The answers are great, but they also miss the decisive influence of war. War loot made proto-aristocracy richer and allowed them to fund better armor and weapons, which both made them more successful in external wars and made them more efficient in imposing their will internally; war pressured nearby societies to develop state instutions from informal relationship networks and eliminated those societies that clinged to a more equitable organization.

A combination of simply lacking the technology to advance production and the rise of the division of labor. Marx has a quote from The German Ideology that is immensely useful:

We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise philosophers by explaining to them that the “liberation” of man is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the trash to “self-consciousness” and by liberating man from the domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse…[There is here a gap in the manuscript]

This is the basis of historical materialism. Early slave societies rose and then transformed into feudalism through successive improvements in production technology, development, and transformations in the division of labor. When early communalist societies began agriculture, this gave some groups more time than others, which gradually transformed into social leverage and an actual class, state, and more. This is also why communism abolishes the division of labor as such, and why many socialist countries try to focus on polytechnical education and development of the productive forces.

The quantitative changes that eventually result in the qualitative shifts of a class society are done mostly by everyday working people who aren’t aware of how their individual actions coalesce into collective action and what they amount to. For example, when I’m at work I’m just trying to get through my 10 hours and get home to my family and to play minecraft, I’m not consciously aware that my work is quantitatively adding on to the development of the productive forces.

People probably weren’t inventing clay storage vessels with the hopes to eventually change the relations of productions of their communalist society. They were probably just like, “dope, these berries are gonna stay good for an extra couple days.”

In the transition from nomadic pastoralism to sedentary agricultural production, in places like Mesopotamia, if I were a farmer, walls, cities, and irrigation are technological innovations that would probably look appealing to me to be a part of. The division of labor (including the bureaucratic control of surplus goods) is also an innovation but of the relations of production instead.

Keep in mind, you’re probably not walking out of the woods to see these cities. Most people are born into these new early fuedal/slave societies. It’s all you’ve ever known and it’s reinforced through not just incredible violence but culture and especially religion. Your city has a patron god and your ruler was chosen by your god. Who are you to ask what they do with your grain?

I highly highly highly recommend Chainslayer’s videos on YouTube that cover the history of human societies from the emergence of class, the state, and money all the way to the industrial revolution. They’re a marxist using historical materialism. They’re easy to understand and pretty comprehensive.

Here’s the link to the video of theirs that might directly answer your question.

https://youtu.be/YMb_ojeZ_gI

We have the right idea about the physical. Like the idea that surplus production would start concentrating wealth

a lot of people alive right now really dont understand how much of a resource knowledge and knowledge production is.

because early on. early, EARLY on, the families producing surplus, the people who actually experienced gains in lifespan and power, were coalescing into local and then regional, then imperial governments? they were able to collect more knowledge and pass it down faster. Something as simple as figuring out how to identify better soil quality could become an edge.

We were as smart then as we are now, and we were way more sensate to the outside world on the whole, because our lives demanded it. Eventually somebody figures out how people work, having all this extra nutrition, and a larger knowledge base, was putting the people at the top of these early hierarchies, a few steps ahead of anybody else in most ways. This happens independently in many places. With different, messy, extremely human intellectual/material technologies, consistently

The first guy who figured out how to convince other people to fight for his stuff, also instantly created the social pretext for war and mass violence, and these are the contexts where figuring out how to get people to do labor that isn’t just for them is being worked out more generally.

There were families and other organizations concentrating knowledge and using it to concentrate influence and power. With time the reasons why you would do this become more than strictly material. The complex contexts based on this need to get people to do stuff means you have to manage their thoughts, and figure out how to motivate people who may be relative strangers to perform labor for you. This creates a need for religion complex enough to be wielded by a state, (though I think the religious impulse is not rooted in this, i do think the impulse towards religion is actively manipulated and has been the entire time we’ve had it). These complex motives amount to delusions and bullshit most of the time, but it becomes culture.

As you move to these larger city-state social organizations, the basic form of the ruling class exists. It’s here, and already for a very long time.

