Sunday, October 13, 2024

Never-before-heard tapes from Jimi Hendrix to go on sale

The demo tapes are understood to be versions of several songs by the rock icon, who died in 1970 aged just 27.

Bethany Minelle
Arts and entertainment reporter @BethanyMinelle
Sunday 13 October 2024
Sky News

:Jimi Hendrix in 1968. Pic: Rex Features

Never-before-heard tapes from Jimi Hendrix will be sold at auction next month - 54 years after the rock star's death.

The 1968 demos are understood to be versions of Up From The Skies, Ain't No Telling, Little Miss Lover and Stone Free, and run for around seven minutes

Each one is expected to make hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Image:Pic: Propstore

Entertainment auctioneer Propstore says the sale will give fans the chance to listen to Hendrix songs that only they have access to.

The tapes were retrieved from the office of Hendrix's manager Mike Jeffrey in 1973 by his assistant Patricia "Trixie" Sullivan, who is now selling them on.

Other items up for sale include payslips for Hendrix and his band members, a handwritten form by the musician requesting his birth certificate, and various receipts that detail his personal life.

Documents range from dry-cleaning bills to tour itineraries, and reveal the off-stage dealings of the music icon.

Pic: Propstore

The auctioneer's music expert Mark Hochman said he was captivated "by the depth and significance of the material".

He said: "It's an incredible collection that not only reflects the personal life of Jimi Hendrix but also transports you back to a pivotal moment in music history".

Hendrix - whose music merged rock, soul, blues and jazz - is considered by many to be the greatest guitarist in pop.

Hits including Purple Haze, Foxy Lady and All Along The Watchtower helped make him one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

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He died in 1970 aged just 27 after overdosing on alcohol and sleeping pills.

Master tapes from other bands managed by Jeffrey, including The Animals and Soft Machine, are also up for sale.

The auction will be held in London on Friday 15 November and will be live-streamed.

Foreign firms warned to treat workers with dignity and respect amid P&O Ferries boycott call

DP World London Gateway, container port in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex

Peter Lazenby
Sunday, October 13, 2024

MORNING STAR

FOREIGN firms operating in Britain have been warned to treat their workers with dignity and respect by the TUC in the wake of the renewed row over calls for a boycott of P&O Ferries.

The boycott call was first made in 2022 when the firm sacked its 796-strong workforce in Britain and replaced them with overseas workers paid a fraction of their wages.

Maritime union RMT launched a boycott of P&O Ferries in response to the sackings in March 2022.

The call was also made by the Tory government’s transport secretary Grant Shapps, who urged travellers to seek alternatives to the ferry firm.

Last week, Labour Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Transport Secretary Louise Haigh introduced legislation which should prevent sackings like those implemented by P&O.

But Ms Haigh was accused of putting a £1 billion British investment plan by P&O’s parent company, Dubai-based DP World, in jeopardy when she referred to P&O as being among “rogue employers.”

She said Labour’s Employment Rights Bill would “close a loophole exploited by P&O Ferries.”

Later she said in an interview: “I’ve been boycotting P&O Ferries for two-and-a-half years and I encourage consumers to do the same.”

The comments prompted a media furore that included speculation that DP World would cancel its investment, and a grovelling Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Ms Haigh’s comments did not represent government policy.

DP World has now confirmed its whopping investment is going ahead following “clarification” talks with the government.

The government is hosting an investment summit this week, which received an advance boost today when Australian infrastructure company Macquarie announced that it plans to invest £20bn in Britain’s energy, water, transport and waste sectors, alongside the construction of new data centres.

But TUC general secretary Paul Nowak warned companies operating in Britain: “It is vital that all companies who do business here treat their workers with dignity and respect. That’s why the government’s new Employment Rights Bill is so important.

“It will establish a level playing field — to stop decent employers being undercut and ensure the gains of growth are fairly shared.”

GMB and Prospect unions urge PM to green-light Sizewell C nuclear plant

A general view of main generator 1, at the Sizewell nuclear power plant in Suffolk, June 19, 2024

Berny Torre

Sunday, October 13, 2024

MORNING STAR

UNIONS have written to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer urging him to give the green light to the Sizewell C nuclear plant in Suffolk ahead of the government’s investment summit tomorrow.

GMB and Prospect say a final investment decision (FID) on the major infrastructure project has reached a “critical point” where further delays would risk the “seamless” transition of thousands of workers and supply chains from Hinkley Point C.

