The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 7: The Stage of Tribal Agriculture

Preventing social time from becoming labor time was the multimillion year tested, tried, and true method of avoiding surplus social product. As I mentioned above surplus social product is more than just surplus - it is, in modern economic terms proto-surplus value. Surplus social product will become surplus value, and like all value (both 1 and 2) comes ultimately from human labor. Eventually human individual and group labor will become the economic category we call human labor-power.

As we have seen, in some parts of the world tribal life began to replace band life many tens of thousands of years ago, while people were still in the hunting and gathering mode of production, precisely because more mouths to feed made having social surplus on hand less probable. At least at first. That is to say, that “tribes” as simply larger “bands” tied together by more complex kinship reckoning systems and cross-kin line cutting sodalities, would with their larger population numbers, naturally require larger amounts of Value 1 (and even Value 2,) thus momentary increases in production were absorbed quickly by more mouths. A corollary proof we can see in the ethnographic record when populations are small much of the year so that people arrange themselves in territorial Bands until such time as seasonal bounty provides the objective basis for a get-together of all the Bands in a Tribal setting where the extra social product can be quickly absorbed by the greater number of mouths. – And, still underlying this way of life is the commandment not to produce more surplus social product than absolutely necessary and when it is necessary to make the larger settlement pattern the option of choice to facilitate the certain consumption of said seasonal bounty.

Why are the categories “tribal society” and “proto-commoditized” labor-time so important?

The Great Divide in the mode of production base of society lies at the boundary between individual concrete labor-time and the value it produces and collective abstracted socially necessary labor-time and the surplus social product (later surplus value) it produces. That Great Divide occurs in the sociocultural evolutionary Stages of Chiefdoms. (This would be a good time to read Papers 2 through 6 on the “Domestic Mode of Production” and related topics in Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Sahlins.) But, its origins lie as far back as the beginning of proto-commoditized labor-time among Tribal hunters and gatherers - especially in the Old World. After the Chiefdom Stages, in the three stages of the Servitude Epoch, abstracted socially necessary labor-time is the entire basis of what is now the academic field of political economy (“economics” in the USA). {As in Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.}

This is the technical definition of value: i.e., abstracted socially necessary labor-time.

The Agricultural Revolution

Tribes, at-bottom, are just bigger groups of people. Yes, they have a more complex kinship system of organization by far than do the bands. Kinship is the only means they have after all, to organize society, and the larger the group the greater the demands on the kinship way of doing things from day to day and generation to generation. - And, tribes have sodality organization also, which simply means that there are institutions that cut across kin lines such as men’s clubs and women’s clubs devoted to different tasks. But, fundamentally Tribes are still just elaborated Bands. In the Old World “tribal” social organization is the basis upon which the agricultural revolution evolves and as such is the first key diagnostic.

With or without tribal organization people in the New World also got to semi-sedentary village life (because of the efficiency of the broad-spectrum wild resource exploitation pattern now so well developed, if at Band levels of population size.) Thus, when we uncover semi-sedentary hunting-gathering Band camp sites in the New World we also know these people would certainly have developed tribal stage social organization, with its agriculture and animal husbandry, as they domesticate the wild precursor plant and animal stocks, during their advanced broad-spectrum wild resource exploitation, day to day. It would tell archaeologists that the next phase they will be looking for, in the ground, would be exactly this new Tribal Agricultural phase. At any rate, the second key diagnostic we want to understand is the revolution that agriculture, as technology, brought to humanity.

Archaeologically, we often speak of a set of artifactual diagnostics that accompany the Neolithic (Old World) and Formative (New World) Revolutions. Ground and polished stone tools, milling and grinding tools to turn high protein seeds into flour, village life, pottery, and so forth. However, what is critically different is that people are producing food rather than collecting it; within the food production arts, it is now inherent, that surplus will be produced.

The General Crisis driving this stage is now the need for ongoing continuing on hand “surplus” (considered a “necessity” by farmers) versus the danger of a system which could, unregulated, open the door to issuing an economic invitation to violence, because of inequality in possession of articles of agricultural production.

Our production formula now looks like this:

(l +lp) + t à V1, V2 + SV

         Surplus in the Family Farms

       Surplus Needed vs. Dangerous

         Surplus

l = concrete individual laboring activity

lp = human labor-power

t = Neolithic/Formative Agricultural Revolution technology

V1 = cost of life

V2 = cost of maintaining technology

SV = irreversibly released surplus social product (proto-surplus value) in large quantities.