The basic relationship between : -motivating people at scale to do things for people other than themselves and their family -the desire to stay in power, to protect gains, to protect the amassed wealth and collective expression/being of the social order they’re at the center of -the basic recognition of knowledge as a resource worth hoarding, hiding, etc.

is a relationship that causes this class to want to preserve itself. So it begins justifying its existence as an abstract idea, either through religious imperative, the promised rewards of conquest, the doling out of “sacred/secret” knowledge (usually the deets on how to manipulate people), or whatever.

“Steve is having to explain why he needs to be in charge, and he is unfortunately the motherfucker who realized you could imprint the structure of the society you want into expression of the culture of that society, so he pays artisans to write and tell the epic of Steve everywhere. We’ve got writing now too, shit, lets plaster this shit everywhere. The entire world is gonna know Steve was too smart to fuck the goddess of love and war.”

the patterns that were established persist, and we never really have stepped out from the inertia of these initial social conditions. We’re just living in some bizarre fractal mutant of those initial conditions.

families/etc. come and go. bloodlines (as a byway for knowledge transmission here) rise and fall, generations of this bullshit come and go, and because this basic structure is what we happened to “pull ourselves up” with, it echoes through the finite song of the human species from its start, and will to its end, unless one can make a conscious, concentrated effort to destroy it, the pattern will probably be around as long as we are as a species.

to be quite honest i think it’ll carry on well past that too lol

If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend reading Origin of the Family by Engels and/or Debt by Graeber.

I just wrote a comment about this in the last few weeks, but idk if it got removed or what.

In Marx’s ethnological notes on Lewis Morgan, he reviewed Lewis’s work on the ancient Roman gentiles, and their communal lifestyle. So I’m basing what I’m gonna describe on those notes. Keep in mind these social forms existed like 50 BC to 500 ad, and feudal/monarchic society predates that by like 8000 years or something.

There were these egalitarian communes of families with a shard ancestor called the Gens, which were genuinely fraternal social organizations where people shared resources and personal property was redistributed upon death of a member. Over time, distinct sections of the Gen seemed to accumulate different forms of social capital. So you got a group of like doctors, or academics, or leaders, engineers, or manual workers. Not formal divisions mind you, but if you were a member of the Gen you knew which people to go in order to get some function of your society. There was still like a genuine fraternity among the Gens at this point, and the functioning of society for the individual members was formally dependent on egalitarianism.

As this social capital concentrated within a group, the informal divisions hardened into castes, called Gentes. There was still respect and fraternity among the members of the Gens, but Gentes are now starting to act according to their own best interests. The egalitarianism still exists informally, but its more like a principle or value than a need in order for each little Gen society to function. Cultural momentum, not a necessity for survival.

Eventually, the Gentes start jockeying for political power and social position. This process destroys the genuine egalitarianism in every form, and replaces it with social competition and hierarchy. Eventually, one caste, one gent, dominates all others. This creates the “ruling class”, which simultaneously creates the other hardened classes. All egalitarian sentiment has been wiped away, both formally and informally, as far as it existed as an essential way that society functions.

In older forms of society, there were many classes that depended on each other for their established place in the hierarchy. Under feudalism the church existed as part of the power structure that maintained monarchic rule. This was extremely stable. But the creation of the bourgeois class created a new middle class that was driven by the relentless search for profit. This relentlessness means that the bourgeois class could not share power. They destroyed the formal power of the church, then the formal power of the monarchy. The capitalist’s ability to buy people, to change society, to formalize their own rule, led to their ability to subordinate the old classes and transform them into capitalist institutions. This is the process that leads to the two formal classes of capitalism, worker and capitalist. But I think its worthwhile to treat informal classes, such as peasant and lumpen, middle and small capitalist, nouveau riche and tech oligarchy classes, though there are others, as “real” since they reflect peoples experiences and real accumulation of social capital.

At the same time, there is one relentless search for profit, one global system that determines the character of all others, that determines the central contradiction around which is accumulated the material possibility for a new socialist society

All societies are capable of producing surpluses of use values. Some societies exchange surplus use values(at first as gifts, later as gifts expecting gifts of similar quantity or quality back.).

From the regular exchange of gifts arises the commodity form and hence commodity-value and exchange-value. From the emergence of the commodity form, there arises the possibility of creating a use-value for the sole purpose of exchanging it with someone else’s; i.e. commodity production and circulation arises.

