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Without specific functions for labor to perform in the world outside of society, any division of labor as a conceit in society will not be relevant for long. The claim of all who aspire to create a division of labor is that the division of labor is tied to natural limits, which apply only when the society is perceived to exist in a fixed ecosystem where the conditions are definite and seen as immutable. If the conditions of the ecosystem or society were mutable, then speaking of a "division of labor" would be a temporary situation at best. As mentioned, if it were conceived that the division of labor could be other than it is, then it would be evident to anyone in society that such a division is undesirable and unnecessary for any productive purpose, and so ecology and economy would not be excuses to maintain it. The aim of those who aspire to heighten division of labor is to find the first excuse to say that the division is somehow necessary and inescapable because of conditions in the world, which do not involve any decision of the agents to make that division necessary. This is strange because the division of labor that is most evident does not serve any productive function at all. The division of labor predominately segregates producers into one or two classes, all of whom share the burden of work, and does not deign to care about the various tasks. The managerial, soldiering, and aristocratic tasks do not accomplish anything productive, and often work against the productive tasks entirely. In short, the division of labor primarily exists to feed those who wish to manage or rule, or fight each other for position. It is only after that fact that division of labor is suggested to stem from some natural rule. It is permissible to speak of division of labor changing gradually as the material conditions change, or as people are reformed since the people themselves are material bodies and are malleable like any other product. It is a conceit of developed society that people are immutable, but every act in the division of labor and many things human do outside of it tell the truth - that they have from the start considered other humans to be prey or machines to be manipulated just like anything else. The belief that people are immutable is a political fiction and usually said by those who wish to hold a monopoly on the command and manipulation of people, and forbid this manipulation to be practiced in reverse, or in ways that would challenge the monopoly. People are, of course, not as malleable as inanimate objects, for reasons that make a lot of sense. They are always aware that others are trying to manipulate them, lie to them, and make them do something they really do not want to do. A simple observation of human malice and cruelty towards each other can be found in every day the human race has existed on this Earth. Those who claim this is not what happens are shouting "retard! retard! retard!" at someone when they say this, and they barely pretend that they are saying anything else. To claim that the self is sacred or inviolable is a way to tell someone that they are stupid and denied the right to defend themselves against others' manipulations.

I have, in hindsight, segregated human labor into seven different tasks that are politically relevant. Though we do not possess political thought at this early stage, we will see how the seven tasks form the basis for institutions, social classes, and thus the conditions which politics can contest. The tasks of labor are not purely political tasks, and much of what people do is not "political" in any sense, even among those who are political specialists. Very often, professions of people will involve more than one of these areas, or don't conform to any position in the schema. Only in oblique ways does the segregation of classes follow from this division of tasks, and very often, full members of society are expected to carry out functions of production, fighting, and learning. The monopoly on violence held by states and delegated to nobility and warriors was less about the common folk being literally animals and incapable of fighting naturally, but the nobility exercising an exclusive right to violence and adopting an ethos which emphasized the glory of their violence and the subordination of production and commerce. The separation of classes into producers (which is split within itself between commercial enterprises and labor), warriors (and proprietors whose claim to wealth is not about exchange but property rights), and clergy, did not occur as if it were just so and made sense, but because there was a nobility to take this right, which made a point of asserting it over the objections of everyone else. All of these tasks devolve to a simple truth of human society - that it lives an environment, and all societies extract from the land to perform any of these tasks. Even the basic functions of human thought and the body are extracted from the world. Virtue is never a given in people. It is always taken from somewhere, and that somewhere is typically the humiliation and degradation of another person. Nor are the productive qualities of humanity things inborn and inviolate. Everything we are is the result of the root process in societies that allows for everything else, which is extraction of raw materials from the land. We quickly move beyond that basic requirement and must become something more to develop society in any recognizable form, but even the most basic laborious task we conceive in our mind is at its core a physical and chemical process. At no point can its existence be taken for granted. Physical and chemical processes can be changed, and if that is true, then all social processes can be engineered by scientific means. This is obvious even to a child, but political society requires upholding a lie that it is not so, despite every act of the political class stating that they engineer society as they see fit. Because humans are aware of this without too lengthy an investigation, political consciousness diverges from its material origins, and must present labor proper as something opposed to the world, done to the world by willpower and managerial intent. So thorough is political thought that in adulthood, the material origins of these things is abstracted away, and the division of labor is presented as something natural yet obviously the design of people, as most labor is either something done by choice or something commanded by a manager who chose it. That is what marks labor as something distinct from other sources of motive force in society - it is willful, and it is managed either by the agent themselves or by another agent. The division of labor is rooted in what is politically useful, and only after this consideration are social valuations made and associated with some token, like money or credit or reputation. Whatever non-political associations someone might make with labor do not factor into the division of labor, until some political value however dim is attached to it. It is entirely possible to make a type of labor more or less valued simply by arbitrary diktat, so long as the impression can be sustained and it suits whoever would maintain it; or some labors whose political utility is not immediately evident have gone on for long enough that they become more or less standard. It is not strictly speaking necessary to pay the "social wage" - the various benefits and expectations members of society have about what it means to be human and to belong. The argument of raw material necessity would reduce to a scenario where humanoids are crammed into hive complexes, fed a diet of soylent and drugs, brainwashed by the most efficient means possible to be reduced purely to the functions programmed into them, and the social wage would be ever-lower until it is almost nonexistent. Nor is it easy to measure what the social wage will be at any given time, because the expectations of people shift. A drive inherent not just in capitalism but in political society and education is to grind down all conditions to their barest minimum.

From the outset, scientific treatments of political economy entailed transgressing expectations once upon a time thought basic, and inventing new expectations that either marked a transformation of mankind that was an inevitable consequence of the scientific mindset, or new expectations that valued a thing that was worthless or even harmful. Once it became possible to invade private life and create a vast impression, when the general fear was harnessed by scientific management and control over society, the social valuations ceased to be related to the productive aims of the past, all of which could have been planned rationally without money as such. Instead, the social valuation of eugenics would be misery itself. The infliction of misery on undesirables became the paramount good, and all productive enterprises would be oriented towards the objective of increasing human suffering and the marked distinction between the residuum and the valid. Vices that were once upon a time a nuisance tolerated or only partially accepted in empires became praiseworthy and expected, while decencies and probity would become a luxury for elites only. Decency and any sign of virtue in the residuum would be deliberately and viciously attacked on all fronts, as such a thing was anathema to the dominant values of those who made decisions, and these decisions would be passed down a chain of command and follow interests beyond mere ideology, which did not always line up with the core eugenic creed. All of these ideas about managing the economy have to encounter a world that existed before them, and the most virulent ideas sought to abolish the material world entirely and supplant it with an entirely politicized concept of reality, going as far as claiming reality is "always mediated", which is stupid to anyone who thinks for five minutes and isn't indoctrinated with slavish loyalty to institutions over their own sense. At the same time, political conceits take on a life of their own, and are reproduced by the machines people build and the actions they take. This is not particular to modernity, nor is the present state of affairs the only possible state of humanity or its "true" state. The present state of affairs is in true reality far removed from what it is purported to be in the ruling ideology and the dogmas presented to those who were selected to die, and a dual system of political values is created. For those selected to live and participate in valid life, the real situation is known to a sufficient extent, and there are a fair number of hints in mainstream media and culture about what is really happening in economic life. For those selected to die, blatant falsehoods about basic political values are uttered repeatedly, and those selected to die are trained, in various ways, to internalize the lies and present themselves as living abortions to the valid. The lower ones' rank among the castes of the residuum, the more abject the humiliations, with a small minority singled out to be nothing more than humiliation targets, so that the rest of the residuum has an example of what happens. If such a class did not exist organically or did not exist in sufficient numbers, it would be necessary to create it, and once the idea of the suffering class takes root, it is morally necessary to tell all who aspire to be valid that open torture and humiliation of the suffering class is the most sacred civic duty, the basis for any republican society. To do otherwise is to give up the project then and there and surrender to rot, perceived or real, and should the damned live and attain any means of vengeance, the damned would be obligated out of dire necessity to take back whatever of the world they can, or at least enact retribution for what was done to them.

