Our age of Transformation and "The Great Release"

It has come to my attention since writing “The Ages of Transformation” and their Pluto out of bounds correlations that they have an economic parallel. This parallel is called “The Great Release” and was coined and written by Robb Smith CEO of Integral Life, an education organization dedicated to applying the principles and ideas of Ken Wilber. Ken Wilber is an American philosopher who has written extensively on the evolution of consciousness. When I first saw Robb’s graphic on the timeline of past economic great releases, I couldn’t help but notice how they closely paralleled Pluto out of bounds. His article is free. Search www. Integral life.com/great release, for the full import of the analysis. (Highly recommended)

The following graph and excerpt illustrates the dates for economic accumulations of capital and cultural adjustments over the past 800 years. The accumulation of capital generally relies on the advantage of commercial resource of goods, manufactured or brokered and militarized protection. The following is an excerpt from “The Great Release”.

“Nearly 800 years of economic history could fill a bookshelf. Instead, in just a few pages, I’m going to attempt to give you a feeling for the historical backdrop, signal moments and key forces that, in their push and pull, end up propelling the eight hundred year arc of capitalism (at least according to A right and Braudel). Although history is messy and simple explanations are often crude, hopefully what will become clear is that there is a discernible pattern in the ascending cycles of economic life. These cycles can be understood at a high-level through the lenses and dimensions summarized above. While we won’t be professional historians by the end, we might be able to step back and view our current moment with a richer, more informed view of the forces that are at work in our lives today; indeed, that have been at work for hundreds of years. Historical events only feel new to those who don’t know their history. If nothing else, as perspective grows, suffering and confusion diminish. Pre-Modern Capitalism Drawing on Braudel, Arrighi argues that modern capitalism arose with the innovation of market-making by Genoa bankers in the 15th century, but that its foundation was laid by Florentine bankers in late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries amidst the ongoing “Italian Hundred Years’ War” of the major city-states (i.e., Venice, Milan, Florence and Genoa). In 1340, Edward III of England defaulted on England’s debts to the Florentine banking firm of Bardi and Peruzzi, which had financed England’s invasion of France. The default led to the Great Crash of the 1340s, which saw banks collapse, a credit crisis throughout Europe, a crash in production of cloth (which employed a third of Florence’s population), and labor riots. Importantly, this event also signaled the critical transition from material trade to financial trade as bankers scrambled to keep their capital growing, leading to an escalation of fierce inter-state rivalries. Arrighi describes why this would be the case: Then, as ever since, difficulties arose from the fact that capital was endowed with a much greater flexibility and mobility than its opponents. As competitive pressures on governmental and business organizations intensified, strictly capitalist organizations were far less constrained by considerations of power or livelihood in the reallocation of their resources than most other organizations–be they the English royal house or Flemish guilds or Florence’s own guilds. Thus, Florence’s leading business enterprises were largely indifferent as to whether the self-expansion of their capital occurred through the purchase, processing, and sale of commodities or through the financing of the struggles that set the various components of the world-economy within which they operated against one another. And as competition drove down returns to capital in trade and production, while the power struggle raised returns in high finance, they began transferring cash surpluses from the first to the second kind of investment gradually in the early decades of the 14th century, precipitously in the middle decades. (Arrighi, 1994, p. 104) It is during this period of war, and the financing of war, that capital mobility achieves its first modern form of fusion between capital and state interests. In 1407 the private financiers formed the private banking coalition of Casa di San Georgio in order to take over and control the public administration and finances of the entire city-state of Genoa: This is the context in which capitalism as historical social system was born. The intensification of inter-capitalist competition and the increasing interpenetration of this competition with the power struggle within and between city-states did not weaken but strengthened the control of these states by capitalist interests. As the ‘Italian’ hundred years war raged on, one city-state after another faced ever more serious fiscal crisis due primarily to ‘truly staggering disbursements for military expenditures and accruing interest on the public debt’… As in all subsequent financial expansions, the alienation of the states to moneyed interests occurred through a transfer of surplus capital–capital, that is, that no longer found profitable investment in trade–to the financing of war-making activities. What capitalist groups could no longer invest profitably in trade, they now invested in the hostile takeover of the markets or of the territories of competitors both as an end in itself and as a means to appropriate the assets and the future revenues of the state within which they operated. (Arrighi, 1994, p. 93) This is the first of many examples we’ll see in which a crisis of surplus capital co-arises with inter-state competition immersed in war, and capitalists standing by to move capital out of production in order to finance that war-making at a higher profit. We can summarize this as a principle we’ll see over and over in Arrighi’s account: when capital gathers in surplus it stagnates, both pushing and pulling states towards the opportunity to leverage it in their war-making and state-making endeavors, and capitalists only too happy to finance the wars that might allow those states to achieve hegemony. In any case, what started in the signal crisis of the Great Crash of the 1340s ended with the terminal crisis of the Peace of Lodi in 1454 in which the Italian city-states achieved detente and “institutionalized the northern Italian balance of power.” This marks the start of the first cycle of accumulation and the long arc of modern capitalism.