__ = Surplus in the Family Farms: both needed and dialectically dangerous (inequality between the farms.) This is the locus of the general crisis of Tribal Agriculture.

One reason for the irreversible release of surplus was and is that farming people need surplus for the rainy day. A myriad of events can bring catastrophe to crops in the field, then as well as today. Floods, droughts, insect pestilence, fire, disease, hurricanes and tornados. In these predicaments the farming families have to have reserves to see them through until a new crop can be planted and harvested.

For another reason it simply isn’t possible to tell either the plants or the animals not to reproduce to capacity. You can thin herds and let fields lie fallow but you wouldn’t have to do this if ever-present extra surplus would not otherwise be on hand.

The fact is that surplus social product has been irreversibly released with the coming of the agricultural revolution. But, this kind of agricultural surplus has a tendency to be irregular due to outside forces such as those above.

As has commoditized labor-time also become a new if irregular feature of Tribal life. For these primitive farmers must pool their collective labor-power at least occasionally for clearing fields, planting and harvesting, and the construction of irrigation works and perhaps the village chapel.

Within this new setting the larger families will produce more than the smaller families, if for no other reason than that they have more “hands;” population will expand simultaneously, because more hands make self-sufficiency of the domestic unit far more certain and also simultaneously, because the more mouths there are to feed the less surplus will be accumulating in individual farms at any given moment. (These sociocultural dynamics are well established in the ethnological literature and the subject of Marshall Sahlins Domestic Mode of Production in his book Stone Age Economics and I strongly urge those of you with a serious theoretical interest to move on to that study as soon as possible.)

More hands and more mouths constitute a vicious circle, running inside and in the same direction as another circle of need for surplus for hard times. - And in both cases these two circles are encouraging increased production (meaning more labor hours and/or labor-time hours devoted to productive activity). We can think of these two circles of causation, as encompassing another counter-rotating inner circle consisting of societal mechanisms for controlling the magnitude of surplus. This is the key nexus for as we have also seen it is the existence of surplus, and the real or potential inequality between the farming families it creates merely by existing, that is now the at-bottom source of envy, jealousy and coveting – the ultimate danger confronting primitive communism.

We can say it again this way: in primitive farming villages of whatever size it is the “more hands and mouths and inevitable hard times means we need surplus” idea, which functions as the central ideological feature driving production. That is, driving production beyond the old hunting-gathering Band level of minimal subsistence requirements.

It is the acceptance of the new reality of constant surplus on hand that sets this new farming village way of life fundamentally apart from the subsistence pattern hitherto lasting millions of years. In other words, this drive for surplus, regardless of magnitude, runs diametrically counter to the millions of year’s old tradition of handling potential and real surplus with (a) minimal labor input and (b) sharing.

This is the General Crisis of Tribal Agriculture. Let’s say it again. The engine at the core of Tribal (or Band) Agriculture, as a distinct sociocultural evolutionary stage, as the principal mode of production is the Tribe’s need for permanent surplus for as-needed redistribution in the event of environmental stresses and for regular redistribution to support community efforts and perhaps one or two professional specialists. Surplus potential increases with the steady growth of population which provides the domestic farming unit with more hands and is sustainable in the new economy. Note that a growing population level, in and of itself, reduces the amount of surplus on hand, at any given moment and simultaneously, makes it necessary that new levels of production be regularly achieved to support the rising population numbers. These central features constitute the driving force to increase production and become antagonistic to the counter-running tradition of discouraging surplus social product from ever coming into existence.

In satisfying the need for more production by assigning more persons to agriculture and sedentary life (as one example), leading to bigger families living in each individual farm, society had created a self-triggering mechanism leading to an inevitable increase in the amount of surplus social product being created in the farms and thus in society as a whole. On the other hand, this irreversible release of surplus social product, was certain to generate social dissolutional effects of envy, coveting, jealousy and so forth unless it was immediately and promptly ameliorated, shared, in some effective way (which initially will be Tribal Council collection of surpluses and then the storage of said surpluses until the time comes for redistribution, or some kind of socially approved consumption.)

The General Contradiction on the other hand continues as it has for the previous many millions of years. The drive not to produce surplus social product, but only produce needed, in the face of the ever-present reality that people in such societies could produce much more than they do.