French energy giant EDF is meanwhile reportedly in talks with investors to raise up to £4 billion to finish the delayed project in Somerset.

General secretaries of Prospect and GMB Mike Clancy and Gary Smith said in the letter: “Any delay risks demobilising the workforce and supply chain, which could lead to unnecessary construction delays, increased costs, and an impact on the economic benefits the project offers the UK.

“Net zero requires nuclear, and the UK needs Sizewell C.

“A prompt FID delivered within the month will solidify investor confidence and provide certainty to the region, the workforce, and the supply chain.”

Referring to expectations that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will change her definition of debt to allow more government spending in the Budget later this month, they added: “With such a framework in place there is no excuse for not making a substantial public investment to get Sizewell C over the line.”

But Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Kate Hudson said suggestions that nuclear power is a reliable, clean and sustainable energy source “could not be further from the reality.”

She said that building Sizewell C is “very costly” and will produce radioactive waste that will remain dangerous for hundreds of generations.

“Nuclear power is not the answer to the climate catastrophe we are hurtling into, or to our energy needs,” she said.

“Renewable energy sources have the potential to supply all our energy needs.

“With the right support and investment, rather than subsidising the nuclear industry, we can soon have enough clean energy from renewables — with the added bonus of creating many jobs.”

Plans to have the FID signed off this July were disrupted by the general election. Ministers have set a new end-of-year target date.

ADepartment for Energy Security spokesman said: “There are no plans for a delay to Sizewell C, with discussions with potential investors ongoing, and our intention is to deliver the project as quickly as possible.”

Tapas bar closes in British town after ‘workers experience racist abuse’

BUT SPAIN IS THE TOP BRIT TOURIST DESTINATION

Laura Brick

Oct 13, 2024

A restaurant owner in Exeter has closed his business in protest against the rise of street crime in the city centre (Picture: BPM Media)

A Tapas bar in Exeter has closed its doors after being subjected to a torrent of racist abuse and violence.

La LoLa Tapas Bar put a notice in their window explaining that to shut because they had been receiving racist abuse, which resulted in at least one person becoming seriously injured.

The note said: ‘Dear customers. Last Friday we suffered a physical assault with serious injuries.’

‘Over the past year we have filed dozens of complaints of racist attacks and death threats to both the police and our landlord, the Exeter City Council and none of them have done anything to stop this violence.’

‘As was to be expected, one person was seriously injured.’

‘This business will remain closed until the Devon and Cornwall Police or the Exeter City Council can ensure the safety of our customers and staff.’

‘Sorry for the inconvenience.’

The restaurant owners said that the police had done nothing to stop the racist violence (Picture: BPM Media)

ITV reporter Nick Smith said on X: ‘What kind of country do we live in?’

‘I spotted this in Exeter today while visiting family.’

‘This is the city where I grew up and I always thought it was pretty friendly and tolerant.’

‘But one of its local businesses (a tapas bar) has now closed citing ongoing racist abuse!’

ITV reporter Nick Smith spotted the notice while in Exeter. (Picture: @NickSmithITV/Kevin Hayes MET)

In August, anti-immigration riots erupted across the country following the stabbing of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport.

According to data published by the Home Office last week, religious hate crimes in England and Wales hit a record high in the year to March, with some 10,484 hate crimes reported in 2023-24.

This represents a 25% increase from the previous year.

Hate crimes against Muslims and Jews surged in the wake of the war on Gaza following the 7 October Hamas attack against Israel last year.

Devon & Cornwall police have been reached for comment.

Joy for photographer who saw 'comet of the century'

Caroline Gall
BBC News, West Midlands

Joanna
The Royal Astronomical Society has called A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) the "comet of the century", because of how bright and visible it can be

A rare comet has been snapped hurtling through the night skies over part of the West Midlands.

Joanna, from the Black Country, shared an image of Comet A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) with BBC News, taken at Kinver, in Staffordshire on Saturday night.

The comet was visible for the first time in 80,000 years about two weeks ago, and astrologers said it might be possible to view with the naked eye on Saturday.

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has called it the "comet of the century" because of how bright and visible it can be.

On Saturday, the comet was expected to come within about 70 million km (44 million miles) of Earth, according to the Nasa Earth Observatory.

In a post on X Joanna, who did not give the BBC her surname, said: "Well, I can’t feel my fingers, but it was worth it.

"There she is. Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas. Hopefully this isn’t the only chance I’ll get to see her."

