Studies in Economic Exploitation and Ideology

This book is a selection of my published essays that address the nature of exploitation and how ideology has legitimated its existence in varied manners over the past five millennia. It includes 10 articles from referred journals and two book chapters. Economic exploitation exists when powerful elites expropriate workers’ surplus, their output beyond that needed for their subsistence. Ideology exists when doctrines legitimating the elites’ privileges successfully convince the exploited that the social system is fair and in everyone’s best interest. Exploitation and ideology did not exist for the first 98% of our species’ history as hunter-gatherers. A high degree of economic and political equality prevailed, precluding economic exploitation of the weaker by the more powerful. Without exploitation, there was no role for ideology to play. The adoption of agriculture 10,000 years ago enabled mild inequality, but unstable legitimating ideology within pre-state chiefdoms. Extreme exploitation and powerful ideologies only emerge with the rise of the state 5,500 years ago, the last 2% of human history. States arose in Eurasia when warrior elites with newly available and expensive metal weapons, military organization, and ideology took possession and control of productive wealth, mostly in the form of land. To survive, all others had to work with the elite’s productive wealth and provide them with their surplus output. They did so as slaves, serfs, indebted peasants, and wage workers. Only in the 2nd half of the 19th century did workers gain adequate political power to retain a portion of their surplus. Industrialization brought workers together in factories and urban slums where they could organize to threaten insurrection. To avoid social disorder or even revolution, workers gained better conditions and most importantly the franchise. Possessing most votes, they could rewrite the social script to greatly lessen inequality. That they failed to do so is testimony to elites’ persuasive laissez-faire ideology that convinced them that it would not be in their interest. Only once, due to the extreme hardship of the Great Depression of the 1930s, was the elite’s ideology sufficiently delegitimated to enable political measures that decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. However, laissez-faire ideology resurged to dominance in the late 1970s, legitimating public policies that have exploded inequality over the past 50 years, proving again the extraordinary persuasive power of the elite’s ideology. This collection of essays provides scholars and others with an understanding of the absurdity of how with our unparalleled material abundance we suffer ever greater insecurity, stress, and pessimism. There is urgency that laissez faire ideology be delegitimated before the policies it justifies lead to the destruction of democracy and our ability to avoid ecological Armageddon. These essays will appeal to academics with interests in the dynamics of exploitation and inequality and to those worried about exploding inequality, the survival of democracy, and preserving our habitat.