“Have you no sense of decency?”

The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence.

I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers.
Only the epithets have changed.

The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.

The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.

The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots”) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators.

This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.

Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.

Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.

By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.

The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.

The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.

The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.

I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God of the Bible?”

Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.”
She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.

Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Congresswoman Stefanik:  You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.

President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?

Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?

Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.

What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?

Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.

Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”

The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welch replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.

The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”

That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.

During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”

Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.

Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.

The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist

A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.

After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle.

Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.

But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.

The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.

Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”

This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”

Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for

Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.

What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.

It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.

This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.

What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”

Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”

Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.

Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.

The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, where House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.

Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionist. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.

What CAN the students at Columbia ask for:

Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.

What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.

They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.

They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.

They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.

But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.

The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”

Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay

The post Universities as Tentacles of the Police State first appeared on Michael Hudson.

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A new transcription of an earlier recording. One of the first interviews where Michael talked about the Ancient Near East.

KARL FITZGERALD: 3CR, radio that’s independent, progressive and making a difference. And welcome to The Renegade Economists with your host, Karl Fitzgerald. This week, we’re stepping back in time, way back some 10,000 years BC, into the world of archaeology, Egyptology and Assyriology. Yes, it’s time for another special with Professor Michael Hudson. That’s right. Michael Hudson back on the show. 

He’s got a new book called “Labor in the Ancient World”. And I asked him to give us a bit of a precis on the background to this very interesting process. Hang on for another riveting conversation here on 3CR’s Renegade Economists. 

MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s a symposium of a group put together at Harvard University of all the leading Assyriologists and Egyptologists and Mycenaean Greek specialists and archaeologists on how early societies mobilized the labor force, especially for large public building projects such as temples, city walls and other infrastructure. 

KARL FITZGERALD: And this is published through who?

MICHAEL HUDSON: It’ll be published by ISLET-Verlag, the Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends. We just finished the typesetting actually today, and they’re sending it to Amazon to be put on their list. It’ll probably be available in about three weeks.

KARL FITZGERALD: “Labor in the Ancient World”, and does that have some sort of Harvard connection? 

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, we originally founded this project 20 years ago at the Peabody Museum, which is their archaeology and anthropology department. We wanted to do a series of books at that time on how modern economies and practices begin. 

And our first colloquium (“Privatization in the ancient near East and classical world”) was in 1994 on privatization in the ancient Near East and classical world. 

Our second volume (“Urbanization and land ownership in the ancient Near East”) was on land ownership and urbanization, how cities were created and how land ownership and real estate patterns developed in a market for real estate. 

And the third volume (“Debt and economic renewal in the ancient Near East”) was on economic renewal in the ancient Near East, in other words, how there were debt cancellations in order to continue to restore the land to the cultivators to provide means of self-support for the population as a whole. 

But then the colloquia got so popular that we added a fourth volume (“Creating Economic Order: Record-keeping, Money and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East”) on creating economic order on the origins of money and account keeping from Mesopotamia to Mycenaean Greece and Egypt. 

And then 10 years ago, we had our fifth colloquium on labor in the ancient Near East. And there’s been so many revolutions in archaeology and Assyriology and even Egyptology in the last 10 years that we’re only publishing that volume now, brought completely up to date. 

KARL FITZGERALD: So the ancient Near East, how many thousand years ago was it? Just put us in the picture. 

MICHAEL HUDSON: We began the volume in 10,000 BC in Turkey, where you have very large city-like ceremonial sites larger than Stonehenge, huge sites that took hundreds of years to build with huge stone megaliths, even in the pre-pottery Neolithic. 

In other words, they didn’t have metal to carve these stones. They didn’t have pottery, but they had in Göbekli Tepe all sorts of huge carvings of an astronomical nature where people would come together on ceremonial times like midsummer, and work.

We dealt from Turkey in 10,000 BC to Sumer in the third millennium BC, Babylonia in the second millennium BC, the building of the pyramids. We have the actual bills and accounting statements for what’s paid labor to build the pyramids. We found they were not built by slaves. They were built by very well-paid, skilled labor. 

The problem in all these periods is, how do you get labor to go to work in a time which for 10,000 years there was a labor shortage? How do you get people to go to work if they don’t want to? They can just move somewhere else. All of this labor that was built on temples and big ceremonial sites had to be voluntary. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have gone there. 