She said she took the photograph at about 19:40 BST after going out to see if she could see the comet.

It was first visible in the southern hemisphere between 27 September and 2 October and is visible until 30 October, the RAS said.

The nucleus of the comet - its solid core - has been estimated to be 2km (1.24 miles) in diameter.

Joanne said she had captured other phenomena in the night skies this year including a rocket launch, the northern lights and the milky way.

"What a year it’s been," she posted.

Stargazers capture 'comet of a lifetime' in UK skies after last being viewed by neanderthals 80,000 years ago

13 October 2024, 09:31 | Updated: 13 October 2024, 09:33

By Danielle de Wolfe

@dannidewolfe

Brits turned their attention to the skies on Saturday night in the hopes of catching a "once in a lifetime" comet.

The celestial A3 comet was at peak brightness as it passed by Earth on Saturday night, visible for a matter of minutes before disappearing for another 80,000 years.

The space rock, described as the "comet of the century", originates from the Oort Cloud, a giant ring of rocks and ice around the solar system.

The comet, which has a full designation of Comet C/2023 A3, was previously able to be seen from Earth earlier this month.

The wonder, which was first discovered in January 2023, was visible with the naked eye and last viewed by neanderthals on Earth some 80,000 years ago.

Wimbledon, London, UK. 12th Oct, 2024. Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS with an 80,000 year orbit is now visible from London after sunset. An aircraft leaving Heathrow Credit: Malcolm Park/Alamy Live News. Picture: Alamy

According to the Nasa Earth Observatory, the comet came within about 70 million km (44 million miles) of Earth on Saturday.

Visible shooting across skies in Spain, Italy, Uruguay, and Indonesia, the comet was visible intermittently across the southern hemisphere between late September to early October.

After disappearing because it drifted too close to the sun, the comet reappeared on Saturday before vanishing for the remainder of our lifetimes.

Taking to social media, stargazers posted a host of jaw dropping shots of the comet from locations across the world.

X user Andrew McCarthy wrote: "Here’s a photo I’ll never be able to capture again… here’s comet c/2023 A3 in conjunction with the fully-stacked starship rocket, a serendipitous juxtaposition.

"In 8 hours, starship will make history as the booster returns to the landing site to be “caught” by the tower."

Another X user wrote: "What a sunrise!!! I took this pictures of the comet C2023 A3 and the partial solar eclipse from Maunakea Hawaii."

A third user posted a time-lapse of the comet, picturing the "rare pairing" of the comet and the moon an hour before sunrise on the Vieques island a week ago.

Comet C/2023 A3 or Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. Digital enhancement of an image by NASA. Picture: Alamy

The comet is set to shine at around a magnitude +2 or magnitude +1, the measurement of the brightness of space objects.

It will make the comet as visible as Polaris, the north star.

After October 13, the comet dim and disappear completely around 20 October.

The comets trail of dust and ice will be illuminated in blue and white by the sun during its approach.

Argentina

University funding law: Milei’s first failure?

Sunday 13 October 2024, by Latin America Commission, New Anti-Capitalist Par

This law aims to recover the budget lost since the Milei government took office, due to high inflation and the ultra-austerity policy. In particular, it aims to raise the salaries of teaching and non-teaching staff (which have fallen by an average of 30%) and student grants.

A veto that won’t go through

A few weeks ago, parliament approved a law to revalue pensions, but the government vetoed it under the Constitution. However, the legislative power has the possibility of imposing its law if two-thirds of the legislators present in both chambers agree. On this occasion, Milei gathered enough deputies to prevent the law from being passed. The mobilisation on this issue at the beginning of September was significant but not massive, with 50,000 demonstrators in Buenos Aires and heavy repression.

On the other hand, Milei’s veto of the university law is facing stronger opposition in parliament. It is likely that more than two-thirds of the Senate will oppose it, and it is possible, although not certain, that the Chamber of Deputies will do the same.

Milei less popular

At the same time, Milei’s popularity is starting to fall. For the first time since he came to power, several opinion polls, including in the right-wing media, show a fall in favourable opinions of his government and of himself. Whereas it was still over 52% in July, it is now below 50% and close to 40% in some cases. This is still high if we take into account all the austerity measures he has imposed over the last year or so, which have brutally worsened the living conditions of the majority of the working and middle classes. This loss of credibility should be seen in the context of the fact that political and trade union sectors, hitherto very accommodating to Milei, are allowing themselves to play a freer game and to make gestures of opposition or resistance.

