Physical Slavery and Debt Slavery

The Old Testament Sabbath Year required that slaves had to be freed every seven years and debts cancelled every seven years.

Slaves freed makes sense, but debts cancelled?? Isn't there a moral obligation to repay one's debts? Apparently there are legitimate debts and oppressive debts---debt slavery; some debt slavery is "legal", but legal is not always moral.

Legitimate debt---I borrow $100 from you; I should repay you the $100 plus a low rate of interest. But much debt is tied to a system of oppression---usury, excessive interest---or predatory lending, subprime mortgages.

Jesus called the operation of the sacred Temple "a den of robbers." In the wrong hands, apparently any social institution, even a religious one, can become a system of oppression---financial slavery, debt slavery. The religious leaders loved money; it didn't come from hard work.

In the ancient world, according to Moses Finley, all revolutionary movements had a single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land."

This blog is built around the book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) by anthropologist David Graeber. When I discovered that Graeber understood both the Old Testament Jubilee and Haitian debt bondage, I knew I had a good book. Graeber's thoughts on Haiti:

"The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti---the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage [bondage]. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, . . . but to defeat Napoleon's armies. . . . France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), [to be paid], and the resultant embargo ensured that the name 'Haiti' has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since."

Note that France did not pay reparations to Haitian slaves for their free labor which helped make France rich. When Britain finally freed it empire slaves, the slaves owners were compensated for the loss of their slaves; the slaves were not compensated for their free labor.

The aim of both physical slavery and debt slavery is to make money, lots of it. As the DeWolf clan of Bristol, Rhode Island, the clan that engaged in both the slave trade and slavery, said, they wanted "Money, money, money, money, money." In some ways, debt slavery is easier and smarter than the hassle and expense involved in purchasing, feeding and controlling physical slaves. Segregation and sharecropping (debt slavery) were probably just a lucrative as actual slavery.

Again, the Sabbath Year identified the two most common and often related systems of oppression---physical slavery and debt slavery. The rich oppressed the poor through slavery and debt. Orlando Patterson, Harvard historical sociologist/anthropologist, has written the classic book on slavery entitled Slavery and Social Death; this book has be summarized as a "full-scale comparative study of the nature of slavery, a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on tribal, ancient, premodern and modern worlds." This description could also be used to summarize Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber is also an anthropologist with a fine sense of history and a good grasp of economics.

Debt is over 500 pages and clearly written, but most of you will not have the time to read it so I suggest that you read the Wikipedia summary and an article by economist Robert Kuttner who has some expertise in modern bankruptcy and who has written an article entitled "The Debt We Shouldn't Pay." In this article Kuttner writes: "In Graeber's exhaustive, engaging, and occasionally exasperating book [Debt], three themes stand out. One is the 'profound moral confusion' in our understanding of debt. A second is the perennial struggle over debt forgiveness and who receives it. A third is the function of debt in the politics of social class and social control [think systems of oppression]."

Some quotations from Debt:

"This Asian trade [gold and silver from the America's] became the single most significant factor in the emerging global economy, and those who ultimately controlled the financial levers---particularly Italian, Dutch, and German merchant bankers---became fantastically rich."

"While we are used to assuming that the Mexican population was devastated simply as an effect of newly introduced European disease, contemporary observers felt that the enslaving of the newly conquered natives to work in the mines was at least equally responsible."

"When dealing with the conquistadors, we are speaking not of just simple greed, but greed raised to mythic proportions."

"Charles Stamp, director of the Bank of England: "The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the earth; take it away from them, but leave them with the power to create credit, and with the stroke of a pen they will create enough money to buy it back again. . . . If you wish to remain slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."

". . . the medieval moralists had a deeper problem than metaphysical entities. They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed [and the systems of oppression that greed created]."

"As everybody knows, the world market system initiated by the Spaniards and Portuguese empires first arose in the search for spices. It soon settled into three broad trades, which might be labeled the arms trade, the slave trade, and the drug trade."

Thomas Jefferson: "The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating."

PS. Now that Pastor Francis has spoken on climate change as a major social evil that heavily impacts the poor, the church needs to add the climate crisis to physical slavery and debt slavery as justice issues that must be confronted and changed by the Spirit-filled church.