Both the General Crisis and the General Contradiction find resolution when the Tribal Council collects surplus above and beyond what is agreed upon to be necessary for the annual upkeep of one given person. In this way the larger families are assured of having what they need as are the smaller families; yet the inequality that otherwise would exist between different-sized farms is leveled out by the collection of everything above this level of subsistence as surplus, and its transport and storage at some central point (the Tribe’s “warehouse.”) It’s administration being part of the job of the democratically elected Tribal Council. {The ethnographic record tells us that immediate recall is an accepted feature of such representative processes. (The primitive communist mode of “term limits” for elected representatives, in other words.)}By the way we should note that the first professional administrators emerge at this time. Why? Because someone has to keep track of all of these contributions – family credit, clan credit, sodality credit, moiety credit, and phratery credit – these are examples of how credit for contributions would have been made – and we haven’t yet considered the role of these Central Consigliore of the Chiefdom in astronomy and religion. These administrators are the embryonic form of what will become a New Class (once classes exist.)

We know from the ethnographic record that another common way of avoiding the production of too much surplus in Tribal agriculture is for these peoples to rely on the old fashioned dumping of labor-time in non-productive chores. Although, in its new form of “moving-on” slash- And-burn agriculture, the dumping of social time comes in the form of the non-essential repetitive dumping of labor-time.

But “inequality” is a real and ever present specter now. Infants and children are exposed to the fact that for some reason (it doesn’t matter what) there is a difference between being well off and not so well off. In other words all I have mentioned above, that is inherent in the economy and social organization of tribal agriculture, makes the fact of inequality inescapable. Even when ameliorated or leveled it was still there; otherwise it wouldn’t have to be handled in these ways. Yet what could these societies do except what they had always done? – And, one feature of what they had always done is that the more hands there are in the family farm the less each of them works. This fact has been expressed in the form of Chayanov’s Rule. Details here are discussed by Sahlins in his book Stone Age Economics.

It was not necessary in many cases that people pick up and move every few years for strictly technical (soil depletion) reasons. This could have been handled with fertilizer, crop rotation and irrigation. The reason they move is because they found the tremendous effort involved in “starting over” all over again, to be good for the spirit of collectivity. In strictly economic terms it dumped labor-time before it could become surplus social product.

Why didn’t this go on forever?

Because, something just as critical as the mode of production was changing. That was the way some people began to view the egalitarian ideas of times past. The superstructure of ideology was changing from being altruistic to something less so… much less so.

Understanding the Primitive Communist Mentality

Now we come to a most important part of this presentation which is, how should we view the primitive communist mentality? How should we understand the way in which primitive communist peoples of the hunting and gathering and/or early agricultural way of life looked at the ideas (mental categories) we call “needs” “desires” and “wants”? In answering this question we are indebted to Professor Marshall Sahlins who proved in 1974 in his book Stone Age Economics (most recently published in 2004 by Routledge) the key lies in the understanding that peoples of the Palaeolithic (Lithic in the New World) considered their society to be “affluent” when it satisfied all of a their material wants – and – when we do this we have to determine exactly what the wants of hunting/gathering and early agricultural peoples were. The absolutely incorrect way to assess this category is to assume bourgeois priorities with regard to needs, wants and desires.

Bourgeois dominated societies (capitalist societies in other words) such as our own, feature the possession of large quantities of “commodities” as the key to affluence. This is because machinofacture production of “commodities” via the application of human labor-power (see Chapter 12 below) is the center of everything the ruling classes consider worth having. It’s all they fundamentally really believe in. It is the barrenness of this world-view which accounts for the continuing appeal of religion to many who should know better and of course to the masses that remain uneducated. However, what Sahlins proved beyond doubt was this is only one way of assessing affluence. For 99% of human history “affluence” was defined first and foremost in an entirely different way. Namely, by the desire to possess very few articles of production. So, if one has those things one considers essential then one is affluent.

“If you desire little than little will make you affluent…”

Slogan of the Primitive Communist

Primitive peoples desired little and therefore found it rather easy to be affluent. This sums up the entire attitude of humanity for millions of years with regard to the possession of articles of production.

