Chapter 14 of 14

Breakouts, and What Comes Next

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Return to the mother

Somewhere around 2350 BCE, in the city-state of Lagash in southern Mesopotamia, a scribe pressed into clay a group of cuneiform signs that we met in Chapter 2: ama-ar-gi. Literally, it means "return to the mother". In the inscriptions of Lagash's rulers, it described something very concrete: the release of people who had been taken into bondage for debt, so that children could go home to their mothers and mothers to their children. It is often said to be the oldest written word for freedom.

Four and a half thousand years later, that same cuneiform sign is the logo of an American educational foundation devoted to the ideals of individual liberty and limited government. Its website explains that it believes the sign to be the first written reference to the concept of liberty, while admitting that the exact meaning of the term is not clear.

There is something fitting in this. The oldest word for freedom has been claimed by people whose idea of freedom — freedom of the individual from the power of the state — is very different from what it meant in Lagash, where freedom was something a ruler proclaimed, by using the power of the state to cancel private debts and release the bonded from their creditors. Both ideas are real, and both have a place in this book. The farm has been fenced by kings and by creditors, by states and by markets, by priests and by landlords. Freedom has meant escape from all of them at different times. And the fact that we still argue about what the oldest word for freedom means tells us that the story is never finished: every generation has to decide what freedom is, and who it is for.

This last chapter asks the question that the previous thirteen have been building towards. Across five thousand years, the human farm has been challenged thousands of times — by flight, by riot, by revolt, by revolution, by reform, by organisation, by prayer and by argument. Most challenges failed. Some succeeded, at least for a while. What, in the end, has actually changed the ratio between the 0.01, the 1 and the 99? What has not? And what might?

The ledger of breakouts

Let us begin by gathering the evidence.

In Sumer and Egypt (Chapter 2), the farm was challenged by flight from the grain states, by their periodic collapse, by the strike of the tomb-builders at Deir el-Medina and, most remarkably, by debt cancellations proclaimed from above. In the Bronze Age empires (Chapter 3), people escaped to the margins, like the ʿapiru of the Amarna letters, and the great palace societies were levelled by their own collapse. In Athens and Rome (Chapter 4), Solon abolished debt slavery for citizens, the plebs of Rome won their tribunes by going on strike, the helots of Messenia won their freedom when Sparta was defeated — and Spartacus and the Gracchi were destroyed. In medieval Europe (Chapter 5), the revolts of 1381 and 1525 were crushed, but the Black Death made labour so scarce that serfdom withered in the west — while, east of the Elbe, lords used the same scarcity to tighten it.

In the empires of the East (Chapter 6), peasant rebellions toppled dynasty after dynasty, without ending the farm; the Buddha, the bhakti poets and Ambedkar challenged the story of caste itself. In the age of enclosure (Chapter 7), Kett's rebels and Winstanley's Diggers failed, but the Highland crofters and the Irish Land League won by organising. On the plantations (Chapter 8), the enslaved resisted constantly, freed themselves in Haiti and were freed by abolition — and the farm survived its defeat through compensation, indemnity, sharecropping and convict leasing. In the factory (Chapter 9), the Luddites and Chartists were defeated, but the unions eventually won the shorter working day, the vote and legal recognition. Against the ledger (Chapter 10), the Populists lost and Jubilee 2000 won. The welfare state (Chapter 11) produced the greatest compression of inequality in the history of industrial societies — and was partly reversed within a generation. And in the digital age (Chapters 12 and 13), the struggles over education, media, data and gig work are still under way.

Looking across all of this, five forces stand out as the ones that have actually shifted the ratio. None of them has worked alone.

1. Catastrophe

The first and most uncomfortable answer was given by Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler, whose argument we met in Chapter 1. Surveying inequality from the Stone Age to the present, Scheidel concluded that the only forces that have reliably and substantially reduced it were catastrophes: mass-mobilisation warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse and lethal pandemics — his "Four Horsemen".

