The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 8: The Simple Chiefdom Stage

There is another way to handle the newly emergent General Crisis within the Stage of Tribal Agriculture, and in doing so simultaneously to stay within the constraints of the General Contradiction of the First Egalitarian Epoch; without moving-on, slashing- And-burning, starting all over again, as a life style strategy.

What is this other way?

That other way was to stay in place, build an irrigation system, fertilize fields, and intensify in situ production via both animal husbandry and field agriculture. This other way allowed each family to intensify its farm’s reliance upon gardens and pens. This other way is what we in archaeology call the Simple Chiefdom way. The details can be understood if one studies Marshall Sahlins classic treatise Stone Age Economics (in its first or subsequent editions.)

Karl Marx Identifies the Chiefdom Stage as the Loci of Class Division

And State Emergence

Karl Marx explains in the Ethnological Notebooks that his view on Chiefdoms was based on the newly available ethnographic data, namely, that they were living remnants of the point in sociocultural evolution where society began to abandon primitive communism for the historical stages of Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. Again, he says this clearly in his now published Ethnological Notebooks. Archaeology as we can see has proven him exactly correct in this regard and furthermore archaeology has provided us the details of the transition. We have to understand the meaning of the archaeological data of course. – And, that is now what I will explain.

The proto-Commoditization of Labor-time Proceeds Apace

The Simple Chiefdom way required the professional specialization of some individual producers, and part of this division of labor along professional specialist lines, is the marking of commodity production with an abstracted sense of the amount of socially necessary labor-time required to create each unit “commodity” (article of production in this case) in the productive process. Thus, the Simple Chiefdom way is also the point in history where we have regular proto-commoditization of labor-time, evolving naturally from what had gone before in the advanced hunting-gathering bands and tribes. Concrete labor-time has become abstracted into socially necessary labor-time, in at least some small component (or large) of the new way of doing things. Some people contribute their part of the de facto social contract by farming (tilling, planting, harvesting, caring for the fields of whatever grass domesticate - wheat, oats, barley, rye, millet, rice, corn, etc.) while others work full time producing pottery, textiles, stone tools, etc. The center (the chief and her consigliore) arrange for the collection and redistribution of the goods produced. This has become a constant or regular feature of social production. Professional specialization is creating “ranks” within society and among them the maturing if still embryonic form of what will become the New Class (after classes exist) can be seen plainly enough.

Professional specialization à social ranks à social classes

Now, even though we cannot homogenize and thus categorize the labor-time input of all of these contributors along the lines allowed by a factory clock{that regulates production per unit time in a capitalist (or socialist) factory} where the creation of “X” amount of goods per unit time is the basis for the economic efficiency analysis of said factory, it does mean that we observers of prehistoric sociocultural evolution can see the “proto-“ emergence of abstracted socially necessary labor-time as an economic category.

Brave New Selfish World

Underlying this shift in the hub of centralized, reciprocal movement of goods and services (from the Tribal Council to the sole Chief) is the new motivation. Namely, in the perception that there is a non-altruistic way of doing things. A selfish way. A new kind of basal psychological imprinting has emerged for the first time in all of human history. Why is this so?

Because the time has come when infants and children recognize that no matter what mom and dad and the parental generation said about sharing, in reality some families were better off than others, and the concomitant logical conclusion must have been that some professions might also be better situated in life than others! Something less than altruism is on the ideological horizon! It will become the new ideological template of the new Epoch (i.e., Servitude Epoch) when the latter is fully extant. It is the parallel developing superstructural tendency accompanying the move from professional specialization à social ranks à social classes:

Less than altruism à selfishness à sadism

 It is inherent within a system where some people are supported by the social surplus of the Tribal Council (in order that they may clear fields, dig ditches, build dams, make pottery and textiles, for those who do not have the time,) that the differential in reward becomes part of what is imprinted as the nature of the real world. Even if, in an ideal situation, the labor-power input of all of the contributors were exactly equal it may not appear so, for individuals may and do have different values with regard to work and reward. Thus, the perception that one individual’s path in life may be superior to another person’s, for said person’s very personal benefit, has taken hold for the first time in five or so million years. In reality it could never have been more than a matter of time until perception truly did reflect the objective fact that some professions offered more reward than others for the same amount of input.

It only takes one person so imprinted, with the desire to be on the better end of the stick, to begin to agitate for a solution to the General Crisis of Tribal Agriculture that is not of the egalitarian moving-on, start over, slash- And-burn, tradition. Such persons might pose the question “why not stay in our homeland, and make our production more efficient?”

