The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 4: Living with the Enemy

After security was institutionalized through group life the principal enemy ceased being the outside world. The only thing that could destroy these groups were their own failures to maintain unity. The enemy was not the lion, the tiger or the elephant. The enemy was envy, jealousy and coveting. These things would blow a group up.

Competition for sexual mates among all concerned was not a sufficient force to dissolve a group. The hominoids had already dealt with this concomitant of intensive sexual activity, in their biological evolution, each step of the way. It had to be something more powerful than that.

Let’s say it again: the answer is that surplus social product was dangerous to the health of all concerned hominoids and hominids. In fact, it still is the most explosive thing in human society. It’s like a powerful drug and it takes a lot of control to use it. For five million years people thought the best thing was just to say no!

It took me forty years to figure out that what was driving the expansion of the human cranial capacity was the critically important need not to produce surplus social product. It is this need that (1) underlies migration and it is this need which underlies the drive to spend more social time (2) doing non-productive things. Because we live in the Servitude Epoch this was hard to see. The one thing that characterizes all Stages of that Epoch {Slavery, Feudalism, Capitalism} is the drive to produce surplus value regardless of all other factors. The one thing that is so difficult for people today to get a handle on, is that maximizing production was an idea that never existed until the Chiefdom Stages (when it was in its incipient form) and until Slavery {Civilization} emerged some 6000 years ago.

Prior to the emergence of first Chiefdoms and then Slavery, the prime directive of the primitive communistic way of life of the hunting and gathering Bands and the Tribal Agriculturalists was to produce only primitive value! 

What does that mean? What’s the difference between primitive value and primitive surplus social product?

The Primitive Form of Value and Surplus

Let us review again what I discussed above with regard to the definition of primitive value. By primitive value in these studies I mean two things. The cost of maintaining the lives of these early people in the very rudimentary form of food, shelter, clothing, defense, etc. From day to day. - And, of course, in this way they could survive to reproduce sexually from generation to generation. I call that Value 1 in the formula we shall be using. The second kind of value is that which is invested in the production of the tools people use to make the first kind of value. I call this Value 2.  The Law of Fundamental Needs (reproducing life from day to day and generation to generation) among humans is satisfied in this new “cultural” way – i.e., the cultural production of value.) The cultural buffer (technology, social organization and ideology) between our species and nature is an entirely new phenomenon on the Earth.

Primitive surplus social product (which in strictly economic terms is also “proto-surplus value” - we shall see below what is meant by “surplus value” in modern economics) is simply that amount of product of hunting and gathering beyond what can be instantly shared and consumed. It is a category peculiar to the Band Stages.

As society becomes more complex - especially, in the Chiefdoms period and the succeeding Servitude Epoch - these terms and the formulae in which we insert them will evolve and transform, continuing as they do so to be critically important to understanding every aspect of modern production. But, in the beginning it is a childishly simple relationship.

To resolve the potential crisis of inequality, created when surplus social product is on hand, people needed bigger and better brains than those available to the australopithecines; these earliest people found migration into more hostile climates an effective way of dumping labor-time in the day to day production of Value 1 and Value 2. Thus, avoiding (putting off) the day of reckoning when surplus social product would be on hand no matter what! {The agricultural revolution when it finally occurs will feature the irreversible release of surplus social product, but that is long into the future.} In other words the australopithecines needed to take the enemy from within and put it outside of them once again, and one easy way of doing this was to move into more environmentally challenging regions, where increased amounts of social product are necessary rather than surplus.

People managed in this way, and in directing potential labor-time into other social activities, to avoid the irreversible release of surplus social product for about four million years. What was so dangerous about surplus social product?

Envy, jealousy, coveting. Especially for people with a brain too small to grasp the details of their behavior in any scientific way. What they knew was that the sharing cooperation they exhibited in food collecting and collective defense made them strong. Intraband strife over surplus undermined this cooperation because it negated sharing. It undermined collective defense too.

Sharing what you have instantly is the answer to avoiding the socially dissolutional tendencies of envy, jealousy and coveting. Sharing binds people together, therefore, and secures the production of Value 1 and Value 2. It is a centripetal process. It is the foundation of primitive social unity. But, it would be even better if excess social product didn’t even come into the picture of daily life at all, so that you didn’t have to face the question of how to share it.

The foundation of social dissolution on the other hand is the centrifugal process created by envy, jealousy and coveting.

