt and medical debt, which can’t even be taken care of through bankruptcy? What about the release of prisoners? We have more people locked up that any other country in the world. Would it be so bad just to let all the non-violent criminals go?

What do you think?

I leave you with some Patti Smith: