Labor

Labor in Human History

In earlier human societies such as bands or hunting and gathering, people had limited or no permanent settlements. Hunting and gathering were the main means of livelihood. It is believed by most anthropologists that men used to hunt, and women used to gather fruits. Though the societies were highly traditional and simple, they contained the principles of egalitarianism. The form of labor was therefore largely voluntary. In ancient Greek and Roman civilization, slavery was the main mode of production. Slaves—collected through war—were unfree labor and did not have any rights. They were also known as “speaking tools” as opposed to “unspeaking tools” such as domestic cattle. During the time of European feudalism, peasants or serfs were bonded labor—they were bonded to lands and bonded to pay rents to the landlords. In feudalism, there emerged a new social group—the money lenders, who also formed small guilds of business enterprises, used to lend money to the peasants, as well as to feudal lords, and charged high interest. Having failed to pay back money with interest, many landlords surrendered their estates to the money lenders. Money lenders emerged as a new “capitalist class” who now “freed” the peasants from their lands and made them “free labor.” This “freedom,” however, was double-sided: freedom to work in the factories, and freedom from their means of production (i.e., lands). [Page 274]As a consequence, the peasants had nothing but to sell their labor in the factory or farms. Though this freedom did liberate them from landlords' exploitation, it subjugated them in a deeper manner. In the previous system, they at least had lands to cultivate in return for paying rent to the landlords. In the new capitalist system, they lost their control over land, and when they started working in the factories, they lost control of their own labor as well. The emergence of wage-labor is nothing but, to quote Karl Marx, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.”

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