We found a number of things. 

KARL FITZGERALD: Michael, how did you actually track this? What were you reading to get this information? 

MICHAEL HUDSON: Everybody who comes to the colloquium is a specialist in their period. For instance, Carl C. Amber-Karlowski is the archaeologist who was dealing with Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. We have Babylonian specialists. We have Egyptian specialists. 

Each person throughout all of these five volumes, we had a specialist in each time period and each geographical area for what we’re doing. 

KARL FITZGERALD: You were reading clay tablets, cuneiform? 

MICHAEL HUDSON: They basically read the clay tablets if they’re Mesopotamia. They read the stone carvings in the Egyptian pyramids on the inside of the big rock blocks that they make the pyramids out of. 

People would carve, I’m from this hometown and that hometown. There are also hieroglyphic records saying, here’s what we have to pay for the people. 

We also have royal inscriptions. One thing we found is that why do people go to work building all of this hard manual labor? One reason is it’s a big beer party. There are huge expenditures on beer. If you’re going to have a lot of people come voluntarily to do something like city building or constructing their own kind of national identity of a palace and walls, you’ve got to have plenty of beer. You also have plenty of meat, plenty of animals being sacrificed. 

What we found is that the people doing the manual labor on the pyramids, the Mesopotamian temples and city walls and other sites were given a very good high-protein meat diet. There were plenty of festivals. The way of integrating all of these people were in public feasts. They all felt that this was like joining their peer pressure group or their peer group, all creating a kind of national identity. 

KARL FITZGERALD: Back in those times, how on earth would they have realized when this festival was on? How was the communication spread that this was the time to come together? There’s a lot of things you guys have uncovered. 

MICHAEL HUDSON: We discussed this in the second volume of our series, “Urbanization and Land [Ownership] in the Ancient Near East”. They do it by the calendar. They do it by counting the moons and the solar solstices and equinoxes. 

All of the ceremonial sites, from Stonehenge to Turkey, are all based on the particular equinox or solstice, where you’d have a date that the chieftains, who would usually be the calendar keepers, would keep the calendar all the way going back to the Ice Age.

Around 29,000 BC, we have carved bones with the phases of the moon on. The job of the chieftain was to carve the phases of the moon, to calculate how long the month would be, to know that, ah, in this month, six months after the equinox, here’s where we have to get together and have everybody come and begin working on the big site. 

KARL FITZGERALD: I’m still trying to grasp this, Michael. All these laborers that would come together in this centralized place to build this giant statue or pyramid, based out of some sort of goodwill, what was it? 

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to begin with, on the first, you’d have a big beer party to get everybody friendly. You’d have a big feast, big meals, and you have this all over the world, that communal feasts are the way of integrating societies. 

And then, obviously, somebody was in charge of designing these monuments. We don’t know whom, but they would carve the stones, they’d carry them over large distances, they’d transport them, just like in Stonehenge, they had to take these stones from a large distance. They’d quarry them, they’d cut them, and we’re dealing in a time before they invented steel or metal. Many of the stones had to be cut just by chipping away with other stones. So they do this very laborious type of business and work. 

Well, later, by about 2000 BC, you had a much more dense population. You would have a shift from the temples that originally organized most of this work to the palaces. And you would schematize and organize this labor coming together. So you’d say, okay, we’re going to divide up the land. And whoever has such and such a plot of land has to supply so many laborers to work on the temples and the palaces and the public infrastructure.

So what we found as a byproduct of the labor volume is that the origins of land rights were defined by the tax payments. In other words, in order to get the right to have a given amount of land of a given size, you had to promise on such and such a date to provide this much labor for the corvée project. It’s a French word because the corvée of paying taxes in the form of labor instead of payments went all the way down through the 18th century in France. And it was typical in medieval Europe before you had a money economy. 

So you’d have everybody who had their own subsistence land or their own land holdings of one form or another or their grazing lands would have to supply X number of laborers to the big building project. 

KARL FITZGERALD: That’s quite some discovery. So you’re saying that labor was provided as an in-kind payment for taxation based around calendars to build these giant monuments?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. Every one of our archaeologists, Assyriologists, and Egyptologists have found for every period of the Bronze Age and the Neolithic.

