Decision making in the civilizations reported by history has been chiefly in the hands of specially privileged minorities.  The purpose of these minorities has revolved around the provision of comforts and luxuries for the decision makers and their dependents and the increase of their wealth and power.  Rarely has any ruling oligarchy said:  “The continuance of our privileges and our barest existence is the result of labor power applied to natures gifts.  We must safeguard nature and improve the health and vitality of those who do the world’s work.  If, due to unforeseen circumstances, over which we have failed to exercise adequate control, there is some shortage, let the idler and the wastrel suffer.  Under all circumstances the producers must have all those goods and services needed to preserve their productive efficiency.”

Through the entire course of written history the shrewdest, the strongest, the best fed and most comfortably housed have gained wealth and power, kept them and added to them.  This has been the central sociological principle followed by the wealth-owning, power-wielding oligarchs of one civilization after another.  Nature has been polluted, despoiled, pillaged.  Society has been exploited and plundered.  Most civilizations, during most of their history, have been led and ruled by the rich and powerful, who have used their wealth and power to advance their own interests, with scant respect for the hewers of wood, the drawers of water and the tillers of the soil.  Those at the imperial center have milked the periphery.  Cooperation has been occasional and confined largely to pre-civilized communities.  In all civilizations exploitation has been the rule; the exploitation of nature, of labor power and of the social fabric.

The record of natural resources exploitation is well known.  Paul Sears’ Deserts on the March; Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet; William Vogt’s Road to Survival, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring tell the story of the misuse and the extravagant abuse of nature.  The record of labor power exploitation is less publicized.

Food gatherers like the North American Indians had no machinery and a minimum of implements or weapons.  They migrated with the weather and the available game, traveling with their possessions.  Herdsmen also moved about in search of pasture.  Land workers faced four new problems.  They must stay with their land and make a weather-proof habitat in dwellings and villages.  They must make the implements needed for farming, building and defense against marauders.  They must accumulate and preserve enough food to carry them from one harvest to the next.  They must improve and beautify their artifacts and constructs.  Traders added a fifth must—­they must produce and accumulate stocks to meet the needs of various customers as well as their own greed for profits.

Successive stages, from food gathering to trading and manufacturing, required more energy—­human energy, animal energy, and eventually mechanical energy.  Part of this energy enabled humans to survive, another part enabled them to multiply.  Still another part made it possible for one portion of the population to live without productive work on the work output of their fellow creatures.  This exploiting minority was headed by land owners, soldiers and priests.