It must be understood that the categories listed here are not so much fixed in nature, but fulfill various requirements of what a human society would do to remain relevant. These can be conducted by a single person, or by a division of people into classes, or by dividing the tasks among the people by some scheme without class distinctions as such. The division of labor then is in reality less about the essential roles of people when it concerns a substantive claim to the world, but the functions of those people which can be split apart from them and seen as ends unto themselves. It is not the men and women who are relevant, but what they do which ultimately allows this to continue in a real world, whether that world is imagined as a material world or a realm of ideas commanded by reason.

Extractive labor - The most basic task is to extract raw materials from the Earth, or some space, and bring them into possession. In order words, reaping rewards from the processes of nature. This process begins with the formation of life itself in some natural environ. It does not occur to non-thinking life that it is doing anything at all. Animals, or any creature with a central nervous system that causes the body to react to the environment in some deliberate way, begin the emergence of the other types of labor, and the fullest emergence arises with humans due to symbolic language and politics in any meaningful sense. The quantity and quality of the output is dependent less on the input of labor-power and more on what a particular piece of land or space will yield. Examples of this type of work are farming, mining, oil drilling, and processes which are dependent on claiming territory, from which some thing may be extracted that is useful for another purpose. The output of this work provides the most basic resources a society has to do everything else it would want. The view of the proprietors, in the final analysis, is that they are exploiting territories, and the people in that territory are just another natural force to be harnessed. The crudest view of society is to view the whole economy as a farm or plantation, all life as livestock with definite utilities, and that the size of the output will be in the end fixed. The role of the proprietor and manager is to lord over that fixed output and allocate it as he sees fit, and this is simply the way of the world. This reasoning makes sense because at a basic level, it is the true form of living economic activity if seen from afar. Even the crudest task of extraction, though, implies some transformation that was initiated by a human being, or a machine built with intent by a human, in order for the extracted material to enter social circulation where it could be contested. Those employed in extractive work, though, cannot through their labor alone induce the land to yield a larger harvest or contain more metal, and any attempt to push extractive workers harder reaches this limit where extra motivation to work changes the output very little. Earlier human societies were predominantly extractive, first living off of what could be gathered on the land and then being predominantly agricultural.

Basic labor - The next task is to fashion that which is extracted from the Earth into either other products, or to consume the raw or produced materials to reproduce social life. In settled society, this means the most basic tasks of industry and reproducing cities. There is necessarily a baseline of "unskilled labor" that is accepted as necessary to speak of labor possessing various gradients of skill, and it is common observance that many abilities of human laborers are so common that they are expected by the vast majority of humans in society, or that the laborious tasks are trivial enough to learn that education does not need an elaborate ritual. The ideal of this basic education would be that the workers, and all members of society, reproduce the baseline expectations of a man or woman of their own volition, or through familiar relationships that are associations people would make because they want to or see the relationships as more beneficial than the alternative of not learning. In practice, no society can acquire freely every labor it would want for a managerial purpose, and every society faces internal and external pressures to maintain its cohesion and its existence against foreign attack. A disciplinary function to ensure this basic labor is socially valued and brought into society is necessary, even if the discipline where originates from an abstract organizer rather than a willful person. The most basic disciplinary functions are expected of the people themselves, individually or collectively. Environmental factors outside of society only have so much effect, because even the simplest laborious task requires some thought of the laborer to be useful labor, rather than simply a natural force to be harnessed like any other. The workers respond to events in the world only through the sense that occurs to themselves, and any sense that society would provide through education has to end with the worker's own learning, to change the worker's response to events or the volition of the worker. The most basic industrial tasks are to transform raw material into other consumable products - grain from crops into bread, wood from chopping into all the things that wood could be fashioned into, and so on. We are concerned here only with articles of consumption, rather than the particular craft going into the object, or the manufacture of tools, though any tool from the simplest to the most advanced machine is also a thing that is consumed like any other raw material.

The earliest industry is little more than workers who would extract engaging in some craft on the side, in addition to their primary extractive duties that would have been seen as the actually important productive enterprise. Perhaps someone makes pottery, or another fashions clothing. Formal industrial work, at first, concerns specialization towards making these things in larger numbers, and so the home pottery is replaced with pottery produced in some facility. This organized industry exists alongside home manufacture for a long time, and part of the family unit is that the wife would be put to work in some craft for the household's need of industry, in addition to the children. It is not at all instinctive for people to line up in some civic plan to arrange industry in a factory, even when the factory arrangement can be demonstrated to be more effective. Urban society, and then the philosophical treatments of menial labor, maintain a belief that self-sufficiency in basic industry is desirable and that any of the desultory labor that constitutes "basic industry" is beneath a free man's dignity. Further reasons for this can be explored in the mercantile function, or the other functions which discipline labor, but at the basic level of the potential consumer, workers do not like to work for no gain or any accomplishment of their self-interest, and compulsion through fear or any other mechanism is only so effective. Slavery or wage labor can provide basic labor to produce a great many things, but the majority of motive power in any society is provided by no particular relation that is compelled by threats or money. The daily reproduction of one's own life is not strictly a task carried out instinctively like breathing, but is something people do and think at least a little about. Someone will bathe, or discipline their manners for a reason other than fear of the law or social shame or some exalted wisdom. A considerable part of this basic labor, to the present day, concerns simply cleaning the environment around people, so that garbage is not piled haphazardly, or that articles of use in our home are not lost due to a disorganized living space. The maintenance of health is at first something we do for ourselves or for reasons that do not require us to be told what is healthy by a pedagogue. What a person is, of any class, is not merely produced by consumption of the environment around them, but by their most basic behaviors, so volumnious that even the most detailed scheme could not break them down to replicate a functional human in a computer algorithm. The reproduction of a city carries this out in a much more organized way, and of a large empire even more basic labor is required. Therefore, it is often the case that societies primarily concern themselves with how to acquire more of this basic labor, increase its productivity, increase its efficiency, successfully reproduce that basic labor both in the person and in larger organizations, and improve the baseline of that basic labor so that more labors can be taken more or less for granted. This question is essential for most of the more elaborate ideas of what sort of society is preferable for the members of that society. The most successful societies historically worked towards all of these goals, from the starting position that their societies were largely premised on an antagonistic relationship and had to find some way to reproduce their society and adapt it to new conditions in which it exists. The failed societies would either neglect the most basic conditions of labor or their social arrangements would be rife with internecine conflict, for reasons petty or large. None of the historically dominant ideologies have been particularly successful if we look at them from afar and without bias.

There are two extremes in the view of the division of labor, and these views are - in accord with a philosophy which celebrates contradiction and hypocrisy - held simultaneously. One is that all labor is really base labor, which is in many senses a true claim in that all labor must be understood as something that could be equated with similar labor. The view of this in a total society, which sees itself as something apart from the world where matter is extracted and put into social circulation, is that all of this labor can be imagined in a virtual space, and so the value of labor is really a social relation. Therefore, economics can never really answer anything about the material world and remains a concern of human beings with each other, unmoored from the environment and unmoored from the real conditions of the social agents. Empirically, without a rational reason to distinguish different labors, we have to start from the assumption that one lump of labor-power - a human being - is not greatly different from another, and in our experience the abilities of humans are adaptable and similar. It does not matter if a stupid man or a smart man pushes a cart full of mined ore one bit. In the skilled task, it could be imagined that a man of lesser ability could be compared to a man of greater ability by some metrics we could rationally understand, and there is no immediate way for us to claim, without some empirical rationale and evidence to tell us otherwise, the absolute limit of one man's ability compared to another's. In theory, the human animal, knowing what it is, can adapt its most basic constitution in ways so vast that an inborn, hereditary advantage would be rendered moot, or any man could acquire tools that render his hereditary, base biological traits a moot point in some skilled task. To make a claim of some man being constitutionally and permanently of a different substance than another requires either a myth that is known on some level to be a convenient fiction, or it requires a definition of the human social agent in purely biological and biopolitical terms. The conventional social theory is that human beings are at first impression selves that are sentient and quite aware of their physical limitations, but that this is a different matter from claiming that different humans possess different essences that cannot transform into anything else. The other theory, which is quite old, is that every labor is of a distinct essence, and thus every skilled profession, every scholarly task, every fighting task, places those laborers above a base or extractive laborer, or places the extractive and basic working tasks in a position which is the most desultory work possible and thus bad. This conceit appears meritocratic but in actuality it turns into an infantile belief that basic things humans must do to reproduce social conditions are irrelevant or can be abstracted away neatly. The ideal of such a conceit is that human society is driven purely by "creatives", or for the petty proprietors and soldiers, human society is driven by a violent will to power which overcomes mere ideas. The true distinction between different types of labors is only understood by recognizing first a basic motive engine, the human, and the environment they live in, which was neglected by classical political economy entirely.

Whatever type of labor someone does, it is presumed that it will enter society in some way that is common for a given place, which is understood here as an ecosystem. There is, in any ecosystem, a generally understood way in which labor is commanded, rather than infinitely many ways. The distinctions of labor relations are limited because making a different relation for each person is cumbersome to manage. In any event, the different social relations that may exist all happen in the same world, and the same part of the world in which regular interactions are observed. The relations of slavery, wage labor, noble privileges, the relation of wives to husbands and the familial relationships, and so on are all subsumed into some sense of general labor. None of these relations are sacrosanct by any natural law, nor is their distinction truly necessary for managing labor. It would seem simple enough to bring people into society because they want to be there, and to not force upon people relations that are indecent. If that were the case, though, no discipline of labor would be possible, and those who would manage would be limited by the willingness of anyone to agree to the antagonistic relationships that have predominated. There are two aims for this general labor. One is to distinguish its positively generative capacities through specialization, and this potential, while not unlimited or immediate, allows for all of the real potentials of labor. The other is to discipline it through mechanisms which are necessarily limiting. The true development of labor is in the end a learning process which is never disciplined by any management, and could never be. All efforts to command labor to learn new positive talents are doomed. What a manager could do is facilitate this development, but if someone believes correctly that the only reward for this development is that more will be demanded of them in a purely extractive relationship, there is no incentive whatsoever for the common laborer to modify him- or herself to the demands of those who manage society. At an early stage, there are no clear managers. There was never a "blank slate" where all men were political and social equals, for humans inherited many habits from the animal kingdom, and they would reside in areas of the world with different resources. Yet, there is no inherent distinction of humanity into any preferred classes or specializations, and the demand of primitive society would be for men and women to possess general intelligence and knowledge about the world. All people must relate to the same world in the end, and in that regard, all are equal. The result was that, absent a particularly good reason, human social relations would be egalitarian and based on mutual benefit and genuine affinity, rather than exploitative and managerial. This does not last long, but it is the only way in which labor would have been able to develop or orient towards anything more than an incessant game of backbiting and imperious posturing. At the most basic level, labor is only possible because it could exist, and because human beings are motivated enough to continue working at all. If labor became too immiserating, the workers would drop dead, kill themselves, turn against the aristocrats, and resort to destroying the beast altogether rather than contribute anything at all. The end result, should management and aristocracy continue, is that no one really wants to do anything at all, and humanity appears as if it is lazy by nature. Humans are not really lazy, though. Industry is something a child can readily pursue, as if by some instinct to acquire and produce. It is the poison of aristocracy that suggests that all such industry is anathema to the purpose of life. It is not that humans are mindless producers or breeders, but that humans have in the main a motivation to do something with their lives beyond an existence as a lump of utility or hedonistic pleasure impulses. If humans wanted pleasure in a utilitarian sense, they would obtain a supply of opium and bliss out, and most of us would be better off. That doesn't work for long, first because of a need for sustenance that drug addicts will not find, and second because of a need for constructive and generative effort to obtain any quality beyond mere life. The moral aims of individuals are their own, rather than something that would abide any general plan of natural order. It would be, in an ideal world, in the interest of those who manage labor to recognize this rather than insist on beating subjects into accepting the roles of managerial intent, especially when those roles are primarily for someone to suffer and exist to be humiliated. The basic laborer will see that different treatment for different people implies a different valuation and intent towards them, and that all managerial intents towards them are definite. The manager does not have any affinity for human potential or kindness at all. Far from it, the managerial strata tend not to be motivated by mercantile exchange in the conventional sense, any sort of martial efficiency that would win any struggle, nor any pursuit of scholarly knowledge or useful information. The manager's stock and trade, and the primary disciplinary function, is to make laborers suffer. If it were not for that, then the way basic labor would be regarded in society would be very different, and the calculation of labor available to a given ecosystem would not be intrinsically meaningful or a thing that should be expanded or contracted in mathematical value for its own sake. The purpose of this basic labor would instead be to create useful qualities in the quantities that are desired, and the bulk of human existence would not be spent on managed labor. Instead, humans would choose what to do with their labor and would cooperate. That arrangement of society does not conform to any of the arrangements of social classes or organizing principles that have taken hold, and would not conform to any preferred scheme of classes and assignments. It would instead be open-ended enough to regard that humans are not economic agents but actual creatures that require more than the barest minimum of sustenance to be human or consider their lives worthwhile. Even with all of the disciplinary functions in place, labor does not exist purely to be managed by imperious wills, and could not exist if it were purely a tool to be commanded by another. For labor to exist as useful labor, it would have to be allowed to even exist, then allowed to do what it would do. Overbearing managerialism is not intended to motivate production, but to choke it so labor conforms to an intent rooted in suffering.

Artisan labor - This category may be called "skilled labor", "applied education labor", or a number of other titles, but the first evident appearance of this category is the specialization of basic laborers that is not conducted by any grand society-level plan, but by a process that happens "behind the backs of the producers". The result is that some workers possess ability to perform some craft or some function that is not immediately available to any human or a large class of humans. Because this is not a formal process and is not automatically valued by legal codes or the interest of proprietors, this group can be conflated with the workers in many analyses, but in any society, a distinction is made between different skills and their utility, in accord with values that society as a whole might hold. Not all of these labors are necessarily favored, as among the specialized abilities are those of a criminal nature. Anyone can be a criminal, but not everyone can be an effective criminal and survive the great game. Attempts are made to make this distinction a moral one, first because a moral distinction provides motive for basic laborers to distinguish themselves for some profit, and second because using moral shame or praise alone can allow social actors to give the artisan something which is in fact no profit or material benefit at all. However much this distinction may be exposed as illusory or of little consequence, the distinction of different skillsets and the people who possess them is very relevant if we wish to understand the different interests among the working populations. We can exclude from this categories of labor that are not, in their core function, productive at all. Many attempts are made to give the mercantile, warrior, scholarly, and untouchable functions some distinction that equates them with artisinal skill or a particular mark of shame, or present functions that are actually disciplinary functions on the labor of society as genuinely productive of some substance. In some sense these disciplinary functions may produce products that can be treated as commodities or tokens that would be exchangeable in a monetary sense, or by some game theory where the disciplinary forces are equated to the production of so much material. The actual work of the artisan, though, is that their work, for good or ill, is intended to produce particular materially real qualities that are desired rather than qualities that are valued purely because they are political constructs like the value of war leadership or legal knowledge, and those qualities are made manifest in various forms. A craftsman may create or repair tools or work with machines that are difficult without specialized training. An actor or musician might perform some art that impresses viewers, that an ordinary man or woman didn't compose. While the mercantile and warrior roles are specialized and can be respected or feared, the particular form the merchant or warrior takes is less relevant than the disciplinary function of the task. The mercantile function could be performed by a street hustler, wandering vagabond with a trove of desirables, small shopkeeper, anyone willing to meet another market participant in a free market setting, a capitalist, a state planner in some socialist arrangement, or many other arrangements. The fighting functions are not limited to professional soldiers, but come in a variety of forms that represent state force or some violent force, all of which are intended to do the same disciplinary task. The artisinal work on the other hand must produce specific qualities that are desired. Artists or skilled laborers are not, in of themselves, intrinsically worth anything. Their specializations may be, from a societal point of view, not merely worthless but actively harmful and deliberately so. From the perspective of the disciplinary functions, which usually dictate what is socially valuable, they are aware that without people who can do specific actions and create those particular things, their disciplinary functions would not be possible. Soldiers need swords or guns, and a wide variety of implements that must be built. The higher levels of organization for mercantile activity require stable institutions which must be reproduced.

