There are four primary determinants of social hierarchy. They are productive ability, social ties, ideology and violent ability. All are affected by geography.
None of these operate in isolation. Productive ability directly affects violent ability. Ideology determines what people will and won’t do but over time tends to move towards what a Marxist would call material determinants, though that time can be a LONG time: it took about two thousand years for the early kings to rise after the introduction of agriculture, so the power of ideology, though not the only factor slowing adoption, shouldn’t be understated. Two thousand years shows a lot of resistance.
To the extent hunter-gatherers tended towards egalitarianism, and there are certainly exceptions, generally based on high surplus, it was based on the fact that one guy with simple wood and stone weapons isn’t much better at violence than any other guy, especially in a society where all men who aren’t shamans are hunters. Oh, the best might be able to take two men at once, maybe even three in exceptional cases, but if a group of other males attacks he’s done. Likewise, though ambushes can change the formula, conflicts between men and groups of men are extremely risky unless one side outnumbers the other.
This changes a lot with early bronze weapons and armor, and it changes even more with organized bodies of men trained to fight together. Professional warrior or soldier classes whip peasants. So when agriculture makes every man not a hunter, but allows for division of labor, the “every man is about as good as another” changes, especially in organized groups.
He who is able to transfer the loyalties of a group of warrior or soldiers to himself can rule. Alternately men good at violence can transfer their loyalty to each other, creating a ruling warrior caste.
Let’s take the case of ancient Greece. The Homeric age emphasizes individual combat, but nobles can train much more for it and have better gear. They rule, but the society is still remarkably flat overall. In the classical period, the primary military arms are the phalanx and the galley. The Phalanx is simple and doesn’t require a lot of training, but it does require fit men with gear acting in groups with high solidarity. If everyone doesn’t push together, in unity, they lose.
Athens citizenship was almost exactly “men who fought in the Phalanx” and “men who rowed the galleys.” The galleys were for poorer men, and the state provided the galleys, but galley rowers had to be highly trained and work in precise unity. Slave rowers could not compete with free men, and highly trained crews of citizens could and did, as with the Athenian navy against the Persians, dominate.
So, while those who rowed were usually of the lowest class of Athenian citizens, they were citizens.
What was also important is that for the phalanx, men provided their own weapons and armor and the state, which was the citizens, provided the ships.
Rome started off similar: legions were full of citizens who served for relatively short periods, and who provided their own arms and armor. As with most of the Greek cities, they returned to their farms or other lives after the wars. They were not professionals: they did not make their living as soldiers, but they were able to beat professionals. Sparta may have been the best for a long period, but they didn’t win every battle, their dominance on land was real, but not determinative. Rome in the early and middle Republican period defeated armies made up of professionals regularly.
The fall of the Republic comes when the army is professionalized: this is now how people make their living, they are provided their weapons and armor, and they are loyal primarily to their generals, because their chance of real wealth is from looting and that depends on the general, including whether and how much he lets them loot.
Crassus, near the end of the Republic, simply raises his own legions without the help of the state.
Rome comes to depend on professionals, not citizens, and those professionals are not loyal to the citizenry, and as such the Roman Republic comes to an end when one of the great generals, Augustus, defeats all his opponents. The Republic never returns, because the conditions for Republican rule are gone.
As we can see, then, if amateurs can’t defeat professionals and if armies are not raised from the citizenry by the citizenry, Republican or Democratic rule cannot continue.
The great Democracy of the last six centuries or so was Switzerland. Similar to the Greek city states, they relied on pikemen, raised from the general population by the general population and able to defeat professional militaries, including knights who had trained since childhood. Even when operating as mercenaries (as city state citizens sometimes did) they retained their loyalty to Switzerland.
But the heart of it is that they could defeat troops raised in non-free states.
But notice in all these cases: men had the franchise, because they were the ones who could and did fight. Women in Athens were treated particularly badly, indeed they were treated worse than most slaves who didn’t work in mines. Switzerland was one of the last western nations to enfranchise their women.
Let’s talk about that enfranchisement. The main feature of 20th century warfare from the WWI thru Korea was that it was mass conscription warfare. The armies were huge. This meant that women, during war, had to take over jobs done by men who were fighting.
Women thus, while mostly not fighting (WWII Russian women are a rare exception), were absolutely integral to military success. They made much of the weapons and kept society running.
When did women get the vote in the US? 1919.
The US draft ended after Vietnam, and the army was professionalized. Not coincidentally, egalitarian distribution of goods has since then spent over 40 years collapsing. This was due, in part, to the constraints on war in a nuclear armed world. Before nuclear weapons, great powers could win wars against each other and the benefits of doing so were huge as were the costs of losing. (Austria stopped existing, Germany lost a huge amount of its land and became a US Satrapy, as did Japan.)
