From Agriculture to Wage Slavery
An isolated hunter-gatherer has only his or her own wits and skills to
depend on. In order to get food, the individual may need to make tools
and weapons using skills learned from the previous generation. In order
to survive periods of low food availability, it may be necessary to
save food such as nuts that will remain edible if they are kept dry,
grain that may remain edible if it can be protected from moisture and
animals, and dried meat or fish that can be kept dry enough not to
spoil.
The same hunter-gatherer in the company of a dog, cheetah, or other
suitable predator-partner, is benefited by complementation of natural
abilities. A dog can not only help with hunting, but also offers
protection and companionship. The dog will eat parts of the prey that
the human probably would not eat and scraps or leftovers of other food
that would otherwise go to waste. So the relationship is symbiotic,
beneficial to both parties.
A hunter-gatherer in the company of another human can enjoy the
benefits of division of labor, complementation of skills, and even
reproduce. With or without the help of a companion-predator, the pair
of humans can be more successful than either one as an individual. The
addition of children imposes additional burdens in their first years,
but they transition to accepting greater and greater levels of
responsibility. Work done in the raising of children is another way of
saving up the work done in hunting and gathering. The children also
serve as an investment for the old age of the parents.
When surpluses are present, bartering and other forms of resource
exchange (including, for instance, gifts and hospitality offered to
strangers) make it possible to gain wealth without doing more work
since trade may provide fish hooks, knives, or other items made by
expert hands, salt or other edible items not available locally, etc.
Both parties in such exchanges benefit.
With increases in population pressure it becomes more and more useful
to keep related families together in tribes. Families may unite the
offspring of two or more sets of originally unrelated grandparents, so
a tribe may be fairly complex in the kinds of genetic relationships it
encorporates. However, increases in population pressure in the presence
of separate clans or tribes of humans may easily result in predation of
one group upon another or warfare over issues of territory. Slavery is
a rather uncommon outcome of such encounters since only captured
children could be prevented from escaping when offered the opportunity.
The invention of agriculture around 12,000 years ago introduced many
important changes to human life. Food could be produced in greater
volume, related families could clump their dwellings together for
convenience and safety, and starting around 5,000 years ago water
buffalo and then oxen were domesticated to pull plows. These animals,
and horses (domesticated around 4,000 years ago) could also pull wagons
and created the possibility of trading large amounts of good and the
need for roads and road maintenance. Once again, increased complexity
of human organization created advantages and also dangers. While
population pressure was low, villages were unprotected, but later on
villages became defended by walls.
Money is an intermediary in trade. Three-way trades are difficult to
arrange in the absence of money. Perhaps as early as 10,000 years ago,
more certainly from around 9,000 years ago, cattle became a standard
unit of exchange. Around 3,000 years ago a certain weight of grain was
used as a unit of currency. The first minted coins were produced around
650 to 600 BCE. Depending on the region, other symbolic tokens of value
may be used, e.g., the cowry shells favored by both the ancient Chinese
and by the Ojibway in North America.
Hunting can be a cooperative activity, e.g., when many people surround
an area of prairie and then close in on game, or when several hunters
drive prey into traps. Presumably, the hunters share equally in the
spoils of the hunt. So it must have been unusual for hunter-gather
individuals to recruit labor for some special project.
Agriculture often must depend on recruited labor to be as successful as
possible. A farmer may have a large field of wheat that has matured and
ought to be harvested promptly to avoid damage by wind and rain. If the
farmer can recruit labor then the entire harvest can be kept safe and
stored away for future use. One solution is for several farm families
to harvest fields together in rapid sequence depending on which fields
become mature earliest. Obviously, if the several farms involved are of
greatly different size then a simple trade of labor will be greatly to
the advantage of the farmers with the largest fields.
Agriculture may secure labor by means other than simple exchange. One
of the earlies solutions is slave labor. A second solution is serfdom,
in which farms are owned by one group and farmed by serfs who are bound
to the land. There are several intermediate variations. One arrangement
persists today, the tenant farmer. The normal solution to short-term
labor requirements is to pay agricultural workers.