The skilled labor is not merely basic labor with some substance of intellectual production animating it, and cannot be reduced simply to arrive at some combined quantity of substance that is comparable to a quantity of basic labor. Qualitatively different labors produce things which are functionally distinct from the products of some basic labor, or another kind of skilled labor. A simple investment of time in intellectual production does not guarantee that this new quality must emerge, and cannot determine what that quality will be. In order to arrive at some equivalency of the different qualities of labor, a scheme to do so must be implied or made explicit, in accord with some principle that is created rather than one that is truly written into nature. Without this, the different labors and their outputs are not freely exchangeable as the same sort of substance. The division of labor, so far as it concerns actually useful articles rather than disciplinary functions calling themselves useful, arises because those different labors present an answer to some question facing an individual or a social organization. A society cannot freely exchange farm labor, mining, manufacture, and so on once the products are created, and it cannot arbitrarily assign a worker in one sector to another without some loss of efficiency. When reassigned, the worker must move to the new site where they produce or extract or do whatever it is they do. If the worker lacks immediate knowledge of the other sector's functioning, he must learn the new function expected of him, and acclimate his body and life to that function. A division of labor that starts out of physical necessity often produces people who are somewhat different in their daily functioning. We can imagine that the workers start as completely blank slates, or we can imagine some innate qualities they posssessed before they were sorted into particular sectors of work, but the specialization of workers in accord with what they do asserts itself either way. This specialization encounters limits, unless it were possible to reduce a worker entirely to his profession, a task that was not truly conceivable nor desirable until scientific management and biology could conceive of the ideal worker drone made real. The past efforts to forcibly assign workers to a role they could not escape concerned their legal and social status, which was regulated entirely by disciplinary functions. This did not prevent task masters from pitting workers against each other based on their specialization, but the effectiveness of this internecine conflict is limited because in actuality the specialization of humans in their functioning does not make them considerably distinct in their core understanding of themselves and their world. A free worker, whether employed in agriculture or industry or musical performance or any other field, was still free and still a human, and expected to do human behaviors rather than mechanical ones. It is still the case in today's economy that a human is expected to be adaptable to a manager's needs, and the overspecialization of trades is a desultory assignment, largely concerning sectors in technocratic society that the sitting regime desires to lock down and control out of a need for security rather than any natural efficiency of doing so. Overspecialization in industrial capitalism had always been a nuisance to the functioning of that arrangement, and it arose more as a consequence of the machinery in that time and a deliberate policy to segregate the mind of the worker into functions that could be controlled. It still remained the case that in industrial capitalism, the complexity and diversity of products and services would increase, even if the demands on the laborer were de-skilled and the skilled craftsmanship of the workman was replaced with a machine created by engineers and scientists. The de-skilling of labor would be, for reasons that become apparent upon historical review, a deliberate choice rather than an inexorable tendency. The increase in complexity of products is not itself an inexorable rule, but as the sum total of knowledge in society increases, so will the needs and wants in that society to answer a particular problem that someone could conceive. The ability of a society to answer those needs cannot be taken for granted. For most of history, this task was of little interest to the governing ideas and received little attention, only perpetuating as if by some inertia of the working classes. In industrial society it was very important to bring this process under managerial control, and then under the control of large institutions which enforced a network that allocated labor into vocations selected by the machine, and used every carrot imaginable to cajole the workers into certain behaviors in an increasingly controlled environment.

In the disciplinary functions, the distinction between skilled and basic labor is illusory at first. The capitalist or the warlord or the planner has no instinctive knowledge of the actual productive crafts and can only guess at a value to relate them to other skilled labors. There is also difficulty in establishing what a baseline for unskilled labor is supposed to be, especially in light of the last disciplinary function of the untouchable. A general theory of science is necessary to begin in earnest the useful distinction between skilled labors, and it is in this general theory of science and the practices of education that the skilled labors can be linked in some grand scheme. Without this, comparison is impossible. It has been a persistent difficulty in managerial schemes to adjudicate how a monetary value of labor, such as wages or a salary, can translate to different utilities or the quality of different tools. For much of history, the variety of products did not change so significantly that this was a great consideration. Some new products would appear by no particular plan except a necessity that was recognized by an inventor, or a vague sense of a thinker that a new idea may be possible and directions on how to realize such a device. From the start of the 19th century, new devices appeared not just in this haphazard way, but in a way that was conscious of the need to continually revolutionize the products and the means of production. This not only meant a greater motive power from steam engines and industrial inventions which were themselves considerably complex machines, but it would produce products that were impossible to make in the past, and so the introduction of new skills could never be reduced to a quantitative increase in raw products. Not only were the products created of a novel type, but a greater understanding of the substances in nature was available for utilities that were not understood or poorly understood before. A whole field of chemistry and nascent medical advances changed thinking on what material things would be useful. Oil, which was once an unwanted residue of other extractive enterprises, became the most valuable liquid to industrial interests, which in turn enabled new engines and machines which were attached to those engines, like the automobile. The introduction of new products did not simply entail things that led to an increase in the total economic product of a society, but machines that were entirely novel. As with any tool, the industrial and later technological tools had a much greater effect both on the users of those tools, and the surrounding environs. The environmental effects were further made apparent by the crowding of people into cities, which created a need for sanitation and health interventions, and with it societal conditions which politicians sought to remedy with yet more novel ideas and machinery.

Exchange - All things that enter social circulation must have a claimant, and claims may be made on a thing that is entirely speculative. The most evident of these things are commodities, and so the commodity is the first thing that comes to mind to someone with a monetary view of that which is claimed. The claims, though, can be made on land, intellectual property, or anything - again including fictitious things - and the exchanges that are made are not always monetary ones. For everything that enters social circulation, there is an expectation between social actors of how that thing is appropriated by the members of society, and this appropriation ultimately falls into the hands of individual persons at some point if this appropriation ever translates to utilizing the thing for any purpose other than exchange. Social organizations collectively do not have a thought process that concerns directly the utility of these things, and if they did, we would be speaking of those organizations not just as legal persons but as flesh and blood life-forms. It is well known that all organizations are necessarily comprised of human agents and machinery wielded by humans. Within such an organization, there are always expectations of the participants about any claim and what people can and cannot do with the claimed things. This applies in a purely cooperative organization and it applies in a very large organization in which the members' relationship is antagonistic. The inhabitants of a city, even if they do not know each other, or even if they do not know they are living in a city, are linked by their physical closeness and invariably their claims to property or the commons are regulated by some process. The mercantile function broadly speaking concerns this regulation, or discipline, of the claims, and that alone. It does not concern directly the production and consumption of the goods, nor does it concern any intrinsic utility or perceived utility in a direct way. It does not concern the political problem of creating laws or enforcing them, or the force required to do so. The exchanging function may also be called the "mercantile" function, as commonly a medium of exchange is presumed that allows, in theory, an exchange of any thing for another thing. Even if the unit of exchange is not a monetary token, all the claims of a claimant are available to meet the claims of another claimant, and all social agents can hypothetically meet another social agent. Whether someone is willing to trade particular claims, or whether someone's claim is a spurious one, does not change that in exchange, all is up for trade in principle. One party may elect to take with threats or the actual use of force, and the motives of this extortion must consider exchange in the same way a merchant would conduct ordinary commerce. The ability to make a threat, and the ability to act on it, require some claim of the extorter against the extorted, and no force can be taken for granted. All of these claims, whether they are property, money, or some sort of planning scheme, are things humans imagine and believe to be real in their mind, but it only needs to be believed. The actual condition of the thing being claimed need not align with the belief, but it is generally beneficial for those in exchange to be certain that their claim does comport with reality. The merchant must, in any exchange, be able to know in their mind the things that are up for trade, and anything they know that can be claimed. Therefore, in societies, there are schemes to value every possible thing that may enter social circulation, even if that thing would not occur to the exchanging parties as a thing immediately available to them. The participants in society can make claims theoretically on anything in the whole of the universe, and all these things are presumably linked in some way that makes general exchange sensical.

