I understand the general Marxist theory about why class society arose, there was surplus production and that lead to the institution of private property and the rest follows.
All of that makes sense on a high level but what exactly happened on an individual human level? Conceivably those early civilizations could have elected to go for a more equitable and democratic distribution of the surplus value even if the result would probably not be 100% equitable and would result in some poverty due to material constraints at the time. How do you explain the first appearance of private property and class society on an individual level without delving into some evopsych nonsense about evolutionary instincts or whatever?
All societies are capable of producing surpluses of use values. Some societies exchange surplus use values(at first as gifts, later as gifts expecting gifts of similar quantity or quality back.).
From the regular exchange of gifts arises the commodity form and hence commodity-value and exchange-value. From the emergence of the commodity form, there arises the possibility of creating a use-value for the sole purpose of exchanging it with someone else’s; i.e. commodity production and circulation arises.
Consequently, one begins to look at a big pile of rocks, or a mammoth with impressive antlers, and see not use-value (tools, meat, artistic material), but exchange-value, how many things (including favours/debts from one’s fellow people) one could exchange it for. This spurs the incentive to figure out how to produce more commodities for exchange faster, but in the palaeolithic and mesolithic these tendencies are very much marginal—in earliest periods, like pre-100,000bc, either non-existent or undetectable—with the main things exchanged being particularly fancy or useful stones for toolmaking.
Why is exchange marginal in these early periods, and why does the commodity not rule society? Because there’s less people, and these people are more mobile. If a foraging band needs stone, in most cases they go set up camp by the stone and get some. In later periods (post100,000bc-ish) there might be people who have “home bases” they return to, store stuff at, trade from, and defend territorially, but in these earlier periods the evidence shows a people that had absolutely no permanent settlements, little to trade, and no way to accumulate anything but people’s favours/debts—if they can even be called “debts” in a period before there is a state to enforce payment.
Accumulation of “debt” by giving gifts, feasts, etc, doesnt seem to persist beyond a person’s lifetime. If Bob was cool and always gave you nice stuff you might feel indebted to him if he asks a favour, but his son won’t inherit anything, largely because there’s no propertt to inherit. If the son is a nice guy, one might still help him out in memory of his father, but if he’s a jackass there’s no cops forcing you to pay “inherited debt.” At worst, if you’re the only one who thinks Bob jr sucks, you might have to go find some other forager band to join.
How does this so-called “primitive” communism collapse? With the increase of human populations over the later palaeolithic and mesolithic, and their related accumulation of knowledge, intensive rather than extensive foraging develops. People forage more intensely over a smaller area, and develop more territorialness over their area. Consequently now if one wants a specific type of stone it may not be possible to just go get it unless its quite nearby. Instead one will need to exchange something else for it. And with a base camp, it becomes possible to accumulate a larger supply of goods. But there is still little to accumulate besides favours.
With the emergence of the holocene, these tendencies are supercharged; production and population increases a lot in the milder holocene climate as regular seasons begin. In the levant, the Natufian archaeological culture developed full time sedentism, based still on hunting and gathering, which eroded its own basis for existence within a few thousand years. Facing the decline in local plants and animals populations, people began to domesticate them, at first haltingly and then more quickly, leading to the neolithic.
With full time sedentism, exchange becomes even more important, and with the domestication (enslavement) of animals, a form of moveable, accumulable, heritable, property emerges. This private wealth challenges the public, eventually indebts more and more people to itself and begins to establish even larger settlements. In mesopotamia, the earliest and largest emerged, first with the protocities of the ubaid period and then with the full urbanism, writing, etc, of Uruk.
With the emergence of Uruk and its expansion, surrounding societies are pushed towards mimicking Uruk (and later Akkad, Babylon, etc) in the same ways those in the imperial periphery are pushed today: on the one hand, by their own elite made fabulously wealthy by trade centralise power for their own benefit; and on the other hand defense against Uruk and other protocities requires such centralisation. Much like the USSR couldnt simply choose to move to full communism under siege, the primitive communists could not maintain their communism under assault by Uruk.
After a few thousand years of regularised commodity production and exchange, like the mass production of textiles by the temples slaves for export to oman and the indus in exchange for copper, money emerges a few hundred years BCE more firmly establishing and expanding commodity exchange.
Very interesting. Do you have any recommended reading or other material on this topic?
On the commodity and its nefarious effects its all chapter 1-3 of capital as you know, but in case anyone else reading doesnt thought i’d mention it anyway. Ime most scholars of pre/history do not have any real understanding of the commodity and its effects, which distorts their views of how markets and such work, so capital is really essential here for examining how commodities emerge and alter social relations. The idea that the revolution must become global or capitalism will return is present in many of marx’s writings, but imo he states it most clearly and succintly in “The Revolutionary Movement” (Jan1 1849).
In terms the development of prehistoric societies, Friedman and Rowlands (eds.) The Evolution of Social Systems has lots of stuff on the development of class society. Particularly from the essays by Kajsa Eckholm (“External Exchange and the Transformation of Central African Social Systems”), P. Bonte (“Non-Stratified Social Formations Among Pastoral Nomads”), and Friedman & Rowlands (“Notes Towards and Epigenetic Model of the Evolution of Civilisation”). The latter two construct useful models of the development, but I disagree with some aspects of both and their model doesnt examine primitive communism and its demise.
