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Hudson, Michael, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point. ISLET, Verlag 2023.

The virus of historical bias.

I read an article recently in which a scholar of history berated another contributor of the same online publication for a naive and insensitive view of early Christian pacifism. The article written by Katherine Kelaidis is entitled “History is not your friend.”  Historical presentations, she rightly asserts, are riddled with a virus of bias. Most certainly, we tend to look into history precisely because we are looking for clues into our own contemporary situations. It’s the old “history repeats itself” adage. 

She inserts the now common push to shun historical generalizations and grand theories in the name of complexity and diversity. To make general conclusions or assertions about a whole span of time is often fraught with faulty reasoning and can be blown to smithereens with the smallest amount of new, uncovered evidence.

There has been in recent years, however, a backlash to this. Peter Turchin and the Seshat Global History Databank, for instance, are making claims that we can make general assertions about historical periods based not on the theorizing of one person, but on the scientific modeling of massive amounts of historical data never before available. Turchin insists on calling himself a complexity scientist. Complexity does not mean abandoning reductionistic reasoning. 

Jared Diamond also resists the notion that history is too complex and unpredictable to venture synthesis and predictability. “If they were right, we would all be in deep trouble, helpless against a myriad of looming disasters.”

Several of the more influential thinkers in my reading list who would loosely go under the category of “soft science” (sociology, anthropology, history, economics) are also reversing the trend away from making historical generalizations albeit more cautiously and less arrogantly. Under that category, I would include Michael Hudson. 

I am very familiar with Michael Hudson’s work and his particular counter view of the dominant, economic ideology being played out in our times. In his latest book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point, he makes clear his own lens to which he is combing the evidence. And I suppose that the scholar mentioned above would recognize Michael as one who is dressing up an intense contemporary debate in the “garb of historical analysis.”

Kelaidis’ urging for cautious conclusions is well put, but perhaps in some other conversation she too would admit that: 1) bias is unavoidable. The best one can do is to clearly state it as much as one is aware and to honestly engage criticism or opposing points of view; 2) a case built on the best data available and solid reasoning is more viable; 3) all inquiry, including scientific inquiry, is ignited by one’s own historical context; and 4) The past affects the ongoing drama of humans on earth. 

Actually, her point leans in the similar direction as Hudson. Oversimplifications of historical trends and outcomes can become ensconced over time and emerge as the useful tool of ideological hacks. Moreover, as I mentioned above, one should be cautious about one’s historical conclusions especially with the availability of data and evidence that can pressingly contradict them. 

Coincidentally, an op-ed in today’s Denver Post poignantly illustrates what Hudson and the Kelaidis are up against. Relying on ancient Rome’s five century political economy without a king (somehow the length validates its legitimacy), the op-ed writer rests on the assumption born in the Enlightenment period that the Roman republic is somehow a shining model of how a “successful” society should operate. The writer presents this “paragon” of success as a fundamental assumption embraced by America’s founders.

Hudson has no qualms about his read of ancient antiquity and of what has been imaginatively reinvented in Western culture ever since. These pillars of “civilization” collapsed. They are not paragons of success. but paradigms of deep-seated societal ruin. They were abject failures from the start and violently, ruthlessly, and perpetually resisted its fatal flaw—its inability, indeed its refusal, to deal with debt and disproportionate land distribution. When the commonwealth is polarized, society will collapse.

Against the longstanding ancient Near Eastern practice of periodic economic resets—what Hudson labels “clean slate” and what the the Old Testament and Jesus called “the Jubilee”—Greek and Roman “civilizations” steadfastly refused to forgive personal debt. Hudson speaks with authoritative certainty that the periodic cancellation of debt and the redistribution of land confiscated by creditors was a well-established practice for millennia long before Greece and Rome. 

After reading Hudson’s book, I have become increasingly aware of just how deep the rosy Roman Empire version still pervades. In addition to the newspaper article mentioned above, I recently encountered another article highlighting a social trend romanticizing the glories of Roman “civilization,” especially among men. 

The author’s pondering as to what is driving the fascination leads directly into Hudsons main contention. Modernity grossly emphasized the political and military male -infused dominance of Rome as the backbone of Rome’s greatness. All the while, Hudson never tires of iterating, the violent dominance of Rome was predominantly internal, against the large majority of its inhabitance. Its main instrument was debt bondage backed by the sword. Rome’s perpetual thirst for conquest was more a way to tempt and distract the populous from rising up against their creditors by offering its soldiers a piece of someone else’s pie.

