The Workers and the Tombs of the Ancient Dead

or: 3000 year old labor strikes and what it means to be free

In my dream last night I was in a horror movie western where I was an outlaw who stumbled upon an abandoned gold mine. Some prospectors came and we tried to co-exist, but it was a hard winter and they were planning to eat us—they’d built a pit fire to lower us into alive.

I bit my tongue hard in my sleep by accident and woke up into a better world than that. In my real life, the people who want to kill me and my friends in order to hoard wealth are more subtle about it, or at least I’ve got more friends who are fighting alongside me. In real life, I’m a bit more free.

Freedom exists on a spectrum. It’s not a binary thing.

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Last week I researched the first labor strike in known history. The tomb builders living in a town called Deir el-Medina in Egypt went on strike on November 14th, 1152 BCE. Three thousand, one hundred, and seventy-eight years ago. And their strike looked an awful lot like ours today. They set down their tools and staged sit-ins, they blocked roads, they marched, they engaged in workplace sabotage. They wrote letters to the authorities requesting a redress of grievances. They stole from work. They did everything that we do today.

We know about the strike of Deir el-Medina because they had scribes who tracked worker attendance. Some of the earliest writing in history was timesheets for workers, so we know that workers called off work because of scorpion stings and sore limbs and we know that workers called off work because they didn’t feel like going or they wanted to build things for their families that day instead of for the pharaohs.

I grew up pretty sure that the people who built the pyramids were enslaved, but that isn’t true. Even across the roughly three thousand year history of “ancient” Egypt, we have no evidence that any of the workers who built tombs for the Pharaohs were enslaved. We know that the later workers, like the striking workers of Deir el-Medina, were wage workers and we know that the pyramids (a thousand years earlier) were built by a combination of skilled waged laborers and rotating corvée laborers. These workers were treated with respect and worked hard and died young and were buried with more dignity and grave goods than others of their social station. Corvée labor is labor-as-tax, and throughout much of the ancient world the infrastructure was built by citizens and residents who performed work for the state as part of their taxes.

That labor is rarely referred to as “forced,” despite it being compelled.

Wage labor is rarely referred to as forced labor either. Even though, time and time again in my reading, I run across colonial rulers instituting “land taxes” on their subjects that compel subsistence farmers into the labor market. This became particularly common during the industrial era, when rulers (democratic or not) wanted more people to live in cities and work in factories. Land taxes were levied on tiny land holdings so that people couldn’t exist outside the market economy.

There was slavery in Ancient Egypt. It wasn’t to nearly at the same scale as it was in Ancient Greece or especially Ancient Rome (which was a slave society that conquered the world in large part to find more people to enslave to fuel the economy in the colonial core), but there were people who owned people in Ancient Egypt. When there are people who are outright owned, it’s easy to see corvée labor as “free” or even “volunteer” in comparison. The builders at Deir el-Medina, of course, were freer still.

In some ways, they seem freer that we are today. I don’t know many people who can call out of work because they’d rather do something else.

But what we call their “wages” might be better understood as “rations.” This was hundreds of years before the advent of currency, and workers were paid in grain, vegetables and fish. They were paid in clay for their pots and oil for their lamps. They were paid in subsistence. Most of them worked second jobs, making grave goods to sell on the side in nearby Thebes (not the Greek Thebes, but the Egyptian one).

They only struck in response to wage theft—a crime all too common today.

In a strange way, being paid in rations almost feels more honest. These were some of the highest-paid and highest-regarded skilled workers of their era, the ones who were trusted to work (assembly-line style) to build, decorate, and fill the tombs of the most powerful rulers of the country. And they were paid “you have the things you need to stay alive.”

These days, people are fighting tooth and nail for a living wage, for an amount of money that prevents you from falling beneath the waves. Most people aren’t “getting ahead.” Most people aren’t “building wealth” except perhaps for retirement, to have the means to live past when their bodies won’t sustain them working any longer. Most people are trying to pay off debt. The poorest live outside. The luckier live in houses owned by landlords. Luckier still, and your house is owned by the bank until you’re just about to retire. Owning your house outright is seen as a marker of incredible wealth. Owning the place you live. This shouldn’t be so high of a bar.

I’m convinced that the line between freedom and unfreedom is more slippery and vague than we think.

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In Ancient Egypt, some people sold themselves (and, because it was an inheritable trait, their children) into slavery in order to avoid crushing poverty. I’ve read about this happening in Ancient Greece as well, and usually it’s presented as an almost heartwarming practice. After all, Greek slavery couldn’t be that bad if people chose it of their own free will, is the subtext. In the most apologetic texts, it’s presented almost like an unpaid internship. It’s true that sometimes, in some places, selling yourself into slavery was a path to a limited amount of social mobility.

In the most extreme case I’ve read about, it seems as though people in Ancient Egypt sometimes paid a monthly fee in order to be accepted as temple slaves, presumably working a second job in order to pay for the opportunity to work unpaid and unfree for this or that temple. It’s likely that they did this to avoid “voluntary” corvée labor, which was more dangerous and miserable still.