The most common and basic exchanges are the informal ones - the understandings and favors between people that may be part of some common courtesy. These "exchanges" at first appear to be no exchanges at all, but they perform a regulatory function just as contracts in barter or money do and just as any elaborate planning scheme would. The informal schemes may be as simple as asking for the salt at a dinner table, but there is only one salt shaker in this hypothetical table, and it must be claimed by someone to be utilized. Another scheme might be some gambling credit written down by a book-keeper, but the exchange of this token need not be understood as pertaining to money or any substantive claim of legal property. Participants in a game, with no particular purpose beyond playing the game, assign values to the things in that game in order to pursue strategies, whether they are cooperative or competitive games. There is also an understanding, which is almost instinctive, that things in the real world do not spontaneously transform, disintegrate, or spawn, and so a token we possess today will be in our possession tomorrow if it is not exchanged. There is also an observed balance in nature between physical forces, such that matter is not created nor destroyed. The awareness of living in an environment is important, because the participants do not always know the extent of that environment, and one man's knowledge of an environment and the conditions of life may be an advantage over another man who does not know anything beyond what is in front of him. The informal exchanges are not always pleasant ones. Very often, deception and every trick imaginable is used to gain advantage in an informal way, either for petty amusement or because this earlier deception sets up conditions of formal exchange that are highly unfavorable to one party. Trust, integrity, and respect are not freely given and can never be assumed as an absolute, and woe to the man who forgets this against a malevolent actor. We can assume that anyone reading this book has established enough trust to participate in society, or could in the past, but it is never possible to take society for granted. The everyday practices of informal exchange, many of them practices we normally don't think about, will typically reach some equilibrium, where behaviors of an agent in a given environment can be expected and are habitual. No more elaborate mechanism of exchange is possible without this step.

There may be an attempt to claim that because all things can be claimed in exchange, then there is some rule of nature compelling this exchange in people, but this is fallacious. The reasons why should be clear by my listing of counterexamples of imperfect information leading to wildly inaccurate notions of what is being exchanged, and the terms under which that exchange is possible. We can and do choose to a large extent the terms of exchange we will allow without a fight. We can, if we so choose, refuse to pay taxes to the bitter end. We can build a whole network of exchanges outside of the formal economy, or an economy with formal tokens that we consciously keep apart from the mainstream of the world. By "exchange labor", we do not refer to a process we would construe as productive in the first three senses we described, but a process which is not in of itself productive at all. Every effort to regulate the movement of things and ideas in society is an expenditure of some effort. The exchanging function is the most obvious way to accomplish this regulation, and at a base level it appears to be the only one. Distinct roles emerge which further formalize the sort of exchanges that people make in upholding the law and custom of a society or polity. These roles are not concerned with exchange in a direct way, but instead regulate the merchants. There are for example lawyers whose work is tied to the existence of a state which can uphold laws, something that can only be done with finality by violence; and there may be arbiters who are not directly tied to the state, but establish agreements between social participants, or between proprietors and their human property who are not in a legal sense recognized as social members but which can only be controlled by some manipulation. The line between "peaceful agreement" and "coercive force" is often blurred. It is often declared that property and thus exchange is inherently antagonistic and thus all mercantile functions - and in effect all exchange functions - are hostile acts by their nature. This naive thinking is to lead people to believe that producers should never exchange at all, or should only exchange in prescribed ways that are adjudicated as harmonious and purged of all discord. The further absurd claim, by those who make economics into a purely ideological exercise, is that this harmonious society is only possible in conditions of perfect competition in perfect markets with perfect information, or that it is only possible with perfect cooperation and perfect information by some perfect natural process that is somehow not organized by any entity. Both effectively state the same thing, both are stated as the position of the most extreme anarchist ideologues, and both have been somehow sold as the extreme right and left positions respectively. These positions make every grotesque error possible in speaking of what humans are, what societies are, what markets are, what planning mechanisms are, what nature itself is, what the state is, what politics as a concept is, what information is, and even what competition and cooperation entail at the most basic level. That such an abominable discombobulation of reality is presented as an idea should be appalling to every basic decency. The further denunciation of this anarchism must wait for later, but it highlights something at the heart of the exchange function. That is that we can and must have a moral sense that distinguishes fairness and honesty from arbitrariness and deceit, to speak of which exchange functions are predatory and which are the result of reasonable due diligence towards co-existence. The antagonistic relations in close quarters that define the life of societies where settled states are established cannot spill over into open violence too often, or be so deceptive that participation in a market is an uncertain prospect. At some point, whatever the legal order or whatever the customs may be that regulate moral behavior, some attachment to reality is expected of the participants in exchange. Even if the reality is that all the participants in society accept legal fictions or myths, sharing a belief in those fictions and myths is very real, and can make real the value of a token like money or faith in an institution. No institution and no money is a given of nature, but is a thing emerging from something that must make sense to the participants, or must have made sense at some point. The promulgation of the greatest nonsense, spoken to activate some psychological instinct against the interest of the recipient, must be understood as a severe danger in any arrangement of society.

All the claims of a person in exchange may be imagined in one hoard, and as informal mechanisms are insufficient or things that the participants cannot agree upon, informal exchange must move to more formal arrangements, and the simplest way to do this is commodification. The particulars of money, and derivatives of it like interest, credit, insurance, and so on, is not of particular interest, nor is it of interest if the formal exchange remains barter. The simple rule is that more things to trade allows more leverage, and there is no exchange without some substantive claim. We can exaggerate the size of a claim to an unwary competitor, but the exchange of claims is what it is. One party trades the claim to another, and once it is securely in the other's hands, an exchange of this virtual substance is recorded in the ledger. Regardless of the legal status of the participants in the society, breaking the terms of the agreement would require another action to do so. Slaves or inmates in a psychiatric institution do not need the legal sanction of a state to talk to each other and do what they will, even if someone wants to imagine the communication between them to be some jabbering of the mouth that polite society does not consider language. Should a third party wish to step in to void the agreement, that is the third party's action, not a given. To claim, for example, that nature compels the exchange between two people to be something other than what it is, is to ascribe to nature the fickle traits of a person. Usually, such claims about nature or a divine intervention into our affairs are made by very selfish and petty humans who see it as their business to meddle. The prerogatives of a relatively honest state or ruler do not need such an excuse. Any economic plan would abide the same characteristics as market exchange does, in this way. The rational planning of exchanges in society may be accepted as preferable to the uncertainty of market antagonisms, but no such planning regime would be possible if the commoner participants were presumed to possess no intelligence and were assigned the most desultory status and education possible. A planner who holds such contempt will inevitably find that their rational planning scheme will be alien to the commoner who is subjected to it. A rational planning that depends on blind trust in institutions, especially institutions that consciously make themselves alien to the commoner's lived experience, is likely to fail spectacularly. This is not an intractable problem at all, because the simple solution is for planners to not insist on bullish imposition of an idea, but to do what it was the participants wanted in the first place, which was to pay less taxes or receive a fairer share of the social product. A strange idea that socialism entails the obsessive micromanagement of peoples' toothbrushes is yet another anarchist trope, but no socialism in history has been so obtuse to the bitter end. It remains, however, a conceit of the classes that were invested in a socialist ideology and philosophy, who sought to form public opinion rather than heed it in any reasonable way. This is not the central failure of historical socialism as a workable economic program or even a persistent economic drag, as the actual economic governance of the socialist countries had less to do with forcing an economic ideology to be true against nature and more to do with what was desirable for industrial interests in that time and place, and what was possible. It is rather a misunderstanding that socialist thought had in making its argument against capitalism, particularly within the capitalist countries. They failed to understand that what sustained technocratic capitalism was not the strength of its ideology or some conspiratorial mind control that was just so effective for spooky reasons. No concept of planning could significantly depart from management without succumbing to the technocratic conceits.

