‘16. And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail.
‘17. And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for the horses, and for the flocks, and for the herds, and for the asses: and he fed them with bread in exchange for all their cattle for that year.
‘18. And when that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide from my lord, how that our money is all spent; and the herds of cattle are my lord’s; there is nought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands:
‘19. wherefore should we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, and that the land be not desolate.
‘20. So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine was sore upon them: and the land became Pharaoh’s.
‘21. And as for the people, he removed them to the cities from one end of the border of Egypt even to the other end thereof.
‘22. Only the land of the priests bought he not: for the priests had a portion from Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them; wherefore they sold not their land.
‘23. Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.
‘24. And it shall come to pass at the in-gatherings, that ye shall give a fifth unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones.
‘25. And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s servants.
‘26. And Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth; only the land of the priests alone became not Pharaoh’s.’
Previously Pharaoh, to exploit the labour of the people, had to compel them to work by force; but now, when the stores and the land were Pharaoh’s, he only had to guard those stores by force, and hunger enabled him to compel them to work for him.
The land is all Pharaoh’s and the stores (the part he collects) are always his, and so, instead of driving with the sword each man individually to work, it is only necessary to use force to guard the stores, and the people are enslaved not by the sword but by hunger.
In a year of famine all may be starved at Pharaoh’s will, and in a year of plenty those who owing to some mishap are short of grain can be starved.
And the second method of enslavement is instituted not directly by the sword, that is, not by the strong man driving the weaker man to work by threats of killing him, but by the oppressor, having taken the supplies and guarded them with the sword, compelling the weaker man to labour for his food.
Joseph says to the hungry: ‘I can starve you to death as I have the corn, but I spare you on condition that, for the grain I give you, you will do whatever I command.’
For the first method of enslavement the man in power needs only warriors constantly riding about among the people and, by threats of death, seeing that his orders are obeyed. For the first method the oppressor need only divide up with his warriors. But under the second method, besides warriors, the oppressor needs another kind of assistants to preserve the stores of grain and the land from the hungry people-he needs great and little Josephs, managers and distributors of the grain. And the strong man has to divide up with them, and to give Joseph a vesture of fine linen, a gold ring, and servants, and grain, and silver for his brethren and his relatives.
Besides. by the nature of the case, under the second method not only the managers and their relatives but all those who have stores of grain become sharers in the advantage of the violence used. As under the first method founded on sheer force, everyone who had arms became a participant in the violence employed, so under the second method based on hunger, all who have supplies share in the benefits of the oppression and lord it over those who have none.
For the oppressor the advantage of this method over the former is that, first and chiefly, he is no longer obliged to coerce the workers by force to do his will, but they come themselves and sell themselves to him; secondly, a smaller number escape his coercion. The only disadvantage of this method for the oppressor is that it obliges him to share with a larger number of people. The advantage of this method for the oppressed is that they are no longer subject to coarse violence, but are left to themselves and can always hope under fortunate conditions to pass over from the ranks of the oppressed to the ranks of the oppressors; the disadvantage for them is that they can never more escape from some measure of coercion.
This new method of enslavement generally comes into use together with the old method, and the strong man reduces the one and extends the other as may be required. But this method of enslavement still does not fully satisfy the strong man’s desire-to take as much as possible of the produce of their labour from the greatest number of workers and to enslave as great a number of people as possible-and does not keep pace with the increasing complexity of life’s conditions, and a still newer method of enslavement is devised. The new, and third, method is that of tribute.
This method like the second is based on hunger, but to the method of enslaving people by depriving them of bread is added that of depriving them also of other necessaries. The oppressor demands from the slaves such a quantity of monetary tokens, which he himself possesses, that to obtain them the slaves are obliged to sell not only more than the fifth of their store of grain that Joseph fixed, but also articles of prime necessity: meat, skins, wool, clothes, fuel, even buildings, and thus the oppressor always holds the slaves in subjection not only by hunger, but also by thirst, want, cold, and all other kinds of privation.
And a third form of slavery is organized-the monetary, which consists in the strong man saying to the weak one: I can do what I like with each of you separately, I can simply take a gun and shoot each of you, or I can kill you by taking the land that feeds you; I can, with the money you have to bring me, buy up all the grain that feeds you, and I can sell it to other people and starve you all at any moment, and I can take from you all that you have: cattle, dwellings, and clothes; but that is inconvenient and unpleasant for me, and therefore I allow you all to arrange your own work and your own production as you please-only bring me so many pieces of money, the demand for which I will assess either per head or according to the land you hold, or by the quantity of food and drink you have, or by your clothes, or your buildings.
Bring me these money tokens and arrange matters among yourselves as you please, but know that I shall defend and protect not widows, nor orphans, nor the sick, nor the old, nor those who have suffered from fires, but only the regularity of circulation of these money tokens. That man only will be justified before me and protected by me who regularly brings me the required number of money tokens I demand. But how he gets them is a matter of indifference to me.
And the strong man only issues these tokens as receipts for the fulfilment of his demands.
The second method of enslavement is that by taking a fifth part of the crops and laying up stores of grain, Pharaoh, besides personal enslavement by the sword, obtains in common with his assistants the possibility of ruling all the workers in times of famine and some of them whenever calamity befalls them.
The third method is, that Pharaoh demands of the workers more than would pay for the fifth of the crops which he formerly took from them, and with his assistants obtains a new means of ruling over the workmen not only in time off amine and casual misfortune but at all times. Under the second method the people kept some supplies of grain, which enabled them without surrendering themselves to slavery to bear small failures of harvest and casual mishaps, but under the third method, when the exactions are greater, their supplies of grain and all other supplies of prime necessities are taken from them and at the slightest mishap the worker, having no reserves of grain or other supplies which he could exchange for grain, has to go into slavery to those