The objective of the farm owner is to obtain wealth by utilizing
farmland, seed, fertilizer, knowledge of farming, etc. The wise farmer
also aims to preserve the fertility of his land and avoid any
side-effects of farming that become liabilities, e.g. runoff of sewage
from animal husbandry, runoff of fertilizers or agricultural chemicals
that may contaminate streams of the land of neighbors, etc. Whether the
farmer lives a abstemious life and gives all surplus money to an
organization such as a church, or spends his disposable income on
frivolities or gambling, or makes some other kind of plan for his
earnings will not affect the basic question of how to make the farm
work.
The ratio of the four outputs from the farm is contingent on several
factors. Waste depends on the crops grown, the care taken in
management, etc. The amount given to workers must be enough to ensure
that they will be available to do the needed work. The amount the
government takes in taxes ought to be according to some general rule
applicable to all farms, but some situations permit some farmers to
reduce their taxes. In China, during the traditional period, farmers
could donate all their land to the nearest Buddhist monastery, and then
rent the farm land back from the monastery (which was tax exempt) for
less than the amount given for taxes. The amount available to the
farmer is the difference between the total output and the
aforementioned three factors. The farmer is not obligated to take all
of that money. The farmer will apply some of the earnings to
maintenance and improvement of the farm, farm buildings, etc., some to
his home and family, and he can put some amount into grain storage (to
protect against a possible failed crop season next year, to make
possible selling grain at high prices in bad years, etc.) and he can
also save by selling surplus output and storing his earnings in the
form of money, gold, etc.
There are several limit conditions that would terminate the normal
functioning of the farm. All of the output could be given to the
workers, in which case the owner would starve unless s/he was
independently wealthy. The government could take all the output of the
farm, in which case the workers would have only the hope that they
could divert enough farm produce to live on. Waste could be so high
that income would be insufficient to support the farmer, pay the
workers, and give the government the taxes it demands. The farmer could
pay the workers so poorly that they would seek employment elsewhere or,
if they could not find other work, they would suffer from malnutrition
and other maladies and become less and less able to or willing to work
well.
The most recent full-blown slavery in the United States before
the Civil War. The institution was linked with a very profitable crop
essential to one kind of mechanized industry, cotton. The industry of
one human being in a cotton field might produce only a little more than
it takes to keep him or her healthy enough to work. However, the
plantation owner harvests that small differential from each of a large
number of slaves and can become very well paid in the process. After
the Civil War, slavery was illegal, but owners of large spreads of
cotton-producing land used other means to secure the labor of African
Americans at profit-preserving costs. Slavery was still legal in
Mauritania until recent decades, but getting rid of the legal status of
the institution has not totally wiped it out.
Maltreatment of farm workers has occurred under the Soviet Union,
Communist China, and other states that have tried to keep possession of
the various means of production in government hands, have the workers
live in communes, and make directors of farms and other industries
members of the political hierarchy. Ironicaly, the party functionaries
took the place of the members of upper classes who ran things under
serfdom. The ancient Egyptians used slavery, and with that institution
in place the only source of relief for farm workers was a slave revolt.
The Germans used slave labor during the Second World War under
conditions that made escape almost entirely impossible, but workers
resisted by discretely sabotaging bombs and other war materials that
they were forced to produce. Slavery and human trafficking are still
present in the world, and not many people try to defend these
institutions. Nevertheless, these institutions seem to thrive in the
same social and technological environment that makes transnational
criminal and terrorist organizations difficult to control by the tools
of national governments. However, as far as I know, there are currently
no national governments that give legal status to slave labor or bonded
labor, indentured servitude, as recognized parts of their social and
political organization.
The problematic motivations of farmers are: (1) desire to provide a
high standard of living for self and family, (2) desire to purchase
more farm land to increase the amount of rake-off accruing to the
farmer, (3) desire to save for the future in the form of stored produce
(which could eventually be sold during times of bad harvests and so
lower the prices of grains sold to families) and in the form of gold,
silver, jewels, money, and other imperishable commodities. That humans
are motivated to create treasure troves, possibly by nature and surely
by culture and education, has been known for all of human history and
the same kind of motivation exists in many other animals that hoard
resources for the future.
