This slavery, it has roots

Current discussions speak of a solar economy and a solar revolution while emphasizing its novelty in our coal- and oil-powered world. Contrary, civilization is by virtue a solar powered phenomenon. What makes a civilization? Complex social organization. What makes complex social organization possible? A large population that can be subdivided into specialized occupations. What makes this large population? Food. How is this food acquired? The hugest contributor to population explosions and the attendant societies organized around food production, the veneration of this production into a mythological construct maintained by a priest class, and ascendance of god kings who control the conditions of plant growth is the grain, nurtured by the sun, the soil, the water, and human toil. Corn in the Americas, wheat in the Middle East and Europe, rice in Asia--each growth of a civilization was powered by the same energy source surplus food production, which was, in turn, powered by the sun. Civilization has and always will be solar powered so long as members of a civilization need to eat. And a religion will venerate the arrangement of people and institutions around what the sun can produce to both sate the risk associated with basing the existence of an artificially maintained population center around food production and to justify the organization of such a society. More importantly, religion conducts a shell game with the causality between sun, plant, food, satiety, and food safety.

Ecology tells us that the sun is a wasted resource. Even by the grossest calculations among scientists, of the sun's total energy that reaches the earth, one tenth, one exponent, one power is lost between what photons blanket the earth and those that ricochet off of chloroplasts inside the cells of photosynthetic life on earth. And for each ensuing step the same loss occurs, which is what gives a food chain such a wide base and not much hierarchy. By dint of that reality humanity has learned that food production around a good source of weather and water affords almost a limitless opportunity to produce its staple foods. And because the sun is a wasted resource the opportunity to maximize production exists such that enterprising farmers who clear a plot of land can expand production to a hypothetical point of excess. And thus in an economy based in real worth, the possibility to produce great food riches exists. Here we have the basis for a relationship between people, the land, and the sun, which produces wealth, power, and population. And it is in that retreating hypothetical point of excess where land use achieves excess food production, a precariously grown population, and a power structure that administers it where we find the roots of slavery.

In essence, it is the excessive production possibilities along with now-established excess population  that sets the stage for a gross abuse of power in the establishment of slaves. Between the sun, the plants, and the people a line of ascension is drawn through symbolism. From this symbolism a very real condition of existence, food, anchors a new identity in power relations between the coordination of land use and the coordination of labor to take advantage of that hypothetical excess production of food. These are the conditions for the emergence of slavery. Technologies of food production don't end at the plow or the irrigation ditch. They extend into the social organization of a class of toilers and the ideological systems that convince them to work the fields, justify the coercive content of labor, and smuggle into the fruit of labor, i.e., civilization, the connection to the sun, the land, and plants. And so out of this arrangement we find the development of property, both land and produce, and finally chattel, that is, people held for labor.

Agriculture is many thousands of years old. People have learned to domesticate and breed plants and animals to establish a productive relationship to set parcels of land. The peculiarities of this system, like human reproduction itself, is that it is set in that atavistic mold and rarely finds different expression outside of those real conditions of labor or the real consequences of not doing the labor. Food production requires a certain amount of labor input to prepare the land, plant the seeds, nurture the growing food crops, harvest them, and process them into the foodstuffs that form the foundation of a culture. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find people enslaved or close to slavery conditions working the land for land owners under some coercion be it the whip, the threat of death, or the reinforcement of money.

The line from sun to food production plays out in time. That is, agriculture, takes time. The culture of food production, the veneration of productivity gods, the arrangement of sacrifices to appease those gods, the quasi-religious ceremonies around planting and harvest, those are human culture. Human culture is time. More importantly so, it is time shifted, that is, time with an express outcome ordering how its sequences flow. From this we have the coordination of the basic conditions of toil required for survival being used to consequentially order how that toil will occur and to what extent it will be maintained. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find that labor and its value is something that can be infinitely exploited for the gain of a few under the quasi-religious organization of labor into a system of production that sustains itself. This is the basis for that shell game, that essential ambiguity, that is handled through myth and ritual.

Agriculture is a mode of social control. And more basically survival is the existential condition upon which all thinking and any mode of sociality rest. Survival is the razor dividing is and is not. Agricultural practice, if one is born into it, is an ongoing struggle with the land to produce enough food for survival. It tethers people to a place, and it requires cooperation among families and communities. This condition of survival is the bedrock of community and the cultures that form within them. Without the immediate concerns for survival people lose that tether to the land, that tether to a place, and the ties among neighbors required to sustain a life and its meaning in practice.

Slavery or abject labor conditions is one efflorescence of a system based in power (that is food energy) production, which in turn is used, in its excess, to found an exchange economy, a diversified labor pool, and an artificially concentrated population. The other efflorescence is slavery by any other name--survival within an often precarious system of food production. Having landed on the moon and sent rovers to mars we are still bodies that need sustenance.