The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 5: The Second Band Stage

People Make Themselves by Struggling to Create

 Fundamental Needs (Value) but not Surplus Social Product

  The actual course of human evolution is not dividable into incompatible species so that one day people can mate and produce fertile offspring and the next day some are so advanced that they can no longer do the same with more “primitive” neighbors. That is never the case in biological evolution anyway.

At any given point in time all humans were capable of mating and producing fertile offspring (assuming that all other things are normal.) What we should be thinking about, anyway, is that there are three rather distinct grades of humanity based on cubic centimeter cranial capacity of the fossil skull data, we can group in time. These three grades of humanity can be associated with general levels of subsistence and modes of production; all of which we can detect in the remnant material culture we archaeologists dig up.

The at-bottom reason for the doubling of the cranial capacity that leads to the archaic form of modern human - that is Homo erectus - was as we have seen surplus avoidance. But, the formula for production stays the same. (H. Australopithecus had ~500cc of cranial capacity and H. erectus roughly ~1000cc of cranial capacity.)

The General Crisis here is the same as it was in the first Stage. We create a second sociocultural evolutionary stage in our sequence because these people are twice as smart as their predecessors (or at least have brains twice the cubic centimeter cranial capacity of their preceding ancestors) but the General Crisis continues as it was.

l + t à V1, V2

  Produce enough

 But no more

l = human concrete laboring activity; i.e., human labor (Homo erectus)

t = hand ax technology

V1 = cost of life

V2 = cost of maintaining hand ax technology

__ = The locus of the General Crisis which continues in the exact same form

New challenging environments, social time dumping into non-labor time activities of intellectualizing the supernatural world and the kinship organization of society, along side the application of real world knowledge and discovery to the handicraft industries of the band - all in the course of collecting animal and plant food - assisted in the sharing cooperation essential to keep the enemy outside; keeping the inside world a place of comfort and safety for the two or three decades that constituted a human lifetime.

Brain size doubled.

Ideology Emerges

Although superstition is the enemy of modern science and intelligence, it was also its mother. (An archetype dialectical paradox.) Primitive people lived in a world of superstition. But the important thing about superstition is that it established a complex abstract world that was the intellectual framework for their cognition of the “real” world. All that remains is to make that “unreal,” real world construct, into an increasingly “real,” real world model. - And, eventually, we shall have modern science!

We know about primitive unreal (superstitious) world views from the study of animism and animitism among living primitives. From what is called the ethnographic record. {Ethnologists (Cultural Anthropologists) write ethnography - thus the term.}We know about contemporary unreal (superstitious) world views from the study of religion.

The world of the hunting and gathering band person is a world of so-called animistic and animitistic spirits. Meaning that everything from the lowly pebble to the great spectaculars of nature has a supernatural component in the minds of primitive people. - And, to all of this, is hooked the aura and mysticism that surrounds the ceremonial life of the band woman and man and child, with regard to their rights and responsibilities to one another, on the kinship organized chart of their little group.

This is why Lewis Henry Morgan’s discovery of kinship terminology as a key to the kinship system, which in turn is the sole basis upon which primitive society is organized, was such a tremendous discovery. It is why we consider Morgan to be the father of modern anthropology. (Kinship terminology, and the social organizational system it reflected, constituted the subject matter of two of Morgan’s greatest works including Ancient Society which also changed Karl Marx’s perception of human history. These discoveries of Morgan’s propelled Marx into his study of primitive society in the last years of his life, 1877-1883.) (See The Ethnological Notebooks, Karl Marx, unpublished manuscript until translated and edited, with an extensive introductory commentary, by Lawrence Krader 1972. Also, the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1888, Frederick Engels, in many editions. – And for some further oral comment on my part there are the audio sections at our new website.

At any rate, these archaic humans had evolved in the period between two and one million years ago, and occupied virtually all of the Old World; possibly the New World too. This latter hypothesis will be tested in the 21st century and resolved on the basis of fact rather than fancy.