196

This gets kinda close to whitewashing exploitation.

That wasn't my intention – my intention was to point out the history of it, in order to set up the argument that we in the present, with our tools of communication and education, should be better than this because we can understand the value of cooperation and other professions not directly producing necessities.

Exploitation is one tool, but it is a cruel and unjust tool, and by no means the only or best tool. We can and should do better. We can look to the past to see the patterns, but we can also look at the present to see where they can and should be broken.

It's true that progress has been driven by specialization, surplus food production, and advances in storing food which further contributes to food production.

For the most part, peasant families had to be self-sufficient all-rounders, producing food, clothes, (simple) tools, fetching water, maintaining their homes and all that is required for running a farmer's household.

Most specialization to do things beyond that, enabled by the surplus, weren't done by the peasants that made up the majority of people in settled societies.

Additionally the entire point of agriculture with domesticated plants has always been the big surplus it provides (and more importantly how reliable it is).

The additional production supports a greater population density, but without some mechanism to transport it from those producing it to those in other professions, they'd mostly put it all towards their own households and neighbours and some other people in their general vicinity.

You'll pay your toolsmith in kind (=food, textiles), you'll feed your elders but why would you sponsor some layabout sitting in his room all day "thinking" and "writing" instead of actually working his share, if you can't really grasp the benefit his thinking and writing brings?

Essentially, the "surplus" would be consumed by an increase in populace, up to the limit the available land will support – at some point, more labour won't help you produce more food and clothing, so it'd just mean you have to spend less time working and more time at leisure. Note this point, I'll get back to that.

Saying that it's the exploitation in particular that has driven progress is a strange take.

The distinction I might not have made clear enough is between "extraction" and "exploitation": Extraction of additional labour and the resulting surplus in resources is what enables professions not directly concerned with producing those resources.

Exploitation is one method by which this was historically achieved. It's not the only method, nor in my opinion the best method.

The progress I mean also isn't the agricultural improvements themselves – those, as you point out, are self-serving. But a collier – someone who oversees the process of turning wood into charcoal – is a specialist whose value might not immediately be visible if you can just go and use the wood for your fireplace directly. Sure, the charcoal burns hotter, but you don't really need that for heating your home and food.

You do need it for processing iron ore into iron and steel, and those into tools, which will in turn help with many other tasks. Obviously, we now know this dependency, and we're familiar with the concept of science, but if, say, someone came to you and said "Hey, can you give me food? I need to bash rocks together and don't have time for work" you'd probably still be sceptical. If someone else then comes and says "I need some clothing, but I'm busy turning bashed rocks into a paste that'll make it easier to build your house" (keeping in mind just how time-intensive producing fabric was), you might be intrigued, but that second guy won't come around until the first guy has had enough chance to bash rocks.

These people need the leisure to work on their stuff that'll hopefully eventually pay off. One way of affording that is to force other people to give up some of their food and textiles.

Again, to stress my point: We can now understand that value. We should fund science just in case someone comes up with a novel way of bashing rocks to make our life easier. We don't need to force people, if those people can be convinced to contribute willingly. We could and should afford people that leisure to try stuff, and I don't believe we need to be forced.

We absolutely shouldn't be feeding the modern equivalent of landlords and nobles growing rich from our contributions while inventing new ways to squeeze even more personal gain from us. That is the part that strictly still requires force.

Do you have a source for the claim that farmers don't produce a surplus without being threatened?

To be fair, that is a simplification. The way I've seen it phrased is "Subsistence and a little more", as in: you'll want a certain excess, not just for safety in case the harvest turns out worse or something happens to your stored grain, but also because having enough to share with others affords some level of prestige.

But at some point, the additional safety and prestige more work could produce, even if you had more land available, yields diminishing returns. Even with all their preservation methods, food generally didn't keep as well as ours does today, and armies would obviously prioritise more lucrative areas to plunder for supplies along their march.

What extortion (and other, better methods) can achieve is getting the peasants to part with some of their surplus, instead of consuming it / converting it into population growth. In a way, exploitation forces the surplus to actually become surplus instead of just resources and safety margin.

Generally, I recommend reading Dr. Devereaux's series on pre-industrial farming, textile production and the general lives of peasants. The whole blog is interesting, but these series in particular touch on the topics of prosperity, surplus and extraction.