People Achieve Unity and Affluence

As I indicated above, in addition to finding more challenging environments, people began to pour more effort into their social organizational component of culture. I alluded to this emphasis on social organization, and the idea system necessarily inherent in primitive kinship reckoning and increasingly complex sodality social structure, (as opposed to an emphasis on technology) because it shows us how “time” (that is to say, “social time”) was dumped (so to speak) in non-technological activities. In seeing this we can explain how something other than technological progress succeeded in diverting social time from becoming productive labor time and why therefore technological innovation was so slow for millions of years. That is thinking about and talking about social organization and creating ideas and categories of thought and indeed specialized kinship words are all things keeping people busy and not constantly scavenging (hunting and gathering) for food like most animals do. This attitude (lack of attention) toward tools is the exact opposite of the way contemporary capitalist modes of production accelerate innovation at an exponentially increasing rate – which you will come to understand in the section on “innovation” in Chapter 12 below.

After all, the technology available to Homo australopithecus was quite sufficient to produce the “fundamental needs” of group life. Any further creation of value has within it the potential of becoming “private” (individual or subgroup) ownership unequal between persons and/or proto-families and that would be a hidden invitation to violence and social dissolution. Remember, the underlying prime directive to produce what is needed and no more, has itself the underlying desire for unity rather than disunity. This is the hidden explanation for what drove selection for the doubling of the brain power of Homo. Increased brain power made increasing concentration on categories other than technology certain. Thus did Homo australopithecus give rise to Homo erectus.

Let’s say it again this way. It takes brains to 1) figure out how to organize society on the basis of kinship and to assign rights and responsibilities accordingly. It takes brains to (2) invent sodality structures (non-kinship categories that cut across kin lines such as men’s clubs and women’s clubs). It takes brains to come up with (3) a supernatural idea system of cognizing the real world. But, if you had (a) the brains to do these things and (b) spent much of your daily life thinking about and talking about these things rather than creating potential surplus, then this kind of primitive affluence would allow, and indeed promote, unity and the group would survive as disunity would disappear from the face of the Earth. (Note: we will define “affluence” scientifically and extensively below.) At least until long after you and yours were buried in the ground. Millions of years thereafter, in the case of the Homo australopithecus  populations!

- And, Homo erectus populations, with their much bigger brains, found a continuation of these patterns of diverting social time much to their advantage as well. The proof lies in the fact that the human brain continued to expand by vastly increasing in size. You will recall this further brain increase is on the order of ~500 cc (from ~1000 cc for H. erectus to ~1500 cc for H. sapiens.) The pattern of continuing to move into more challenging environments where social time spent as labor-time was necessary simply to provide the “fundamental needs” of group life (rather than the creation of what would have been surplus in the more bountiful environments from which they came - those needs more quickly and easily provided earlier in the tropical and subtropical zones of the original Eden.)

As these better socially organized - via kinship reckoning and sodalities - peoples, and their more sophisticated supernaturalism confronted the world, they found that by “moving-on” into new and more challenging environments that they were all busy; every day producing limited value, sharing it and just living the simple life. In this way they had the necessary but minimal amount of surplus social product on hand. In their minds they were affluent. No objective social basis existed for stealing. People covet what they see; not what they have never seen, don’t have and can’t have. The resulting permanent intra-society peace achieved becomes part of the reward one has for this simple way of life and a pillar of being affluent as defined here. In other words, these people are happy because they have the necessary things of daily life and that’s that.

However, dialectically there was in this surplus avoidance patterning an opposite beginning to emerge.

Note: Culture Contact

It is this simple fact that affluence is defined among primitive peoples as having that needed for daily life and nothing more based on what they know, which is another proof in its converse of the entire thesis presented herein. When a “superior” culture (invariably defined as a technologically more advanced culture) meets an “inferior“culture the latter often collapses altogether as we see time and time again with the impacting of Native American societies by incoming White society. The Russians had a similar history with the Eskimo and Herding peoples of their Far North and Siberia.

What we have here is the new fact that there “are” new things to covet. In this case the “inferior” culture people had no previous knowledge that these things existed and were obtainable. Over night their way of thinking about things was changed in a de facto revolutionary way simply via culture contact.

Still another Way of Spending Social Time

Along their palaeolithic way people also found that a good way to dump social time before it became labor time was in handicrafts. Making things. Making things again and again also means making some of them better and different; for new previously unthought-of of uses. Thus, handicrafts are inherently a kind of social time dumping that leads inexorably, if invisibly, to increasing technological sophistication. (A dialectical conundrum.)

Resistance is Futile.