This book has found plenty of evidence for him. The Black Death did more to weaken serfdom in western Europe than any revolt (Chapter 5). The collapse of the Bronze Age palaces flattened the hierarchies of Mycenaean Greece by destroying them (Chapter 3). The two world wars, with their destruction of capital, their inflation, their crushing taxes on the rich and their mobilisation of whole populations, produced the great compression of the mid-twentieth century (Chapter 11).

And revolution? The French Revolution abolished feudal dues and the privileges of the nobility. The Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century produced some of the most dramatic levelling ever recorded, by expropriating landlords and capitalists wholesale. They did so at the cost of millions of lives — in civil war, in terror, in man-made famine. And they did not abolish the farm. The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas, once one of Tito's closest comrades, was imprisoned for publishing The New Class in 1957, in which he argued that the communist bureaucracy had itself become a new ruling class, enjoying privileges and controlling property in the name of the people it ruled. It is Orwell's lesson from Animal Farm, written as political science from the inside. The pigs had moved into the farmhouse.

Scheidel's conclusion is bleak: peaceful reform, he argues, has rarely if ever produced levelling on the scale that catastrophe has. If he is right, the price of a more equal society has historically been paid in blood, and no reasonable person would wish for it.

But there is a second half to the story of every catastrophe in this book, and it is just as important. In the late Middle Ages, the same plague freed peasants in England and bound them more tightly in Prussia. After the Second World War, the same destruction produced the NHS in Britain but not in many other countries. The catastrophe opened a door. Whether anyone walked through it, and who, depended on other things.

2. Scarcity and indispensability

The second force is the one that the farm's owners have always feared most: the herd becoming scarce, or indispensable.

When the Black Death killed a third or more of Europe's population, the survivors could demand higher wages and better terms, and the Statutes of Labourers could not stop them (Chapter 5). When the Athenian state came to depend on poor citizens to row its warships, the poor citizens won democracy (Chapter 4). When the Roman state needed its plebeian soldiers, their refusal to fight won them their tribunes. When twentieth-century states needed millions of men to fight total wars and millions of women to work in munitions factories, those men and women won the vote, social insurance and the welfare state (Chapter 11). When industrial workers were gathered by the thousands in factories whose machines could not run without them, they could stop production by stopping work (Chapter 9).

The logic is simple and runs through the whole book. The farm needs the herd. When the herd is plentiful and replaceable, its owners can dictate terms. When the herd is scarce, or its cooperation essential, the herd can bargain.

That is why the owners of the farm have always worked to keep labour plentiful and replaceable: by importing captives and slaves (Chapters 4 and 8), by enclosing the commons so that people had nothing to fall back on (Chapter 7), by recruiting new immigrant groups to undercut organised ones (Chapter 9), by moving production to wherever labour is cheapest (Chapter 11). And it is why the question raised at the end of the last chapter — what happens to the herd's bargaining power if machines can do much of its work — may be the most important question facing the 99% in the coming decades. We will come back to it.

3. Organisation

The third force is organisation, and it is the one that most clearly distinguishes the breakouts that worked from those that did not.

The historian Robert Brenner, whose argument we met in Chapter 5, asked why the same labour scarcity after the Black Death freed peasants in the west and enserfed them in the east. His answer was the relative strength of the classes: where peasant communities were cohesive and able to resist, they won; where lords could combine with each other and with the state, they did. A shock helps the herd only where the herd is organised to take advantage of it.

The pattern recurs throughout this book. The peasants of 1381 and 1525, the Luddites and the Swing rioters, rose in great numbers and were crushed, because their movements were local, short-lived and without lasting institutions. The Highland crofters and the Irish tenants, by contrast, built land leagues, organised rent strikes, invented the boycott and elected members of Parliament, and they won security of tenure and, in Ireland, the land itself (Chapter 7). The factory workers of the nineteenth century lost almost every early battle, but over decades they built trade unions, friendly societies, cooperatives and political parties, and those institutions eventually won the shorter working day, the vote and the welfare state (Chapters 9 and 11). Economists who have studied the long history of American unions, such as Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu, have found consistent evidence that unions reduced inequality and explain a significant share of the sharp fall in American inequality in the 1930s and 1940s. When union membership collapsed after 1979, so did that effect.

