Please don’t take this question the wrong way, I am just trying to learn and get the opinions of more people on this subject. I find it interesting.
Please don’t take this question the wrong way, I am just trying to learn and get the opinions of more people on this subject. I find it interesting.
The stages of development are just how our history has unfolded, they’re not prescriptive. A different trajectory is hypothetically possible.
It makes sense to me that some form of forced labor would be necessary since it is the simplest way to organize labor. But yeah, I suppose different ways to organize labor could have formed instead, although it seems unlikely to me.
The Inca empire didn’t have slavery, but they conquered and developed large amounts of territory even without literacy. They just exchanged rations of necessities for a set amount of labour per year. People had their needs met and Infrastructure Week went smoothly.
that’s very interesting, now I want to learn more about The Inca empire
Slavery is a very old method of production that had a resurgence a few centuries ago.
It’s more of a regressive economic movement than a new development, then and now.
It was not inevitable; the ruling class exploited socioeconomic conditions in Africa and exported enslaved laborers to colonies in the Americas accordingly.
I was referring to slavery as a necessary step during antiquity only, more recent slavery I don’t believe to have been inevitable at all.
The “terrible swift sword” that forced hunter-gatherers into the wheat fields was maybe necessary for economy of scale early agriculture, yeah.
I can see the argument, but the amount of free labor it takes to maintain a slave system is so high (especially when there isn’t much in the way of technology) that significant slavery at the dawn of agriculture seems unlikely. Seems like that’s something you could only start to pull off with a decent sized city state’s worth of overseer labor, and at that point you’ve already had agriculture for a while.
Is it though? Wouldn’t it be easier to organise labour if the people you’re organising are cooperative?
maybe it isn’t, the more questions I ask the more I realize that I don’t actually know very much about this.
In a manner of speaking slavery is very simple if you’re heavily armed and surrounded by people who do not want to do what you want to.