Massive demonstrations

The deep popular attachment to the public university (which is free in Argentina, with no conditions of access and of a high international standard), Milei’s growing discredit and the fact that it was the university authorities and all the unions who launched the call explain the success of the demonstrations on 2 October. They took place all over Argentina, including in small towns, and were, in terms of numbers, of the same order of magnitude as those of last April, i.e. massive: from hundreds of thousands to a million people. Unlike the demonstrations of recent months, they did not give rise to confrontation or repression. Politicians such as Massa, the former Peronist candidate in the last presidential elections, and members of parliament from the UCR, the traditional ‘radical’ party of the bourgeoisie, were even seen in the ranks of the demonstrators. Using this presence, Milei and the media in its service have of course described the demonstrations as ‘political propaganda’. But nothing says that this is enough to stop the movement.

Before and during the vote in Parliament in the coming week, university strikes and demonstrations are planned across the country. It will be important to see whether the student movement, which has been largely absent for years, mobilises en masse on this occasion. In any case, hopes are growing of inflicting on Milei what would be a first political defeat after more than ten months of authoritarian and ultra-neoliberal government.

Why a Liberated Palestine Threatens Global Capitalism

By Jason Hickel

October 12, 2024

Source: Transnational Institute

Why is Palestine at the center of the climate and colonial struggle? How are capitalism and the ecological crisis linked? Who really benefits from the exploitation of resources in the Global South? At the Transnational Institute’s Ignite Festival in 2024, Jason Hickel argues that the Global North—the “Imperial Core”—is responsible for the excess emissions and resource extraction driving the climate breakdown. He believes that achieving economic democracy and sovereignty in the South is essential to dismantling the colonial power structures at the root of both climate change and imperial exploitation.

What Ideas From the Paleolithic Are Still With Us in the Modern World?

An interview with renowned economic historian Michael Hudson on where our calendar comes from, his collaborations with the late intellectual David Graeber, and the long-lost practice of forgiving debt.

By Michael Hudson, Jan Ritch-Frel

October 11, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Is the order of the modern alphabet connected to how our shared ancestors counted the phases of the moon and its effect on tides 50,000 years ago? Did the first stirrings of government and bureaucracy emerge from the efforts of early astronomers to reconcile solar and lunar calendars? These are the kinds of questions that have kept economic historian Michael Hudson up at night.

On the surface, learning about the origins of the methods people use to bring order to their lives—such as time, weights and measures, and our financial systems—seems like just another history lesson. One ancient practice leading to another, resulting in guesswork of what people did before the last Ice Age.

But it goes beyond interesting. It’s very useful. The more we can parse out and extrapolate the beliefs and attitudes of previous eras, the more we might be able to step out of present behavior patterns and perceive social problems we keep creating because we thought we had to.

A deeper reach into human history is now possible, thanks to a growing body of archaeological and scholarly research collected in recent decades. Many experts in related fields have speculated that this research will have a large social impact as it percolates through centers of influence and we become accustomed to relying on a wider, global human historical evidence base as a reference. Society will greatly benefit from minds that are trained to think in deeper timescales than a millennium or two—archaeology and biological sciences increasingly permit useful insights and pattern observations into humanities at a historical depth spanning millions of years.

Hudson’s research has already made inroads into modern life. Many contemporary economists rely on his understanding of financial history in the Ancient Near East. Hudson’s collaboration with the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber inspired his launch of the debt cancellation movement during Occupy Wall Street. Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a popularized adaption of Hudson’s research on the early financial systems of the Near East, encouraging Graeber to follow up and coauthor the bestselling book The Dawn of Everything, an overview of new interpretations in archaeology and anthropology about the many paths society can take.

I reached out to Hudson for a conversation on these topics, starting with his reflections on what drew him into prehistory in the early 1970s, and his collaborations with Harvard prehistorian Alex Marshack.

Jan Ritch-Frel: Alex Marshack was well-known for his idea that many of the social institutions we live by today are derived in large part from the “thought matrix of the Paleolithic”—the ideas and attitudes, social systems, and means of recording and transmitting information developed over thousands of millennia until the most recent Ice Age. How did you two find each other?

Michael Hudson: I had read in the New York Times about Alex Marshack’s analysis of carvings on a bone found in France, made approximately 35,000 years ago with markings that he viewed as tracing the lunar month, not mere decorations. We became friends. He was living and working in New York City, with a housing arrangement between NYU and Harvard to provide housing for each other’s faculty.