Organisation has an enemy, and it is the oldest weapon of the farm: division. B. R. Ambedkar's observation that caste is "a division of labourers" (Chapter 6), Edmund Morgan's account of how colonial Virginia separated poor whites from enslaved Africans (Chapter 8), the employers who mixed nationalities on the shop floor and brought in strike-breakers of a different colour (Chapter 9) — all describe the same mechanism. Every successful breakout in this book required the herd to overcome at least some of the divisions that the farm had built within it. Every defeat was helped by the herd's failure to do so.

4. Divided owners

The fourth force is less heroic, and easier to overlook: conflict at the top.

Again and again in this book, the 99% have won most when the 0.01% and the 1% were divided against each other. The Mesopotamian kings cancelled debts because private creditors — often their own officials — were enslaving the free farmers on whom royal taxes and armies depended (Chapter 2). The Tudor crown legislated against enclosure because depopulated villages produced neither taxpayers nor soldiers (Chapter 7). The Gracchi were aristocrats trying to save the Roman farm from the greed of their own class (Chapter 4). Bismarck introduced social insurance to undercut socialists, and the British Conservatives accepted the welfare state because, as Quintin Hogg put it, if they did not give the people social reform, the people would give them social revolution (Chapters 9 and 11). Franklin Roosevelt, a patrician from one of New York's oldest families, was denounced by many of his own class as a traitor to it.

This does not mean that the herd should wait for a benevolent ruler. Reform from above in this book was almost always temporary, partial and designed to protect the farm, not to dismantle it. Uru-inimgina's reforms were swept away by conquest within a few years; Hammurabi's laws may never have been applied in court; the Tudor anti-enclosure statutes were evaded by the very gentry appointed to enforce them. But the fault lines within the elite are the cracks through which breakouts have most often come. Organisation from below and division at the top together have been far more effective than either alone.

5. Law and institutions that last

The fifth force is the one that determines whether a breakout lasts: whether its gains are locked into institutions that outlive the moment that produced them.

The contrast between the breakouts of this book is stark. Mesopotamian debt cancellations were one-off events; debts built up again immediately. Solon's ban on enslaving citizens for debt, by contrast, was permanent law, and it held. The abolition of slavery, once enacted, was never reversed, even when the farm found new ways to extract labour from the formerly enslaved. The Factory Acts and the inspectors who enforced them, universal suffrage, public education, the National Health Service, Social Security, the right to form a union: all of these survived decades of pressure because they were embedded in law and supported by large constituencies who benefited from them.

Where gains were not institutionalised, or where the institutions were weak, they were reversed. Reconstruction after the American Civil War was undone by Jim Crow (Chapter 8). The great compression of the mid-twentieth century was rolled back in the countries where unions were weakest and taxes on the rich easiest to cut (Chapter 11). The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics with Simon Johnson for their research on how institutions shape prosperity, distinguish between "extractive" institutions, designed to transfer resources from the many to the few, and "inclusive" ones, which give broad sections of society both a share of the gains and a voice in decisions. In the terms of this book, extractive institutions are the farm. Their research suggests that inclusive institutions, once established, tend to reinforce themselves — but that they are fragile, and must be defended constantly against the efforts of elites to capture them.

A breakout in which everything aligned

There is one episode, outside the main narrative of this book, that shows what can happen when all five forces act at once. It took place in East Asia in the years after the Second World War, and it was the largest peaceful redistribution of land in modern history.