Resistance to technological improvement becomes futile. - And, technological sophistication also becomes increasingly desirable as the challenge of new environments increases. As we have also seen this migration into new and harsher environments is also another way of saying social time dumping is transformed into productive social time without increasing surplus social product! Thus, you can see technological sophistication not only does not threaten constant social surplus product on hand but does so by transforming that “surplus” social product into “necessary” social product. So, technological sophistication is a concomitant of the territorial expansion of the human race. But, not its cause.

Again, these two “opposites” (to social time expenditure in ways calculated to avoid the production of surplus social product) were inherent in the very process of avoidance.

I am not illustrating this book so I will leave it to you to get pictures of Oldowan, Chellean, Acheulean, Levalloisian, Clactonian tools and techniques. I shall simply note that stone tools become increasingly sophisticated between five million and one million years ago. However, it didn’t require four million years to learn how to take all the surface off of a cobble or a flake of stone rather than just a few flake removals to get a cutting edge.

When it is all said and done, what is crystal clear is that people doubled their cubic centimeter cranial capacity in that four million years because of the importance of making culture work for them. That meant organizing their social relations to minimize friction internal to these primitive hunting and gathering Bands. To produce only what they needed (which is Value 1 and Value 2) and to do anything and everything to avoid the production of surplus. All the things I have mentioned above including and especially their “intellectualizing” about the “supernatural” world, then associating these “ideas” with the kinship organization of society honed their abstract thought skills. The better their ability to think abstractly, (combined with their sexually motivated group life and their ability to express their thoughts with precision due to speech), the better their selective advantage in the environments they confronted.

Every Sociocultural evolutionary stage has its own General Crisis driving it and in this case the general crisis is that created by the need to create daily needs collectively versus producing too much.

We can illustrate this australopithecine cultural mode of production in a formula:

The Australopithecines

l + t à V1, V2

     Produce enough 

          But no more          

l = human labor (which much later will become the category of labor-power)

t = technology (Oldowan stone tools)

V1 = cost of life (food, shelter, clothing, etc.)

V2 = cost of maintaining Oldowan technology.

__ = General Crisis

 

 

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The End (for now)

For our purposes it is time to wind down this discussion. In future years, I intend to elaborate different sections of this Handbook. For the moment suffice it to say that the Fundamentals of Historical Materialism have been presented to you to the best of my ability given the space constraints of a handbook.

 

You’re Tasks

            Propaganda, agitation and organization are the three magic bullets if you will, of the first phase to a revolutionary working class seizure of state power. This is your task. Never forget that in the capitalist countries revolution is now on the table - it is the order of the day. We have the technological basis to make both Socialism and Communism work, or in the latter case we soon will. The General Crisis of Capitalism has created the conditions which necessitate working class action everywhere in the world. Only after revolution can working class state power allow the successful construction of Socialism and Communism. It is the task of those of us who call ourselves Bolsheviks to proceed to the leadership of the class struggle everywhere, and to take it in the directions outlined above. Namely, the new Bolshevik Party in the USA our Communist Foundation Party USA. Never forget that we are American Leninists. We know we are right. We know we are going to win and by taking command now we will be privileged to make the World know it too. Thus we return to Epilogue as Prologue where we began this book - we have

come Full Circle. Good Luck.

 

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Chart of Sociocultural Evolutionary Stages

 

(Read this chart from bottom to top which is to say from the oldest to the most recent category.)

 

Second Egalitarian Epoch   

Star Trek Stage

Communist Stage

 

Second Transitional Period

Advanced Socialism Stage

Stalinist Socialism Stage

 

Servitude Epoch

Capitalist Stage

Feudal Stage

Slave Stage

 

First Transitional Period

Stage of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms

Stage of Simple Chiefdoms

 

First Egalitarian Epoch

(Epoch of Primitive Communism)

Stage of Tribal Agriculture

Stage of Advanced Homo sapiens Hunting and Gathering

Stage of Homo erectus Hunting and Gathering

Stage of Home australopithecus Hunting and Gathering

Biographical Data

Jason W. Smith was graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology from California State University Los Angeles, in 1968. He received the Ph.D. from the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Department of Archaeology at the University of Calgary in 1974. He authored his first textbook Foundations of Archaeology, in 1976 (Jason W. Smith, Glencoe Press, Beverly Hills, 568 pp. see The Romantic Years) and his most recent in 1999, New Perspectives in Physics

The author’s autobiographical books are entitled Idaho Smith’s Search for the Foundation in eight volumes five of which have been published and are available in university libraries across the US and Canada, and from Foundation Press. For autographed copies contact IdahoSmith@hotmail.com.