Contra to the prevailing notion that somehow the precondition of democracy was the absence of “kings,” “Caesars,” and “tyrants,” (in other words, a counter social institution that could reign in the unbridled seizure of wealth by controlling elites), Hudson asserts the opposite. The precondition of democracy was freedom from debt peonage. For millennia before Greek and Roman empires, “liberty” always meant a release from crippling debt and a reapportioning of land.  

After following Hudson for 15 years, I can predict that his book will be ignored. During the pandemic, the issue of debt forgiveness came to the surface, and Hudson was consulted on a smattering of media outlets. Most economists had never heard of him and one speculated that he was a “Marxist economist.” Hudson has known for years that he is up against a dominant economic ideology that is not going to crumble any time soon. Yet, he doggedly persists that there was an economic history before Greece and Rome and that the practice of “clean slates” was convention, not fantasy.

The Iranny of Tyranny.

Unlike most “economists”today offering their fortune-telling prophecies from their think tank temples, Hudson has over the course of his career consistently placed his economic assessments in broad historical contexts. Having co-founded the Institute for the Study of Longterm Economic Trends (ISLET) project in the 90s, he persists that the dominant Western economic paradigm—Neo-liberal economics, especially propagated by Margaret Thatcher and the University of Chicago—operates in a near ahistorical vortex. 

Hudson consistently portrays current economic orthodoxy of the West as not only misreading the liberal economics of the 19th century but deliberately distorting it to go the opposite direction. This is accomplished via the always clever and deceitful use of euphemism. This insistence is pervasive in Hudson’s work. He dedicated an entire book, J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, to unmasking the Orwellian double-speak employed by wealthy elites to placate and distract the public while robbing their wallets and enslaving them.  

This resistance to euphemistic double-speak is nothing new. The prophet Isaiah condemns the same thing:  Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. (Isa 5:20). And lest we think this is about some theological issue, Isaiah makes it quite clear what the evil is: depriving the innocent of his right (to a portion of the land).

Hudson goes further than just pointing to the amazing similarities between the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations and our own. He asserts that today’s economic situation is directly attributed to it. The world has changed dramatically since the end of the Greek and Roman civilizations of antiquity, but when it comes to the issue of debt and land confiscation, today’s Western societies are still stuck in the rut of history. We refuse to institute economic resets where there is a redistribution of land and resources and a cancellation or write down of personal debt. 

By the way, Hudson alway makes the distinction between debts accrued by persons and households in arrears and the ones accrued by the merchant class. Today it is the opposite. Any business can declare bankruptcy and appeal to a write down of debt. The large finance sector can call for “quantitative easing” on the threat of worldwide financial collapse. But the individual is compelled to pay back all debts with interest!

We, like the Greeks and Romans of old, desperately cling to the mythical principle that all debts must be paid in full. Hudson insists that this is not practical or smart and only leads to a polarized society and eventual collapse. “Debts that cannot be paid won’t be paid,” Hudson quips. 

Hudson hones in on a shining example of euphemistic economics in ancient Greece and how we live with the remnants of that to this day. It is the clever use by Greek oligarchs (to remind, oligarch means rule of the few) to label those advocating for economic restructuring (meaning forgiveness of personal debt and a redistribution of land) as tyrants. 

In our day, most everybody knows what a tyrant connotes. A tyrant is a cruel dictator who forces most everyone around him to do his own selfish bidding. He arbitrarily and unjustly institutes his own law and order to serve him. A tyrant robs others of free agency. The well-known Gadsden flag motto, “Don’t Tread on Me,” aptly depicts the popular sentiment against tyranny.

A precise etymology of tyranny is hard to come by. It could have simply been a title for ruler, leader, or king. Hudson suggests the appropriate translation should be demagogue—leader of the people. This better retains the populist connotation. Tyrants led popular revolts against iron-fisted oligarchs. 

Thanks to the euphemism ploy, a tyrant quickly became a word of derision, especially denoting an illegitimate ruler. But this illegitimacy was always in contrast to established and entrenched ruling elites—the landed oligarchies who had firm control of land use and credit. 

So here’s the irony of tyranny. It was the landed oligarchs who slapped the tyranny label on a “leader of the people” who challenged ruling elites’ claim to absolute power over the public domain. Of course, it feels cruel when one has his grip on wealth and resources challenged by many who consider it to have been illegitimately gained by violent seizure. And of course, it feels like dictatorial overreach when one can no longer play by cheater rules where one conveniently always ends up on top. 