Consequently, one begins to look at a big pile of rocks, or a mammoth with impressive antlers, and see not use-value (tools, meat, artistic material), but exchange-value, how many things (including favours/debts from one’s fellow people) one could exchange it for. This spurs the incentive to figure out how to produce more commodities for exchange faster, but in the palaeolithic and mesolithic these tendencies are very much marginal—in earliest periods, like pre-100,000bc, either non-existent or undetectable—with the main things exchanged being particularly fancy or useful stones for toolmaking.

Why is exchange marginal in these early periods, and why does the commodity not rule society? Because there’s less people, and these people are more mobile. If a foraging band needs stone, in most cases they go set up camp by the stone and get some. In later periods (post100,000bc-ish) there might be people who have “home bases” they return to, store stuff at, trade from, and defend territorially, but in these earlier periods the evidence shows a people that had absolutely no permanent settlements, little to trade, and no way to accumulate anything but people’s favours/debts—if they can even be called “debts” in a period before there is a state to enforce payment.

Accumulation of “debt” by giving gifts, feasts, etc, doesnt seem to persist beyond a person’s lifetime. If Bob was cool and always gave you nice stuff you might feel indebted to him if he asks a favour, but his son won’t inherit anything, largely because there’s no propertt to inherit. If the son is a nice guy, one might still help him out in memory of his father, but if he’s a jackass there’s no cops forcing you to pay “inherited debt.” At worst, if you’re the only one who thinks Bob jr sucks, you might have to go find some other forager band to join.

How does this so-called “primitive” communism collapse? With the increase of human populations over the later palaeolithic and mesolithic, and their related accumulation of knowledge, intensive rather than extensive foraging develops. People forage more intensely over a smaller area, and develop more territorialness over their area. Consequently now if one wants a specific type of stone it may not be possible to just go get it unless its quite nearby. Instead one will need to exchange something else for it. And with a base camp, it becomes possible to accumulate a larger supply of goods. But there is still little to accumulate besides favours.

With the emergence of the holocene, these tendencies are supercharged; production and population increases a lot in the milder holocene climate as regular seasons begin. In the levant, the Natufian archaeological culture developed full time sedentism, based still on hunting and gathering, which eroded its own basis for existence within a few thousand years. Facing the decline in local plants and animals populations, people began to domesticate them, at first haltingly and then more quickly, leading to the neolithic.

With full time sedentism, exchange becomes even more important, and with the domestication (enslavement) of animals, a form of moveable, accumulable, heritable, property emerges. This private wealth challenges the public, eventually indebts more and more people to itself and begins to establish even larger settlements. In mesopotamia, the earliest and largest emerged, first with the protocities of the ubaid period and then with the full urbanism, writing, etc, of Uruk.

With the emergence of Uruk and its expansion, surrounding societies are pushed towards mimicking Uruk (and later Akkad, Babylon, etc) in the same ways those in the imperial periphery are pushed today: on the one hand, by their own elite made fabulously wealthy by trade centralise power for their own benefit; and on the other hand defense against Uruk and other protocities requires such centralisation. Much like the USSR couldnt simply choose to move to full communism under siege, the primitive communists could not maintain their communism under assault by Uruk.

After a few thousand years of regularised commodity production and exchange, like the mass production of textiles by the temples slaves for export to oman and the indus in exchange for copper, money emerges a few hundred years BCE more firmly establishing and expanding commodity exchange.

earlier economies of primitive accumulation were run on scarcity and debt

consider that and it becomes apparent how it begets inequality. given time this begets class structures and those get codified into legal systems and socially accepted and internalized by the people living in such societies.

I’ve been trying to figure this out myself.

My best pet theory right now is trauma-induced anti-social behaviors creating runaway social processes that replicated and then merged, almost certainly starting with patriarchy.

Take a group of humans who have a subsistence living. These humans will always hit a scarcity moment on natural cycles. During times of scarcity, resources will be rationed and some people will die. In order for the species to propagate, pregnant people are going to be first priority, followed by healthy children, followed by people who possessed the largest capacity for bearing more children. So while some may die due to starvation, it is more likely that those who cannot bear children will bear the larger burden of the scarcity.