Marshack was working from the Paleolithic forward, the time before the last Ice Age, to see how it shaped the Neolithic and Near Eastern Bronze Age. My approach was to study the Bronze Age because my study was about the origins of money and debt and its cancellation. And then to work back in time to see how these practices began.

Marshack was most focused on how the measurement of time began before there was any arithmetic. Counting began with a calendrical point of reference. Marshack showed that lunar months initially were pre-mathematical, indicating symbolic literacy proliferated in the Paleolithic. He developed the idea that a motive was to arrange meetings—groups separated by distance tracking the passage of time to convene at pre-agreed locations. I was interested in the calendar as an organizing principle of archaic society: its division into tribes, and as providing a model of the cosmos that guided the structuring of social organization.

I had been writing on ancient debt cancellations, and the idea of economic renewal on a periodic basis. We both had this basic question—how did this awareness of time turn into actual counting and provide a basis for ordering of other systems, from social organization to music? Marshack showed what I’d been writing to the head of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, who invited me up for a meeting, and soon enough I was a research fellow there too.

I began my work on how order was created by trying to think about how the calendar became the basic organizing principle certainly for the entire Bronze Age, and no doubt leading up to it.

Ritch-Frel: The words “month,” “measure,” and “menstruation” are all derived from the word moon in Proto-Indo-European: “mehns” according to scholars of the early Bronze Age Language, which is ancestral to many of Eurasia’s major languages spoken today. Going back to Marshack’s research direction of looking at the thought matrix of the Paleolithic, what answers was he looking for with the evidence from the past?

Hudson: Marshack saw the centrality of social and prosocial behavior as a driver among separate groups—today’s humans thrive on the interaction between groups. The management of that, diplomatically and administratively through a calendar process had to be a key basis for survival across time; it had an ordering function. The need for dispersed populations to come together for trade and intermarriage.

Marshack believed that Paleolithic leaders would have understood that this lunar calendar and the notations associated with it were technologies of chieftains, of governance. Oftentimes, leadership comes down to organizing meetings and the rules these meetings have. The lunar calendar was the basis for figuring out when separate groups were all going to meet together at some annual interval, and maybe there were meetings at the monthly or seasonal interval, such as the equinoxes or solstices. And it was probably based on a new moon.

Here’s a case of the thought matrix of the Paleolithic shaping societies that we call ancestral: Marshack and I came to interpret that the key meeting date would be a new moon—time was thought of as a baby, the moon grows and becomes older. This goes right down to the Roman calendar. The new year was the shortest day of the year. When the year is born, it’s the smallest before it grows. The idea of a life course of a year, with weather, people, and animals traveling along with it was at the heart of the Paleolithic thought matrix. Marshack, for example, studied the amount of attention and care Paleolithic cave painters of Europe put into drawing animals to indicate a particular time of year. If there was a painting of a fish, it would have the long jaw that fish developed in the mating season. You could look at whether the animals were molting or not. Paleolithic artists across the world were always careful to note that.

To show you how the year’s 12 lunar months were a format often adopted for organizing other social structures, let’s consider the social models we see in the Near East and the Mediterranean that are recorded in the Bronze Age: As populations settled into increasingly sedentary communities, a typical form of association was the amphictyony, divided into 12, four or six “tribes” or regions. These tribal divisions enabled the rotation of chiefs by the month or season so that all members of the amphictyony would be equal. “Foreign relations” were standardized carefully to provide equality.

Ritch-Frel: I am mindful that when people elect to use an ordering system for some part of life, it’s based on good reputation and there being a convention that connected social groups share. If people decide to organize society into groups using a 12-month lunar calendar logic, it’s a measure of its latency in the wider human culture and is still with us today. This Paleolithic tradition organizes the backgammon board we play on today, designed by Sassanid Persians, it’s rooted in the lunar calendar logic of 12. We don’t pay much attention to ordering systems once they’re in place, as long as they work.

Hudson: Certainly by the Neolithic, people began to count everything. Even if they didn’t have systems of mathematics, they were counting—and trying to find correlations and associations with natural phenomena around them, from weather to the behavior of animals. For instance, an archaic cosmologist might count the number of teeth of a horse and attempt to correlate that with something that shared the same number.

The assumption was that maybe we could control things by taking some proxy that shared the same number or some other cosmological characteristic with another, and we could have a ritual on earth that would somehow manipulate the heavens and our environment in the way that we wanted to.