Yes, many a “tyrant” violently seized land and wealth, but nearly always with the intention of redistributing it in a more equitable fashion. Tyrants tended to also be lawgivers attempting to establish legal and judicial structures that could regulate and reign in unbridled greed. The Greeks had a word for wealth addiction—pleonexia, the desire for more. They despised wealth addiction and attributed its root impulse to sheer arrogance. 

As with most libertarians I have encountered, the oligarchs of old bitterly resisted the notion of a commonwealth especially after taking a disproportionate piece of it. They whine of any public obligation that does not first and almost always profit them. I have two sayings that I use often to refer to the oligarchs both now and in the past. They are “all for justice, just as soon as they get theirs.” The second is: “freedom for me, but not for thee.” 

Certainly oligarchs feared the lethal violence of the mob which is why they amassed private armies and walled in their land holdings. They used the worn out, but always useful reasoning that their control of nearly all social structures was necessary to maintain “order.” 

The depressing part about Hudson’s presentation of tyrants, Caesars, and kings is that their success was limited. In the end, the oligarchs won mainly because of the extent they would employ ruthless violence to seize and hold it and to insist on the sanctity of debt repayment in full with interest.

Palace or Plantation

Hudson persistently portrays ancient economic history as a struggle between unbridled oligarchic rule and the palace/temple structure that tried to rein them in. From an ancient antiquity perspective, monarchs, usually adjacent to temples, were the only social organization capable of tempering “pleonexia” among oligarchs. Kings were the only ones who had enough alternative social power to claim “clean slates” and to create and enforce laws or decrees. 

The power or authority to rule over and against the economic strangleholds of powerful monopolistic elites was both terrestrial and mundane. They claimed the sanction of both a higher power and a lower power. Their claim to champion a divine will could only hold sway if it didn’t in some way champion the will of the people. It had to at least present itself as seeking the good of the commonwealth. Honestly, sanction of the lower power, some form of democracy, was usually smoke and mirrors, and it did often reflect the violence of the mob verses the violence of the private armies of oligarchs. 

The ability of monarchs and emperors to enforce debt cancellation and land redistribution was the threat of sicking the mob on the oligarchs. 

Hudson also points to the immensely troublesome historical examples where a cadre of ruling oligarchs managed a symbiotic relationship with monarchs. This is what is known of today as fascism. In this scenario, the “people” are screwed.

Certainly, the perspective that government is a critical check against the power of the wealthy is up against steep resistance today. We Americans have been schooled since children. America spit out monarchs ever since the Boston tea party and we have no intention of going back. Unfortunately for us, the robber barrens and one percenters love that kind of talk. 

We might want to note that the meticulous way the framers of the constitution knew of and wrote into the constitution checks against the abuse of power in government but did almost nothing to address the havoc that powerful wealthy oligarchs can and mostly do produce. Oligarchs both then and now despise any kind of centralized governing authority that could defend the commonwealth. They are all for centralized control when it is they who control it. White House or Wall Street?

Problem of double-speak

Certainly, we can look at the likes of Donald Trump and see the similarities with Greek tyrants or the likes of Vladimir Putin and see similarities with Roman Caesars (Czar is a derivative of Caesar). Both tyrants and Caesars employed violent seizure to impose their will on competing oligarchs.

It is important here to note that contrary to a lot of thinking, Hudson includes Augustus Caesar as a reformer, one confronting the Roman Senate, elites controlling vast estates. Augustus Caesar, like nearly every “tyrant,” was assassinated by those elites. 

For Hudson, the issue is not centralized verses dissipated authority. There is always a centralized authority. It is a question of whether or not and to what extent it benefits the commonwealth. Oligarchs, then and now, want control of the many in the hands of the few. Hudson insists this creates economic polarization and ultimate societal collapse:

“Any form of government—democracy, oligarchy or kingship—is an arena in which private wealth, most notably that of creditors and landholders, vies for control against strong rulers, monarchs or civic authority whose interest lies in protecting the general population from wealthy patrons appropriating their labor and land. A key defining factor for any society is how it treats debt dynamics, along with land tenure and tax policy. Will creditor and property interests be subordinated to the common weal, or will governments support their rentier claims at society’s expense? At stake is whether to deter or permit (indeed, encourage) economic polarization. The central focus of historiography therefore should be to place policy choices regarding debt, land tenure and taxation in the context of this eternal conflict between strong government and private wealth.” (425)

The depressing part of the book is that it seems that private wealth in conjunction with sponsored violence always seems to win over the needs and desires of the commonwealth. 

