Daniël Franke 
When exactly did we start to think that the point of humans was to be productive, instead of thinking that the point of productivity was to take care of humans?
JuneSim63 💚@ainmosni When elites started taking any surplus for themselves.
ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋ@junesim63 @ainmosni Sooo, that would be when the first humans appeared on the planet?
Reg
John Carlos Baez@ReggieHere @deshipu @junesim63 @ainmosni - some say it started with raising grain: the elites get slaves or paid laborers to grow grain, store the surplus, use it to feed armies, etc.
Interestingly the storage of grain is also when cats started hanging out with humans. So it's not all bad.
Yes, the advent of agriculture and stored surpluses seems to be the consensus here. Prior to that people would have lived more nomadic lives and it would have been unlikely that anyone could 'farm' anyone else's production.
@ReggieHere @johncarlosbaez @junesim63 @ainmosni I have been reading "Against Grain" and "Dawn of Everything" and I can't help thinking that it must have went the other way around. People have been dabbling in agriculture for ages before, but it never really was that much better. Only when it became possible to force other people to work for you and take all their stuff (because it became harder for them to just run away from you), agriculture came into fashion.
@ReggieHere @johncarlosbaez @junesim63 @ainmosni By the way, ore mining and metal smelting might be two other industries, apart from agriculture, where you can't easily run and hide.
Absolutely. Society gradually coalesced as occasional societies became more permanent, but anthropologists place the earliest settlements at around 25000 BC while humans have been around for several hundred thousand years (give a millennia or two either way).
Whether those early societies operated according to a system of theft, slavery and forced labour, social credit, or a combination of them all is anyone's guess.
@ReggieHere @johncarlosbaez @junesim63 @ainmosni I'm willing to bet that theft, slavery, and forced labor were not invented overnight, and different societies at least dabbled with them for a very long time, possibly before anatomically modern humans even. But as you say, there is no proof, and it's unlikely we will ever find any.
It's hard to believe that those things didn't exist, or that tribes wouldn't subjugate others when they had the chance, but if the global human population in 10000BC was roughly half of the population of modern day London, it might have been tricky to find people to subjugate.