We might call that pseudoscience—confusing similarity with true correlation, confusing correlation with causation. While many of us might make a living in science using higher-grade scientific standards, there’s quite a lot of that still going on today—in conversations with family and friends, in sports and its statistics, and fortune telling is an industry that’s still going strong.

Ritch-Frel: We can regard this general instinct as leading to know-how and in some cases part of science, as the process gets refined.

Hudson: Think of it as experimentation: “Let’s see if we can do this and see what works.” They were experimenting, but the logic was to think in terms of a system, and I think that’s what made the Bronze Age societies work.

The key to archaic science was to think in terms of a cosmos, in which everything was interrelated. The so-called Astrological Diaries of Babylonia correlated grain prices, the level of the Euphrates, and other economic phenomena, including royal disturbances and behavior much as modern astrology seeks to do. They were seeking order, and they started by correlating everything they could, including the movements of the planets.

Today, we think in the decimal system. But it’s not automatic to assume 10 fingers as the basis for how hunter-gatherers are going to count; even in cases of using the body as a memory device. Some Indonesian societies, for example, counted across the span of their outstretched arms, with 28 spots. That would be a measure of using the body to follow the phases of the moon. I also noted that these tended to track with a range in the number of letters in the alphabet that we see in many languages today, in the mid-20s and 30s. It seems that before numbers, something like the alphabet was used to name the moon’s phases.

The number of letters in many early alphabets that we know of corresponded with the lunar months. And the most important characteristic of the alphabet is its sequential order. We don’t say AMD, we say ABC. They’re always in the same order. Does that contain an older pattern? The key is the fixed sequence, a pre-mathematical organizational system.

We know that many Paleolithic communities across Eurasia and the Americas were following the phases of the moon. And we know from Neolithic structures such as Stonehenge that people were also focusing on the key solar intervals, especially the solstices that were turning points for the birth of the year on the shortest day, and equinoxes that were the turning points.

There was a permanent need to combine a lunar calendar, which governed local social life, with a solar calendar, which told the story of the seasons, separated by solstices and equinoxes. And, of course, that was a big problem because imagine the frustration that they had when they realized that the lunar and solar months don’t correspond exactly: A lunar year has 354 days, and a solar one has 365. The mathematics of the form of solstices and equinoxes, and the time gap between the 354-day lunar year and the 365-day solar year (as well as the leap year) could lead to divergences in cosmology and social ritual using the calendar as a basic organizing principle. The solstices and the seasons, often highly social events with important rites and traditions, would be more complicated to schedule and would be pushed to different dates as the years went by.

Marshack thought that once arithmetic was developed, some priest-like individuals or chiefs began counting everything, looking for a pattern, an explanation. “Let’s see what works.”

I became curious about how Mesopotamia and others blended their cosmological calendars and kept their traditions on schedule and societies harmonized. We know that many of the lunar years remained the basis for many religions all the way from Mesopotamian practices to Jewish practices, down to today, and yet there was also the solar year.

Ritch-Frel: As Near Eastern societies became more complex in the 3rd and 4th Millennium BCE, how did they reconcile all this? And how did the calendrical system become imbued into an arithmetic basis of weights and measures and rations?

Hudson: The early Sumerian cities like Uruk or Lagash frequently experienced the upheavals of warfare and disease. That meant there were large numbers of widows, orphans, and slaves in these cities. The place they found for them was basically in large weaving workshops around the temples. A large, exploited workforce producing textiles required an administrative system to feed the labor pool over the course of the year—a new calendar system.

Leaders worked with their astronomers and cosmologists to develop this administrative calendar to feed this workforce population. It seems that the convention of 12 months per year borne out of the lunar calendar was assumed, the question came down to how many days are there in that month. Neither the 354-day lunar or 365-day solar calendar worked—for causes of variability in length, their need to be corrected to follow the seasons, or the inconvenience of the way the numbers couldn’t be divided by 12. There couldn’t be oversights in the administrative calendar that missed a day—mistakes made in provisioning food for people are quickly noticed.

It seems natural they’d want to land on a day that both served the administrative needs and could be correlated with the 354-day lunar calendar and the 365-day solar calendar. After trial and error, 30 rations per month, 12 months per year produced a social logic of 360, pretty close to the two ancient cosmologies.