Before the war, much of the farmland of Japan, Korea and Taiwan was owned by landlords and worked by tenants who paid a large share of their harvest in rent — often half or more. In Japan in the early 1940s, close to half of all cultivated land was farmed by tenants. Between 1946 and 1950, under the American occupation, the Japanese government compelled landlords to sell land beyond a small limit to the state, which resold it to the tenants who farmed it. The landlords were compensated in bonds that post-war inflation soon made almost worthless. By 1950, the share of cultivated land farmed by tenants had fallen to around a tenth. In Taiwan, the Nationalist government that had retreated there from the mainland capped rents at 37.5 per cent of the main crop in 1949, sold off public land, and in 1953 passed a "Land to the Tiller" act that transferred much landlord land to tenants. South Korea carried out its own land reform around 1950.

Look at the conditions. There had been a catastrophe: a total war that had shattered the old order. The owners were divided and weakened: in Japan, the landlords had lost their political protectors with the defeat of the empire; in Taiwan, the Nationalist government had no ties to the island's landlords and every reason to win over its peasants. Fear of revolution was intense: the communist revolution in China, completed in 1949, had been built on peasant hatred of landlords, and the American advisers who drove the reforms, such as the agricultural economist Wolf Ladejinsky, saw land reform as the surest defence against it. The farmers' cooperation was indispensable to the new governments. And the reform was locked into law and into the ownership of millions of small farms, which gave a whole class of people a lasting stake in it.

The results were far-reaching. Rural inequality fell sharply. Many economists, including Joe Studwell in How Asia Works (2013), have argued that the land reforms laid the foundation for the extraordinary economic growth of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea in the decades that followed, by raising farm output, spreading income widely and creating a domestic market for industry. The reforms were not painless, and they were imposed by governments that were in several cases far from democratic. But they show that the ratio can be shifted dramatically, and durably, without the mass killing that accompanied land reform in revolutionary China — when the conditions are right.

What did not work

Just as revealing is the list of things that did not shift the ratio, or did so only briefly.

Revolt without organisation failed almost everywhere. From Spartacus to Kett to the Luddites, the herd's anger was real and often justified, but anger without lasting institutions was crushed, and its leaders were hanged.

Changing the farmer without changing the farm failed again and again. The Chinese dynastic cycle (Chapter 6) produced emperors who had been peasants and priests who became kings, but the land tax, the gentry and the examination system came back within a generation. The Mamluks were slaves who became sultans. The communist revolutions produced Djilas's new class. In Orwell's fable, the pigs end up indistinguishable from the men.

Moral appeals to the owners changed individual lives but not the structure. Seneca urged kindness to slaves and owned hundreds. Carnegie preached the gospel of wealth and broke the union at Homestead. Philanthropy built libraries and hospitals, and left the distribution of power exactly where it was.

Technology alone never freed the herd. The productivity gains of the industrial revolution were captured largely by profits for half a century before wages caught up (Chapter 9). The productivity gains of the digital age have not delivered Keynes's fifteen-hour week (Chapter 13). Technology has repeatedly made the farm more productive. Who gets the produce has always been decided by something else.

Exit — simply leaving — has been one of the oldest forms of resistance and one of the most important constraints on the farm. The economist Albert Hirschman, in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), argued that people dissatisfied with an institution can either leave it or try to change it from within, and that the possibility of exit strengthens voice. The ʿapiru, the maroons, the runaways of every age and the emigrants who crossed oceans to escape enclosure and famine all exercised exit, and James C. Scott, whose account of the first grain states opened this book, devoted another study, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), to the peoples of upland South-East Asia who for centuries evaded the lowland states. But exit has rarely changed the farm for those who stayed behind, and in a world with no unclaimed land left, it is available to fewer people than ever. Borders, as Chapter 11 noted, now open for money far more readily than for people.

The story and the breaking of it

There is one more force, which runs beneath all the others: the story.

David Hume, whose observation opened this book, saw that the many are governed by the few because of opinion. Every farm in this book has depended on a story that made it feel just: divine kings, natural slaves, the three orders, the Mandate of Heaven, karma, improvement, race, the free market, merit. And every great breakout has begun with someone breaking the story.

