Testing the Bio Economy Metaphor

It is always easiest to start with something obvious and relatively small in scale.

Maybe we could start with slavery. Humans aren’t the first to do this of course, ants have been at it for literally millions of years. The simplest approach is to invade colonies to steal eggs or larvae, which they either eat or raise as slaves. Others attack to choose only the biggest and strongest adult workers. Sometimes the attacks are sneaky. The marauding queen slips past the battling workers and kills the defending queen. The killer queen smears herself with the dead queen’s phermones (kind of like perfume) to fool the local workers. The attacked colony then marches off behind the disguised queen to what will become their slave quarters. The slavemaking ant workers guard the slaves and maintain their eggs and larvae in slave hatcheries to make more slaves. The guards chase down and forcibly return any would-be escapees. The purpose of slavemaking is to expand the colony’s ability beyond what their own workers could perform.

Picture of a slave-ant
Clipart courtesy FCIT

Sometimes the slavemaking is taken to the extreme, such as in some Amazon ants, where the ants can no longer do any work by themselves — they can’t even feed themselves. Without slaves the colony would fail.

Is there a good example of slavemakers in modern human times? Yes, even today in many countries slaves are still used. But I want to look at a particular situation that is parallel to the ants.

The United States, like many countries in the world routinely used slaves to expand the performance of the colonies beyond the ability of the US local workers. Slave labour in the US probably became common sometime around 1650. Mostly but not entirely in the south, they came from Africa where slavemaking people invaded African villages to steal the children to be raised as slaves. Others attacked the villages to choose only the biggest and strongest adults to become slaves. Sometimes the attacks were sneaky. Instead of attacking the slavemakers would pretend to be offering huge benefits and high wages. Once on board a ship, however, the slavemakers quickly subdued them and made them captives. By 1776 when the US was declared, slavery was a major factor in the growing success of the US economy. Almost a whole century of active slavemaking and local increase in the population of slaves went by before the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865 abolishing slavery. During this period, just as with the ants, a relationship evolved between the slaves and their keepers. Probably in most cases, the slaves were well treated and maintained. Slaves were relatively expensive to replace. It was good policy to keep them healthy so they could work hard — an attitude similar to keeping cattle well-fed. However, they were definitely not free, and any attempt to escape resulted in harsh, sometimes deadly punishment.

Painting of capturing slaves in Africa
Photo from USA History

The south was dependent on the slaves. There simply were not enough white workers to do the job. Whether intentional or not, the abolition of slavery was not accompanied by legal statutes to enforce the abolition. Slaves however, demanded their freedom and in addition wanted to negotiate equitable wages. The south quite simply could not afford to pay equitable wages and still deliver products at the market prices. In a gruesome but very smart move from a business perspective, former slaves were routinely convicted of trumped up charges by Justices of the Peace hired by land and factory owners. Once they were convicts, they could be put to work back in the same jobs from which they had recently been freed. Only now they were much cheaper than slaves, and only rented, so they were subjected to horrendous conditions. The industries became absolutely dependent on these peonage and later sharecropper labourers. In fact, many of the finest households were totally dependent on the slaves, the gentry incapable of preparing meals to feed themselves without the slaves or indentured labour.

Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of the US from 1901 to 1909, was very much against the illegal peonage and secret slavery. So he resolved to remove it entirely.

If Teddy Roosevelt had been working with a solid knowledge of slavemaking ants, he would never have attempted what he did in the manner that he used. He would have been able to predict that forcing factory owners and agricultural owners to free the falsely accused convicts and pay them a reasonable wage, would have bankrupted the country. In the end he simply failed to correct the humanitarian disaster, and business was able to carry on without much change in treatment of the exploited workers. Exploitative strategies are very good for business because they increase the profit level. That’s the same reasoning that ants use. And it remains a very strong incentive for people who do not share a humanitarian view to see exploitative strategies as good business. In fact, in the US African Americans continued to be exploited until well into the 1960’s, and some would argue even into today. Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech “I have Dream” and the march from Selma to Birmingham in 1965 spelled the beginning of the end to massive exploitative use of black labour.

So what strategy would have worked using the biological metaphor? Not so fast, let’s back up a minute and just use the biological metaphor to predict what would happen if … Then maybe we can figure out what to do.

The situation in the early 1800s was a slave-based economy industrial capitalism flourishing with lots of inexpensive labour making many smart ordinary people very wealthy. Let’s ask the ants what would happen if we just left it the way it was? According to the ants, everything is just fine. The ants were actually a little smarter than the people slavemakers because they were actually managing the reproduction to ensure healthy crops of young slaves. Well, you ask, what about the slaves? According to the ants, slaves have no rights. This matches perfectly with the industrial capitalists view who held slaves.

In an article in Forbes magazine 12/08/2011, Jim Powell says “Obama And Teddy Roosevelt: Both Progressives, Both Clueless About The Economy.” He notes that Theodore Roosevelt vowed to “punish certain malefactors of great wealth” arguing this is a foolish position and he should have let the economy take care of itself. Ron Paul, the current great libertarian is an enthusiastic proponent of allowing the capitalist system work without government interference.