The standard ancient daily ration in these early Mesopotamian cities for the workers and enslaved people was two cups of grain per day per person. Using the administrative 30-day calendar, 60 cups of grain was one month’s ration. A slave or a temple worker required 60 cups of grain a month—it became a rule of thumb for the city leaders and managers. One month’s rations, 60 cups, is a unit of weight, a bushel. That key weight, organized by the number 60 has a forcing effect on how the commodity grain is often exchanged for silver. It led to silver being organized in weight units of 60, called a mena, so that the trades for weights of grain and silver could correspond easily.

The palace calendar became the administrative ration calendar model, the 12-month, 30-day calendar. And there was administrative efficiency. They saw correspondence in the rations with the units they used for weights and measures, and for calculating loans and mercantile trade. Naturally, if silver and grain are organized on the basis of 60, it was convenient for minds trained to calculate on the basis of 60 to use it as the numbering structure for interest rates. You can see how units of measure, once they become convention, have an easy time traveling across categories of activity. To hammer it home, the time units for payment plan structures on early Mesopotamian debt were derived from Paleolithic time units: monthly, borrowing from the lunar calendar; quarterly, borrowing from the four annual seasons divided by solstice and equinox; or annually using the solar calendar.

That annual part is the next phase of this to discuss, as you’ll remember, the 360-day calendar is a social artifice that needed a process every year to correctly align with 354- and 365-day calendars. The incompatibility between these calendar years was treated as a time of anarchy, which required harmonization—long before the administrative one was invented. The process of bringing order to chaos was also brought over from the Paleolithic—it was as familiar a convention as the 12 lunar month calendar. The resumption of a new solar year was treated as an occasion for setting affairs back in order and clearing up old dues—not just getting the calendar to align, but the social imbalances and unresolved appeals to justice inside groups and among them. The cleaning of the slates, which listed debts and obligations in increasingly large settlements, would have drawn their justification from this Paleolithic process.

The importance of recording grain supplies and the related mercantile trades and the lending system around them, the palace administrative calendar, and forecasting lunar and solar cycles to find concordance dates for future calendar years put pressure on the astronomers and cosmologists of the Bronze and Iron ages to develop fuller arithmetic, quadratic equations, and even analogue computers with gears to determine the movement of the sun and the moon and other heavenly bodies that served as useful fixed points for their calculations.

Ritch-Frel: The process is important here, and so is this example for understanding how existing human social conventions like the Paleolithic lunar calendar form the basis for future ones. How did Bronze Age rulers adapt Neolithic and earlier traditions of resetting the annual calendar, old debts, and unresolved justice?

Hudson: Archaic societies knew well that social order required active intervention to restore order. Unlike the calendar, realignment in the social economy was not achieved automatically. The birth of a new year was a tool and natural marker to clean up debts and obligations from the year before. This became especially important with the spread of interest-bearing debt in trade and agriculture: It was necessary to prevent an oligarchy.

Cosmology is a system. And calendrical cosmology is a system with an inherent source of disorder: the gap between the solar and lunar years. Certainly, both in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the idea that the gap between the lunar year and the solar year was a time out of time—when repair of social inequality and imbalance could be addressed.

Debt cancellations were normal practice throughout the Bronze Age in the form of royal proclamations of clean slates. Not only were debts wiped out, but bondservants were free to return to their own families (and enslaved people were also returned to their debtor owners), and lands that had been lost through debt or other misfortune were returned to their former holders. The logic of the statements in the proclamations follows a thought line of, as above, so below; on earth as it is in heaven. It’s useful to cloak the ancient calendar convention of the Paleolithic chaos-into-order period into the social-economic principles that the new agricultural society lived by.

And while you’re dealing with this cosmology trying to create order and restore order in terms of time, how do you prevent the disorder from the increase in wealth that occurs as technology and population grow and societies become more and more productive and wealthy? That was a big challenge to civilization. The Asian societies met it very well. The Middle Eastern societies met it very well.

They had a system that was able to keep time, and generally prevent or remedy social polarization. They wanted to have a system that maintained order on a continuous basis without creating disorder. And that’s what led me to work with David Graeber and other people trying to think, well, how is it that you’d have some very archaic societies that very often lasted a lot longer than the ones we have today? And as Graeber pointed out in his more recent book, The Dawn of Everything, there are many Mesoamerican, and generally speaking, Native American communities that had a very careful standardization of social poles—you didn’t want there to be wealthy people, it creates egotism, it tends to be abusive to other people.

Ritch-Frel: Can you share a bit about your collaborations with David Graeber?

