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Musings Report 2018-34 8-25-18 The Inheritance of Rome: Seismic Shifts in Society
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The Inheritance of Rome: Seismic Shifts in Society
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 is not an easy, breezy read, as the Amazon reviews explain.
Despite its daunting length and detail, the book helped me understand how the power structures of societies change over time in ways that may be largely invisible to those living through the changes.
The Inheritance of Rome focuses on the lasting influence of Rome's centralized social and political structures even as centralized economic power and trade routes dissolved.
This legacy of centralized power and loyalty to a central authority manifested 324 years after the end of the Western Roman Empire (circa 476 A.D.) in Charlemagne, who united much of western Europe as the head of the Holy Roman Empire. (Recall that the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire endured another 1,000 years until 1453 A.D.)
But thereafter, the social and political strands tying far-flung villages and fiefdoms to a central authority frayed and were replaced by a decentralized feudalism in which peasants were largely stripped of the right to own land. Thereafter they became the chattel of independent nobles.
In this disintegrative phase, the central authority invested in the monarchy of kings and queens was weak to non-existent.
In the long sweep of history, it took several hundred years beyond 1000 A.D. for central authority to re-assert itself in the form of monarchy, and several hundred additional years for the rights of commoners to be established.
Indeed, it can be argued that it was not until the 1600s and 1700s--and only in the northern European strongholds of commoners' rights, The Netherlands and England--that the rights of ownership and political influence enjoyed by commoners in the Roman Empire were matched.
It can even be argued that the rights of Roman citizenship granted to every resident of the late Empire were only matched in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rights of commoners were slowly chipped away by civil authorities and transferred to the feudal nobility. As the book explains, these rights included limited self-rule within village councils and ownership of land. These rights were extinguished by feudalism.
The connections between these civil society/legal freedoms (of self-rule and ownership of land/capital), the Protestant Reformation and the birth of modern Capitalism are explained by historian Fernand Braudel's masterful 3-volume history Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, a series I have long recommended:
The Structures of Everyday Life (Volume 1)
The Wheels of Commerce (Volume 2)
The Perspective of the World (Volume 3)
The self-reinforcing dynamics of religious, civil and economic freedoms are key to understanding the transition from feudalism/monarchy to the world system of today, in which some form of self-rule or political influence and economic freedom are expected of every civil authority.
Let's fast-forward and ask what relevance these histories have in the present era.
I think there are two points worth discussing. One is the acceleration of change; what took 300 years now takes 30, or perhaps less.
The second is the slow erosion of commoners' self-rule / political influence and ownership of meaningful, productive capital.
This gradual, almost imperceptible erosion is what I call neofeudalism, a process of transferring political and economic power from commoners to a new Financial Aristocracy/Nobility.
If we examine the "wealth" of the middle class/working class (however you define them, the defining characteristic of both is the reliance on labor for income, as opposed to living off the income earned by capital), we find the primary capital asset is the family home, which as I have explained many times, is unproductive--in essence, a form of consumption rather than a source of income.
Ultimately, all pensions, public and private, are controlled by central authorities, even though "ownership" is nominally held by commoners. (Ask middle class Venezuelans what their pensions are worth now that central authorities have debauched the nation's currency.)
In a globalized, financialized economy, the only capital that has power is mobile capital, capital that can be shifted by a keystroke to avoid devaluation or earn a higher return.
Housing and pensions are "stranded capital," forms of capital that are not mobile unless they are liquidated before crises or expropriations occur.
I am also struck by the ever-rising barriers to starting or even operating small businesses, a core form of capital, as enterprises generate income and (potentially) capital gains.
The capital and managerial expertise required to launch and grow a legal enterprise is extraordinarily high, which is at least partly why a nation of self-employed farmers, shopkeepers, artisans and traders is now a nation of employees/subcontractors of government and large corporations.
What sort of capital can be acquired by the average commoner now? Enough to match the wealth and political power of financial Nobility? This is the source of our fascination with tech millionaires and billionaires: a few commoners have leveraged technology to join the Nobility.
As for political influence: a recent study found that voters have very little power in the U.S., which is effectively an oligarchy:
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
"The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country's citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful, a new study from Princeton and Northwestern universities has concluded."
Our society has a legal structure of self-rule and ownership of capital, but in reality it has become a neofeudal Oligarchy.
Highlights of the Blog This Past Week
How "Wealthy" Would We Be If We Stopped Borrowing Trillions Every Year? 8/24/18
This Is the Longest Bull Market Since the Great Pyramid Boom of 2580 B.C. 8/22/18
The Telltale Signs of Imperial Decline 8/20/18
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Hurricane Lane dumped up to 40 inches of rain on the eastern areas of Hawaii island in two days, but nobody lost their life and no infrastructure was destroyed due to the absence of hurricane-force winds.
Musings on the Economy
Economist Adam Tooze has just published a 700-page account of the 2008-09 Global Financial crisis and its aftermath: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.
I want to share this article on the book and some excerpts explaining the underlying dynamics:
The post-crash world: how the 2008 crisis led to our current age of extremes: Ten years on, the aftershocks of the crash threaten the very notion of the nation state.
This was the world that finally blew apart in autumn 2008: one where senior bankers didn’t understand what was going on in their own banks; watchdogs were watching the wrong things; economists couldn’t keep up with the changing economy and globalisation-loving politicians couldn’t grasp the nature of globalisation.
That autumn, politicians and central bankers threw everything they had into saving a regimethey didn’t fully comprehend. Huge amounts were mobilised: based on 2009 IMF figures, every man, woman and child in Britain underwrote £19,271 for the finance sector in bailouts, and loans and state guarantees on bankers’ trading during the crisis.
Alan Greenspan was asked whether he was a John McCain or Barack Obama kind of guy. His response: "Thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president."
The "financial globalisation that Greenspan and his ilk had worked so hard to institutionalise as a quasi-natural process had been exposed as... an artefact of deliberate political and legal construction with stark consequences for the distribution of wealth and power."
Yet look down rather than up, and you can see how financial globalisation coupled with austerity for the many and largesse for the few is breaking up the very unit of the nation state. Brexit Britain, Trump’s America: these are stories of deep fissures and polarisation whose causes are economic.
This article focuses on Britain, but the dynamics apply equally to the U.S. and the rest of the global economy. The money quote to me is Greenspan's: "Thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president."
The take-away for me is that globalization isn't just offshoring of jobs or cheap goods from Asia; it has shifted the entire power structure of all economies and all nation-states, and not for the better. Financial Oligarchies rule the world.
From Left Field
How Does Your Pay Stack Up? Companies are disclosing what they pay workers. See how you compare. -- nothing on the self-employed or small-biz owners....
Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map' -- good to see there's no fear-mongering in the mainstream media...
We're Going to Die in Record Numbers as Heatwaves Bake The World, First Global Study Shows
Extreme Heat Could Make One Third of Planet Uninhabitable
The monetary bubble to end all bubbles is coming
THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MEDICAL MARIJUANA FOR SENIORS
The "Next" Financial Crisis and Public Banking as the Response
To understand China and its future, look to its past, social historian says
Is China is Treating Africa The Same Way European Colonists Did?
Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature"
Donald Trump and the American Left -- "neither elections nor the public interest hold sway in the corridors of American power."
Connecting the Dots Behind the Curtain (via Chad D.) -- well worth a quick read, just to track where all the key players have been working the levers of power since 2001....
"If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice." Judge Billings Learned Hand
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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