Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

BRIEF BACKGROUND

Rural indebtedness is certainly not a new phenomenon. It is in fact concomitant to the appearance of money and probably even paved the way for its creation (Graeber 2011). The phenomenon was widespread in Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, Greece and the Roman Empire, as well as China and India. It was also present in medieval Europe.

But by the second half of the sixteenth century, after much politico-ethical controversy, a new factor entered the post-medieval picture of most of Western Europe: interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. -bearing loans started to be legalized and enforced. The morality of charging an interest was relegated to individual conscience and the state largely ceased to hamper ‘usury’ (Jones 1989). Although much variation existed between the different regions, the use of credit became routine throughout society (Muldrew 1998; Fontaine 2008). The general context was favourable, characterized by new emerging property relations, rapid urbanization, and increases in population size. Generalized indebtedness – both rural and urban – thus seems to closely correlate with the birth and spread of capitalism.

As consolidating nation-states and colonial authorities quickly moved from taxes in kind and labour to taxes in cash, the tax system played a key role in pushing peasants into indebtedness (up until recently, as debts may allow farmers, ironically, to pay today less tax). In parallel, debts were also incurred for investment purposes. As soon as the seventeenth century, French peasants borrowed to improve their production, and apparently not only rich farmers (Hoffman 1996; Postel-Vinay 1998). This observation is consistent with the assumption that capitalism had already taken root in rural Western Europe. Through credit, middle peasants had to invest productively in order to preserve the independence of the family farm under the conditions of emerging market competition (Kriedte et al. 1981).

Continuing on these older trends, farmers’ dependency on credit increased dramatically with the generalization of cash crop monocultures generating income only intermittently. Many peasants became obliged to borrow during the unproductive seasons. Subsistence-oriented peasants, in contrast, had elaborated complex polycultures supplying food all through the year. But even in these cases, a bad harvest could make creditors indispensable again. The ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s typically exacerbated the dependency on credit to buy seeds and inputs.

Today, indebtedness has spread to virtually every corner of the world, and credit is still often regarded as the major instrument of rural development. Different forms of credit policies have been favoured according to the changing ideological contexts. Since the 1980s, there has been a general shift from state-sponsored rural subsidies towards the financial market Financial market The market for long-term capital. It comprises a primary market, where new issues are sold, and a secondary market, where existing securities are traded. Aside from the regulated markets, there are over-the-counter markets which are not required to meet minimum conditions. approach, including through rural ‘microfinance’. Under this ‘new paradigm’, the attention has shifted from the borrower’s production to the lender’s returns, and the goal has often been to ‘modernize’ agriculture via agribusiness involvement and new (bio)technologies.

While credit may allow, without previous savings, to project one’s imagination into future improvements – a powerful potential that explains why credit is still attractive to many (Steppacher 2008) – it simply represents for most the possibility to sustain a ‘normal life’ within a given institutional setting with specific values and unequal power relations. This ‘normal life’ consists in being able to eat, produce, pay taxes and cover the basic life-cycle events such as weddings, funerals, housing, health care and education. But whatever the circumstances, credit has a debt side which has consequences.

CLASSIC VIEWS ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF RURAL INDEBTEDNESS

The relatively small number of studies that address – usually in passing – the implications of rural indebtedness can broadly be divided into four camps. The ‘stagnationists’ emphasize the poverty-generating and stagnation effects of rural indebtedness (e.g. Kriedte et al. 1981), while the ‘entrepreneurialists’ stress the credit-based improvement of production and associated business acumen (e.g. Hoffman 1996). The ‘culturalists’ have highlighted the gradual shift from an embedded ‘moral economy’ of local lending practices to an impersonal large-scale system of formal credit (e.g. Muldrew 1998; Fontaine 2008; Graeber 2011). And finally, while acknowledging a shift, the Marxist camp has emphasized exploitation and the social differentiation effect of credit/debt (Kautsky 1900 [1899]; Lenin 1967 [1899]).

While Marx largely concentrated on the employer/employees relationship, he clearly pointed out that the surplus value is appropriated by both the owners of capital who receive profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. of enterprise and those who collect interest (Marx 1992 [1894], ch. 23). For him, circulating capital (including credit) and production capital represent the two constitutive pillars of capitalism. In his unfinished analysis of the credit system, Marx mainly focused on intercapitalist relations within a (relatively) modern banking system, but he also studied (albeit sketchily) rural indebtedness (that he called ‘usury’).