 The First, Genoese Cycle of Accumulation: Every cycle of accumulation’s nominal beginning (and the end of the prior cycle) is marked by a terminal crisis, followed decades later by a signal crisis that tells the hegemon when to switch from trade and production to high finance, and then later again with its own terminal crisis that sees the end of its reign as hegemon. Terminal crises force some reorganization of the world economy in such a way that capital can continue to grow, and which gives the hegemon the predominant spoils of its global cycle of accumulation (relative to other states of the time). Genoese hegemony grew out of its troubles in the late 14th and early 15th centuries as its Central Asian trade routes deteriorated and, after its defeat to Venice in the War of Chioggia in 1381, its power in the eastern Mediterranean declined. Leading up to the Peace of Lodi in 1454, Genoese trade routes and commercial networks were getting hammered. Genoese capital owners were seeing declining opportunities in “landownership and state-making.” Making matters worse, its capital and interests across its trade network were increasingly left exposed and without protection because the Genoese aristocracy, which previously had provided military protection for its interests, withdrew from commercial activities. Capital is at its most innovative when it is squeezed. In response to its troubles, Genoese capital partnered with the Spanish by taking over the Castilian wool trade, which allowed an important reorganization to occur: a specialization of skills in which Genoa would focus on banking and capital activities while financing a militarized state–Spain–whose interests lie in territorial expansion and had the capability to protect its source of capital: For the Genoese–Iberian designation of the first systemic cycle of accumulation does not refer to the Republic of Genoa as such—a city-state which throughout the cycle led a politically precarious existence and ‘contained’ very little power. It refers instead to the transcontinental commercial and financial networks that enabled the Genoese capitalist class, organized in a cosmopolitan diaspora, to deal on a par with the most powerful rulers of Europe and to turn these rulers’ mutual competition for capital into a powerful engine for the self-expansion of its own capital. From this position of strength, the Genoese capitalist diaspora entered into a highly profitable relationship of informal political exchange with the rulers of Portugal and Imperial Spain. By virtue of this relationship, Iberian rulers undertook all the war- and state- making activities involved in the formation of a world-encircling market and empire, while Genoa’s diaspora capitalists specialized in facilitating commercially and financially these activities. (Arrighi, 2005, p. 92) The Genoese (both in Genoa and in the broader Genoese diaspora around Europe) were at the spearhead of leveraging their extensive commercial and financial networks to greatly expand the overall material world economy of the time. Their financial specialization “turned Genoese merchant bankers into the most powerful capitalist class of the sixteenth-century” as they developed the basis of modern banking: checking, bills of exchange, balance of payments, bank transfers, and the like. They were also the first to establish the practice of “good money,” which attempts to achieve stability of money as a store of value and unit of exchange. In 1447, Genoa passed a law that required businesses to transact using coins that had a fixed weight of gold in them. All of these innovations not only stabilized the value of money, they kept Genoese capital far more flexible and adaptive than competitive systems in Venice, Florence and Milan. Recall that the transition in a cycle from trade expansion to financial expansion is marked by a “signal crisis.” In the Genoese cycle of accumulation this occurs with the bankruptcy of Spain (i.e., Spanish Empire, House of Habsburg) in 1557–the first default by a sovereign government–which caused the Spanish to abandon their traditional financiers (the Fuggers, a German financing house) in favor of the Genoese: Although superficially the power of the Fuggers at its height resembled that of the Medici a century earlier, their story was thus a replica of the vicissitudes of the Bardi and Peruzzi two centuries earlier… they overextended themselves at the wrong time, with the result that their business was ruined by the Habsburg default of 1557 and by the crisis that over the next five years shook the European financial and trading system to its foundations. The true Medici of the 16th century were a clique of Genoese merchant bankers… who in the midst of the crisis abandoned trade to become the bankers of the government of Imperial Spain in the nearly absolute certainty that in this role they would make rather than lose money.… During these 70 years, Genoese merchant bankers exercise a rule over European finances comparable to that exercised in the 20th-century by the bank for international settlements at Basel–‘a rule that was so discreet and sophisticated that historians for a long time failed to notice it.’ (Arrighi, 1994, p. 127-28) This quiet dominance of the European financial scene by the Genoese would continue for another 70 years, enabling the Spanish Empire to finance its interminable wars in an ongoing symbiosis between surplus capital and state. As we’ll see, one of these wars, in the Netherlands, sets the stage for the decline of Genoese hegemony and the rise of the second, Dutch systemic cycle of accumulation.