Fighting and Deception - The exchange function implies that cooperation is possible, while the fighting and deceptive functions - both of which I shall conflate as the same sort of thing - are between hostile parties. Soldiering, spycraft, various forms of guard or security labor, and a number of other professions exist because all other means of regulating tasks have not worked, or other means of regulation are not desirable for the actor involved. It is entirely a drain on the productive economy, and its characteristics do not have a necessary moral implication of good or bad. There are legitimate reasons for antagonistic relations to reach the point where it is no longer possible to assume society's members are going to cooperate. There are legitimate reasons why someone would consider deception worth undertaking for security. There are legitimate reasons for defense, and reasons not to defend, and aggression is not inherently irrational or wrong. A distinction between predation, and further an ideology which exhorts people to be predatory, and aggression must be clear. Predation is an ethos declaring that aggression in of itself is good, for material benefit or in its purest form it declares the predator's victory to be morally virtuous in defining oneself. Aggression is simply violent force, for good or ill, and it is not an act of predation to attack a clear threat, or to merely eliminate a rival. Again, a naive anarchist view will claim that all defense is good and all aggression is bad. The defensive reaction can be waged for predatory intents, like a defense of a predatory ethos against those who would fight against its presence in the world. It is a curious trait of our time that defense of honesty is considered a most foul aggression even if it is the most pacifist defense possible, and the most vile predatory aggression is somehow defensive in nature. The inverse - a righteous aggression against those who deceive for petty amusement - is anathema to the ideology of those who believe the purest predatory element to be a fount of sacredness, so much that it must be vigorously snuffed out. It does not matter to the predatory whether the righteous aggression is tempered or if it is, out of necessity, far-reaching. The predatory are great at games of moral equivocation and psychological manipulation, and the predatory present their ethos as not only legitimate war but that this ethos is in some perverse way a productive act greater than the worker's. It should be noted that, in a sick sense, this is perfectly reasonable. The predatory ethos, in its more developed stages, believes acts of terror and predation constitute a substance whose production should be sought for its own right, and so, predatory societies favor lurid rituals, prostitution, drug addiction, and that which is known to be deleterious. The more ruinous, the greater for the predatory ethos. The wicked comes to possess a quality that presents an unchallengable value to the ethos, and the constructive acts only exist in service to that predatory ethos. The practice of war, by itself, has no inherent moral quality, though in practice humans have difficulty waging wars without some moral cause. Historical societies were defined by the rise of warlords and the priests who collaborated with them, and so, the glorification of violence came early, and this informed much of the constitution of early settled society. This only heightened a pattern of endemic predation throughout nomadic humanity that simply couldn't be answered. It is a common belief among partisans of the predatory system that all societal progress is only ever progress towards more elaborate regimes of predation. This works both in enhancing the position of a warrior aristocracies and the machinery of control and deception, and degrading the rest of the populace who are defanged and told of their utter worthlessness. Wherever any significant advance does happen though, even in the field of weaponry, the predatory ethos has always been a nuisance. The most effective predatory societies were not the ones that revelled in predation at the highest level and glorified a warrior aristocracy with silly conceits. The feudal warrior aristocracy of the Middle Ages was utterly ruinous for fielding an effective army, and was only effective in the ecosystem of Europe because it was geared towards terrorizing serfs and fighting wars against other states constituted similarly. What virtue such kingdoms showed in war was almost entirely an inheritance from the Roman tendency of seeking military advantage. Warrior aristocracy and the general veneration of warrior culture has always been a laughably bad way to attain the best army, but they are effective at maintaining regressive social hierarchies and supporting a rise of barbarism generally. It is for this reason that the cultures that venerate warrior culture for its own sake choose such a strategy, rather than actually believing this makes an army battle-effective - or at least, this author hopes the political leadership isn't stupid enough to believe their propaganda.

There have been attempts to join together this fighting task with exchange or mercantile functions, or scholarly functions, to assert that there is some mercantile or scholarly element inherent to the idea of fighting, and conversely that those elements are incomprehensible without the ideology of war. In other words, the familiar canard "violence is the supreme authority". The extractive and productive functions are decidedly subordinated here. From the belief of the domineering instinct, the productive economy exists to serve the goals of domination and control, down to the most basic tasks people do. This is a crude form of a tendency in the philosophical state, but misunderstands just what happens in any human society, and further misunderstands any highly developed society where large institutions must remain stable. The truth is that violence and deception do not need any inherent attachment to productivity or the other regulatory functions, and such violence and deception can stand alone for whatever purpose someone might have for them. Every violent and deceptive act requires a substantive investment of resources, and these resources can be imagined in some sort of exchange with the other actors, but violence itself is not inherently necessary for those acts to be sensical, and the assertion of will has characteristics that have nothing at all to do with productivity, a need for material gain, any scholarly purpose, or even a need to uphold a particular situation where some group is untouchable and undesirable. The competitive instinct in people is a necessary one not because it is economically necessary, but because life to be life must always be able to secure itself and, if it wishes, be able to attack rivals. The rivals do not need to be of a different social class to justify the aggression, nor is it a given that someone is automatically a rival due to some cultural signifier or geographic distance. It is the aggressive and defensive act itself that is important, whatever the motive for the fighting. It may be assumed by a certain sort that all fighting is inherently bad or wrong, but such a position is something people have to choose of their own volition. A "non-aggression principle" inherent to nature cannot be taken for granted, or imposed on all life as a moral cause no matter what. It is instead the case that human beings who can think can usually see that violence for no purpose whatsoever leads to conclusions that are undesirable, if that violence were a general rule. It is even worse if violence becomes the chief organizing principle and spiritual authority. Regardless of this, there are those who choose to glorify violence, and those who simply believe that without some will to fight there is nothing to actually live for. Life cannot persist as merely producers, who would come to be seen as some process of nature. The most basic assertion of self has a seed of aggression simply for someone to assert themselves and maintain their constitution. The extreme of total non-violence is to say that some person does not have any right or cause to exist at all, except as something another actor wished, and so it is not desirable. There is in reality no moral component to this fighting, and this gives rise to another pernicious tendency that the purpose of life is power, and that power creates its own morality. That view has been espoused enough and leads to predictably terrible consequences we have known for a long time, yet it always finds adherents because it is attractive to a petty-managerial mindset. Attempts to make out of the fighting function something more than it actually is are doomed to outcomes that are sadly predictable, which means that morality cannot arise from fighting. Morality also cannot arise from productive or exchange functions for reasons that are not difficult to discern - the purpose of life is not some drive to expand or some practice of exchanging things for its own sake.

The difficulty with isolating the fighting and deceptive functions as a task is that various forms of fighting and deception are built into institutions we take for granted. This fighting is not in truth the province of a privileged minority who are entitled to the sole right of aggression. Such a thing is a necessary pretense of states, which by their nature cannot brook open dissent against the state's authority, but anyone with the means to fight is capable of fighting in some way. Casual acts of aggression are often taken as a joke, and petty attacks are so numerous that the reader can likely find these acts in their daily life. The aggression need not serve any ulterior motive and the motive can be nothing more than petty amusement or competitive spirit, even competition of a friendly sort like a game or sport. Further along, whole bureaucracies and institutions which are ostensibly peaceful are in reality premised on a belief of deception, going out of their way to deceive the public of the very purpose of their institutions. Institutions claiming to exist for the welfare of the people are, by capitalist governments, also tasked with control and management of an underclass, with an open contempt for the recipients. This is necessarily attached to the function of untouchability which is something different from the fighting or deceptive function, but it is conceivable that an institution supposedly for mutual aid can be ruled by the same deceptive intent. In the case of welfare organizations during the 20th century, they were often attached to functions like eugenics and the tracking of the populace to bring them under control, and in return the recipients would receive conditional means to survive, and the particular status of social untouchability was a thing that was relied upon and encouraged to use the welfare mechanism for so-called "moral correction". In practice, no such moral improvement of the recipients was expected, and eugenist societies found the concept of any moral rehabilitation completely unacceptable to their core conceits. So total was this particularly eugenicist idea of the poor that very specific incentives were set up specifically to punish recipients who wanted to improve their station, which even capitalist society understood to be deleterious. Eugenist societies and the greater aims of what I have called "eugenism" must be expounded upon later, but the reader is very likely to have some familiarity with the welfare state and its motives, either from the perspective of the benefactor or as a recipient who has been given the treatment by some social worker whose hostility cannot be contained. The example of the welfare office is only one such example. Many institutions of various functions are premised on deception to convince people that the institutions do something other than what they actually do, or are premised on a social obligation to pretend that these institutions are something other than what they are. This tendency of mass deception reached its height with technocratic society in the 20th century, first imposing a highly alien life to what had existed before, and then using tactics intended to deceive and cajole such that the people were not allowed to speak plainly about anything that had happened and were definitely not allowed to question central conceits of the technocratic states that did exist. It is not the sole tendency, and it is known on some level that the deception cannot hold forever and its maintenance has consequences. For the deceived and for those who are dependent, it is of little use to rail against the unfairness of the deception or the unequal society that results. The dispossessed and the despised can say all they like that it is supposed to be some other way, but the petty-manager and the learned bureaucrat have never listened to that argument once in their entire history and they never will. The proprietors who command the state take this opportunity to say that it is not the specific intent of those who operate the welfare state to do these things, but that welfare itself leads to degeneracy, and by doing so, all the deliberate acts and incentives set up to maintain a social order are entirely the fault of the recipients. This statement is the prelude to ensuring that welfare, so far as it continues to exist, displays an even greater intent to suppress the recipient population. It is not the giving of material things to the poor in of itself that is the problem, but the desultory existence that is imposed for reasons quite apart from any law of nature or society. If instead the recipients were given land and a sense of entitlement to some project that they shared in, the mentality would be quite different. The same people who bemoan the welfare state brag about strucutural unemployment that has no reason to exist and brag about the reduction of class sizes and the desultory education of those selected for an underclass, which is appropriate to the ideology of eugenics that was at the forefront of neoliberalism.

