Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over. But extreme inequality was not an immediate and organic consequence of our ancestors’ transition to farming. Many early agricultural societies were far more egalitarian than modern urban ones, and in ancient rural villages and hamlets people often worked cooperatively, shared the product of their labors evenly, and only hoarded surpluses for collective benefit. There is also plenty of evidence to suggest this archaic form of “kibbutz” egalitarianism endured because it was an effective way to manage the recurrent episodes of material scarcity that fast-growing farming populations routinely suffered. Thus, for instance, the small-scale farmers who established themselves across much of what is now Spain and Portugal over the course of the first millennium BC are thought by some archaeologists to have been “assertively egalitarian”—until the Roman legions appeared on the horizon in the first century BC.