Very briefly, Marx saw ‘usury’ as one factor – among others – ‘assisting in establishment of the new mode of production by ruining the feudal lord and small-scale producer, on the one hand, and centralizing the conditions of labour into capital, on the other’ (1992 [1894], 732). In this ‘centralizing’ phenomenon, the producer pays the capitalist his surplus labour in the form of interest and this exploitative process prevents the producer, Marx thought, from improving productivity and technological conditions.

Subsequently, some Marxist analysts of the rural world expanded on these observations. Kautsky (1900 [1899]) identified rural indebtedness as the key mechanism alienating peasants from their means of production, stressing, like Marx, the counter-productive effect of debt on the development of productive forces. Both Lenin and Chayanov agreed that one of the main consequences of modern credit is the social differentiation induced within pre-capitalist communities. Importantly, Lenin (1967 [1899]) stressed both potentials of credit: not only the stagnation effect of debt but also the economic growth associated with credit. The emergence of agrarian capitalism, he argued, gave rise to two different types of debt: one was a sign of precariousness, the other of increasing consolidation and capitalization.

Among more recent authors, Banaji (1977) and Roseberry (1978) mainly updated these observations with additional fieldwork data. They illustrate the idea that usury capital is the strategic form of circulating capital in many rural areas – arguably representing a distinctive form of ‘production relation’ – because peasants are increasingly dependent on credit to reproduce their households. Bernstein’s (1979) notion of ‘simple reproduction squeeze’ elaborates on similar ideas. Extremely vulnerable to external demands and ecological conditions, poor peasants become ever more dependent on credit, frequently mortgaging their land. They may eventually become full proletarians if they fail to generate sufficient income by supplying (cheap) labour and/or commodities Commodities The goods exchanged on the commodities market, traditionally raw materials such as metals and fuels, and cereals. .

In this context often characterized by ‘contractual interlocking’, Bhaduri (1983) showed that rural indebtedness gives rise to an exploitative system of ‘forced commerce’. More recently, Brass (1999) argued that unfree labour – typically made possible through debt – is not only compatible with capitalism but that it is capitalism’s production relation of choice when the class struggle allows it. Debt thus leads, he wrote, to a ‘deproletarianization’ of the workforce (i.e. its shift from the status of free to unfree labour).

Building on these interventions, I will try below to systematize their implications, also including elements taken from studies of rural credit/debt that could be classified as either ‘stagnationist’, ‘entrepreneuralist’ or ‘culturalist’.

RURAL INDEBTEDNESS AND THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM

Indebtedness and the Reconfiguration of Ownership and Labour

The debt-driven reconfiguration of land ownership, especially its concentration, is a well-known consequence of rural indebtedness. The decline of the smallholder and the rise of the landless labourer has been one of the most important themes in the historiography of early modern Western Europe. While a great majority of studies acknowledge the role of debt in land concentration, few actually address the issue in detail. Those that do focus on this question tend to reveal the vast extent of the phenomenon. The effects of these debt-driven processes seem comparable – and even more powerful in many regions – to those of the different ‘enclosure movements’.

Overall, however, these processes remain difficult to evaluate – both historically and in the present – because they often leave the written trace of standard ‘voluntary’ land sales, glossing over the fact that the owner was forced to sell in order to repay creditors. But it is fair to say that both credit- and debt-driven ownership reconfigurations are key mechanisms of social differentiation.

Of course, instead of being reimbursed or accumulating assets, creditors may prefer to remain interest collectors. This was, for instance, true in early modern France, where long-term debts formed the major source of credit in much of the rural world (Postel-Vinay 1998). These long-term debts consisted of perpetual and life annuities (rentes) that lenders with extra funds ‘bought’ from individuals needing money. The debtors then paid interest on the capital, either ‘in perpetuity’ or until the death of the creditor – a phenomenon that is also applicable to modern banks.

In the same way, creditors may seek to control as long as possible the labour of the debtor. Such mechanisms may take different forms and have been observed virtually everywhere. In rural Asia, Li (2010, 387) found that: “the principal mechanism through which owners of capital have been able to profit from rural peoples’ labour and the principal vector of dispossession long before the introduction of high-input agriculture has been debt … Debt makes nominally independent landholders in effect their tenants, disciplined by the need for further loans and the threat of foreclosure.” Some scholars have called this situation ‘concealed’, ‘partial’ or ‘disguised’ proletarianization (Banaji 1977; Little and Watts 1994).