Note: In everyday talk we always call articles of production commodities, but commodity has a special meaning and definition in capitalist economics – commodities are created by applying labor-power to machinery to get said articles which contain value and surplus value. In bourgeois dominated capitalist society almost everything we obtain is produced in this machinofacture way. Almost everything we in the U.S. obtain are commodities because they are produced in this way. In other words in modern society – capitalism - the articles of production equal commodities. In short, commodities in the technical definition sense (in capitalism) are always produced by labor-power. Before capitalism (and before the Servitude Epoch and its stages of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism) for the most part articles of production were not commodities and were created not by labor-power (defined in modern economics as the homogenized labor of a group of factory workers – i.e., the average production of a group of workers organized in a factory at their various workplaces, with the average being regulated by the factory clock) but by individual human concrete labor. Thus, individual artist produced pottery, glasswork, metal ware and so forth are not commodities but something else – in these cases objects of art. (Note that such products could be converted into commodity-like articles for sale at some later stage by a mercantile capitalist of some sort. But no matter what happens to them they will never be capitalist commodities in this strictly technical definition of the term because they were not in origin created by labor-power.) Labor of this sort and labor-power are two distinct things. This fact was Karl Marx first and original contribution to Classical economics.

The Affluence of Primitive Communism

Sahlins proved affluence can be achieved in two ways: (Case 1) by desiring little (and sharing everything as in primitive communism) or (Case 2) by producing much (as in capitalist societies but with distinct dramatic differences in individual sharing in this production). Sahlins amassed considerable ethnographic data to prove this point and a wealth of ethnographic proof has subsequently been assembled which makes this point “written in stone” as far as science (anthropology in this case) is concerned. (Go to Murdoch’s World Ethnographic Sample for the proof assembled from ethnographic data of over 1000 primitive societies.)

Why do primitive peoples desire little? There are numerous reasons and all of them reflect factors inherent in the rather primitive hunting and gathering mode of production or the nearly as primitive early agricultural mode of production. To take just one factor, let’s look at mobility. If one is mobile on a daily basis, as are hunter/gatherers (99 percent of human history lies in this mode of production) there is only so much one can carry. If one becomes semi-sedentary or truly sedentary such as in the early farming daily lifestyle there are only so many things one can use in the farming household. When you have these things then that is that. It would be hard to desire something one has never seen, can never see, and will never even know about (until such time as contact occurs with a technologically superior culture.)

As importantly, the ethnographic record proves there are a multitude of ideological ways to discourage production beyond what is socially recognized as needed from an individual regardless of his/her hunting/gathering or agricultural status; regardless of Band or Tribal status. Having “x” is desirable and everyone should have that much but having more (“y”) is not desirable and no one should allow surplus to accumulate in their hands any longer than necessary to consume it in a timely way.

In short, both natural factors and social factors mitigate in favor of an ideology where there is a distinct and recognized limit to what should be accumulated, and the corollary a certain amount of possessions (regardless of how held) must be considered “desired affluence.” Primitive peoples always live in a world of superstition as Elman Service has so pointedly proven many times (Profiles in Ethnology) so their ideology will be one of animism and animatism.

An Economic Invitation to Violence

Furthermore Sahlins proved primitive societies do not horde articles of production and would always rather use them up immediately. They do this not simply because they probably constitute too much to carry or store on the walk or on the family farm but because if they were to accumulate things, besides being impractical, it would create social differences in relative wealth. As we have seen it is this difference in “wealth” between individuals and/or families which is the true enemy within: the source of coveting, envy and jealousy. It is for this reason the more individuals there are in a given social group the less each of them works. This fact was presented by A.V. Chayanov in 1966, (The Theory of Peasant Economy). It’s one proof of our theory that says surplus of any kind is highly dangerous to social health and the main focus of primitive communist’s day-to-day battle for egalitarianism, not production, of even more trouble-making surplus. This fact is as I have said the basis for what we now call Chayanov’s Rule. (The fewer hands in a given family the more each must work or conversely the more hands in a given farming family the less each will be expected to work.)

The essence is that if one allowed surplus social product to be created to the limit of each household’s productive capacity and then held within that household, there would be farms with far more “wealth” than others, if for no other reason than the different position of each farm in the cycle of births and “hands” on hand. This is as Sahlins says a “…economic invitation to violence.” (Sahlins 2004:88). I think you can see this concern with differences in “wealth” has been at the bottom of primitive communism’s concern with surplus social product for millions of years prior to the agricultural revolution.