Commitment to efficiency in production does have a lot of advantages. All that unnecessary, and sometimes dangerous, moving is eliminated. People get to stay where they feel at home and comfortable. - And, for awhile the actual results will be better for everyone. Efficient field agriculture and stockyard husbandry will produce more surplus at a lower labor-time input per person. Note how complex the SURPLUS VALUE column has now become:

The General Crisis emerging features surplus constant and on-hand as a fundamental reality and necessity. Yet, its division will be a source of great social friction when there is too much or too little social product.

(l +lp) + t à V1, V2 + Surplus 

        Storage/Support

     Neither too much or too little 

l = concrete individual laboring activity

lp = labor-power as a proto-type is emergent

t = Protoarchic/Archaic, Neolithic/Chalcolithic technology

V1 = cost of individual labor and collective labor-power

V2 = cost of maintaining technology

SV = Surplus Value

Storage = that surplus value in storage (for redistribution as needed or as planned)

Support = that surplus value used to pay the professional specialists, and the center (the chief and her consigliore, retainers, families)

__ = This is the locus of the general crisis of the Simple Chiefdom Stage. One must have enough surplus to supply demand (necessity) but not too much. That extra (above agreed minimum personal maintenance needs) is collected by the Chief and stored in the central (society’s) warehouse (not in the family farms.) Potential inequality is eliminated and needed surplus obtained simultaneously.

Changing are the General Contradiction and the Prime Directive

Instead of avoiding the enemy within (envy, jealousy, coveting) by evading surplus production, one is now saying maximize surplus production, because with honest central collection and efficient one-woman administration we will all still be equal! However, on this course, and in a few more steps (and centuries), the maximizing of surplus production will occur far beyond “necessary” amounts.

Why?

Because (A) society has been (1) dividing into special interest groups (via professional specialization) which constitute de facto “ranks” of differing access to both the articles of production and the means of production! These ranks are the necessary result of the simple fact that with the professional specialization of individual concrete labor, some professions are economically and “politically” “better off” than others.  – And, (2) simultaneously non-egalitarian ideology has firmly taken root!

(B) The effect has been that the higher “ranks” of society, now selfishly motivated, want to maximize production to take more as “profit” for themselves. The General Contradiction of the Servitude Epoch is on the horizon.

This new and coming General Contradiction would have been camouflaged by all the talk about how, what we call the General Crisis can be more efficiently handled. The archaeological record is universally in line with this interpretation. Everywhere, without exception, where we have a continuous sequence of sociocultural evolution in the ground, we see the transition from Tribal Agriculture to Simple Chiefdoms happened exactly this way. Which is to say in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and Peru.

Efficiency in a tribal agricultural setting is further enhanced, some would have said, by getting rid of the Tribal Council and all that “democratic rot”, in favor of military discipline and organization of the various productive tasks that come with the professional specialization of labor. So one Chief is elected - and, although she may have consigliore from the clans - it is a revolution in social organization tending toward centralization and concentration of social authority as well as surplus.

The small group at the center will have within it that “one” who advocated (or will advocate) this change for the ulterior motives of greed and self-advancement regardless of the effect on the community as a whole. Not that the immediate effect will have been bad. It probably will have been excellent. But to the person with the hidden agenda this is altogether a matter of fortune, he or she can turn to their advantage in selling the “new way.” Her concern is with herself - not “them.”- And being in the center of the reciprocal movement of goods and services means you can pull some of it out of the “cash flow” as you will, to do as you wish!

The farther one goes down the road of efficiency, via professional specialization of labor, the further one has traveled along the road of social revolution. The Chief collects the surpluses and assigns different persons to new tasks such as full time irrigation and dam building; full time pottery and textile production for the new rank of irrigation and dam builders. Etc. The more labor-time that is actually specialized - truly commoditized now as numbers of people are assigned to specific tasks where their labor-time is socially necessary and abstracted - the better the results in the production of both value and surplus social product (including proto-surplus value.) The Chief and her family, helpers and cohorts from the clans, the religious specialist who convinces all the rubes that all this is divinely inspired, now constitute special “ranks” themselves. As do the farming families; the professional specialist families.

