With speech coming out of their mouths, the erect apelike creatures from the grasslands spread out over the watery planet, on foot where there was a path, on the back of beasts when they could be tamed, and sometimes over sea, bringing their tools and weapons with them, interbreeding with those they came upon and picking up new skills and tricks as they went. Though there was often peace between factions, circumstance might cause one or another from among them to assert control. In this way, parts of the planet became centers of cooperation and science, and parts (including some of the same) became centers of war and domination.
In search of providence, some discovered that the world was not large enough for them and their kind. Gods spoke to them in book form, assuring them of their rightful mastery spurring them to discovery and the establishment of new lands to claim as their own. Empire was born and with it new tools, sciences and culture to sustain and spread it. Empires consumed empires, enlarging themselves. Empire was good for emperors and burdensome for the provinces. In the outposts of empire, even where empire once flourished, it was frequently dropped when no one was looking. The creatures having discovered many ways varied the methodologies of coexistence to suit the circumstances.
In parts of the planet where grass stretched from horizon to horizon or abounded in jungles of fruit bearing greenery, the feats of past generations were preserved in stories and songs. Where cities and states rose up often in places in which plants and animals were cultivated, farmed and stored, the complicated circumstances of administration favored methods of record keeping on durable media. Technologies of representing speech and thought and customs around them arose in service of the practice, resulting in a proliferation of writings that came to be thought of as the history and inheritance of societies.
Where there were crossroads, there were civilizations war and conquest, but there was also trade of goods, skills, knowledge and gods. In more remote corners of the world, war lords rose up and some became kings who lorded over all. Kings could beget kings and they favored those who executed their orders with titles and domains. Priesthoods administered the texts that underwrote the order that favored the few and upheld the rationale for the servitude of the many.
Across the world even where there were kings, need was that which had to be met. When need could not be met-- through drought, calamity, the spreading of sickness, war or greed-- crisis inspired invention, from means of flight to methods of distribution. One invention inspired by the waves of recognition that the planet could be known and conquered was the persistence of ownership, which resulted in the sealing off of land and fields that had been used in common to such an extent that propriety became the dominant strain of the law-- that which would be enforced. Exclusion from the land forced starving masses to sell their time and labor to owners in return for subsistence and shelter for as long as their labor was useful. The work that the many did for subsistence created products-- food, clothing and other materials that were sold back to them to see them through another day of work. In this way, need became secondary to the production of articles for sale. The skies became black with the smoke of machines making things.
The people of the enclosure sensing the finitude of land to enclose in their home turf spread over the world, turning the common and established foreign lands into further enclosure, and forcing the peoples that they found there to work until they resisted or died; and when they ran out of locals they raided southern lands for workers that they kidnapped and brought across the sea to the new lands where they were forced to work- to plant, to grow and to harvest the crops that they found in the new lands in order for them to be used for industries in the old lands. In return for the labor of the absconded workers, the enclosers gave nothing but enough subsistence for another day's work. Soon the extent of the world that could be enclosed was known by the enclosers, who became concerned with enclosing the rest of it. Where once the planet was a boundless world of plenty for the vast collective parallel existences of the many, it soon became merely a small stage for the exploits of the enclosers, with the rest of the people relegated to bit players, extras in a cataclysmic melodrama of small rich men who thought themselves great.
Owners had the property, the machines for producing the goods of society and a monopoly on the power structures that enabled them, and the debt that everyone owed them in order to survive, but those who worked for their survival had the labor and the numbers that they began to use to collectively turn the tables. Worker power inspired a fair part of the world to ride worker empowerment over the enclosing order to a new order of ostensible restoration of the commons. All was not solved. In the self-important enclosed part of the world. the enclosers devised new ways to fend off the collective. Moreover, in the enclosed part of the world, the greed of the owners tended to cause deep crises to recur-- crises suffered most acutely among the many at the bottom of the enclosed order. And in the places where commonality returned, it was apparent in short order that it was a lost art, especially in the hands of its administrators who having education had become a kind of priesthood. But it kept the enclosers at bay and the example of the return of commonality as a possibility served as a threat that mitigated the greed of the enclosers, inspiring in the enclosed part of the world the emergence of measures to reduce the lopsidedness of the distribution of pain and pleasure that ownership by the few inflicted on the many.
There was plenty for all. But not enough for the enclosers who devised a plan. Using the excuse of a particularly deep crisis that their greed had caused, the enclosers used the pretext of hard times to pin the blame on the least among them. It did not matter if it made no sense that the smallest most oppressed number with the least power was behind the troubles, if a group could be seen to be other than the majority of a society, the elite enclosers learned that blame could be re-directed from themselves. Where this othering was most successful, the elites, now backed by the masses, frequently became more dangerous. During the darkest crises, war broke out across the planet, and the enclosers enlisted the knowledge class to devise powerful weapons with which to assure victory for themselves against the aggressors. Only after wreaking their promised death upon their others, the most othering aggressors were defeated by an alliance of the rest of the planet. But having commanded the forces of nature into the composition of weapons of such power that they only needed to be used once to demonstrate the doom that their use spelled for the planet, there soon came to be a standoff between those remaining super powers that each had their own version of the destructive technology-- which happened to be the societies of resurgent commonality on one side and the concentrated theocracies of enclosure on the other.
There were other differences between the two worlds and even more between those two super powers and the remainder of the world, which was forced into alignment with one or the other of the two former allies against the dark forces of the last world war. The super powers were engaged in a war without fighting. Meanwhile, the enclosers undertook a hot war against commonality in the third underdeveloped part of the world. A duplicitous campaign was followed: publicly, the enclosers expended great effort in turning their half of the world into a parade of wanton consumption of the products of their industries. Life centered around consumption of goods manufactured on the cheap. The price of plenty was destruction of the planet. But the religion of the enclosures made the science that would have foreseen the fate of the planet nullified and forbidden. Evidence of the holy bliss of the religion of constant consumption was beamed around the world, both to make a case to the third worlders ostensibly emerging from subjugation from the enclosers (but very much still beholden and indebted to the enclosers to such an extent that they could never become contenders for global domination themselves). and also to keep their own laborers under the sway of the religion of consumption. Meanwhile, surreptitiously, the enclosers sent death squads to keep the third worlders from experimenting with commonality or making too much progress with complete independence.
For decades, the conflict between the people of commonality and the people of enclosure seemed deadlocked in the threat of global annihilation. Then money won. The side of the planet that had struggled to retain commonality for the people gave up. Soon enclosure and the owners' way and consumption ruled from pole to pole. Now a new age of triumphant money bolstered by new technologies of instant interconnectedness promised a global utopia of democratic plenitude at long last. But history was not quite finished. in order to justify continued exertion of dominance on every part of the globe the enclosers, with the help of pissed off formerly subjugated malcontents, began to pretend that it was no longer a struggle between ownership and commonality but rather between modern globalism and ancient provinciality.
yadda yadda yadda. Surveillance capitalism. Forever wars. Rampant inequality. Space commercialism. Global warming.
Tune in for the conclusion.
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