John Ball asked who was the gentleman when Adam delved and Eve span. The German peasants of 1525 wrote that Christ had redeemed them all with his precious blood and therefore they should be free. Chen Sheng asked whether kings and nobles were a breed apart. Frederick Douglass described how a slave was made a man. Ambedkar declared that caste was not a division of labour but a division of labourers. Occupy's protesters wrote "We are the 99%" on cardboard signs, and gave this book its numbers.

Breaking the story is never enough on its own. A slogan without an organisation is a cry, not a breakout. But no breakout in this book succeeded without one. The fence that people build in their own heads has to come down before the others can.

Here, too, there is a warning. New stories can become new fences. The French revolutionaries' "liberty, equality, fraternity" became the slogan of a republic that restored slavery in its colonies; the communists' promise of a classless society became the justification of Djilas's new class; the internet's promise of a world without gatekeepers became the business model of the data farm. Every story of liberation can be captured, if those who tell it are not watched.

What has already been won

A book about the farm runs the risk of leaving its readers with the impression that nothing ever changes. That would be false, and it would be a story of its own — one that serves the farm very well, because people who believe nothing can change do not try.

Consider what the breakouts of this book have actually won. In most of the world, no human being may legally own another. Debt bondage, serfdom and chattel slavery, which were normal for most of recorded history, are crimes almost everywhere, even though forced labour persists in the shadows. Children in most countries go to school rather than to the mill or the mine. The working day that Elizabeth Bentley endured at the age of six — sixteen hours in busy times — is illegal across most of the world. Billions of people can vote, and women, who were excluded from political life in nearly every society in this book, now share in it. Global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1800. According to the World Bank, the share of humanity living in extreme poverty fell from more than a third in 1990 to under a tenth by 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic briefly reversed the decline.

Not all of these gains were the result of breakouts; technological change and economic growth played enormous parts. But many of them were — and almost none of them were granted freely. They were won by people who refused to accept that the farm was the natural order of things, and who organised to change it. The ratio between the 0.01, the 1 and the 99 has proved remarkably stubborn. The conditions of life of the 99 have not. That, too, is part of the history of the farm, and perhaps the most important part.

What comes next

What does all this suggest about the farm's future? This book has tried to be a diagnosis rather than a manifesto, and it would be dishonest to end it with a programme. But it is possible to say what the history suggests about the pressures that will shape the next chapters — chapters that have not yet been written, and that its readers will help to write.

The first pressure is the future of work. Throughout history, the herd's strongest lever has been the farm's need for its labour. If artificial intelligence and automation reduce that need — if the shuttles really do weave by themselves, as Aristotle imagined — then that lever may weaken, and the herd's ability to bargain may weaken with it. Alternatively, if the productivity gains are broadly shared, they could bring Keynes's fifteen-hour week within reach at last. History suggests that which of these happens will not be decided by the technology. It will be decided by who owns it, and by whether the people affected are organised enough to claim a share of what it produces.

The second pressure is climate. The farm's growth over the past two centuries has been powered by fossil fuels, and its costs will be borne, like the costs of every previous farm, very unequally. According to an Oxfam analysis published in 2023, based on research by the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest one per cent of humanity was responsible for about as large a share of global carbon emissions in 2019 as the poorest two-thirds — while the poorest will suffer most from the heat, floods and failed harvests that follow. Who pays for the transition, and who is protected from its effects, will be one of the great distributional struggles of the coming century.

The third pressure is the taxation of great wealth. In 2021, around 136 countries agreed through the OECD to a global minimum tax of fifteen per cent on the profits of large multinational companies. In 2024, a report commissioned by Brazil's presidency of the G20 and written by the economist Gabriel Zucman proposed a coordinated minimum tax of two per cent a year on the wealth of the world's billionaires. Whether such proposals are realised, or defeated by the political power of those they would tax, will say a great deal about the balance of power in the decades ahead.