Chayanov’s Rule functions to insure “…that the three elements of the DMP (Domestic Mode of Production) so far identified – (1) small labor force differentiated essentially by sex, (2) simple technology, and (3) finite production objectives – are systematically interrelated. Not only is each in reciprocal bond with the others, but each by its own modesty of scale is adapted to the nature of the others. Let any one of these elements show an unusual inclination to develop, it meets from the others the increasing resistance of incompatibility.” (Sahlins 2004:87)

Missing the Boat: White and Harris

None of the conceptuality of the bourgeois mentality is present in primitive society for these reasons. – And, as a historical note let me add a few comments. This is where the mechanical materialists such as Leslie A. White, and Marvin Harris, stumbled, faltered, and forever failed, in their attempts to rationalize sociocultural evolution as systems of increasing energy efficiency.

Unfortunately White did not live long enough to internalize the significance of Sahlins discovery. In 1976, shortly after the publication of my book Foundations of Archaeology, (where the Foreword was written by world famous archaeologist Richard S. MacNeish) I had asked him to write the Foreword to my book Principles of Anthropology and he had agreed. It had been my intention to take up these questions with him prior to his writing that Foreword but he called me before 6:00 am on the day of our meeting to tell me he was quite sick and I should not travel to Santa Barbara that day; before I knew it he had passed away.

In Harris case he simply was always too bent in his ways to consider other opinions (as I learned at the Mexico City, Society for American Archaeology May 1970 meeting at the NationalMuseum, in the Seminar on Marxism and Archaeology organized by Professor Antonio Gilman, where I participated as did Harris.) - And Harris continued to go down the wrong road of trying to prove that sociocultural evolution was a function of increasing energy efficiency among primitive peoples. A completely wrong way of looking at things (because of its non-dialectical and in fact anti-dialectical nature) and now he is gone; the ideas he espoused have lost the champion that kept them around a lot longer than they might have otherwise (or if people like me had not switched our daily endeavors to matters more mundane and down-to-Earth such as the civil war in Peru.) Harris had never had the slightest grasp of dialectical materialism and proved it in a chapter by that name in his otherwise outstanding book The Rise of Anthropological Theory.

His epistemological bankruptcy was at-bottom the reason he ultimately failed in his anthropological theoretical career. His example should be a warning to any of you who may mistakenly think that philosophy (dialectical materialism) is of no importance in the understanding of human sociocultural evolution, primitive or modern. (Harris had grasped the truth of Marx and Engels discovery of the evolution of society from one stage to the next – i.e., the practical side of historical materialism – but that is as far as he got.) Chapters 1 through 10 of this book answer that question missed by White and Harris – which is to say now you understand how and why society continued to evolve through this series of stages. Or, if you don’t yet you will once you read and re-read these chapters (1 through 10) a few times – take notes – and study. I have done my best to popularize this for you but you have to do the learning.

Increasing energy utilization efficiency ratio’s discussed by White (Evolution of Culture) and later made the totality of Harris’ model (Culture People and Nature) may all well be true but are merely true – i.e., irrelevant. What is relevant is the struggle between the need for social (collective) labor to survive, reproduce and live day to day and the need on the other hand to avoid too much surplus on hand which would be the economic invitation to violence in the Hunting and Gathering Stages as well as the Tribal Agricultural Stage. The prime directive to produce only as much as needed and avoid surplus on hand at any cost is the mode of production base for the superstructural manifestation of desiring little to be affluent. The ideological axiom of primitive communism is thus explained. – And the trained scientific mind should be able to imagine what must be coming…

“The Slogan of the Modern Communist”

To each according to her needs from each according to her ability.

Desire as much as you like for our productive capacity can provide

All your needs and desires

Having made a point of “the slogan of the primitive communist” foregoing I will jump to the conclusion of much of this, for just one moment, so you can see that what we envisage as modern communism is technologically exactly the opposite of primitive communism. Thus, the resolution of the general contradictions of the Epoch of Primitive Communism and the Servitude Epoch is resolved in the Second Egalitarian Epoch with the emergence of the Communist Stage. Our technology will then be so advanced that there are no practical limits to our being able to produce everything everyone wants and needs. This proper application of technological advance to society’s betterment rather than the betterment of an exploiting, ruling, domesticating class, frees people from the day to day struggle to live. The new technological revolutionary advance offers all people the freedom for the first time in human history to pursue their interests in life as they will. – And, for society as a whole to pursue greater social objectives such as exploring the universe. That is why Frederick Engels called the period beginning with the Communist Stage, the Era of Freedom; he referred to that period of our existence prior to the emergence of the Communist Stage as the Era of Necessity.

Now back to the ranch and the beginning of the first period of sociocultural transition: the Stage of Simple Chiefdoms.