The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 6: The Third Band Stage

The archaic human populations we call Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens or modern people with roughly 1500 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity by one million years ago. All of the erectus populations made this journey. There was no fantasy-land separation of the grades of humanity with some pockets left behind. Culture was always the factor being selected for. Technical competence and social organizational and ideological sophistication were the universals responsible for nature acting in favor of the increasing cranial capacity. That’s the end of that story.

Broad-spectrum Wild Resource Exploitation is a Revolution

Triggering a new General Crisis

What is new and revolutionary to understand is that these Homo sapiens populations faced the crisis of broad-spectrum wild resource exploitation for the first time. The ability to exploit virtually every living animal and plant resource was at hand.

Why was this a crisis?

Because such exploitative ability has within it the assurance that surplus social product is increasingly likely as an outcome - exactly the opposite of what all this social time expenditure of millions of years was about. By dumping social time in the ways we have just discussed, primitive people managed to stave off the terminal deepening of the crisis of increased competence in production (too much on hand) until now - now the “potential” of nearly unlimited surplus social product on hand could no longer be deferred. In other words, the broad-spectrum wild resource revolution which had been inherent abstractly, was now at the door. It was the enemy at the gate and the ways of a million years or more would no longer suffice to ameliorate the outcome. Every step they would now take to delay the inevitability of surplus social product on hand instead made having it on hand the immediate and irreversible result. A true dialectical irony.

The archaeological evidence is universally in line with this interpretation and compellingly conclusive in this regard. We see all over the Old World from seaside camp villages on the French Riviera {c. 400,000 BP} to  grassland burning South African bands {c. 100,000 BP;} to the Chinese of Choukoutien {500,000 to 100,000 BP} that people had learned a very great deal about their environments and had started controlling them in a variety of ways. Not the least of the results of that control was the ability to spend long periods of time in one place. - And, to produce quite sufficient social product with a relative minimum of labor input. Social affluence now achieved with an absolute minimum of labor input.

The classical work on this “Original Affluent Society” is published as the first paper in the book Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Sahlins.(the original edition, was published in 1974 by Tavistock, London, and is available in all libraries of tertiary institutions; a new 2004 edition is available from Routledge, London, 348pp.) Those of you seriously interested in Anthropological Economics in the cross-cultural comparative sense, are urged to study that text.

These Hunter/Gatherers could work less hours and do other more creative things. But, although the reduced labor-time input into production could keep the output to just Value – creative activity also led to more knowledge about the world - which implied the ability to produce even more social product. An excellent example of an emerging dialectical opposite.

The First proto-Commoditized Labor-Power

Occurs Among Homo sapiens Advanced Hunter-Gatherer Tribes

Often these larger kin units engaged in group production, where the concrete laboring activities of the individual were de facto abstracted, through joint communal effort. The cliff-jumping of herds; netting of migrating fish; the planned burning of grasslands to encourage the growing of certain nut trees, are examples of “pooling” labor-power. Even though these pooled labor-power categories were not governed by the modern “homogenizer” of labor power - the factory clock - we can see that labor-power has been placed in a clearly “proto” position with regard to this kind of homogenized labor-power production for there is a certain amount of time regulation – even if it is only “we work from dawn to dusk” - and thus, we can say in strictly economic terms, that the next step for this primitive (proto-) homogenization of labor-power is the actual commoditization of labor-power, in that this proto-labor power could be allocated to community or inter-community tasks and/or otherwise put up for exchange. A more precise term, given our temporal perspective, would be that this pooling of labor-power in primitive hunting and gathering Tribes is a form of “proto-commoditized” labor-power.

With the advent of animal and plant domestication, the tribal form of life was already very much on the horizon in the Old World. MacNeish’s studies show that in the New World without the domesticated animal component, Bands were often the basic social organizational form by which the arts of subsistence were practiced prior to serious reliance on plant domesticates made semi-sedentary agricultural village (Tribal) life possible. - And, this kept Band society around several millennia longer in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the rate of change in the Old World centers of agricultural revolution (with their numerous potential animal and plant domesticates); where Bands quickly transformed into the larger Tribal unit; but the process is and was identical.

This is the general crisis of all hunting and gathering bands and tribes.

By 110,000 BP we see tool kits of intricate content all over the Old World in archaeological sites. These specialized tools reflect deep knowledge about environments and ways to exploit and control them. Most importantly from our perspective these specialized tools reflect the great amount of labor-time devoted to experimentation with and perfection of said tool kits. - And, increasing emphasis on time consuming “beauty” in the manufacture of utilitarian items.

By 20,000 years ago people were making the final steps toward irreversible release of surplus social product. Or, another way of putting it is that they were making their first tentative steps into the agricultural revolution. Over the next five to ten thousand years (say 20,000 BP to 10,000 BP), in center after center of the origin of animal and plant domestication, people would become irreversibly committed to this new (agricultural) way of life. Producing food rather than collecting it. - And, in this process they would come face-to-face, finally, with the enemy within.

At the core of this transition is the reality that social time consumed in experimentation, perfection and beautification of tools (rather than engaging social time in direct production [i.e., hunting and gathering]) had back-lashed into making people even more capable of creating social surpluses than they were before.

The General Crisis continues (produce enough, but no more) in a more sophisticated form of extraordinarily complex social time usage. Nevertheless this increased concentration on thinking abstractly in order to engage in such extraordinary social time dumping is simply exacerbating the rate of development of this tendency to potentially being able to really significantly increase production by making it certain people know more and more about plants and animals and every other aspect of their objective daily lives. In other words, the more they know about nature because of this extraordinary amount of thought and time devoted to de facto learning, the more they could if they wished increase their production. The proof lies in the fairly rapid emergence of broad-spectrum exploitation in the latter part of the Lower Palaeolithic and then in the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and its in turn transformation into the agricultural revolution! Finally, we consider this a distinct sociocultural evolutionary change because of the extremely acute nature of the General Crisis and the biological evolution of the carriers to having 1/3 more cubic cranial capacity (and presumably smarter too.)

The new formula looks like this:

  l + t à V1, V2 + Surplus Social Product

    Non-productive time creates more

   Productive potential

l = human concrete laboring activity

t = Middle and Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic tools

V1 = cost of life

V2 = cost of maintaining technology

Surplus Social Product = proto-surplus value about to be irreversibly released productive potential.

__ = This is the locus of the general crisis of hunting and gathering, as it has been, but it is now acute.