I understand the general Marxist theory about why class society arose, there was surplus production and that lead to the institution of private property and the rest follows.
All of that makes sense on a high level but what exactly happened on an individual human level? Conceivably those early civilizations could have elected to go for a more equitable and democratic distribution of the surplus value even if the result would probably not be 100% equitable and would result in some poverty due to material constraints at the time. How do you explain the first appearance of private property and class society on an individual level without delving into some evopsych nonsense about evolutionary instincts or whatever?
Sometimes it did push in the other direction. Western and central Europe had more class differentiation during the bronze age than the earlier iron age for example. But then the commodity form re-infiltrated them through the greek and phoenician merchants, more militarism became necessary to defend against encroachment from the south (and from neighbours later on), their warriors grew wealthy from raiding greek and roman colonies (or from serving the same as mercenaries), etc. The same sorta push in the other direction has happened countless times, usually leading to what the nobles view as “dark ages”—but so long as any class societies exist they will re-establish themselves
Itz why the revolution needs to be global and must struggle to abolish commodities or “the whole rot” (as marx called it) will just re-establish itself again