KARL FITZGERALD: And so it was still rather on a voluntary level. There was no quantifying?

MICHAEL HUDSON: There was no [coercion]. We’re dealing with society— there weren’t that many people in the world in 2,000 B.C. or 3,000 B.C. or 10,000 B.C.

And what you have, when you would have a government that got too oppressive or when they would raise the contributions or taxes too high, people would just flee to another area. Or if they were too much indebted, the debtors would flee as they did from Babylonia around 1600 B.C. all the way down to Roman times.

KARL FITZGERALD: Right. So they had to build this social contract around these feasts, around this sense of belonging by being at this public works event. Sounds like a fascinating way to keep society on track and organize labor so that civilization would develop on some level. But have you found any indication on that managerial class and how they developed through the chieftains?

MICHAEL HUDSON: They were mainly the priesthoods. The calendar keepers were usually the chief, and most of the religions were basically cosmological. They wanted to create a whole cosmology of nature and society. And it all was based on astronomy, and it was all based on the calendar.

When you have tribes, a society divided into 12 tribes, as you had in Israel, but you also had it in Greece in the Amphictyonies. You also had it in Mesopotamia. The division of 12 tribes was so each of the tribes could take turns administering the ceremonial center for one month out of the year.

Cities were based on the calendar. You had cities. If they were big cities, they would have 12 gates. Most cities had maybe four gates, and the four gates represented the four seasons or the four quarters of the earth. The outline of the land and of the earth was all based on a two-dimensional cosmology. Like the cities were designed as calendars and miniatures. Well, so were the ceremonial sites, like Stonehenge was a calendar and miniature. So the light would fall on the stones in a particular way on a solstice. We have this going all the way back into the Ice Age, around 30,000 BC.

Alex Marshak’s article on the second volume on urbanization found that these sites already in the Ice Age were usually sited on waterways so that everybody could get to them. They often were sited in a way that from the site, you would have like mountains in the background, and it was in between the mountains that the sun would shine in a particular way that it would be on the equinox or on the solstice that you could have a particular pattern that occurred at that calendrical time, and they were really recreating on earth what the cosmos was.

KARL FITZGERALD: You’re on 3CR’s Renegade Economist, this week with distinguished Research Professor Michael Hudson from michael-hudson.com, and we’re discussing his new book, “Labor in the Ancient World”. We’re tracking back some 10,000 odd years, hearing about how civilization was developed.

Michael, this is a fascinating discussion, and I’m interested in, of course, here on the Renegades, about this role of land tenure, how that influenced citizens’ role in society. From what I’ve read out of your new book, it sounds like that land holdings, of course, played a huge role in the status of a participant in one’s society. 

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in America, down to the time of the revolution in the 18th century, and in early Australia, I assume, also, in order to vote, in order to be a citizen, you had to be a landowner. All the way back in Rome and earlier times, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Sumer, in order to be a citizen, you had to have your own land, and in Rome, each citizen and his voting rights were defined by the land area that he owned. I say he because the landowner was a male, and only the males were citizens. It was a patriarchal society.

You had citizenship defined by land ownership. What that meant was, today, we have the great interference with land ownership as being finance. If you owe money on a mortgage and you can’t pay, you can be evicted. You had that begin to happen already around 2000 BC in Babylonia.

Well, this caused a real problem for rulers, because what do you do if a creditor evicts the landowner, takes over the land? Well, then all of a sudden, this former landowner is no longer a citizen, and if he’s not a citizen, he can’t serve in the army. One’s rank in the army, down through Roman times, was all defined by how much land one had. If you have just a little bit of land, you’re in the infantry. If you have a lot of land, then you have enough money to support yourself and enough leisure to have a horse and to participate in all the military training and the armor you had. It goes all the way, same thing in Japan. All over the world, the citizenship, the rank in the army, and land ownership were all together in a single comprehensive system.

KARL FITZGERALD: Yes, and through the English military, the same sort of things happened as well. You can see a point that if you own lots of land, you want to defend it so that these landowners need to be involved to defend their land. How times have changed.

MICHAEL HUDSON: They weren’t merely defending. They would also be aggressive, I’ve got to say. There was a continual attack, and the attacking or the defense also had a financial land ownership dimension. 