Supposing that had been allowed to happen. What do the ants predict? Some of the slave ant species have figured a way to reduce the amount of slavemaking that the slavemakers can carry out. The slaves in the colonies that are completely dependent on slaves and can’t work, they allow the slaves to reproduce outside of the colony (they need to have access to their queen to reproduce), but bring the eggs and larvae back to be tended by the slaves. The slave nurseries are separate from the slavemaker nurseries. Slaves are responsible for caring for both the slave babies and the slavemaker babies. Only the slavemaker females carry out the raids and bring back the slaves (don’t forget worker females in ant colonies don’t reproduce, they are the workers). So the slave ants sneakily kill as many of the female slavemaker babies as they can. This means there aren’t very many soldiers to go out and capture slaves.

The prediction by the ants is that people slaves would find a way to reduce the ability of the slavemakers and keepers to make slaves. In the case of the ants, they do it by murdering the babies that would turn into the ants that capture and guard the slaves. Hmmm… That could be a nasty turn of events if the people slaves were driven to murder their guards as babies. In the US, many slave revolts occurred, but none were successful and often resulted in brutal collateral murder of slaves not directly involved in the revolt. Whatever the strategy, the prediction is that the slaves will figure a way to reduce the number of slaves the industrial capitalists would be able to make and keep. It could be a bloody time, but that is the prediction.

The lesson here is that the ants have no sense of moral responsibility for the slaves they keep. The ants are a resource. Any individual slave is completely expendable, and can and will be replaced by another slave if that is more efficient.

The exact same equation is true of capitalist organizations. The strategy of industrial capitalism is to dominate the marketplace by controlling the production and distribution of goods made from raw materials for the purpose of exchange of wealth among the capitalists (owners of capital in the corporation) that belong to each organization. The focus is on maximizing profit to maximize wealth. The measures used to reduce costs definitely include reducing the cost of labour wherever possible. If that means exploitative labour and it is not against the law, or if we can get away with it by paying minor fines, or if we can replace the employees with cheaper machines, then let’s do it. In the capitalist equation there is no variable for the people who are not entrepreneurs. The employees may be people but that is an accident of opportunity, they could just as well be horses or machines.

So what strategy will work? That depends on your goal. If free market enterprise is your goal with capitalists free of government intervention to make money and build the economy that way, then biology (the ants) predicts the results will be just what we saw in the south of the US until the slaves figure out counter measures on their own — and that will probably not be pretty. This is not a change that is going to take place in the time frame of an ecological model, this would be on an evolutionary time scale, just as with the ants — it took a modification of their inherited behaviour patterns. Given that the people slave situation lasted for 200 official years and a further 100 years unofficially in the US, the evolution of a slave-based solution would likely have taken thousands of years. On the world scale, slavery is still a fact of life, so the slave-based fix has still not evolved for people, even though at least for some species of ants, countermeasures against slavery have evolved.

If some other goal is in mind, such as a more equal distribution of wealth, then we could ask what change of conditions in the system might allow that to happen. In nature, the individuals of all species react to the environment in which they find themselves. That is also the premise of free market enterprise. What condition would you like to change? Oh, and don’t forget it is really hard to manage a system from inside it, unless you have absolute control of all the variables. If you are on the inside of the system, you can only negotiate for what you want to do. Or in the case of a biological ecosystem wait and see what develops. For example if we shoot all the top predators in an ecosystem, all kinds of things happen, most of which would be pretty hard to predict in detail. In general, removing a top predator ripples all through the system with some previously uncommon to rare species becoming very common, and some previously common becoming rare or disappearing. Let’s try to predict what would happen if we suddenly removed all the predatory industrial capitalists that used slaves in the south. Well pretty obvious first reaction is that the production of all the agricultural and industrial products from the south would come to a screeching halt. The effects would be far-reaching and cause a cascade of business to fail and consumers left without those products to use. Over a period a a few years, new capitalists would set up new businesses. Unless there was some reason why they couldn’t use slaves, they probably would. If there was a truly immediate and commercially lethal reason not to use slaves, the cost of products would be much higher and in some cases, not worth producing. I could go on, but as you can see, the cascade of effects is not easily predictable nor is it necessarily possible to adjust once they have begun and you can’t or don’t want to put the top predator back.

In the case of the US, it was the “human” reaction against the sometimes unspeakable horrors being perpetrated on the slaves and later on people held in peonage that finally forced back the resistance by factions that claimed the “slaves have no rights” and that to change the slave-based economy would ruin the economy of the US. In this case it did not ruin the economy of the US. But it took hundreds of years for the attitudes of people to change enough to override the very effective and efficient ability of the capitalist system to develop immense wealth for a small segment of the population and a reasonable share for some of the others, all at the expense of a group of people essentially acting as slaves to the system.

The basic lesson is that we can use the biological metaphor to predict the results of a change or the addition of a new species, but it is not a simple prediction. In the case of the slave example, this is just one minor part of a very large system, so it was by comparison a fairly simple example.

One thought on “Testing the Bio Economy Metaphor

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