Is Donald Trump a Tyrant?

There is no doubt that authoritarianism is on the rise all over the world. It is not surprising. Anytime there is the widespread anxiety that a society is collapsing, the natural impulse is to want strong leadership barking out commands and dictating the terms and everyone else in lockstep obedience. Screw consensus, debate, free will, or the will of the people. We don’t have time for that shit. 

Nobody, from the richest oligarchic empires to the middles class to the poor, wants to relinquish what they have gained whether it was through playing by the rules or cheating the system. 

Historical comparisons are always tricky, but I will offer some based on Hudson’s presentation. Authoritarian leaders of today are like “tyrants”of ancient Greece in some ways. The Roman counterpart to Greek “tyrants” were scornfully labeled “kings,” “Caesars,” or “dictators” according to Hudson. They were able to rally an angry populous against a small but truly ruthless group of elites tightly controlling almost all social organization. Attempts by the “demos” to play by the rules always ended with “heads I win, tails you lose.” 

Like the Donald, tyrants of old were considered lawless by the ruling elites because they blatantly and sometimes violently broke up their monopolies. They claimed to “drain the swamp.” And again, it was the ruling elites who whined the most about someone other than themselves who would dictate the terms and call the shots and police their pleonexia. 

But the Caesars and “tyrants” of old radically depart from authoritarian leaders of today as to what they were attempting to accomplish. Hudson presents tyrants of old as steadfastly after one thing: an economic reset. For one, this meant a periodic redistribution of land and its resources. Since ancient economies were mainly agricultural, having a parcel of land to farm meant a small sense of self-sustainability and with it self-determination, i.e. freedom. 

But this sense of personal autonomy was constantly being subverted through usury and debt-bondage. For ruling oligarchs, credit was a wonderful system to capture nearly all the wealth in a society without the messy stuff of war. Thus, the second thing tyrants called for was debt forgiveness.

I hardly think Trump or any of America’s two parties are really after redistribution of real estate and write downs of personal debt. Both seem fine with swallowing up someone’s small cache of wealth because they got sick, their job was transferred to Viet Nam, or they are living on the street because they could not afford to pay rent.  

When asked by a friend to provide a gist of the book, I pessimistically responded. Nothing much has changed in human history as to the capture and control of the commonwealth by the few. As I have written in several articles, oligarchs are truly “divine” in their ability to persuade the vast majority that submission to the unquestionable inequities of wealth distribution is natural, inevitable, and the only way for the commoner to have his “daily bread.”

Hudson does not waiver from his bias:

That message of surrender to polarization is part of the ideology by which oligarchies seek to preserve themselves, claiming that their taking over economic planning from government (“regulatory capture”) is the most productive form of social organization, not the harbinger of the End Time. (426)

We can hold as an absolute maxim that those who seize wealth will do almost anything to keep it and to addictively want more. It would be nice if they willingly participated in the redistribution of their ill-gotten gain, but mostly not. (There are some exceptions such as Yvon Chouinard the founder of Patagonia who converted his corporation into a trust where profits that are not reinvested in the company are distributed as dividends to protect the planet.

“The donor class,” as Hudson likes to call todays oligarchies, want us to believe and for the most part are quite successful at convincing us that only they are competent to allocate resources from their hoarded storage barns and that any government attempt at equitable distribution of land, resources, and wealth is diabolic tyranny. “Free market” for oligarchies primarily means freedom from public responsibility and accountability and freedom for monopolistic price and “fee”gouging (known as economic rent—income not socially necessary for production). 

On a final note and one that will need to be explored in much more detail in later articles, I should mention what is sometimes lacking in Hudson’s work; i.e. solutions. What would debt forgiveness and land redistribution look like in today’s complex economic fabric? How would debt forgiveness and redistribution of land and natural resources be implemented?

Oddly, he puts it in a footnote. Nonetheless, it is there. “Socialist economies,” for Hudson, is “the closest modern day equivalent in the modern world to Bronze Age rulership.” In other words, Hudson advocates a consistent, structural practice of redistribution as more obtainable and feasible than periodic “clean slates.”

His book The Destiny of Civilizations: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism more thoroughly lays out the choices governments and economies are facing. If the one percenters or the ten percenters for that matter object to the tyranny of the mob seizing their wealth, perhaps they should “buy in” to more equitable systems of its distribution.