In Greece, there’s a military manual in the third century BC by a man who took the pseudonym of Tacticus. Not Tacitus as in Rome, but Tacticus for tactics. He wrote that if you’re attacking a city, what you do is you agree to cancel the debts and free all the slaves, and all the debtors are going to come over to your side. If you’re defending a city, then you also promise to cancel everyone’s debts and free the slaves, and that’s how you get people on your side.

That’s what Coriolanus did in Rome, and it’s what Zedekiah did in Israel, but both rulers went back on their word as soon as things were over.

But in Babylonia, we have continual debt cancellations. Whenever a new ruler would take the throne, and this is in our third volume, “Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East”, the ruler would proclaim underarum or misharum, a clean slate, and he would do three things. These three things are exactly what you get in the biblical jubilee year. You would free the debt slaves or the servants and let them return to their family of origin. You would cancel all of the debts that were owed, and you would return the land rights or the crop rights to debtors who had pledged them to their creditors. 

In other words, what you would do is restore order. You’d make things the way they were in an idealized past in which everybody owned their own land and could be able to provide their own means of subsistence free of debt. It’s the opposite of today’s idea of debt serfdom, reducing more and more of the population to debt peonage where all of their income has to be paid to creditors, and finally, if they lose their job, they lose their land and their house, and the banks get to keep it.

That idea depopulated the ancient world. If that would have happened, you’d have everybody just getting up and leaving, or they’d go over to the enemy when other armies that did have their own land would attack. You would have defections all the time. That sort of locked in the system of widespread land ownership and liberty from debt.

KARL FITZGERALD: Right. So reiterating the clean slate would build that social contract with the ruler and help continue the goodwill that led to this massive public development that was voluntarily provided, well, in kind really, tax in kind.

So that sounds fascinating that people would just defect and move to another country under another ruler if the debt stayed too high. Even back in those times when we weren’t anywhere near as mobile as today, that sort of behavior was going on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. We have all sorts of documents, and especially the hapiro, who some people translate as Hebrews around the 14th century and 13th century, all were debt fugitives. Rome itself was said to be founded by exiles and runaways, mainly runaways from debt, who’d just created their own society there.

So it goes way back. It’s surprising one doesn’t have a similar idea today, but that’s why David Graeber picked up all of this history in his book on “Debt, The First [Five] Thousand Years”.

KARL FITZGERALD: The history of clean slate and the jubilee, how did the role of agrarian debt develop? And there was quite a battle between the creditors and the rulers. How did that all play out?

MICHAEL HUDSON: It played out differently everywhere. There was a constant tension by the Bronze Age through Classical Antiquity between central rulers who were trying to maintain society and local headmen who were trying to get the power for themselves.

So the big question is, who’s going to run society? Is it going to be the priesthood and the military rulers at the top of the pyramid, or is it going to be the creditors who are grabbing everybody’s land and trying to separate in the past?

And strong rulers, like Hammurabi, would centralize rule. But then you’d have periods called Intermediate Periods, where everything sort of fell apart and there was a free-for-all, and all of the local leaders came [out of]. 

Well, from 1200 BC to about 750 BC in the Mediterranean, you have a whole Dark Age. Apparently, you had not only very bad weather around 1200 BC, but the bad weather and crop failures, maybe a small ice age, and drought led to mass invasions, and all of the palaces were burned, and you have just the Dark Age for 500 years. And then when you have people emerging, the person who had been the local branch manager of the palace workshop all of a sudden appears as the Basilius, the ruler, because you could see when central power falls apart, the local guys take over, the dissolution of national power.

You had the same thing in England. After the Norman invasion, you had the Magna Carta. You had an autocratic ruler, King John, who was trying to grab all the money for himself, and then you had the landowners who wanted to break free. And the Magna Carta was saying, okay, you can’t tax us. The rent that we used to have to pay you to support the royal army, we’re going to keep for ourselves now, and the debts that we owe to the Jews, we don’t have to pay because they’re not allowed to earn land thanks to anti-Semitism.

And you have the founding documents of almost every nation have to do with the relationship between finance, land, and the relationship between central rulers’ power and local power. And you could say that the progress of civilization for the last thousand years since feudal times has been a dissolution of autocratic feudal power towards more and more democratized power.

