In case you weren’t aware, the Pilgrims weren’t the only people who landed on Plymouth Rock: there were also slaves, indentured servants, women to entertain the male Pilgrims, and other non-pilgrim sorts of folk who supported the Pilgrims by building, farming, cooking, and making while the Pilgrims prayed and otherwise got their Pilgrim on.

There are far more thorough (and more patriotic) discussions of this out there, and I’m not going to go into much detail, but believe: the country may have been founded by a bunch of pious folk who wanted to pray to their version of the one true god and who had no love for tax-paying, but the country was built by slaves, on a foundation of bent-backed indentured servants, and painted with the blood of wantonly slaughtered indigenous peoples. And all of these people, without whom the Pilgrims would’ve failed miserably and either died or gone crying back to the King, were not in any way included in the “We The People” that came around some 200 years later, and were only ever included with great reluctance and disbelief, and only after several revolts, uprisings, mass demonstrations, and the like, but especially only after the ruling class (and capitalism) realized that citizens are more productive than slaves and other resident non-citizens.

And when it came time to make a new nation, the framers of the constitution had no interest in setting up a classless society, or even making a nation that was much different than the one they left: they were white, slave-owning, landed gentry who wanted to set up a society where they and their friends could thrive off the backs of the poor and the black just as they had done for generations.

They didn’t have to work too hard to set this society up and get it humming to their liking: it pretty much happened all by itself. A few people started out ludicrously rich, a few others got rich due to luck or marriage or (very rarely) hard work, and went on to tell stories about how hard work and discipline led directly to their success, and pretty much everyone else fell right in line, hoped and dreamed and happily spent their limited time and incredible talent to create more wealth for the already wealthy.

For some, the truth revealed itself: hard work brings blisters and callouses, not riches and leisure, leisure comes for some only after many years of labor—and for most people never appears at all—and riches come with even greater rarity (and are not even useful for most people: Mo Money, Mo Problems, don’t you know). But these lucky few were far between, and on the rare occasion that they then made attempts to rouse the sleeping masses, the State quickly (and happily) labeled them Communists or devil worshipers or something equivalent, and shipped them off to gulags or gallows (more often the latter).

The idea that we are all citizens, that the government exists for our benefit, that hard work will deliver riches and fulfil our dreams, is fiction perpetrated down through history by the powerful and the otherwise wealthy until it became accepted as fact. After all, people will work quite a bit harder, and with a greater willingness, when chasing after a carrot than they will when being beaten with a stick, even if they never grasp or even get close enough to smell the carrot, even when the carrot is merely a succession of toys and shiny things that have no value: use, exchange, or otherwise.

The only time carrot-baited workers will fail to participate is when the carrot is revealed to be completely illusory. When there is no hope, no visible future, there is no incentive to participate in the society, to work to make things better in the community.

This defines essentially the group of abject poor people, the poor people who know they are poor, and know that there is no way out within the socioeconomic system in place. This group—I hesitate to call this group a ‘class’ just yet—needs the most help and consideration, but receives the least. The governors don’t care about them because they don’t contribute to campaigns and don’t often vote, and they don’t vote because they know the governors don’t care about them.

The truth is, there is only one group of people who have ever really mattered to the state, and that’s the “captains of industry,” the benefactors of the powerful, those who are adept at aggregating capital by whatever means necessary: rents, corporate takeovers, downsizing, outsourcing, free-trading, outright theft, and the like. Thorstein Veblen might call this group the ‘Leisure Class,’ and I might as well, if I had a more thorough understanding of Veblen, and maybe I will one day. But in any case, this is the way human societies have always been, ever since humans moved away from egalitarian societies and began building hierarchical social structures.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s some group of cigar chomping fatties in a leather-bound club somewhere, scheming and plotting to keep the masses subservient. This is not the case at all, nor has it ever been. The structure is already in place, rumbling along, with no need of pilots. It only needs the various bits to understand and act out their roles.

And what are these bits? Here it gets slippery, and long, and it will have to wait for next time.