Humans oppress humans. It’s been thus from the dawn of time. 

I’ll go you one further. Oppression and exploitation are the flip-side of genocide, which we have engaged in with zest since the invention of the sharpened tree branch. Where are Neanderthals today, you ask? [clears throat]

Hear me out. 

The holy bible is filled to the gold-threaded brim with the god of jews, christians, and muslims wiping nations, tribes, sometimes all of humanity, off the face of the earth. 

When He is too busy, old Jove exhorts the people he likes best to rid the world of folks he’s less enamoured with. These are of course fantastical stories conveyed by people –like you and me– to justify murder. 

When we don’t murder, we oppress. Because murder is tiresome, and perhaps, not such a natural thing to do after all. This is a fairly recent insight for humans. Maybe it’s the abundance and cyclical lifestyle of farming that’s afforded us time to ponder the inner workings of fellow humans, albeit of different hues, who should, just maybe, not be quashed upon sight as one would a dung beetle.

And hey, maybe these ‘others’ can help out with the harvest? And while you’re at it, do be a sport, build us a pyramid or a henge? That be lovely. Tha very much! 

A.k.a. slavery, a.k.a. the rule of fight club that didn’t make it out of the editing room, a.k.a. the dominant economic model of the world from 10.000 BC to… okay, we’ll get to that.

Ancient Athens famously kept slaves. Which was okay, because these slaves were ‘others’, barbarians captured in war or a game of checkers. Less publicised: Sparta enslaved neighbouring Messenians, who were fellow Greeks. A bit of an awkward topic at dinner parties at the time; a taboo if you will, which Spartans resolved by calling the thing that they were doing that was definitely slavery ‘not slavery’. 

Greece has remained an example to enlightened Europeans ever since. We engaged in feudalism, not slavery, thank you. The under-person belonged to the land, not to a lord (although said land did belong to said lord, so potato, pota-h-to. Or as the saying went pre-1492: turnip turnip. But I digress.)

Around the 15th century, Europeans discovered that instead of continuing to murder all the different kinds of Europeans that existed, including the Muslims and Jews of Spain who had achieved a level of science, medicine, philosophy and technology the rest of the continent wouldn’t again reach until the late seventeen hundreds, they could export themselves to other continents and do the same but to a wider batch of people.* 

The ‘others’ had a simple choice. Work or die.** 

When Leopold II of Belgium conquered Congo to acquire obscene wealth by forcing the Congolese to work for free, he did so in the name of abolishing slavery. And after the United States abolished slavery in 1865, its most regressive states enacted all kinds of ludicrous laws so that they could (re-)imprison as many black people as possible. Today, with over 2 million incarcerated, and a turnover of $74 billion, the American prison system eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. Just don’t call it slavery. 

Europeans scoff at American uber-capitalism. In the newish world, people working two, three jobs to pay off college debt or medical bills are unexceptional. But things are scarcely better on the old continent. In April, Germany waived COVID-related travel restrictions for 80.000 seasonal workers from Romania. Although EU Labour laws are pretty strict, rules are circumvented by sub-contractors (of sub-contractors of sub-contractors), dragging in people from all across the globe. Less-than-socially-acceptable labour practices, down to full-on gulag conditions, are fast spreading to more and more economic sectors: from transport and construction to meat processing, healthcare, services…

As long as there are others who have very little, they will work for very little. Large corporations lobby for exemptions to rules generations of workers fought and died to obtain, or for authorities to turn a blind eye to abuses. The end-result is that an ever-smaller group of employees, by and large coinciding with the dominant ethnic group, enjoys the good old socially-corrected market economy. Cigar-chomping robber barons need that money to light those cigars, thank you. 

Concurrently, large corporations wield their ever-growing financial and political clout to escape corporate taxation. As a result, in the EU, the dominant ethnic group that enjoys all the perks of being the dominant ethnic group, is left alone to pay not only for its own social security and pensions, but all of infrastructure, governance, defence, and policing (the hordes at the gate). Sandwiched, if you will, between unchained, untaxed elites, and an underclass living a Dickensian nightmare. 

The cycle is vicious indeed. The still-dominant but shrinking white middle class turns ever more inward, preyed upon by populists with a promise of law and order and walls to repel barbarians will come for their jobs, their unemployment benefits, and their wives. The promise/threat is an existential one, the proposed solution more oppression, more racism, and increased exploitation. 

Every society has its ‘others’, inside and out. The white soon-to-be former middle class, particularly in the United States, is fast finding out that being white does not in fact shield one from the voracious appetite of prêt-à-manger capitalism. It’s everyone for themselves against lumbering untaxable Leviathans. And with that realisation crests, it seems, the violence, direct and indirect, piped through the manifolds of militarised law enforcement, against American blacks. 

For most, racism is ignorance. 

For some, it is a means to an end. That end being economic exploitation.

To a deranged few, the objective is still genocide. Work or die… 

The premise that underpins exploitation is scarcity. There’s not enough food, so we must hoard and we must fend off, exploit, or murder hungry ‘others’. But scarcity is a lie. Agriculture, 12.000 years and counting, is pretty adept at covering most basic human needs. It works best in the cooperative framework of just governance, fair taxation, and equitable distribution. We never really needed pyramids, henges, cathedrals, or Empire State buildings. They are the visual, all too literal, manifestation of artificial scarcity. A giant middle finger erected in the nearest desert or swamp screaming: work or die! In that sense, communism never really intended to shift the needle on human exploitation. Remember: it doesn’t matter who or what owns the serfs. 

Slavery and its contemporary: exploitative labour; in Asian sweatshops, iPhone factories, Amazon warehouses, German meat-processing plants, shrimp fisheries, the entire fashion industry, hampers all human progress, both social and technological. Why invent a wheel barrow when you have an endless supply of spinal columns? 

Meanwhile, robots can build those pyramids. Scarcity is fiction. The only way forward out of this mess is a new compact among those who truly hold the levers of power, without realising: you and me, and 99% of everyone you know. 

*Again with the genocide. What is it with you, Gustav?

**Mostly both