One classical form of labour control is through advances on sales, but many variants of debt bondage have been described, including numerous mechanisms for keeping workers in perpetual debt to their creditors, sometimes over generations (Brass 1999). Subcontracting credit can be seen as a modern form of debt-based labour control (Little and Watts 1994). The companies-cum-creditors usually provide technical and management advice in order to increase productivity and ensure payments. The main advantage for them is the minimization of costs by removing the need to purchase land and hire labour. Unlike banks, such companies can extract interest directly from the crop prices and make sure the credit will be spent on production by distributing loans in kind or in the form of vouchers.

However, the effects of rural indebtedness should not simply be understood as a process whereby the poor debtor gets expelled/exploited by rich creditors. In reality, indebtedness also concerns the élites and the capitalists. Their own debts have crucially modified ownership relations in order to maintain their solvency, notably through land expansion (including imperialism) and by selecting the most cost-efficient tenants. Debts have pushed many landlords to enclose with the aim of generating extra income to reimburse their creditors (Habakkuk 1994). In other words, credit/debt relations may generate social differentiation in every rural class, not only among the poor or middle strata.

Although credit/debt relations predate capitalism, the latter offered them a particularly flourishing ground, amplifying their impacts both quantitatively and qualitatively. Credit and debt became in fact a central element of the ‘capitalist social-property relations’ defined by Brenner (1982) as the particular class relations generating capitalism’s relentless drive to accumulate through market dependence. Credit/debt relations, in this sense, are clearly more than a mere ‘assistant’ to the birth of capitalism (Marx). They were an essential lever in the transition from market as opportunity to market as compulsion, as we will see next.

Indebtedness and Behavioural Reconfigurations

Once an economic actor – whether rich or poor – has entered an interest-bearing and guarantee-based credit contract, he/she is compelled (to different degrees) to think and to behave in a particular way in order to secure timely repayments (Steppacher 2008). The typical debtor must fundamentally focus on the potential demand of moneyholders. He/she is forced to produce commodities that, from the very beginning, are not designed for personal consumption but for the purpose of obtaining money. Moreover, the interest rate forces upon the debtor a value of production which must be greater than the principal, and hence requires economic growth (Heinsohn and Steiger 2013).

The expansion of credit in early modern England remarkably correlates with the rise of a more commercial mentality. Habakkuk (1994, 315) wrote that ‘there is a strong case for supposing that debt was a stimulus to development’ (‘development’ meaning here productivity increase, commercial activities, and industrialization). Muldrew (1998, 95) wrote that ‘it was credit, above all, which dominated the way in which the market was structured and interpreted’. According to him, credit imposed upon everyone in the society new and similar constraints. Initially, in the absence of a fully functioning legal enforcement system, people had to trust that those with whom they dealt would honour their word and possessed the means to repay their loans. Since credit was an imperative, people lived always with an eye to reputation, monitoring conduct so as to avoid a bad name (Finn 2003). There was a torrent of moral literature warning against the perils of the ‘prodigal’ indebted life and fostering people to discipline in order to ensure payments. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe wrote that a government, a businessman, a farmer or a labourer could properly handle credit only if they endorsed a specific pattern of ‘good behaviours’ notably characterized by a calculating and industrious attitude (Hoppit 1990).

Defaulting is no minor matter for most borrowers. Until the nineteenth century, imprisonment was not rare, and slavery and prostitution remain classic outcomes of indebtedness (Graeber 2011). Today, property selling or foreclosures are the most frequent means to recover an unpaid debt, which has led to countless suicides worldwide – not only in India. There is little doubt that such pressures make debtors work hard and do everything they can to repay loans on time. The first thing indebted farmers do is to implement a ‘structural adjustment Structural Adjustment Economic policies imposed by the IMF in exchange of new loans or the rescheduling of old loans.

Structural Adjustments policies were enforced in the early 1980 to qualify countries for new loans or for debt rescheduling by the IMF and the World Bank. The requested kind of adjustment aims at ensuring that the country can again service its external debt. Structural adjustment usually combines the following elements : devaluation of the national currency (in order to bring down the prices of exported goods and attract strong currencies), rise in interest rates (in order to attract international capital), reduction of public expenditure (’streamlining’ of public services staff, reduction of budgets devoted to education and the health sector, etc.), massive privatisations, reduction of public subsidies to some companies or products, freezing of salaries (to avoid inflation as a consequence of deflation). These SAPs have not only substantially contributed to higher and higher levels of indebtedness in the affected countries ; they have simultaneously led to higher prices (because of a high VAT rate and of the free market prices) and to a dramatic fall in the income of local populations (as a consequence of rising unemployment and of the dismantling of public services, among other factors).

