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It is interesting to note the flip side of that particular coin, and ask, “What did the European nobility understand about hunting, that made them reserve it unto themselves alone…?” That is, hunting was a privilege for the elite; this tells us something about hunting vs. other modes of producing food, and what it tells us appears to converge with the overall “general thesis” of neoprimitivism.

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Leisure can be defined as time that is not spent in subsistence or maintenance activities. One is tempted to include sleep as a maintenance activity, but apparently that too has been eaten into by the demands of the economic culture, to the point where the average American runs a constant sleep deficit of 1 - 2 hours per 24 hour cycle.

Now we take a group of humans and total up the amount of time they need to provide for their subsistence and maintenance, and the remaining person/hours are available to allocate as leisure.

What Jason and others seem to be saying here is that HG socieities allocate that leisure more or less equally: each person works 2- 4 hours a day at subsistence, and has the balance of their non-maintenance time available for leisure. Whereas in agricultural societies, the total time required for subsistance increases, reducing the aggregate amount of time remaining. Then elites usurp this remainder, enabling them to create a leisure-class life for themselves at the expense of virtual or actual slavery for everyone else. (I am wondering if perhaps the usurpation of free time follows from the fact that agriculture renders free time more scarce: and the fact of scarcity is what attracts the parasites and hoarders.)

This line of thinking is going in a very interesting direction.

Consider humans as inhabiting space-time. Where both space and time are abundant, there is no basis for parasitic forms of social organization: those whose freedom or livelihood are threatened with usurpation can simply move to another part of the forest.

Agriculture produces a “space shortage” by way of constraints on land that can be cultivated, and a “time shortage” by way of increasd time required to produce subsistence.

From the “space shortage” it would seem that we end up with rents, defined generically as payment for the ability to occupy a given set of spatial coordinates.

The “time shortage” leads to “time-hoarding” by elites, the disproportionate disparity in leisure across economic classes (BTW, I am not a marxist).

Thus it would seem that agriculture produces only the appearance of a surplus (by way of large harvests being brought in, and large numbers of animals in livestock pens; in both cases exceeding the “counting” function of the brain and being lumped together as “large number” or “many”), and in actuality produces scarcities plural. And from those scarcities comes the basis of time and space hoarding that lead to rents and wage slavery etc.

Hmm. I don’t have a conclusion here. But this is very interesting stuff, and I say that from the perspective of an eco-industrial in a subculture of eco-industrials, for whom the term “tool maker” (not just “tool user” as used in previous Theses) is high praise and a well-equipped workshop is home.

Veblen states that one of the two requirements for the emergence of a leisure class is “(2) subsistence must be obtainable of sufficiently easy terms to admit of the exemption of a considerable portion of the community from steady application to a routine labor.”

I’m probably missing something major, but if agriculture is, in fact, a grossly inefficient and difficult means of producing subsistence, why is it that agricultural societies have many, many more members of a “leisure class” than the HG societies?

Shouln’t that be lower - less food per labor input?