The human animal experiences these moments of relation to death as a form of stress, a particular form of stress we call traumatic stress. This stress induces a change in the body that has behavioral implications often for the rest of the life of the individual. These changes can suppress some parts of cognitive function and amplify other parts.

Enter the concept of sociopathy. We have given names to anti-social behaviors but fundamentally what we can take from modern psychology is that it is immanent in the human organism to have cognitive patterns that destroy rather than build communion with other humans. These are pathologies of the individual that become pathologies of the society.

So humans are in-built with the possibility of anti-society behaviors as much as we are in-built with the possibility of compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice. Since stress represses some cognition and amplifies others, and since traumatic stress can lock these changes in for long periods of time, what we see is the potential for subsistence communes to experience natural scarcities that induce deaths that must be distributed according to the decisions made by people in a tight knit community. This has a high probability of inducing traumatic stress in certain members, with a higher incident rate among the people lower on the priority list. Without intervention, this traumatic stess can permanently alter the behavior of some members of the community, and some of those permanent changes could be anti-social and even sociopathic.

The thing about sociopathic behavior is that they destroy societies and since society is necessary for the human organism, given a single society with no outside context, a single person destroying a society will necessarily destroy themself. That is to say, sociopathy is internally contradictory.

And there are probably instances of this happening. And the process ends.

But there are also likely instances where the contradiction was recognized by the sociopathic person and they attempted to address the contradiction by delaying the consequences of their actions. They may not have seen it as delay, they may have seen it as displacement - displace the consequences of the contradiction on to others and I can behave in a contradictory way - but materially that’s always a form of deferrment - the consequences being displaced on others assumes the buffer will absorb the consequences forever, and no buffer can do that.

So now we have some societies wherein a sociopath, likely so produced by untreated traumatic stress, is behaving in a way as to protect themselves at the expense of others. Well, this won’t last long. A single person against a whole community? Unlikely to be tolerated for long. So now we have the next filter. Can the sociopath enlist other people to support their consequence-deferrment system.

And we see this in male circumcision cults that literally traumatized each other as a way of bonding (trauma bonding) in their commitment to break free from their mothers (anti-matriarchy). And then we see circumcision become not a cult practice but something done to every infant with a penis, because that cult ultimately succeeded in defending its interests and repressing resistance.

This sort of thing happening all over the world in small ways gets addressed or not in myriad forms. But some of these processes become inter-societal, creating arms races between systems of anti-social deferrment, leading to aggregation, leading to arms races between larger and larger groups.

Under this admittedly amateurish narrative, classes emerge when individuals hit upon them as a “solution” to the contradictory consequences of their trauma-driven anti-social self-preservation behaviors, and thus likely started with the creation of genders as classes by the aggrieved non-childbearing members of communities to protect their interests against the rationing decisions of the community in times of scarcity, which created runaway processes of contradiction between the genders which required further repression producing further contradictions ad nauseum. Eventually this results in the masc gender needing to subdivide further to manage its own internal contradictions that emerge as a result of the anti-social behaviors that maintain the gender as a class, including ritualized trauma-binding as a form of elite reproduction which is required to maintain the consequence-deferrment system as the originator(s) of that system become infirm.

Subdivision of the masc gender would sometimes coincide with the domination of other communities, which would drive a different form of class division to manage the contradictions between subjugator and subjugated. This would lead to parallel non-synchronized classification along disparate dimensions, leading to what we now perceive as complex intersectionality.

Eventually we end up with medieval (or even potentially ancient) awareness of mutually assured destruction where complete extinction of “the other” is recognized as likely to result in “our own” destruction, leading to the emergence of formal governments to manage the contradictions of multi-faction anti-social coesxistence, the fusing of these governments into city-states and then nation-states, and ultimately the place we find ourselves today.

i think if your ancient society starts doing slavery then you can out compete the hunter gatherer guys in your region or go enslave them. like it does offer certain “advantages” obviously strictly to the new owner class but once enough groups enter that mode the cat is kind of out of the bag. it’s a stage of human economic development and once it became widespread or structural there was no going “back” any more than we could choose to go back to feudalism

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