IMF : http://www.worldbank.org/ programme’ in their exploitation through intensifying production, engaging in commercial activities, and enrolling in temporary wage labour (Gerber 2013). Rural indebtedness is therefore not just a factor of stagnation.

From this perspective, economic growth does not simply result from ‘unlimited wants’ or an innate ‘drive for profits’ made possible via investment credit; it also results from the obligation to take out loans and from the subsequent constant threat of defaulting in a competitive context. In other words, the threat of bankruptcy is the key component of the familiar ‘whip of market competition’.

This threat defines the entire hierarchy of economic decision-making and the valuation process associated with it (Steppacher 2008). Above everything else, the debtor must focus on a monetary cost/benefit valuation of all economic transactions and resources, based on the current market prices. He/she must think in individual terms and prioritize short-term benefits. Accordingly, land, labour and natural resources are monetarily evaluated while surrounding socio-cultural and ecological considerations remain secondary. A researcher studying the African plantation sector reported that ‘every [indebted] household is thus little by little brought to prioritize its needs and to make painful choices, to choose between … social expenditures and productive investments’ (Janin 1995, 126).

Cost/benefit calculations, personal discipline, cost-cutting innovations and intensification are all elements that acquire a particular meaning in the mind of many debtors. Taken as a whole, all these small and big pressures (depending on the actors) contributed to shape mental representations and priorities. And these mental reconfigurations have of course very material consequences. The need to improve cost-cutting technologies is a prime example of this. In early modern rural economies, there is evidence that indebtedness led to increased land productivity and cost-cutting techniques as well as many productive innovations (Habakkuk 1994; Hoffman 1996; Watt 2006). Exemplifying this for the United States, Post (2011, 152) describes how, after 1840, indebtedness and taxes forced family farmers to compete in the market, a process that ‘unleashed a dynamic of productive specialisation, technical innovation and accumulation’. These dynamics, as anyone can guess, are not necessarily good news for the community and the environment.

Indebtedness and Socio-ecological Reconfigurations

Rural indebtedness has played an important role in eroding community-based ways of life. Very directly, debt undermines community by dispossessing defaulting debtors and fostering social differentiation. It is also an important factor behind temporary, permanent and circular migrations outside of the community. In addition, credit destabilizes customary commons because it frequently requires that alienable portions of the community’s land are provided as collateral Collateral Transferable assets or a guarantee serving as security against the repayment of a loan, should the borrower default. , a phenomenon already noticeable in early modern Europe (see Pichard 2001). In twentieth-century Latin America, commons were dissolved as peasants turned to coffee production and therefore to collateral-based credit (Roseberry 1978).

More indirectly, credit dissolves traditional bonds between community members by individualizing economic responsibilities within dyadic relations. With the initial sixteenth-century credit boom, indebtedness exacerbated tensions in rural communities and led to an explosion of debt litigations in local courts. ‘The culture of credit was generated through a process whereby the nature of the community was redefined as a conglomeration of competing but interdependent households’ (Muldrew 1998, 4). In modern Southeast Asia, a study on credit reported that village conversations ‘rarely failed to raise statements bemoaning the decreasing cooperation between villagers’, stressing ‘the fact that people in the village are becoming increasingly “calculating” (berkira) in their approach to money matters’ (quoted in Scott 1985, 188).

Rural indebtedness also creates adverse pressures on the environment as a result of the new priorities it generates. Ecologically damaging growth may for instance represent a response to prior levels of indebtedness. This has already been reported in early modern France where commercial agriculture expanded because of mounting communal debts (Pichard 2001) as well as in early modern Scotland where the aristocracy’s indebtedness stimulated extractivism and deforestation (Watt 2006).

More recently, Canada’s National Farmers Union (2010, 19–20) observed that ‘Debt repayment deadlines push farmers to make choices based on short-term cash flow, rather than on the needs of the soil or of the next generation … Debt forces farmers to adopt the short-term thinking common to corporate boardrooms, with predictable results for the environment, fertility, and the future.’ In Central America, a study reported that ‘if peasants have access to credit, particularly at high interest rates Interest rates When A lends money to B, B repays the amount lent by A (the capital) as well as a supplementary sum known as interest, so that A has an interest in agreeing to this financial operation. The interest is determined by the interest rate, which may be high or low. To take a very simple example: if A borrows 100 million dollars for 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, the first year he will repay a tenth of the capital initially borrowed (10 million dollars) plus 5% of the capital owed, i.e. 5 million dollars, that is a total of 15 million dollars. In the second year, he will again repay 10% of the capital borrowed, but the 5% now only applies to the remaining 90 million dollars still due, i.e. 4.5 million dollars, or a total of 14.5 million dollars. And so on, until the tenth year when he will repay the last 10 million dollars, plus 5% of that remaining 10 million dollars, i.e. 0.5 million dollars, giving a total of 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total amount repaid will come to 127.5 million dollars. The repayment of the capital is not usually made in equal instalments. In the initial years, the repayment concerns mainly the interest, and the proportion of capital repaid increases over the years. In this case, if repayments are stopped, the capital still due is higher…