Going all out, enlisting as many men as possible and increasing war production thru the roof all made sense.
But in Vietnam, the US never went all out, because North Vietnam was a Russian ally. They wanted to win without really winning: without conquering North Vietnam.
You don’t need a mass conscript army for a war where you’re not seriously trying to win and where, indeed, seriously trying to win may provoke a nuclear war. (This also applies to the Ukraine war to some extent.)
It is notable that democracy rises with cheap gunpowder weapons. Mass egalitarian societies, in economic terms, result from WWII, and the policies supporting them come to an end about the time that mass drafts are done away with and armies are “professionalized”, aka, become internal mercenaries.
Worse for the future may be the rise of robotic armies. If you don’t need men for soldiers, if you don’t need mass numbers of women to step in and make the robots, well, perhaps the time of egalitarian societies is done.
Or, perhaps not. Because as important as who fights is who makes the weapons. The great disaster of the war of 1812 is that decentalized American armaments production could not compete with centralized armaments factories. It was the end of the yeoman farmer ideal: the idea that decentralized armies raised from the yeomanry could defeat professional militaries.
But if drones and robots which are effective combatants and effective assassins or area denial weapons can be created by ordinary people easily, and the powers that be are unable to deny people the means of doing so, then robotics may prove to be positive in spreading power among the population.
This is one of the hopes of the future, and you should understand clearly that those who want to restrict your access to the determinants of power do not have your best interests at heart.
We’ll talk about that at a later date: it gets to the heart of much of the culture war around guns, a contentious topic and with good reason, given just how many children are being served up on its altar.
But that is for later, for now: who is good at violence matters and it determines who gets the good life and who doesn’t; who rules and who serves.
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By Bruce Wilder
Sometimes a comment is better than the post which inspired. This is one of those cases . — Ian
The New Deal created a balanced system of countervailing power on variations of the theory that the political power of citizens working together could oppose and balance the power of the wealthy and business corporations. Labor unions. Public utility regulation. Savings & Loans and credit unions and local banks to oppose the money center giants. Farmers’ cooperatives. A complex system of agricultural supports to limit the power of food processors. Antitrust. Securities and financial markets regulation.
Yes, the rich kept fighting their corner.
When ordinary people had it good by the 1960s, they stopped caring. Or maybe their children never started caring, having never experienced the worst oppressions the wealthy could dole out. Friedman’s message was a simple, deceptive one: the economy ran itself. Government was irrelevant, the problem not a solution. Consumers had sovereignty over business in “the market”. The New Deal as political project ran out of steam as politicians stopped thinking that “fighting for” the common man, the general welfare, the public interest was a genuine vocation or a vote-getter. The rhetoric continued to be used by Democrats to the turn of the century, but the meaning had drained away with emergence of left neoliberalism in Carter’s Administration.
Friedman had an apparently persuasive theory of the case that he made align with people’s desires and illusions.
The institutional base of the liberal classes eroded away. The intellectual basis faded rapidly. FDR’s agricultural policy was one the most successful industrial policies ever enacted. I have never encountered a reputable economist, even a supposed specialist in agriculture, who could even outline its main features. Most take the Chicago line that it was all smoke and mirrors, an illusionist’s trick — that the tremendous shift in resources and growth in productivity was “a natural” emergence that would happen anyway despite gov’t policy. Nixon subverted the whole scheme, helping to make the whole population sick and fat. Nothing to see here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The disastrous deregulation of banking and finance was a far more public spectacle than the dismantling of agriculture, but it has never provoked any sustained political movement in favor of even the simplest reforms, let alone a theory of financial reform. Watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” at Thanksgiving is as close as most come to the intellectual outlook of the New Deal.
I have heard it as the theory of 500. Societies of more than 500 or so require institutions of collective government to prevent the worst sort dominating everyone else and the worst usually manage to subvert government to their own ends any way, making the state an agent of oppression. FDR managed to pull together a wildly disparate coalition to create a government that succeeded for a time in constraining the worst impulses of the wealthiest and the business corporations.
It has failed in large part because the many could not remain even minimally organized or informed, free to even a small degree from cheap manipulation of impulse and prejudice.
And From Purple Library Guy:
And this is the fundamental problem with social democracy in general. While they’re in power they can make a nice system, but since it’s predicated on allowing people who want to trash that system to still control most of the wealth, it will inevitably die fairly soon.
I’m just finishing up reading Ed Broadbent’s book “Seeking Social Democracy”, and I found myself impressed by his decency, his erudition, some of his takes on practical politics . . . he was a good man, a very good man. But, he didn’t really grapple with this fundamental issue which in my opinion dooms his project.