These ranks have special interests. It is inevitable that they will become antagonistic, if for no other reason than that the vagaries of primitive agriculture and animal husbandry. The exigencies of Tribal Agricultural Stone Age Economics may create a severe shortage of surplus leaving the central granaries depleted. {Hail, rain, flooding, drought, locusts, disease, war or raiding, etc., etc.} Who is going to get the shit-end of the stick when the Chief’s warehouse is approaching bankruptcy? When the granaries are full which groups if any stand to benefit more?

The General Crisis of the Simple Chiefdom Stage is the growing need for professional specialization of labor on the one hand and on the other the concomitant need to offset the tendency toward social dissolution. A society split between different special interest groups with inherently different interests, implies potential antagonism between them, and thus impending social crises. One must either stop fragmenting society and return to the simpler Tribal Agricultural way of life or find some way to offset the dissolutional effects arising from the fractioning of society into groups of relatively discontented people.

The First “First Stage Chiefdoms” in the Near East and Egypt

When these primitive Chiefdoms migrated where did they go?

In the Near East and North Africa, some of them went to what appear to be the worst rather than the best locations. Going deeper and deeper into the deserts of Arabia is one example. That is leaving the lush environs of the Mediterranean, or the hilly flanks of Southwest Asia, for the blazing hot desert sands along the Tigris and Euphrates as far as Sumeria is an example. Up the Nile into the incredible ovens of Egypt and the Sudan is another.

So, why did they do it?

Because, it was an “excuse.”

Whose excuse?

An excuse of the “privileged” rank to further professionalize labor, which is the source of their power and the riches. Wealth is being accumulated by the Chiefly rank, as a function of their “New Rank” position in society. This is also the origin of the New Class (when ranks become classes.)

Not every Simple Chiefdom went this route. Where mass democratic impulses were stronger than the selfishness of the few, who wanted to further intensify social ranking and the concomitant privilege of the central administrators and bullshit artists (shamans are becoming priests and priestesses,) the chiefdoms moved into environmentally friendly areas. Which is to say, Tribes and Simple Chiefdoms, where democratic inclinations were more powerful, moved into areas where they could “stay with the old ways.” Where the rubes could slash- And-burn to their hearts content, and live happily ever after. Such as the vast steppe lands of the Soviet West and Central Asia and Eastern Europe and so on and on...

The Oldest Profession

Shamans had become full time specialists (priests and priestesses) supported in totality by the center of the Simple Chiefdom. This was the first time in human history that a religious specialist was anything more than a spare time practitioner of the arts of supernatural communication and manipulation. The job of the religious bosses was to support the increasing reliance upon professionally specialized efficiency in the use of abstracted labor-time, for those tribes and Simple Chiefdoms moving into the New Way.    For those simple chiefdoms that were dominated by the newly selfish few, beyond the point of sticking to the “old way;” and that did move into the deserts where the most intense professional specialization of abstracted labor-time was the only way to survive... well, there were more surprises in store for these people. At least for the ones doing all the work.

Challenge

Do not think that only deserts (such as those of Iraq and Egypt) provide the necessary challenge. The key word is challenge. That could be the challenge of living in intensely populated regions such as nuclear China along the Huang ho and the Yangtze Rivers; it could be the arctic and alpine environments of the highland valleys of the Peruvian-Bolivian Central Andes; it could be the humid swampy lowlands of Yucatan and southeast Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. It could be many things but the challenge is always so great as to encourage or indeed necessitate the extreme organization (perhaps quasi-militarization) of the labor force along professionally specialized lines.

Nuclear China

In the great regions bordering the Huang-ho River in the north and the Yangtze River in the south, nature provided China and humanity with some of the finest and greatest tracts of agricultural land with the most perfect climate she provided any  Neolithic farmers anywhere in the world. Conditions over these millions upon millions of acres were exactly the opposite, one thinks, to the regions of environmental extremes posed to farmers in the other principle areas of the origin of civilization. Elsewhere, the challenge confronting the early Simple Chiefdoms were deserts, or low and humid lowlands, or alpine and subarctic highlands, as in Egypt, Iraq, Mexico-Guatemala, and the Central Andes of Peru. Areas which we have seen required the professional specialization of labor and the application of true labor-power. So what happened in nuclear China? If challenge is always the key, and it is, why do we see identical sociocultural evolutionary trajectories in environmentally near perfect China? What was the challenge?

