"From egalitarianism to kleptocracy"

There's a fine Chapter in Guns, Germs And Steel which sketches out how and why we developed from smaller bands of hunter-gatherers, via tribes and chiefdoms to large, modern states. Everybody will have his own thoughts on the hows and whys, but his are more coherent than most, to pick a few key paragraphs:

Over the past 13,000 years, the predominant trend in human society has been the replacement of smaller, less complex units by larger, more complex ones... By now, it should be obvious that chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed non-egalitarian societies [what to do with the surplus they generate]. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis [his examples are irrigation ditches, in the modern context this is motorways, sewers, the national grid etc]. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes.

These noble and selfish functions are inextricably linked, although some governments emphasise much more of one function that of the other. The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesman, between a robber baron and a public benefactor, is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute [his term for rents and taxes] extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.

We consider President Mobutu of Zaire a kleptocrat because he keeps too much tribute (the equivalent of billions of dollars) and redistributes too little (no functioning telephone system in Zaire). We consider George Washington a statesman because he spent tax money on widely admired programs and did not enrich himself as president. Nevertheless, George Washington was born into wealth, which is much more unequally distributed in the United States than in New Guinea.

For any ranked society, whether chiefdom or state, one has this to ask: why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question, raised by political theorists from Plato to Marx, is raised anew by voters in every modern election...

What should an elite do to gain popular support while still maintaining a more comfortable lifestyle than commoners? Kleptocrats throughout the ages have resorted to a mixture of four solutions:

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite. That's much easier in these days of high-tech weaponry, produced only in industrial plants and easily monopolized by an elite, than in ancient times of spears and clubs easily made at home.

2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways. The principle was as valid for Hawaiian chiefs as it is for American politicians today.

3. Use monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. This is potentially a big and under-appreciated advantage of centralized societies over non-centralized ones... Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death [gives examples] Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and contributed to the acceptance of of centralized authority as tribal societies grew larger.

4. The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy. Bands and tribes already had supernatural beliefs, just as do modern established religions. But the supernatural beliefs of bands and tribes did not serve to justify central authority, justify transfer of wealth, or maintain peace between unrelated individuals. When supernatural beliefs became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion [For these purposes, Nazism in Germany or Communism in the USSR were religions in exactly the same way as Christianity or Islam were to mediæval states - most Islamic states are still mediæval for these purposes]

Other points that he makes is that hunter-gatherer tribes have no concept of land ownership or rents; or that more complex societies enable more wealth to be created, partly because of 3. above, but also because more complex societies with more people allow more specialisation and more complex societies with more people need to form themselves into states, it's all very chicken-and-egg.
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What he doesn't say expressly, so I'll say it myself, is that states and land ownership go hand in hand; economies organised within the framework of states tend to create a bigger surplus than smaller, less organised ones (and bureaucracies and national armies are only affordable IF the underlying economy produces a surplus); and to the extent that the surplus is not collected in (public) taxes, it is collected in (private) rents instead.

Perhaps this is how the misunderstanding arose, the entirely erroneous belief that the land 'owners' themselves created and hence deserve to collect privately such a large part of the surplus? It is of course the concept of 'exclusive possession of land under the protective hand of the state or society as a whole' which is important and not land 'ownership' in the modern sense; and it is certainly not the actual individuals benefitting from such exclusive possession from time to time who matter. If those particular individuals hadn't benefitted, then somebody else, somebody who lost out would have benefitted.

This overlaps with 4. above, of course. In the UK, land owners are afforded semi-divine status, the typical tourist guide for a country house or castle will say, in suitably reverent and hushed tones that "The land has been in the family for ... generations" as if somehow the longer that a family has been collecting rents from the same location makes them higher beings than the grubby factory owner or film star who has snapped up a few acres with his own hard earned money and built his own castle, or the grubby investment fund which buys up land and buildings, or Heaven forfend, builds new buildings.

And in the UK context, he misses off method 5.

In some states they have "bread and circuses" but in a Home-Owner-Ist society, all the landed kleptocracy needs to do to co-opt the support of the masses is to generously allow a majority of them to buy tiny plots of land at inflated prices and then to trick them into believing that they too belong to The Hallowed Land Owning Class, all of which merely shoves the burden elsewhere - it pits owner-occupiers against tenants and would be first time buyer (i.e. NIMBYism) and in any event, most owner-occupiers are being robbed of far more via their taxes and the inflated land prices they have to pay off than they can ever earn back as rent.