The problem is that land has been democratized on credit, and so instead of owing money to landlords, homeowners now owe money to their bankers.

KARL FITZGERALD: That is the challenge of the ages, isn’t it? And looking through these writings of yours, it just becomes so clear that this battle between credit and the sovereignty of this democratic process has been an ongoing challenge. And in antiquity, did the vocabulary really distinguish interest from usury? 

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, there was only in the 13th century, really by Thomas Aquinas, was there a distinction between interest and usury. Any taking of interest was considered usury in antiquity. That’s why some people tried to ban it for consumer interest. And when usury, the distinction was made, usury was supposed to be for unproductive consumer loans, and interest was to be for bona fide commercial loans. The Italian word was agio, a foreign, a premium, so that bankers would try to get away around the Christian sanctions against usury by saying, okay, it’s not interest, it’s a fee. It’s a foreign exchange fee, and they would pretend to be making a foreign exchange transaction and paying for the foreign exchange convertibility. Like if you’re converting Australian pounds into dollars, you have to give a few percentages to the transactor. You had interest concealed as a foreign exchange fee, and as interest and various things like you do in today’s Islamic finance.

KARL FITZGERALD: So when we look over the history of this era and this battle between credit and the ruling elite, the challenge was over maintaining land ownership within your community and keeping your people there, making sure that they had some sort of share in the benefits of working together. And this sort of independence of people being able to live off their land seems to have been the battle between the democratic principles and the creditors again.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s basically so. And all of the earlier common law had blockages against it. So if you’re a creditor and you want to get somebody else’s land, how do you get it? Well, in Babylonia and also neighboring Indo-European speaking communities, such as the Hurrians in Nuzi, you would say, well, all of the land tenure rights are only transmissible within a family. So the family gets to keep control of its basic land. And so the creditors would get themselves adopted by the debtor as a number one son, as their heir, so that when the debtor died, the creditor would inherit the land as if he were part of the kinship based community.

There were all sorts of proverbs in Babylonia. A creditor has many relatives and things like that.

And so basically there were these subterfuges that the creditors would use as what you would call small print today. And creditors at Wall Street have always been very subtle in finding end runs around laws to obey the letter of the law and change the spirit of the law completely.

KARL FITZGERALD: Changing the spirit of the law, let’s speed into the current American situation with Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic ticket. I saw this week that she’s come out fighting against banks and their threat to reduce donations to the Democratic Party if Elizabeth Warren doesn’t tone things down. Did your blood boil when you read that, Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Not at all. The Democratic Party in America, you have to realize, is to the right of the Republican Party. Basically, the Republicans could never get away without turning over power to Wall Street because as long as they’re in power, the Democratic opposition will block them from doing it. Although the Republican Party is almost entirely funded by lobbyists from corporations to Israel, the Democratic Party is the one that has the power to unblock the giveaways to Wall Street. And most of this is done under former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was an administrator who got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act, who inaugurated the whole wave of crime going through banking. The Glass-Steagall Act and the lack of regulation for derivatives was done in 1999. It took only eight years for the most criminal organization, Citibank and Wall Street, to bring down the economy. And who was the head of Citibank? Rubin, having freed all the regulation, went to Citibank and ran what’s called the Rubino Gang, a group of corrupt criminals that essentially wrote fake mortgages. They’re called liar’s loans, or Alt-A, and sold them to gullible people like German Landesbanks, who believed that Wall Street wouldn’t try to cheat them, and essentially pulled the biggest ripoff in history.

You can read what my UMKC colleague Bill Black has written recently on Naked Capitalism and the University of Missouri-Kansas City site, New Economic Perspectives, on the Citibank criminal organization there.

But the Democrats, being in power under Obama, blocked any prosecution of criminals. Not a single bank crook has been thrown in jail after over $4 trillion have been stolen. The crime wave of Wall Street and real estate in the last decade has endowed an entire ruling class for the next century in America. And they’re absolutely vicious, more criminal than the Russian kleptocrats, because they’re in total control of the government.

