Studies in Economic Exploitation and Ideology

These selected published essays address the nature of economic exploitation and how ideology has legitimated its existence. Economic exploitation exists when elites expropriate workers’ surplus. Ideology exists when doctrines convince the exploited that the prevailing exploitative social system is in everyone’s best interest. Among hunter-gatherers, exploitation did not exist and thus there was no role for ideology to play. Although mild exploitation with unstable ideology arose in some early agricultural pre-state chiefdoms, extreme exploitation and powerful ideologies only emerged over the last 2% of human history when warrior elites with metal weaponry and military organization established states and took control of productive wealth. To survive, all others had to work for them and give up their surplus output, which they have done as slaves, serfs, indebted peasants, and wage workers. Only during 19th century industrialization could workers adequately organize to threaten insurrection, thereby gaining the franchise and political power to retain a portion of their surplus. Possessing most votes, they could have greatly lessened inequality. Their failure to do so is testimony to elites’ persuasive laissez-faire ideology that convinced them that it would not be in their interest. Only during the extreme hardship of the Great Depression 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. 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.