it echoes the way exploited people everywhere and throughout history tend to feel about their situation: their bosses, or landlords, or superiors are blood-sucking vampires, and they are treated at best as pets and at worst as cattle. It’s just that in the Americas, a handful of societies enacted those relationships in a quite literal fashion. The more important point, concerning ‘modes of production’ or ‘modes of subsistence’, is that this kind of exploitation often took the form of ongoing relations between societies.