The answer: a very rapid population explosion of Neolithic (Tribal Agricultural) farmers over an area so vast as to dwarf any of the other foregoing centers of origin – and to do so by orders of magnitude. Excavations carried out in the 1990’s, along the Yangtze drainage, by Chinese and foreign archaeologists (especially Richard S. MacNeish) show us that the agricultural revolution was well along by 14,000 years ago and that by 10,000 years ago rice paddy agriculture was being invented. This irreversible release of huge quantities of agricultural surplus laid the basis for rapid population expansion. With this rapid rise in population numbers came the early and absolute concomitant necessity of immediate, thorough-going and dramatic transition to increasingly effective Simple Chiefdom society featuring intensive professional specialization of virtually every productive task and the early application of true labor-power to agriculture and other handicraft industries. The challenge was the sheer numbers of people – far greater in numbers than in any of the other centers of origin. To overcome the challenge the Simple Chiefdom had to remain in place and intensify its internal processes. As there was nowhere to migrate, those persons in the center with the new ideology of selfish acquisition motivating them had only to advocate doing what was clearly essential and doing it, in place.

Getting it Right is Important

For once Karl Wittfogel’s idea of the requirements of hydraulic civilization was almost right. I say almost, because, at-bottom, Wittfogel’s hypothesis of irrigation agriculture necessitating “state” (army and police in the hands of a ruling class) origins is essentially incorrect. It was not the requirements of irrigation agriculture which necessitated “the state.” “The state” arose once classes came into existence, as the simple and straight-forward product of their irreconcilability. Irrigation is a technological improvement emerging nearly everywhere in the Stage of Simple Chiefdoms (and even among some earlier Tribal agriculturalists). Irrigation undergoes massive expansion with the emergence of Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms, and of course, is even more massively expanded with the rise of the Stage of Slavery. It is the process of reorganizing society along rank and then class lines which is underway, and the state (army and police) arises, in the midst of this process, in the hands of the privileged ranks cum classes, that have the money to pay the thugs (i.e., to finance the state.) Because Wittfogel did not understand dialectics he was unable to get the horse in front of the cart and this is an area where there is no substitute for getting it right in theory.

First, those that would form the ruling classes (beginning with the privileged center of Chief and Consigliore and their retainers and families; later the higher ranks composed of theses same persons and other strategically and advantageously placed persons) had to get into position. It was this position which provided a mechanism to professionally specialize labor and a reason to justify the application of the new economic category of labor-power, (always because of some underlying environmental challenge). Thus, in Egypt and Iraq, in the Mayan lowlands, in the Central Andes, the Simple Chiefdoms walked into, asked for, solicited, these environmental extremes. In China, it was the in situ fact of vast human numbers which provided the “environmental” challenge key to enabling the underlying interest of the new selfishly motivated persons to intensify their advantage via special position in the center of the new mode of collection and redistribution. In other words, the interests of those in the center were advanced, when the need to professionally specialize labor and apply labor-power in place, occurred anywhere, regardless of the reason. Once the ranks formed, and privilege existed, the conditions were ripe for class separation and the emergence of armed force in their very private hands.

It requires surgically precise logic to see the difference between this and what Wittfogel superficially and mechanically projected; it requires the dialectical understanding of cause and process in prehistoric sociocultural evolution. That is what science is all about. If everything were self-evident about these processes there would be no need for science. Wittfogel’s errors led him into pathological anti-communism and into acting as a willing agent for US imperialism in later years.

Origin of the Concept of Profit

Side by side with the sincere converts to the “cause” of efficiency via professional specialization and tight central administration, were those of ulterior motivation whose basal imprinting of selfishness (and soon, if not already, true sadism) was invisible. Cloaked as it were from public view.

One can imagine a variety of “reasons” offered for moving into the hot and hellish deserts of Mesopotamia and Upper Egypt/Sudan. Free land ready to exploit. Relative security as people would be protected from raiders by the very deserts themselves. But, at-bottom, the real reason was that survival in these extreme climates could only be certain if these societies went whole hog down the road of professional specialization of labor. - And, in that process, of course, those at the center of the reciprocal movement of goods and services stood to benefit - indeed, to profit. Thus, emerges for the first time in human history the concept of “profit” as a primary motive for the action of certain persons. Hidden for sure, but none the less, just as real. – And, the category of “profit” in our equations as an economic category. It is a distinct new category because, for the first time, we see that a new disposition for surplus value exists. One in which surplus value can be extracted by the administrating clique for its own upkeep, and lifestyle; perhaps even for “reinvestment.”