Another good work on the development of ancient empires is Mogens Trolle Larsen (ed.) Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, especially the essays by Eisenstadt (“Observations and Queries about Sociological Aspects of Imperialism in the Ancient World”), Eckholm and Friedman (““Capital,” Imperialism, and Exploitation in Ancient World Systems”), Larsen (“The Tradition of Empire in Mesopotamia”), and Susan Frankenstein (“The Phoenicians in the Far West: A Function of Neo-Assyrian Imperialism”).
Stuff by indigenous folks like Forbes Columbus and Other Cannibals or Kayanesenh Paul Williams Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace have also influenced my analysis a lot, seeing how native folks being invaded by commodityproducers understand and understood it in the Americas provides useful questions and frameworks for examining those processes in prehistory.
For instance, the Phoenicians, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, and Romans all used booze in the same way (i.e. to cheat natives by getting them drunk). Nothing is written from the native gaul, briton, berber, etc, perspective on this, or even about it at all (other than greeks glorying in profit and laughing at the drunkard barbarians getting cheated). But by examining whats happened in other native societies colonisers have dumped booze on, imo we can begin to understand the likely effects the wine had on northern europeans societies (and archaeologically, we see evidence of increased violence and patriarchal structures).
Lastly in terms of concrete historical and prehistorical evidence, i’m just about finished (~1930/2000 pages) Cambridge World Prehistory (absurdly dry reading). Before that i read a few more regional prehistory books (oxford prehistory of the near east, Cunliffe’s facing the ocean, Broodbank’s Making the Middle Sea, and a few whose titles i’ve forgotten that covered a bit of the emergence of “civilisation” in China, Peru, and Mexico, and lots about Rome’s relationship with “barbarians”.
In terms of more recent history, my curiosity about the origins and functioning of colonialism and imperialism really started reading Walker’s The Conquest of Ainu Land: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800. I was amazed how similar the methods of even the early shogunate were to Britain and France’s methods in Canada. Since then ive read stuff like One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark and From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands, c.1493-1820, Peasants, merchants, and markets : inland trade in medieval England, 1150-1350, etc, to get as concrete a view of these processes as I could, and I sorta just slowly worked back from there towards prehistory, trying to figure out when/how the processes started.
And all that reading has really led me back to marx’s description in ch1-3 of the emergence of commodities, and how class society starts from there. It lines up, at least imo from what ive read, quite well with the actual prehistorical evidence—astounding when you think how much less research on the period he had access to.
Great, thanks so much! Respect for working through some less glamorous material. I believe that a lot of the sexy revolutionary theory has been worked out already, and that the intellectual work that really needs doing (besides, of course, practical organizing and agitation) is the less sexy empirical analysis and extending the historical understanding for which Marx only laid the foundation. There are a lot of interesting threads that should be pulled, like this question on class society, but I also would like one day to read more on the Christianization of Europe and indeed the world, and how that interacted with the development of capitalism via the suppression of paganism etc.
I have one minor hesitance, not to say a challenge, but a nagging question impelling me to learn more —
Your description of the commodity seems a little anachronistic, doesn’t it? Certainly commodities existed incidentally in precapitalist societies, and so did money. But it was not predominating production until the capitalist era; Marx writes about this in several places, which I can dig up if you would like. Money, too, was not money in its fully developed capitalist form, until the capitalist era. For example, money could not represent abstract labor until the commodity figures as the general form of the product of labor, which doesn’t happen until capitalism; money also would need to be generally exchangeable for any commodity whatsoever, but I thought that money was limited to a unit of account, accounting for unpaid taxes, in some of these ancient societies? not generally used for exchange of any two commodities?
Thanks! Yeah the more I read Marx the more all the more theoretical stuff seems settled to me. Europe’s christianization is a really interesting topic imo, though I’m more familiar with things on the christian side of the border. There’s a lotta simularities in early christianity to other revolutionary movements (including its eventual co-optation, and even the posthumous co-optation of “anti-revisionist” priests and monks who opposed e.g. the increasing wealth of the church
No need to dig up the Marx quotes
On commodities, I thought I made it explicit but I might have been unclear: i am not saying there was predominant commodities(either in the sense of most goods being produced as commodities or in the sense of commodities dominating people) in the mesolithic or palaeolithic. I am saying the commodity-form emerges in these periods, but stays marginal.
By around the early-mid second milleniumBC, i would describe these societies as being dominated by commodities’ circulation and production, including for social necessities (most notably producing textiles to exchange for copper, tin, slaves, and wood). There is no money at this point, and most of the necessities of life (food, clothes) are still locally produced as use-values. But commodity production and exchange play a large role in determining where labour surplus to subsistence is directed. These exchanges are framed in texts as generous gifts; in reality the giftgiver expects something back of similar value and might invade if insufficiently pleased.
Those “money” tokens are actually what I had in mind when saying most scholars of the period (bronze and early iron ages) dont understand the commodity and its effects. I do not think they can be called “money”. They were, as far as we can tell, non-exchangeable, and not even used as money of account, let alone as physical money. Rather than using them to measure value, they were used to represent specific quantities of use-values. Standardised ingots of metal are getting close to being used as a universal commodity at this point, but nothing has been formally baptised money. Money arises near the beginning of the classical period in western anatolia (lydia iirc but dont quote me on that) and spreads around the eastern mediterranean from there.
The classical period and rome (until the collapse of its monetary economy in the 3rd and 4th centuries) i would be comfortable describing as capitalist with generalised commodity production: land was alienable, everything (even food by non-peasants) was produced for exchange, everything was saleable for money. After rome’s collapse, it took a few hundred years for a similarly commodity and money focusses society to emerge in the west (the most successful being England under Alfred and Edward, which had money-rents and kicked people off their land if they couldnt pay leading to re-concentration of wealth).