Hudson: Graeber’s basic aim was to show how some societies had avoided polarization and inequality as social wealth developed. How do we explain the origins of inequality and how do we prevent it? We had talked originally about economic historian Karl Polanyi and his circle’s attempt to go beyond the economic orthodoxy that social organization began with individuals bartering and lending money based on its rate of return. He took the viewpoint that there was a wider society in motion that was shaping our economic structures, not just merchants and customers.

Well, he had read my books, and I mean, we had long discussions and he said, he wrote Debt: The First 5,000 Years largely to popularize my work, and because he realized that debt was the great polarizing fact of antiquity. And that’s why he pushed the Occupy Wall Street movement to focus on debt cancellations.

One of David’s activist tactics was to buy defaulted debts of people for 1 cent on the dollar, which everybody thought was collectible. There are marketplaces for defaulted debt that lenders have given up on, and there’s a secondary market for debt-collecting divisions of banks that want to take their chances, buying the debt at very steep discounts. And Graeber wanted to raise money to buy these debts and tell the debtors, you don’t owe this money anymore. Look, we paid it all off for you.

What David and his friends couldn’t have bargained for is just how depraved and corrupt the banks were—the banks had sold the same collection rights to many different collectors. The debtors were still being harassed by debt collectors even after their loans were bought off.

The tactic didn’t work, but the idea was right. David and I both wanted to advocate debt cancellations here because that’s what’s destroying the economy today. Western civilization never developed the means of canceling debts in the way that the Near East and other parts of Asia did.

Today, we are smothered in a fake storyline, a fake origin myth for economics. Margaret Thatcher typifies this attitude. You have to pay the debts. You have to let the rich people take over because they get wealthy. And unequal wealth is what civilization is all about. The ability of wealthy people to crush and destroy civilization is Western progress.

The myth goes like this:

In the beginning, there were individual entrepreneurs who tried to make money, the government then stepped in and wouldn’t let them make money, canceled the debts, and nobody would lend money anymore, so economies couldn’t develop. But fortunately, our modern economy figured out how to grow: the payment of debts is a must, and that gives security to the creditors. We can’t have a free market, wealth-creating economy if the 1 percent can’t drive the 99 percent into debt. And that’s why the stock and bond market and the real estate market have gone up when the rest of the American population economy, the 99 percent since 2008 have gone down.

Meanwhile, if you look under the hood of the Bronze Age, the Neolithic that preceded it, and the Paleolithic before it—the evidence overwhelmingly points to a default: mutual aid, and common wealth.

Our leading economists say civilization couldn’t have begun this way: “If you began this way, how could you ever have the security of creditors to make the loans, to help everything develop?” They’ve just never lived in that world, so, therefore, it’s unimaginable for them.

Ritch-Frel: A fuller account of human history that stretches millions of years into the geological time scale, across a wider geographic area, is part of the infrastructure humans need to pave a road back to more resilient and equal societies. What have you gathered as you have followed the evolution of social insurance and mutual aid systems into government administration, modern banking, and finance? Did you spot paths not taken that lead to more humanistic outcomes?

Hudson: In my opinion, the key driver of Western economic history is the shifting and unstable political relationships that grew out of the financial dynamic of debts growing at compound interest faster than the economies can pay. Casting the net wider, we can see that it was a tenet of Chinese law, Indian law, and Middle Eastern law, to prevent an independent financial oligarchy from developing.

How did we lose all of that?

A series of historical events, of course, rooted in what we call the Classical Era in the Mediterranean. When Phoenician and neighboring sea traders expanded their trading posts into the Mediterranean and mixed with various colonies, they enforced the concept of charging interest on debts, and the chieftains of city-states and colonies adopted this policy without the debt cancellation cure that centralized rulers adopted across the Near East. The traders just wanted their silver, they weren’t terribly bothered by upheavals in the social order that occurs when you don’t cancel debt. The economies of Greece and Rome and their political heirs in Western Europe were all about creating a financial oligarchy and sanctifying debts instead of sanctifying the cancellation of debt.

By explaining the Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern royal proclamations canceling debts and reestablishing order, it is possible to show people another path—one that has worked for thousands of years, and emerged out of that Paleolithic thought matrix. What we call Western civilization and progress is a detour from the direction that human civilization had been traveling for a much longer time.

This whole detour of not being able to control the egotism borne by wealth and the development of a creditor class—who eventually gain control of the land and the basic needs of life—is a civilizational problem.

This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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