This year the Queen is celebrating her 60th ‘jubilee’ but the original meaning of jubilee had a lot more to do with righting injustice than an extra bank holiday and Brian May on the roof of Buckingham Palace, says Tim Jones of www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk
The word ‘jubilee’ comes from the Jewish scriptures, and describing an ancient event occurring every fifty years. In the jubilee year everyone, remarkably, took a whole year off from working the land – not just one day – living simply off surpluses from previous years. All debts were to be cancelled. All slaves were to be released. All land was to be returned to the original sharing between the Hebrew tribes.
Jubilees were instituted in order to restore a sense of equilibrium into the economy. People working on the land got in debt when harvests failed. To feed their families they borrowed from their neighbours – supposedly without being charged interest, though many found ways to get round this law. As debts accumulated and families became unable to pay, they had to sell off their land to their creditors. Rent was charged on the sold land, so as creditors got richer, the debtors got poorer – and their debts were only likely to increase. As David Graeber sets out in his book Debt: The first 5,000 years, farmers often became stuck in debt and even had to sell their children into debt slavery.
The first known jubilees took place in Mesopotamia (the area comprising current day Iraq and chunks of Syria, Turkey and Iran) 3000 years ago where rulers would periodically cancel the debts – and they can be interpreted as either an act of benevolence, or a safety valve to prevent economic collapse or violent overthrow of the lenders.
Nowadays, of course, we do not have the benign safety valve a jubilee brings to society, instead inhabiting a permanent debt economy. During the Wall Street crash and great depression, in the early 1930s, 24 governments defaulted on paying their debts. This was, however, followed by a period of relative stability because from 1945 to the mid-1970s, just four countries had to default on paying their debts owing to a global system of regulating loans and debts across the world which limited the movement of capital across borders.
This system broke down in the 1970s when the current economic system – what we might call neo-liberal capitalism – began to emerge. The US abandoned the gold standard and began printing far more dollars. Controls on capital were removed and at the same time, oil price increases led to large amounts of ‘petrodollars’ from oil exporters being put into western banks. These dollars were lent across the world – huge amounts going to Latin American and African countries.
At the start of the 1980s, the same US banks who had lent the money out, increased interest rates in order to control inflation. The prices of commodities fell – a problem for the many Southern countries dependent on these commodities for export. Many Latin American and African countries were unable to pay their loans to the bankers and the ‘third world debt crisis’ was born.
Rather than allowing these countries to go bankrupt, or instituting some form of jubilee, the powerful pushed for so-called ‘bailouts’ by the IMF and World Bank – effectively repaying the banks, and simply transferring the debts. At the same time they insisted on structural adjustment; austerity, and rapid radical deregulation and liberalisation. The result: countries lost their ability to make democratic decisions about their economic policy. Latin America and Africa saw their economies decline for the next twenty years, and poverty and inequality increase.
With continued deregulation across the world, loans and debts between countries continued to increase and grow rapidly. And so the debt crises continued from Mexico, to Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia, then Russia and Argentina, and a few years ago reached the US, UK and Eurozone.
Today we live in a world of huge debts. The debt owed by everyone in the UK – individuals, companies and the government – is 950% of our annual income. The total debt owed to foreigners by the most impoverished countries still stands at $930 billion, an increase of $300 billion since 2006.
Whilst slavery is formally abolished, in many parts of the world the burden of debts still denies people their freedom. A family with a large mortgage and negative equity are trapped where they live. Deeply indebted countries, from Greece to Jamaica, have their economies run by foreign powers. Land and capital have become increasingly owned by a few at the top.
But the indebted are beginning to fight back. In the late-1990s The Jubilee 2000 campaign was launched, calling for a debt free start for 52 countries – a jubilee that was to be declared in the year 2000. It was based on the work of activists from indebted countries who saw that the loans had done little or nothing to benefit ordinary people, but had created a debt which was bleeding their countries of resources.
The campaign has some impact. From 2005, thirty-two countries, mainly in Africa, began to have significant amounts (around $130 billion) of debt cancelled. But to qualify, governments had to keep following IMF and World Bank neo-liberal policies.
Other governments took matters into their own hands. In 2001, Argentina, in the middle of a debt crisis, defaulted on its debts, devalued its exchange rate and brought back controls on capital. After a few months of turmoil, its economy grew strongly.
A real jubilee would allow us to stop and examine what sort of society we are living in and strive to ensure everyone’s needs are met. In a modern context it would mean radically reducing debts, regulate finance and control the banks to ensure they are run in the public interest.
Across Europe, this vision is inspiring people again as campaigners call for ‘debt audits’ – public assessments of an economy’s debt so that ordinary people can assess these debts and decide whether they should be paid. The idea comes from the global South, but debt audit movements have now been set up in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France. Activists in the UK are now considering following their own debt audit campaign.
The call for a jubilee goes well beyond a call for charity. It is a call for justice. Just as it mobilised people 15 years ago to combat debt slavery in the global South, we believe it can mobilise people now to combat debt slavery everywhere, to challenge the type of finance-run economies we live in and to restore the notion that we should all have a say in how our economy works.