Michael Hudson : Today’s civilizational break against Western financial oligarchies

From Professor Hudson’s Patreon

I would like to start a discussion here about how the present break by the Global Majority behind China, Russia and Iran is a radical split that is more than merely geopolitical against the US/NATO West and its Asian and Global South satellites. It is a conflict of economic systems.

At the deepest level, that conflict is against the Western dynamics of financial oligarchy, whose polarizing and ultimately impoverishing predatory dynamics have forced the United States and Europe to turn to economic neo-colonialism and tribute taking, backed by the military force (mainly air force) that is peaking in NATO’s war against Russia in the Ukraine arena, and Trump’s fight to conquer Iran and turn it into another Venezuela, with its oil reserves seized and their export revenues placed under the control of the United States and the designated client oligarchy that it hopes to replace.

My two books on the history of debt – “… and forgive them their debts” and The Collapse of Antiquity – have shown that what the West calls “civilization” is really the distinctly Western civilization that emerged around the 8th century BC in contrast to the preceding civilization from Mesopotamia and Egypt in West Asia to China. The West Asian concept of “divine kingship” and pharaohs recognized the need for a central authority to prevent the emergence of an independent creditor oligarchy from emerging, monopolizing the land and taking control of government away from any central authority empowered to protect debtors and the population at large from falling into states of dependency. China’s Confucian principles of rulership called for its emperors to prevent popular disorder by protecting the self-sufficiency and prosperity of citizens in a similar way that limited economic oppression.

Greek Stoic philosophy reflected what anthropologists have recognized as being was a universal characteristic of all early low-surplus economies: The problem of how to deal with wealth addiction, “money love” and its tendency for personal egotism to threaten social balance and cohesion. One attempted solution was to create democracy, but as Aristotle pointed out, democracy tended inevitably to evolve into oligarchy.

That has been the characteristic of all Western societies. Oligarchies have defended themselves by claiming to free populations from government “interference” with “markets” defined as their privilege to indebt populations, deprive them of their land and means of livelihood, and polarize economies to create various rentier classes whose economic role is extractive, not productive.

And that is what characterizes today’s split. It is what led China to develop its alternative of industrial socialism, along lines that classical economists sought to steer industrial capitalism toward evolving into socialism in the late 19th century.

It would be a mistake to conflate our idea of “the West” as being synonymous with a civilization itself. that of course has been the aim of the West from classical antiquity’s fight among rival regions that ended in the Roman Empire. That takeoff is depicted today as the victory of democracy – an Orwellian doublethink word for oligarchy. For oligarchies quickly became the political form that the West has taken as soon as the Greek reformer-tyrants and Roman kings were overthrown and replaced by what became a wealthy class monopolizing the land and polarizing society between creditors and debtors with no central authority to prevent their “freedom” to reduce the citizenry to economic dependency and serfdom that brought general prosperity to a stifling halt. Wealth took the form of economic rent, from land rent to financial creditor claims.

By stifling prosperity at home, the only source of prosperity for the wealthy ruling class of Western realms was to obtain tribute from abroad. This is becoming most clear in today’s desperate attempt by the would-be American Empire to extract tribute from the rest of the world, ruling through client oligarchies and military dictatorships to provide a flow of monetary debt service and tribute, land and natural resource rents and monopoly rents to the wealthy financialized core of the United States, Europe and their foreign satellites.

The break from the U.S./Nato West in response to America’s final power grab to control the world’s trade in oil, food and monopolized information technology and internet platforms is becoming more than just a geopolitical break. It is a catalyst for a much broader and deep-seated over what kind of society can avoid the blind alley into which the West has fallen.

            We are dealing with a disruption as great as the collapse of the Roman Republic and its empire two thousand years ago.