Scholarship - The development of formal systems of knowledge and the ideological basis for organizations constitutes a task seperate from productive tasks. Indirectly, is seeks to regulate economic behavior by rational argument or statements of faith that are taken as rational - that is, the statements of institutions which are presumed to hold some spiritual authority, rather than the independent judgement of such. All such institutions rely on an appeal to rationality that at first is not the property of the institution, rather than commonly accepted facts that are merely assumed. This can work at the smallest level, where an industrial arrangement could be planned by reason to be more effective, or it can work at a higher political level, where a theory of society and how to do this is advanced. The formality of these systems of knowledge is the relevant part. The core aim of this task, then, is to advance theories and organizations of education, from which knowledge of the sciences and applications of science can be derived. This educational theory, or pedagogy, must be distinguished from the learning individuals understake to assimilate knowledge of the world. People can and do integrate knowledge without any formal system or theory given to them by a pedagogue, and once a system is handed down from teacher to student, the student can use that system as he wishes. If the student thinks the system is wrong or needs to be revised, he may do that. No cult of education is truly ordained by natural laws, and people can integrate knowledge in any way that is suitable. Integration of knowledge into a world-system is ultimately an event local to a particular thinker, and while we may be able to reason general laws of nature informing why we think the way we do and what kind of world-systems are possible for a human to conceive, the actual understanding of a human is local to them. The scholarly task is about separating this wisdom from the person, and presenting the knowledge as some sort of thought form that is communicable outside of people. This could be as simple as writing books and assembling libraries, or it may entail an ethos of education that teachers or larger organizations perpetuate. The thinking of a philosopher's education is the central takeaway from Plato's Republic, and the thing that is supposed to be the true engine of the ideal city-state. Without this, the scheme is not workable at all, let alone capable of producing what the philosopher would consider good.

The larger implication of this is that societies, to become states or any large organization, must perpetuate themselves as an idea, and so tasks like the scholarly task play a substantial role in the perpetuation of society as we know it. Directly, individual people only contact so many other people, and those interactions are limited out of necessity. The formation of any nation as a polity requires some shared conception of a community that doesn't materially exist. We do not know every single participant in the nation in this direct way, or at best we would only be able to know direct information about all the participants in some registry of citizens. It is not realistic for the human animal to personally relate to 100,000 other citizens. If there is a leader of the city addressing the citizenry in a group, the speaker must be aware of how he speaks to the assembled group, and the leader has to give the impression that his authority is worth following. A smaller group may have a leader, and there is always some executive functioning implied for any organization, but the concept of being a leader does not necessarily have to conform to the idea of a dictator waving his mighty hand and the subjects following like automata. That approach historically has not been terribly effective, but once again the conceits of the petty-manager find comfort in a showy dictator like Hitler, or a parody of the showy dictator like Donald Trump, less because this method of leadership is effective or even the actual state of affairs. It is instead that a psychological expectation of leadership is present among the faithful, who sycophantically attach themselves to a leader, and in turn the leader - and in modern dictatorships, a PR machine - enable this sycophancy. The modern conceits of dictatorship do not greatly resemble dictatorships of the past, and the actual functioning of dictatorship cannot be entirely PR. At some level, the dictator must present some competence or the appearance of it to be credible. The magic of PR is to extend what is credible, such that the populace believe in fictions, or at least are too terrified to act against something that smells foul.

All of this scholarship and education is meaningless without the means of production and its associated labor. It is also not possible without some concept of the regulatory functions of exchange, fighting, and deceit. Arriving at some truth or wisdom may happen in a way that is local or largely organic, but economics is no friend to the truth or any honor or integrity. The basic logic of the economic task does not concern the moral or the true, but only the world as it is and that which regulates it at a basic level. A belief that wisdom alone is paramount, or that the accumulation of knowledge is a goal for its own sake, is really calling for the productive, mercantile, and martial means available to a society to be subordinated to some seat held by the wise, who manipulate the lesser functions to their benefit. Truth, on the other hand, exists outside of any one person, and we must accept this very early to even begin the process of accumulating wisdom for ourselves. Wisdom only recognizes for an individual truth that is accessible, in theory, to anyone and anything. Truth does not give us ready-made morals, but it is what allows us to even conceive of morality. Another conceit is that human labor is morally distinct because of this faculty of reason through symbolic language, and that this is an essential distinction of people from any other class of matter. The philosophers themselves understood that the greatest wisdom they know is that they in fact know nothing, and they could see that conceit obscured genuinely useful wisdom let alone the truth. For our individual wisdom, though, we are always limited by conceits we hold because to challenge them would be to challenge ourselves and the institutions we created, that perpetuated the very education that raised the question. We certainly were able to raise this question without any great pedagogy to tell us that it was a question, because there was some time in human history where there was no formal pedagogy to teach us wisdom. With more formal philosophy, and the organization of society that follows, the question would be more pressing even if scholarship and the quest for wisdom remained separate from the other spheres of human activity. Because the philosopher does have wants, though, it was highly impractical for economy and reason to remain separate spheres that never violated the other. The philosophers were very aware of the temptations economic reality created in them, and while they superficially bemoaned the encroachment of economic life onto their leisurely pursuits, the philosophers were also engaged in a struggle with the productive and martial sectors for resources and security. Likewise, the producers have good reason to resent an arrogant philosopher cajoling them, and as mentioned, to the common man this philosophical state appeared like some perversion to their own wisdom and a truth that was apparent to them even as a vague feeling. The philosophical state heightens this economic conflict. Reason will seek, out of necessity or desire, to co-opt the productive and regulatory functions, and the people engaged in production or war or proprietorship have greater need of reason for their own aims and to assert that their own wisdom is worth something against the intellectual centers which promulgate the ruling ideas. It is the propagation of the idea that truly begins class struggle in the sense we are familiar with the concept, because there was a meaningful language to describe the organization of institutions and the overall structure of polities. Even if we assumed the common folk to be somewhat ignorant and unwise of anything beyond what was in front of them, the thing that was in front of the commoner was itself changing in ways that were perceptible. A gentile formation of society that seemed natural to their senses was displaced with a philosophical formation of society and a state that was alien to the older thinking on government and the position of people. Even without the state dictating this from on high, the formal knowledge of industry and trades, and the organization of enterprises by rich men was increasingly apparent.

