Government technology is a collective name for the tools that governments use to control resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Laws, police, courts, schools, central banks, prisons, executions, etc. are examples.(1)

It's fruitful to consider historical trends in wealth inequality as a function of how effective government technology is at the time. That is, rather than seeing social, cultural, economic factors as drivers, assume that the ruling class will take as much as they can without provoking uncontrollable resistance. The more inequality the more fierce the resistance and so the more effective government technology must be to maintain stability.

They never take less than they can for moral reasons. They never return anything unless they're forced to. American slavery, the limiting case of wealth inequality, didn't end because people finally realized it was evil. Everyone already knew it was evil. It ended because there was no way to maintain it in the face of massive resistance, both by slaves and, in the form of the civil war, by capitalists with enough foresight to see that capitalism was unsustainable if slavery was allowed to continue.(2) If they'd had sufficiently effective government technology slavery would never have ended. If they somehow develop it again they'll start enslaving people immediately.(3)

TLDR Riots work.

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Notes:

1. I learned about government technology from Steve Gallo's essential work on Gilded Age urban parks and commoning, in particular Parks Over Pasture: Enclosing the Commons in Postbellum New Orleans (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781421000566)

2. Steven Hahn's The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom is very good on the effects of slave rebellion and resistance on abolition. (https://www.worldcat.org/title/244628661).

3. The effectiveness of government tech isn't only intrinsic. It's a function not only of the intrinsic capabilities of the tools but also of the people being controlled. Government technology grows ineffective over time as its victims learn to thwart it. At one point the US government had sufficiently effective government tech to control literal slaves. It stopped working in mid-19th Century, but not because anyone got nice.

#Slavery #ChattelSlavery #SteveGallo #StevenHahn #GovernmentTechnology #Capitalism #Anarchism #SlaveRebellion