The Original Serfdom
For most of history, work was drudgery: backbreaking, unchanging, inescapable. Nearly all were consigned to hard agricultural labor: to eking out a subsistence from the stingy soil. This was a precarious existence: always only a couple bad harvests away from death by malnutrition.

Work was backbreaking because technological progress was extremely slow, which meant scant few labor-saving devices and techniques. This lack of innovation is what made the work unchanging and inescapable. Providing for the most basic needs of life demanded nearly all human effort. People could not afford to engage in other kinds of work for less urgent ends, lest they succumb to hunger and the elements.

This stagnation was the result of deficient customs of morality and justice. Technological advancement requires saving and investment: the turning of resources away from consumption and toward production. But significant saving was made impractical by the insecurity of property rights. Any conspicuous "surplus" was likely to be seized, either by egalitarian neighbors or elite potentates: these being the archaic "Left" and "Right" wings of humanity that have forever preyed on and weighed down human potential.