Here, the adoption of currency and state-issued coinage was very influential in changing the thinking of people, not so much because the currency itself had a corrupting effect on the smallfolk, but because the people most interested in coin were already wealthy interests who desired and attained something that secured their interest. Common farmers and workers and artisans were now in competition with wealthier formations of people. The merchant and proprietor interests were certainly aware of their position, and so were the idle rich who could devote their time to scholarship. The past conflict of classes had less to do with economic roles and more to do with membership in organizations that were held against outsiders. That could be a clan against another clan, a nation against foreigners, or a nobility that served a religious or cultural role against those who were just "everybody else" and had no institution to immediately operate from, as the Roman patricians held the Senate and religious functions of society. The philosophical state heightened explicitly the economic nature of classes and the function of different classes. It described both the functions themselves, and ways in which the function itself could be perpetuated. The Academy, and the newer philosophical institutions, were adoptive institutions with an eye for their particular function, more than some sentiment for blood relations or favoritism of friends. This process proceeded in much of the world, where philosophy and political theory became more prominent, and the means to realize what those theories pointed to was apparent. It only required men who could seize that opportunity with knowledge of what could be possible, and this is what distinguished the classical empires from earlier formations. Certainly we can see some theory and ideology of earlier states, like Babylon and Egypt, but if the political theory attained the assembly of knowledge that of the Greeks or the Chinese kingdoms or Hindu kingdoms learned and put into action, it is lost to our written history. A number of advances, some of which seemingly small like the standardization of coinage, made the formation of the philosophical state closer to reality. Whether the participants actually thought building the ideal state was itself the goal is another question altogether, because for as long as theories of the philosophical state have existed, there have been philosophical criticisms of this construct and reasons for the participants of society to find all of it loathesome. Further, the practical needs of any society and any organization may and often do run counter to the pretenses of a philosophical state, and so the ruling ideas, laws, customs, and practices of a society develop in ways not intended by any rational manipulator or grand conspiracy. The rise of grander conspiracies requires many more technical innovations than the mere conception of this philosophical political theory or the tools available to the classical era states. The basic characteristics of this philosophical idea of the state, though, are very resilient to a change that would challenge the most core assumptions that drive them. The philosophers and proprietors may disagree, both between the two groups and within each group, but there are some political principles they know they can never give up. Among them is a simple rule that the common people must never, ever be allowed to win, and if the commoners by some chance do win, the philosophical idea must quickly reassert its fundamental structure such that it can continue to perpetuate and the cycle can continue. Another is that wealth landing in the hands of little people is generally a thing to be avoided, unless this wealth in their hands can be channeled to some long-term benefit of those whose view of society is managerial or conspiratorial against the commoners. Many such gems of political wisdom assert themselves for no particular reason other than a pigheadedness, backed by a reasoning that those who assert them have no reason to stop, and that they will do it because they can.

Untouchability - The existence of a despised group, or some despised characteristics, has been a persistent feature of human society for as long as anyone can recall. The final disciplinary function in an economic sense is simple - that some are to suffer, either temporarily in response to a transgression, or permanently as a status assigned to them that must be reinforced. Here, the concern is not an act of aggression, a shunning from exchange, or the imposition of an idea that is important. Nor does any productive quality from the world undo the core condition, which is that suffering is seen as necessary in some way. This is often written off as a personal condition of no social import, and the suffering is the problem of the individual. But in any society, the economic behavior takes into account this suffering. The use of violent force can be deployed not towards simple elimination of a threat, but towards inducing suffering. The proliferation of addictive drugs or some other material vice can consciously be directed to produce suffering. Exchanges may be manipulated with a conceit that some despised person or group is made to suffer, and this suffering is not merely by denial of the product of society but a moral outrage that is reinforced in every exchange that is made. It is not a surprise that many ideological regimes and philosophies concern themselves with suffering. Outwardly, many religions speak of offering a relief from suffering, or an understanding of suffering. Within religions, in some of the darker and more overtly predatory religions, or within a rational philosophical framework, the infliction of suffering does not become merely a condition in the material world, but a thing to be commanded intellectually and with full intent of how this suffering is intended to transform someone or their behavior. The assignment of shame possesses a quality that is unmistakable to nearly all social participants. It is not a simple mirror reflection of honorability or positive esteem. More often than not, honor and high esteem are defined specifically by the lack of anything shameful, rather than a quality that is considered honorable for its own sake. Shame and suffering are everywhere, but honor and the higher pleasures are scarce. The ideology which is conscious of suffering can and does seek to insist that normal people should be ashamed that they lack this honor and virtue. The more sadistic create an elaborate game in which the normal people, lacking this virtue, ask what is expected of them, and those who get to lord over the honor taunt and laugh at the stupid, expecting the outsider to play a game to figure out the great joke. In this situation, the ugly truth is that there is nothing to the supposed honor of the favored classes, and that this imposition of rejection and suffering is very intentional for some reason or another. Perhaps it is intended for some elite to get on a moral high horse, in an effort to adjust the behavior of those outside of the honorable sectors, knowing that the underclass will never have the free ride that the privileged attained by inheritance or cunning. Other times, the grand joke and the masquerade is carried out for nothing more than a demonstration that it can be done, or some thrill it gives the dominant over the outcast. Other times, the rejection and scorn is sold as something that is intended to be constructive.

This is the credo of every bully, and the hypocrisy of the bully is plain as day when conditions place the bully in a similar spot. But, perhaps, there are those who are cognizant of the need to inflict suffering to build some moral education. This moral education is played with most of all by the predatory ethos. On one hand, the predatory element loves to get on a moral high horse and proclaim their open hypocrisy is in fact the highest morality, and the ideal of the predatory element in this regard is to advance an idea that suffering initiated by the predatory element is wholly the fault of their targets. On the other, a sinister believer in the predatory ethos will promote indulgence and sloth in the lower class, knowing that it will perpetuate a cycle of victimhood. Every instinct of fear is deliberately heightened to teach the underclass learned helplessness, so that the underclass is habituated to a role of inferiority. It may be imagined that few societies are so extreme as to create absolute suffering or the absolute thrill of the predatory ethos, and there have been historically limits to how far this process could be carried out. To some extent, though, it has always existed. The role of those whose life is consigned to suffering is typically excised in philosophical treatments of society, except as an example to be avoided. It is this that makes the role of the untouchable, the one who suffers, economically relevant. A hated underclass, or certain hated behaviors, will set an example to all participants in society, so that transgressors of the law - and very often, an unwritten law operating in parallel - know just what happens if they are caught. The Spartans would play a great game in which prospective soldiers were instructed to kill a slave without being detected. Only those who successfully performed the task would be true Spartans, but if caught due to incompetence, the prospective soldier would be harshly punished. This punishment, however harsh, would never be as severe as the daily life of a helot, who was despised vigorously. No free man could be hated as much as a slave, and the slaves would out of necessity hate their masters and seek an even greater retribution should the opportunity arise. Such examples are omnipresent, and so, the status of untouchability functions as a large body of unwritten laws concerning things large and small. The need of this function may be questioned by a few timid souls, who ask if this is actually an effective moral education compared to alternatives that do not require such an elaborate deception. Realistically, no human society has made any significant attempt to ameliorate this, or see it as any problem at all. The hated, in the view of the favored, deserve their suffering, however they wish to justify it and however much they might try to claim that they themselves are above such cruelty. As much as possible, religions teach a familiar trope where the living world can only be suffering, and that all relief from the suffering is either in the afterlife or a temporary reprieve. In some sense, this may be demonstrable by an understanding of human psychology as something originated in fear and a response of nerves we could call pain. The vast suffering, particularly that suffering which only exists because of the conceits of a bully, has no reason to exist and serves no true moralizing purpose. Those of a sadistic, predatory ethos always hold a belief in their hearts that if the world can be proven so horrible and irredeemable, that the people of the world can be bent infinitely to the will of the strong, and will never let go of that belief. Such beliefs infect every society, no matter how many times they prove to be demonstrable failures. The hope of the predatory, as they accumulate greater knowledge, is to find some way to ensure that their regimes are permanent, by smothering any voice or inclination that would tell them no. This is a matter that must be investigated further as my writing continues, and it is this precise problem that has brought me to write the present text and all the books in this series.

The seven functions mentioned above do not, in of themselves, constitute distinct classes in the actual division of labor. They have remarkably little to do with the actual legal division of society into social classes, despite a pretense that usually maintains certain functions are reserved for certain legal classes. We may imagine, indeed, a society full of many classes, for each profession and each guild around which the class organizes. We may imagine a society with many competing institutions, like a federation of competing cities or a league of competing sports teams. We can speak of socioeconomic classes as groups which possess some shared interest. For example, we call the landlords those proprietors with a stake in deeds of land, whether the landlord commands a large estate, a lucrative piece of land in a large city of sacred importance, or owns nothing more than a humble dwelling that they may rent to a tenant. The small holder who only owns their own piece of land to hold their home has a shared interest in a legal structure which protects deeds of land and property, even when the overall arrangement of landed property works against him and the other landlords are seeking to squeeze out all the small holders. We can see a class of lawyers whose interest is in being able to provide those legal services, due to specialized knowledge of the law and the contacts a lawyer possesses that allow him to work in the courtroom. Since representing yourself in court is a really bad idea even for the best lawyer, such a profession would exist even if everyone knew the law. And so out of some basic functions a great many specializations appear, which each have areas in society and the world that are interests. A full catalogue of them is not necessary.

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