 A Digression I’ll take a moment to briefly digress in order to highlight the importance of one Genoese innovation: the bill of exchange allowed for claims on money to be made across state lines, similar in function I suppose to a modern money wire service. As Arrighi points out this was extremely profitable because 1) it allowed bankers to profit from differences in exchange rates between places and between forms of money (gold, silver etc.) and 2) charge high fees because the service was so valuable to states, which now had a way of moving money around without actually physically transporting it from place to place (with all the attendant costs and risks associated therewith). But peer deeper and the power of this seemingly simple innovation becomes clear: while money does fuse capital and the state when their interests are aligned, mobile money also affords a total separation of capital and state, and this reparability sits at the core of modern capitalism. The rise of populism today is tied directly to this set of ontological features of money, features that arose in the 16th century. Because money can move anywhere and be transferred into different forms quickly, money: does not salute a given flag; can move across borders almost instantly; is not bound by place or territory; can seek the highest return anywhere in the world; is highly adaptable (whereas states move slowly). And so on. When we look at current events through the lens of this fundamental difference– the territorial-based nature of a country versus the mobile, trans-national nature of money–we get another perspective on the anger that’s arising in our modern world: Make America Great Again; “I’m the President of the United States, not the world;” bring jobs back home; dismantle the globalist, administrative state; tax imports, not exports. In other words, this is not just a war over jobs, or between nationalists and globalists, both of which I’ve said before. As I alluded to in Part I, it’s also a war over the loyalty and mobility of money and the desire to reimpose territorial interests on globally-mobile money. It should really come as no surprise that this war is being waged 1) in the United States in the “autumn” of its hegemony, 2) by a President who is representing the non-mobile, territorial, state-based interests of the “working class” voter, 3) against the interests of the owners of that mobile, surplus capital.”

This sketch of the beginnings of capitalism sets the theme for one of many Pluto themes. The schemes of money movement (largely unnoticed} among a small cadre of power brokers and royalty was clandestine to say the least. The overextension or could we say greed of the controlling interests revealed a vulnerability. Militarized force wants it spoils. The financing of the military to do its bidding of physical takeover and occupation is imperative for protection. The protection of an invisible force, the flow of money. It is beyond irony that the themes have been in Capricorn and Cancer following the   natural growth cycle of the seasons. The disintegration phase stepping out beyond the ecliptic only to emerge with a fresh idea.  As you will notice in the following graph the influence of capitalization increases in identity with each cycle. Its level of organization and influence permeates and fuels world prosperity. The curves are not a perfect match but one can agree that the similarities are compelling. The usage of just one planetary factor i.e. Pluto out of bounds sure puts us in the ball park.

Notice also the progression of city states to province-states to Nation states and world states, an increase or evolution in larger areas of control of monetary movement. In my previous article I had focused on the individuals increasing responsibility and opportunity for self- governance. 

The last two periods of 1781 and 1940 are very tight. Our recent history makes this more vivid when we recognize the inception of the U.S. and our economic dominance since world war two. We are in the throes of a Pluto return and more importantly out of bounds.

As we can see the current period is some years from a traditional reorganization according to Pluto being out of bounds. Our disintegration phase sure feels like it is and has been under way. Pluto out of bounds is one and a half election cycles away, not only that but the dancing of Pluto being out of bounds is uncharacteristic of previous cycles. In previous cycles it had full periods of being out of bounds. The next period represents seven periods over a nine year span. My intuition tells me that this may represent a more intentional response to adaptation and resilience, but I am an optimist.

The next graph is the current projection of the economic parallel under way. We have some major transits to proceed and accompany the Out of bounds Pluto starting in 2025. Most notably in December 2020 the Jupiter /Saturn conjunction in Aquarius , Pluto ingresses into Aquarius January of 2023 and a Saturn/Neptune conjunction in Aries March of 2026. There are some promising opportunities if we collectively revision what it is to be human in the 21^st century.

In the next article we will focus on these individual out of bounds periods and what additional planetary influences may assist in our last historic period of Pluto being out of bounds.

Blessed be, denis