The fourth pressure is ownership. The most ambitious breakout in Chapter 11 — Sweden's wage-earner funds — failed because it went to the heart of the farm: not wages or welfare but ownership itself. That question has not gone away. It reappears in cooperatives such as the Mondragon group in the Basque Country, owned by tens of thousands of its workers; in employee share ownership; in proposals for sovereign wealth funds owned by all citizens; in the digital commons of Wikipedia and open-source software; and in the platform cooperatives of Chapter 13. Readers of different political traditions will judge these very differently. Some will see in them the beginnings of a more democratic economy; others will prefer to break up concentrations of power through competition, as the anti-monopoly movements of the left and the right both advocate; others still will see the state itself as the greatest farm of all, and want to shrink it. This book has tried to show that the farm has been run by kings and by markets, by states and by corporations, by priests and by algorithms. The question is not which institution should run it, but whether any institution can be prevented from becoming one.

The economist Thomas Piketty, in Capital and Ideology (2019), put the point in a way that offers both a challenge and a hope. Inequality, he wrote, is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political. If he is right, then the ratio between the 0.01, the 1 and the 99 is not a law of nature. It is a choice — made, remade and contested in every generation.

The questions

At the end of Chapter 1, I asked the reader to try asking the five questions of this book about their own life. It is time to ask them again.

What is your fence? What stops you from leaving, or refusing — a mortgage, a student loan, a visa, a health insurance plan attached to a job, a credit score, the fear of falling? Who built it, and who benefits from its being there?

What is your feed? What does the farm take from you — your hours, your interest payments, your rent, your data, your attention? Where does it go?

Who are your shepherds — and are you one of them? Many readers of this book will be. The scribes of Uruk, the reeves of medieval England, the overseers of Jamaica, the managers of Taylor's factories and the engineers of the data farm were not villains. Most of them were doing a job, doing it well, and believing in the story that justified it. The shepherds have always held the key to the farm, because the owners cannot run it without them. In almost every breakout in this book, the moment when the shepherds began to doubt — the lawyers and junior officers of the great revolutions, the priests who preached with John Ball, mill-owners such as John Fielden who joined the campaign for the ten-hour day, the Facebook employee who leaked the company's own research — was the moment the farm began to change.

What is your story? What belief makes your own position feel natural — whether it is near the top or near the bottom? Did you earn everything you have? Did those with less earn their lack?

And what would your breakout look like? Not alone: Étienne de La Boétie's call, "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed," has echoed through this book, and it is half true. The farm depends on the consent of those it farms. But one person who resolves to serve no more is simply replaced. Every breakout in this book that worked was made by people together — by villages and unions, leagues and movements, congregations and parties — who had found a way to overcome the divisions the farm had built between them, and who had built something that would last beyond the moment of their anger.

The last entry

This book began with a tablet from Uruk: twenty-nine thousand measures of barley, thirty-seven months, and a name — or a title — that might be the oldest name in history. Kushim, if he was a person, kept the ledger of the first farm. He recorded what the farmers owed and what the storehouse held. We do not know what he thought about it.

For five thousand years since, someone has always kept the ledger. Priests and scribes, stewards and clerks, bookkeepers and bankers, actuaries and data scientists have recorded what the many owed the few, and the few have used those records to collect. But the ledger has also been seized and burned — by the rebels who, as the Admonitions of Ipuwer describe it, broke open the offices of Egypt and carried off their records, by the peasants of 1381 who burned the manorial rolls, by the clean slates of Babylon and the jubilees of modern debt campaigners. And from time to time, it has been rewritten — by Solon, by the abolitionists, by the founders of the welfare state — so that the entries began to flow the other way.

The ledger is still open. The next entry has not been written. Whether the farm can be ended, or only managed better, or whether it will be tightened again by the new technologies and new crises of our century, is a question that history cannot answer, because it has not happened yet.

It depends on what the 99 do — and on what the 1, who keep the books, decide to write.