The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is contracted. The real interest rate is the nominal rate reduced by the rate of inflation. , increasing annual productivity becomes vital to their ability to repay their loans’ (Wilson 2010, 88), a situation that leads to an increased risk of pollution and ecosystem damage.

Policy and Political Implications

What kinds of lending organizations could alleviate some of the negative effects of rural indebtedness? Credit unions could be a candidate. Named differently across the world, they pool their members’ savings to finance their own loan portfolios. F.W. Raiffeisen (1818–1888) is considered one of the fathers of the modern credit union. As nineteenth-century Germany was characterized by the progressive decline of small farmers and the rise of agribusiness, Raiffeisen’s goal was to free smallholders from indebtedness to outside capital. His goal was thus to finance them, at reasonable rates and usually without collateral, relying on solidarity and Christian values. The essential rule was to stay local, thereby allowing interpersonal relationships, and democratic as the cooperative was governed by a general assembly.

Socialists have been critical of credit unions, fearing the ‘embourgeoisement’ of subordinate classes and emphasizing production cooperatives rather than financial cooperatives that are accommodating capitalism. Yet specific worker- or state-run credit unions could be compatible with some models of socialism. Among more radical options, forms of (planned) ‘social credit’ and (unplanned) ‘mutual credit’ have been proposed by various authors (Gerber 2015). In the short run, however, debt cancellation and the (re)building of public services are crucial reforms to be pursued against rural indebtedness (Graeber 2011). These policies will only be possible if the anti-debt movements increase their pressure, which does not seem to be unlikely.

Gerber et al. (2021) provide a preliminary global overview of mobilizations against private debts. Our database shows that the rural world is at the forefront of such struggles. These movements have contested various aspects of the creditor–debtor relation and involved different social classes with various political objectives, ranging from populist-opportunistic to radical-revolutionary. The majority of the cases come from members of rural lower classes, for whom credit is a fundamental albeit dangerous ‘last resort’ (or ‘safety net’) when the compulsory payments are no longer immediately possible.

Indebtedness – and the struggles that go with it – must always be placed within their broader politico-institutional context. In the United Kingdom, for instance, Davies et al. (2015, 5) found that ‘there is a clear link between a lack of social safety net and borrowing in times of personal/family crisis. This … poses a direct challenge to policy narratives which seek to individualise debt as a personal problem.’ The simultaneous necessity and burden of the credit/debt couple explains why it is politically inflammable, and probably increasingly so as economies continue to financialize. At the same time, the frequent harsh repression of anti-debt protests – seen as a threat to the very foundation of capitalism – and the particular subjectivity associated with debt have also deterred mobilizations.

CONCLUSION

Capitalism has witnessed the dramatic expansion of credit – and therefore debt – both quantitatively and qualitatively. Together with the employer/employee relations, there is little doubt that the creditor/debtor relations should figure at the core of the capitalist social-property relations.

The present chapter shows that rural indebtedness is not only a factor of stagnation and subjugation, as several agrarian analysts have argued. Debt is also a multifarious phenomenon that cannot be dissociated from credit and that has had far-reaching consequences at different levels. At the micro level, these consequences take the form of new pressures on debtors: pressures to remain solvent, to respect time constraints and to make a profit. These pressures vary, of course, along class and other lines, but they retain these fundamental features. At the macro level, all these pressures – small and large – represent a powerful evolutionary force influencing the trajectory of capitalism. As we have seen, credit and debt have not only played an important role in reconfiguring land ownership and labour relations; they have also contributed to shape capitalist rationality and culture according to the strategic principle of creditworthiness.

In a nutshell, the threat of bankruptcy and its disciplining effect have contributed to generate some of the typical productive features of capitalism (i.e. innovations, productivity, growth) but also some of its most emblematic impacts – exploitation, social differentiation, economic crises, and the degradation of the environment. With the worsening of the multiple debt crises, debt-centred organizing may reinvigorate radical movements in the rural world.

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