Yep, they were basically the tech/finance/etc... workers of the time, in that they had the opportunity to buy their financial freedom.
Is this an attempt at humor? If so, it fell flat for me. Tech and finance workers are some of the most highly-compensated people in the world today. Comparing them to Roman slaves, who were considered property, had no freedom of movement, and were subject to brutal corporal punishment, shows a callous disregard for the real human suffering occurring around the world.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm making a relative comparison - tech and finance workers are to the average worker in the world what the intellectual or the higher household slaves in Rome were to the average. By the way, those slaves had freedom of movement and, especially later in Roman history, some legal protection, as well as in many cases the right to work for a wage outside of the purview of their masters.
I am trying to underlie the fact that we have many privileges and the ability to change social strata compared to the average working person, which is an interesting parallel. Of course even Roman slavery was horrible.
First management theorists or first recorded management theorists? I feel like there are similarly (or nearly as) advanced cultures in this approximate era for whom we unfortunately have significantly less recorded material - and often what we do have was created by other civilizations (such as Rome itself or Greek city-states) who interacted with said people. These persons surely had theories of management for their…
> These persons surely had theories of management for their assets, which undoubtedly would include slaves and indentured servants. Yes, exactly. I'm sure the Egyptian pharaohs who built the pyramids a thousand years earlier had some theories regarding management.
I'm really pretty sure they did. In fact I'd go one step further and say a lot of Old and Middle Kingdom society WAS a peculiar kind of management theory. Those pyramids weren't built by slaves either. There is plenty of managerial advice in their literature. They even invented the careers-advice text... (be a scribe, my son; it's indoor work with no heavy lifting)
Yep, they were basically the tech/finance/etc... workers of the time, in that they had the opportunity to buy their financial freedom.
Is this an attempt at humor? If so, it fell flat for me. Tech and finance workers are some of the most highly-compensated people in the world today. Comparing them to Roman slaves, who were considered property, had no freedom of movement, and were subject to brutal corporal punishment, shows a callous disregard for the real human suffering occurring around the world.
GPs point is that under "capitalism" everyone is effectively a slave - working on someone else's terms, and it's only a few elite jobs where you really make enough to potentially buy your way out of the system. It's an opportunity that people working in a coffee shop or something don't have.
(Edit- well nearly, the GP clarified his post in a sibling post)
What an elaborate essay, equating modern wage-earners with slaves and measuring them by utility. It seems to be recruiting the reader to the 'slave-master' mindset.
I’m fairly certain that this kind of attitude, far from being an abberation, is exactly how the ruling class thinks of us. Jerry just feels secure enough to say it out loud. My guess is that we’ll get more and more open authoritarianism from the capitalist class as time goes on. They already refer to us as “human capital.”
> "With slaves, however, who were stakeholders in the system," "With slaves, however, who's stakes were forcibly held by others in the system," FTFY
Household slaves could buy their freedom from their masters. Then they became freedmen, still allied and somewhat subordinated to their former masters, but their children were already full Roman citizens. The prospect of manumission was a huge incentive for the slave to work harder and smarter. Some freedmen became very rich. The slaveowners could theoretically renege on their promise, but rarely did so, because they…
Well it was kind of a social contract, and it was primarily the Greek slaves who achieved manumission, starting from a position of parity in cultural and racial perception (we're speaking purely in terms of their status in the Mediterranean as a people with greatness, with the legacy of a great history which in general is the consequence of being conquerors), and usually an advantage in most intellectual matters. In the intellectual the Roman shone in oratory, law, civil engineering, and others I forget. There are many where the Romans were considered the best. But Greek language was of greater prestige in the highest circles of Rome, for instance the last words of Gauis Julius Caesar were in Greek, tutors had to be Greek, and Greek slaves played, under working conditions enviable even by many Americans in the 21st century, an essential part in the production of the Aeneid, which was the equivalent of the time of a major motion picture, and which involved extensive cryptography. Cryptographic techniques of the time were used to conceal its true message for thousands of years, while ensuring there was enough fidelity in the whole work to ensure the message could be conveyed. What this meant in practice is the Greeks serving Virgil had to count sounds in verses by applying certain rules to the characters, and count with absolute certainty. Coming full circle, for such great undertakings that required such great secrecy to conceal the message from the Emperor the slave's loyalty could really only be bought with the sound promise of freedom.
Is this an attempt at humor? If so, it fell flat for me. Tech and finance workers are some of the most highly-compensated people in the world today. Comparing them to Roman slaves, who were considered property, had no freedom of movement, and were subject to brutal corporal punishment, shows a callous disregard for the real human suffering occurring around the world.
GPs point is that under "capitalism" everyone is effectively a slave - working on someone else's terms, and it's only a few elite jobs where you really make enough to potentially buy your way out of the system. It's an opportunity that people working in a coffee shop or something don't have. (Edit- well nearly, the GP clarified his post in a sibling post)
You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this. I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need…
Well, there was nothing contractual about this relationship: you have no contract with your property. A related rant. Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant, as you can go wherever and leave your employer whenever you want; being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave, since you're not property, are tied to a place (and cannot be just moved wherever), have legal person…
> Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant... being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave
What's next? Shall we unite the concept of citizenship and the concept of economic freedom? Perhaps with something like a citizen's dividend? A freedom dividend you might say?
A semantic pedantry argument could be made that recorded material is what separates the theorist from the practitioner. Easily countered of course by remarking that records getting lost over the course of a few millennia shouldn't make a theorist less of a theorist. Personally, I'm fine with adding an implicit "that we know of" to every "first".
Oral traditon is a kind of lossy recording on oddly volatile media.
There is merely a step away from arguing for 'wrongthink' as a policy. Ideas should be examined, thoroughly and openly. Staying away does the opposite to the goal you may want to achieve. Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
> Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse. But they can. Religion, racism, terrorism, fascism: they are all ideas that can corrupt, and some people are more susceptible to this than others. If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to tu…
> If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago
I think you've interpreted the article as some kind of prescriptive document modeled on slavery.
This isn't Business Insider. It's Aeon.
If anything the article comes across as critical of modern management by way of being too similar to Roman slave management.
But it's more interesting than that. It's a look at how Roman slavery was a very complex system, much different from the way we popularly imagine "Slavery" (with a capital "S")--AKA American chattel slavery.
I think that your revulsion is coming from a very beautiful place, and that you're a bit out of step here. We can rightly revile chattel slavery, and despise the thought of ancient slavery, and also be curious about it.