And they’ve redefined free markets. To them, a free market is Wall Street completely free of any government regulations to control banking, and free of any criminal prosecution, because they have their guy in the Justice Department. The head of Justice Department is Eric Holder, whose job is to protect Wall Street. And he wants to resign recently in favor of a successor who also is a Wall Street lobbyist. So we’re about to have essentially the whole real estate and mortgage system in America has been criminalized in the way that Bill Black has been describing in four wonderful articles that he’s published in the last week on Naked Capitalism.

KARL FITZGERALD: Excellent, Michael. I’ll look forward to reading those. I mean, that’s the horror story of banking, but I like the fact that you’ve dug into the archives and found one of the bright spots for the finance industry, and that was the St. Simonian banking ethos. Can you remind our listeners what that was all about and what we hope the finance sector aspires to?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, in the 19th century, of course, you had the Industrial Revolution just taking off. And the question is, how can you have banking serve the industrialization of countries? Before the 19th century, and all throughout antiquity, there’s not a single bank loan in antiquity, almost, that was ever made to build a factory or actual means of production. Loans were made against property, or they were made largely to ship goods, products, exports, once they were produced. But banking before the 19th century had never actually funded investment. James Watt wasn’t able to get the money for the steam engine from a bank, except by mortgaging his property and borrowing from friends.

So St. Simon and France said, look, we’ve got to industrialize France to catch up with England and overtake it. We’ve got to have banking, essentially, instead of making loans in exchange for interest payments, which can force them under and force them into bankruptcy when business turns down. Bank loans should really be a profit-sharing deal, as they were, by the way, way back in Babylonian times. And his idea of banks were more like mutual funds, whose fortunes would go up or down with those of the customer.

Well, the main country that adopted St. Simonian industrial banking was Germany, and also other Central European countries. And there the banks would take a position with their customers. They’d be stock owners, as well as creditors. They would support industry and act, basically, as the forward planning arm of industry.

And it was expected, until World War I, most futurists, from Karl Marx to just regular businessmen, expected banks to take the lead in planning society. But after World War I, Germany lost, and the world reverted to Anglo-American banking. And the Anglo-American banking was basically short-term, hit-and-run. They don’t make loans for industrial development. They make loans to take over companies, to take over industry, and to ship exports. But they’re really not plugged into how to actually fund industrialization and capital formation.

And so what we have is societies fallen back in the last 100 years to just the opposite of what classical economists and what 19th century futurists had expected to be.

So although we do have now a centrally planned society, centrally planned in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other financial centers, this planning is extractive, not productive. It’s seeking to extract interest payments to profiteer from takeovers and gambles, but it’s not designed to industrialize. And that’s why most of the world now, outside of China, is in a period of economic shrinking and de-industrialization.

KARL FITZGERALD: So to wrap things up, Michael, what can we learn from the ancient Near East? And perhaps you can enlighten how you got interested in this whole historical topic, going way back through these cuneiform readings of clay tablets.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the advantage of studying the ancient Near East is to see how different economies through history have dealt with the phenomenon of debts that are too large to be paid. Right now, you’re having in the Eurozone, with its arguments against Greece, saying, well, if you can’t pay your debt, you’ve had to submit to austerity. And if your population emigrates, as much of the Greek population is doing, you have to pay the price. Shrinkage and emigration is what to pay for debt cancellation.

The ancient Near East couldn’t afford the Greek Eurozone solution because they would have been depopulated and they would have been conquered by neighboring countries that didn’t submit to austerity program. So the advantage of studying the ancient Near East is to see a contrast in all this.

I got into this originally. I’d given a lecture. I was working with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in 1978 and 79. And we had a big meeting in Mexico. And I’d warned, I gave a lecture on what I’d found when I was Chase Manhattan Bank’s balance of payments economist, that the third world couldn’t pay its foreign debts. This was a few years before Mexico declared it couldn’t pay in 1982. And there was a riot. People were trying to beat up the Americans thinking they were me.

And there was such a fuss that I thought, gee, I’m going to write a history of how debts can’t be paid. And got all the way back into the Near East and found out there wasn’t any economic history of the Near East, that it was all scattered through many journals. And that’s when I went up to Harvard and we decided to put together this group to do an economic study, category by category, of how ancient economies actually developed the origins of modern economic civilization.

KARL FITZGERALD: Well, Michael Hudson, thank you very much for joining us here on the Renegade Economist radio show. Yet again, must be about our 10th interview, I reckon. Fantastic, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good. Thank you.

