fits.

Communities of businessmen pooled their profits, extended their markets,
built fleets, enlarged cities. Through joint action they engaged in
plundering expeditions and collected tribute from their victims.
Organized fabrication turned out the goods and services which were
marketed for profits. The resulting wealth enabled the successful
businessmen to build houses, stock them with consumer goods and art
treasures, hire servants, live sumptuously. Productivity, wealth,
prosperity filled their honey pot to overflowing.

Honey pots provide the "good things" of life for their owners. They also
tempt outsiders. Honey-pot owners fear pilfering by their servants; fear
sponging by their relatives, friends, neighbors; fear robbers and
kidnappers; fear migrating hordes on the lookout for plunder. Defense is
a necessary aspect of each rich household, neighborhood, city, nation,
empire, civilization.

The sequence from productivity, through prosperity, wealth accumulation,
abundance and the measures needed to defend and safeguard the
accumulations, leads to an affluent community or society. It also calls
into being new and distinctive class forces.

I. The business class (hucksters and profiteers), a self-seeking,
aggressive group of adventurers, promoters and
organizers of bourgeois society to whom _profit_ comes
first. At one or another stage in the life cycle of every
civilization aggressive bourgeois greed for wealth and
power makes itself felt. Their role in western civilization
has been outstanding. The business class through
its control of the productive apparatus and the sources
of credit has been able to surround itself with subordinates,
scientists and other experts, apologists, strong-arm
squads (police and military), spies and assassins.

II. A middle class, made up of business class subordinates
plus self employed tradesmen, professionals, independent
farmers and craftsmen.

III. A class of blue collared and white collared producers of
goods and services who hold their jobs during good
behavior. When not needed or wanted they are pushed
into the ranks of the partially or wholly unemployed.
Most civilizations have added to the working force serfs,
peons and/or chattel slaves.

IV. A class of hangers on--economic parasites--who consume
more than they produce. The payment of unearned income
to property holders and the creation of monopo