In his work “What Do Bosses Do?” Stephen Marglin observed that capitalist owners had to awkwardly insert themselves as managers in workers’ efforts in order to justify their extraction. Many tasks, he argues, are hyper-specialized not because this is more economically efficient, but because it artificially creates the role of the capitalist as a coordinator of tasks.

Where this *didn’t* happen is in industries where the resources in use were fixed, concentrated, and easy to register with the state and hence police. So, for example, in mining, Marglin found that early capitalists found it unnecessary to insert themselves as bosses. Instead, they allowed teams of miners to manage themselves, waiting outside the mine to collect the revenue from sales without having to get their hands dirty.

What were the miners going to do, steal the mine? Take it with them and set it up somewhere else? Of course not. There was nowhere else for them to engage in their trade on their own. The frontier is closed.

9/10

I’ll close by noting how important concepts like asylum and guesting once were to nonstate and weakly hierarchical societies.

Many Indo-European societies encoded an obligation to host strangers in their religions; think Odin wandering in the guise of an old man or the Ancient Greek principle of xenia, or hospitality, to honor Zeus. The Pashtuns have melmastya, hospitality, and nenawate, asylum, as two key principles of their traditional social code.

In “The Dawn of Everything,” Graeber and Wengrow go so far as to argue that the freedom to abandon one’s community *and expect to be welcomed in another* is a core human freedom that we have lost:

“A North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements—speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own—with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.”

Without this freedom, we are trapped. Every state border, every checkpoint, every property line hems us in. But we’re surrounded by historical examples of societies in which people committed themselves to hosting and welcoming total strangers, with the understanding that if they themselves ever needed to leave, they too would be free to do so.

10/10

They just…said it. Out loud, as it were. Explicitly. If you can control people through wages, that’s cheaper than controlling them as slaves, and you still get work out of them. That’s how capitalism works, folks. It is a transformation of slavery, not its replacement.

In her 1965 work “The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, Ester Boserup made a similar observation:

“Where population is sparse and fertile land abundant and uncontrolled, a social hierarchy can be maintained only by direct, personal control over the members of the lower class. In such communities therefore, both subjugated peoples and individual captives of war are kept in personal bondage. Bonded labour is a characteristic feature of communities with a hierarchic structure, but surrounded by so much uncontrolled land suitable for cultivation by long- fallow methods that it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding alternative means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that the land can be controlled, it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower class in personal bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working classes of the right to be independent cultivators.”

5/10

Once you hit "stop seeing this ad" you get a choice of why you'd like to stop seeing the ad, but it doesn't really offer super on-point options, like, say, "This advertiser is a grifting prick working to make people stupider and overthrow the republic in favor of a feudal dictatorship," so just click whichever approximates it best.

Now, you could be done, but if you want to go a step further and really mute fash motherfuckers from your feed forever...