The repretoire that humans have for increasing their own wealth to the
disadvantage of others includes: direct predation, slavery, serfdom,
tenant farming, and providing hired workers with the minimum necessary
to retain the desired number of employees. In situations wherein the
employer provides food, living space, sundry goods, etc., employers may
apply fees, interest on loans, penalties for various infractions, etc.,
with the intention of making employees owe to the farm or other place
of employment more than they are due in wages. The situation is often
complicated by the fact that if the owners of similar enterprises pay
their employees at wage-slave rates, then they can undercut the minimum
price at which that owner can still make any money. One of the
functions of a minimum wage law is to protect the interests not only of
employees but also of compassionate employers who otherwise face a
choice between going out of business or becoming yet another
wage-slaver.
When two economies are not in equilibrium, when the economy of one
country is such that workers must be compensated for their work at some
minimum salary R in order to buy food and pay for the other
requirements of daily life, but the economy of a trading-partner
country is one in which workers only need, e.g., half that amount to
maintain an adequate way of life, then the second country can sell
grain or some other product at a lower price due to the salary
differential. Businesses in the country with a higher standard of
living may succeed in cutting costs by gains in efficiency, but also by
cutting workers' salaries. Finally they may be unable to compete
against imported products and are then required to take rather extreme
steps to stay in business. One solution is to make their products by
employing workers living in the other country. Doing so means that
almost all of their original employees will have to find other forms of
employment or become unemployed. Advanced forms of production such as
depending largely on automated machinery to till and harvest farmland,
manufacture products, etc. will also create a large swell of unemployed
workers. Then workers in neither country will escape harm. Perhaps the
most damaging effect of trade among countries at various stages of
economic development and iving standards occurs when first-world
countries with highy developed agro-business firms that can produce
corn, wheat, and other grains at very low cost then sell part of their
surplus in third-world countries wherein it is the much-cheaper
product. Doing so can make unemployed large numbers of farm workers who
had been working with primitive tools, little or no use of fertilizers
and/or agricultural chemicals, and unimproved varieties of seeds.
Ironically, when the foreign suppliers no longer find it possible or
convenient to export grain to those countries, and when drought or
other causes of famine visit the third-world country, they are most in
need of locally-produced crops but the laborers and perhaps even the
farms cannot jump in to fill the gap in the food supply. In the
aftermath refugees from starvation may put large burdens on surrounding
nations with better supplies of food, epidemic diseases may occur at a
serious rate, violence may be spurred by the unplanned and unwelcomed
mixing of populations, It may be impossible to make an inclusive list
of all the problems that could develop in the wake of spasmodic imports
of large volumes of grain to third-world countries with tenuous
agricultural economies, but in the aftermath of a famine most people
would probably agree that it would have been preferable to avoid all
the human suffering by tolerating some level of governmental
regulation.
In many situations in first-world countries all players in some field
of the economy would benefit by making a major change in their
production methods or in other practices. However, not one of them will
be the first to make the change because doing so would add appreciably
to the selling price of their product and it would then become priced
out of the market. Decades ago, automobile manufacturers in the United
States knew that seat belts would save the lives of many of their
customers, but they also knew that if consumers reacted against
installing restraints or reacted against the increased price of the
vehicle, then they could suffer greatly in the marketplace. Government
regulations that made seat belts mandatory components of all new cars
sold in the U.S., and traffic laws that penalized car occupants for
failing to use seatbelts made seatbelts commplace and accepted, and
their regular use resulted in saved lives, decreased levels of injury,
reduced costs to communities for providing emergency services, etc.
Two important commonalities of all the economic systems examined
thusfar should be given careful attention:
(1) Humans at least appear to be hard-wired to save for a rainy day. If
this penchant is a culturally-derived peculiarity of our species of
hominid, then it is an oddly widespread choice to be based on
supposedly unrelated past histories.
(2) Humans are either hard-wired to take advantage of other people, or
else they find it extremely easy to learn how to do it and how to
appreciate the advantages that it brings to them.
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