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The post Labour in the Ancient Near East first appeared on Michael Hudson.

As published in Berliner Zeitung.

The dismantling of German industry since 2022 is collateral damage in America’s geopolitical war to isolate China, Russia and allied countries whose rising prosperity and self-sufficiency is viewed as an unacceptable challenge to U.S. hegemony. To prepare for what promises to be a long and costly fight, U.S. strategists made a pre-emptive move in 2022 to turn Europe away from its trade and investment relations with Russia. In effect, they asked Germany to commit industrial suicide and become a U.S. dependency. That made Germany the first and most immediate target in America’s New Cold War.

Upon taking office in January 2021, Joe Biden and his national-security staff declared China to be America’s number one enemy, viewing its economic success as an existential threat to U.S. hegemony. To prevent its market opportunities from attracting European participation as it built up its own military defense, the Biden team sought to lock Europe into the U.S. economic orbit as part of its drive to isolate China and its supporters, hoping that this would disrupt their economies, creating popular pressure to surrender their hopes for a new multiipolar economic order.

This strategy required European trade sanctions against Russia, and similar moves to block trade with China in order to prevent Europe from being swept into the emerging China-centered mutual prosperity sphere. To prepare for its U.S.-China war, U.S. strategists sought to block China’s ability to receive Russian military support. The plan was to drain Russia’s military power by arming Ukraine to draw Russia into a bloody fight that might bring about a regime change. The unrealistic hope was that voters would resent war, just as they had resented the war in Afghanistan that had helped end the Soviet Union. In this case they might replace Putin with oligarchic leaders willing to pursue neoliberal pro-U.S. policies akin to those of the Yeltsin regime. The effect has been just the opposite. Russian voters have done what any population under attack would do: They have rallied around Putin. And the Western sanctions have obliged Russia and China to become more self-sufficient.

This U.S. plan for an extended global New Cold War had a problem. The German economy was enjoying prosperity by exporting industrial products to Russia and investing in post-Soviet markets, while importing Russian gas and other raw materials at relatively low international prices. It is axiomatic that under normal conditions international diplomacy follows national self-interest. The problem for U.S. Cold Warriors was how to persuade Germany’s leaders to make an uneconomic choice to abandon its profitable commerce with Russia. The solution was to foment the war with Russia in Ukraine and Russia and incite Russophobia to justify imposing a vast array of sanctions blocking European commerce with Russia.

The result has been to lock Germany, France and other countries into a dependency relationship on the United States. As the Americans euphemistically describe these NATO-sponsored trade and financial sanctions in Orwellian doublespeak, Europe has “freed itself” from dependency on Russian gas by importing U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) at prices three to four times higher, and divesting itself of its business linkages with Russia, and moving some of its major industrial companies to the United States (or even China) to obtain the gas needed to produce their manufactures and chemicals.

Joining the war in Ukraine has also led Europe to deplete its military stocks. It is now being pressured to turn to U.S. suppliers to rearm – with equipment that has not performed well in Ukraine. U.S. officials are promoting the fantasy that Russia may invade Western Europe. The hope is not only to rearm Europe with U.S. weapons but that Russia will exhaust itself as it increases its own military spending in response to that of NATO. There is general refusal to see Russia’s policy as defensive against NATO’s threat to perpetuate and even escalate attacks to grab Russia’s Crimea naval base in pursuit of the dream of breaking up Russia.

The reality is that Russia has decided to turn eastward as a long-term policy. The world economy is fracturing into two opposing systems that leaves Germans caught in the middle, with their government having decided to lock the nation into the unipolar U.S. system. The price of its choice to live in the American dream of maintaining a U.S.-centered hegemony is to suffer industrial depression. What Americans call “dependency” on Russia has been replaced by a dependency on more expensive U.S. suppliers while Germany has lost its Russian and Asian markets. The cost of this choice is enormous. It has ended German industrial employment and production. That has long been a major buttress of the eurozone’s exchange rate. The future for the EU looks like a long-term downward drift.
So far, the loser in the U.S. New Cold War has been Germany and the rest of Europe. Is economic vassalage to the United States worth forfeiting the opportunity for mutual prosperity with the fastest growing world markets?

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