In America, of course, people work job after job to avoid falling into desperation that might lead to a life of crime, and we’ve got a whole amendment to our constitution that specifically permits forcing people caught doing crime to perform unpaid labor.

The more I read about money and labor in the ancient past, the more I’m convinced that our modern understanding of work being something that grants “economic freedom” is a blip, maybe even an aberration. It seems like most people in the “civilized” world in history have simply sought some method of staying alive, and living in the patronage of the powerful has always been an option many of them have chosen (or been forced into). You either are powerful yourself or you find yourself someone powerful to keep you safe and fed.

We see remnants of this today. The priesthood, the military. Cults. Many people, understandably, are happy to be less responsible for themselves and their needs and their decisions. Not because they are weak-minded, not because they’re not responsible people, but because the civilized world seems to have been built on unfreedom, on forcing people into economic dependency.

For most of us, those who don’t work for themselves or in cooperative environments, our workplaces are little tyrannies with strict hierarchies. It’s good that we can leave those jobs and be “free” at home after hours (excepting the unfreedom put upon the home sphere by forces like patriarchy), but it’s strange that we accept our own complete lack of agency in the workforce.

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In the eighteenth century in England, there was a fad for the rich to keep ornamental hermits. There was no better display of wealth than to feed, clothe, and house a man with a long beard and conical hat who could live in your garden and entertain your guests.

The first time I read about them, I was a broke author living in a minivan and I thought to myself “I would sign up to do that.”

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The early labor movement in the United States came out of the wake of abolition, and many of those labor activists saw themselves in the same tradition as those abolitionists. Lucy Parsons, who was herself born enslaved in the more traditional way, wrote often about how “wage slavery” had replaced chattel slavery. Some wealthy Northern abolitionists had been upfront about how their problem with slavery was that it was ill-suited for industrial production and that it was cheaper to pay people wages than to own them and be responsible for their well-being.

I don’t think it is useful for us anticapitalists to go back to framing wage labor as “wage slavery,” because the horrors of American racialized chattel slavery should never be downplayed. In a world with a history full of slavery—and various forms of being unfree—American racialized chattel slavery was a unique evil.

I do think it’s important that we can quit our jobs, that we can look for other ones. It’s part of why a phrase like “wage slavery” rings hollow to me. Actual slavery continues, all over the world, and it’s not a word I’m interested in watering down.

But wage labor is still compelled labor. We need our rations in order to survive. I spent my twenties attempting to walk away from money, and I found a temporary freedom by living in abandoned buildings and eating trash. It wasn’t sustainable. My health plan was “don’t get sick,” and there was no way I would have been able to start a family. I relied heavily on two safety nets, staying for extended periods with other anarchists who did work jobs and I was also aware that I could rely on my family too, all of whom worked. I don’t think I would have been half as adventurous without having both of those options.

Freedom is a spectrum, or it’s a complicated multi-dimensional chart with all sorts of positions that are neither free nor fully unfree. We need to understand that we are in many ways unfree. That we are still, essentially, being paid rations. You do not get rich, not plutocrat rich, by working for a wage. No matter the wage, no matter the rations they allot to you. We could work our entire lives for one hundred times the rations of our peers and we still wouldn’t become billionaires. You only become a billionaire by extracting the wealth produced by other people, by making other people less free.

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I’d rather not understand freedom as a static condition at all. Freedom isn’t a lack of constraints, it’s something we give to one another. Freedom is a relationship between people. (I got that idea from my friend Ben who probably got it from like, Kropotkin or some other old dead anarchist.) We offer one another freedom by taking care of one another. My anarchist friends offered me freedom when they gave me a place to stay, and now I do the same for others.

We offer one another freedom when we learn to deescalate conflict with one another, when we learn to accept people in all their diversity, when we learn to accommodate for each other’s needs. When I take care of myself as best as I am able to, I give others around me more freedom. When others take care of me, they offer it back.

In some ways, the plutocrats of the world are the least free, because they never get to interact with the people around them as peers.

I’m not trying to offer them pity. Their way of life needs to be destroyed if any of the rest of us have any chance of a livable world, let alone something akin to real freedom.

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It’s nice to remember, though, that labor action and collective bargaining is as old as wage labor (and that wage theft is as old as wages).

When the Egyptian state began to falter (as it has over and over again during its 5000 years of history, since Egypt is the oldest country in the world), the same striking workers at Deir el-Medina began to coordinate with armed outsiders to loot the tombs. It’s part of why the grave robbers from Europe mostly found empty burial sites when they started their systemic robbery of Egypt—the people of Egypt, the workers, had already taken back their own buried wealth thousands of years earlier.

(I’d love to paint that part all neat and rosy, but best as I can tell the workers were coordinating with corrupt aspects of the government to do that looting. I’m not studied enough to tell you whether or not that wealth found its way to the working people of Egypt, only that it was taken back from the dead monarchs by their own people not too long after it was buried.)

I don’t mind the fact that freedom exists on a spectrum (or a field). I don’t mind that it’s a fight we’ve always been fighting and will always fight. We may never win, not completely, not permanently, but we’ll never lose either. Because it’s by fighting that we build those relationships of freedom. It’s by fighting that we win.