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?
Very interesting. Do you have any recommended reading or other material on this topic?
On the commodity and its nefarious effects its all chapter 1-3 of capital as you know, but in case anyone else reading doesnt thought i’d mention it anyway. Ime most scholars of pre/history do not have any real understanding of the commodity and its effects, which distorts their views of how markets and such work, so capital is really essential here for examining how commodities emerge and alter social relations. The idea that the revolution must become global or capitalism will return is present in many of marx’s writings, but imo he states it most clearly and succintly in “The Revolutionary Movement” (Jan1 1849).
In terms the development of prehistoric societies, Friedman and Rowlands (eds.) The Evolution of Social Systems has lots of stuff on the development of class society. Particularly from the essays by Kajsa Eckholm (“External Exchange and the Transformation of Central African Social Systems”), P. Bonte (“Non-Stratified Social Formations Among Pastoral Nomads”), and Friedman & Rowlands (“Notes Towards and Epigenetic Model of the Evolution of Civilisation”). The latter two construct useful models of the development, but I disagree with some aspects of both and their model doesnt examine primitive communism and its demise.
Another good work on the development of ancient empires is Mogens Trolle Larsen (ed.) Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires, especially the essays by Eisenstadt (“Observations and Queries about Sociological Aspects of Imperialism in the Ancient World”), Eckholm and Friedman (““Capital,” Imperialism, and Exploitation in Ancient World Systems”), Larsen (“The Tradition of Empire in Mesopotamia”), and Susan Frankenstein (“The Phoenicians in the Far West: A Function of Neo-Assyrian Imperialism”).
Stuff by indigenous folks like Forbes Columbus and Other Cannibals or Kayanesenh Paul Williams Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace have also influenced my analysis a lot, seeing how native folks being invaded by commodityproducers understand and understood it in the Americas provides useful questions and frameworks for examining those processes in prehistory.
For instance, the Phoenicians, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, and Romans all used booze in the same way (i.e. to cheat natives by getting them drunk). Nothing is written from the native gaul, briton, berber, etc, perspective on this, or even about it at all (other than greeks glorying in profit and laughing at the drunkard barbarians getting cheated). But by examining whats happened in other native societies colonisers have dumped booze on, imo we can begin to understand the likely effects the wine had on northern europeans societies (and archaeologically, we see evidence of increased violence and patriarchal structures).
Lastly in terms of concrete historical and prehistorical evidence, i’m just about finished (~1930/2000 pages) Cambridge World Prehistory (absurdly dry reading). Before that i read a few more regional prehistory books (oxford prehistory of the near east, Cunliffe’s facing the ocean, Broodbank’s Making the Middle Sea, and a few whose titles i’ve forgotten that covered a bit of the emergence of “civilisation” in China, Peru, and Mexico, and lots about Rome’s relationship with “barbarians”.
In terms of more recent history, my curiosity about the origins and functioning of colonialism and imperialism really started reading Walker’s The Conquest of Ainu Land: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800. I was amazed how similar the methods of even the early shogunate were to Britain and France’s methods in Canada. Since then ive read stuff like One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark and From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands, c.1493-1820, Peasants, merchants, and markets : inland trade in medieval England, 1150-1350, etc, to get as concrete a view of these processes as I could, and I sorta just slowly worked back from there towards prehistory, trying to figure out when/how the processes started.
And all that reading has really led me back to marx’s description in ch1-3 of the emergence of commodities, and how class society starts from there. It lines up, at least imo from what ive read, quite well with the actual prehistorical evidence—astounding when you think how much less research on the period he had access to.
Great, thanks so much! Respect for working through some less glamorous material. I believe that a lot of the sexy revolutionary theory has been worked out already, and that the intellectual work that really needs doing (besides, of course, practical organizing and agitation) is the less sexy empirical analysis and extending the historical understanding for which Marx only laid the foundation. There are a lot of interesting threads that should be pulled, like this question on class society, but I also would like one day to read more on the Christianization of Europe and indeed the world, and how that interacted with the development of capitalism via the suppression of paganism etc.
I have one minor hesitance, not to say a challenge, but a nagging question impelling me to learn more —
Your description of the commodity seems a little anachronistic, doesn’t it? Certainly commodities existed incidentally in precapitalist societies, and so did money. But it was not predominating production until the capitalist era; Marx writes about this in several places, which I can dig up if you would like. Money, too, was not money in its fully developed capitalist form, until the capitalist era. For example, money could not represent abstract labor until the commodity figures as the general form of the product of labor, which doesn’t happen until capitalism; money also would need to be generally exchangeable for any commodity whatsoever, but I thought that money was limited to a unit of account, accounting for unpaid taxes, in some of these ancient societies? not generally used for exchange of any two commodities?
Thanks! Yeah the more I read Marx the more all the more theoretical stuff seems settled to me. Europe’s christianization is a really interesting topic imo, though I’m more familiar with things on the christian side of the border. There’s a lotta simularities in early christianity to other revolutionary movements (including its eventual co-optation, and even the posthumous co-optation of “anti-revisionist” priests and monks who opposed e.g. the increasing wealth of the church
No need to dig up the Marx quotes
On commodities, I thought I made it explicit but I might have been unclear: i am not saying there was predominant commodities(either in the sense of most goods being produced as commodities or in the sense of commodities dominating people) in the mesolithic or palaeolithic. I am saying the commodity-form emerges in these periods, but stays marginal.
By around the early-mid second milleniumBC, i would describe these societies as being dominated by commodities’ circulation and production, including for social necessities (most notably producing textiles to exchange for copper, tin, slaves, and wood). There is no money at this point, and most of the necessities of life (food, clothes) are still locally produced as use-values. But commodity production and exchange play a large role in determining where labour surplus to subsistence is directed. These exchanges are framed in texts as generous gifts; in reality the giftgiver expects something back of similar value and might invade if insufficiently pleased.
Those “money” tokens are actually what I had in mind when saying most scholars of the period (bronze and early iron ages) dont understand the commodity and its effects. I do not think they can be called “money”. They were, as far as we can tell, non-exchangeable, and not even used as money of account, let alone as physical money. Rather than using them to measure value, they were used to represent specific quantities of use-values. Standardised ingots of metal are getting close to being used as a universal commodity at this point, but nothing has been formally baptised money. Money arises near the beginning of the classical period in western anatolia (lydia iirc but dont quote me on that) and spreads around the eastern mediterranean from there.
The classical period and rome (until the collapse of its monetary economy in the 3rd and 4th centuries) i would be comfortable describing as capitalist with generalised commodity production: land was alienable, everything (even food by non-peasants) was produced for exchange, everything was saleable for money. After rome’s collapse, it took a few hundred years for a similarly commodity and money focusses society to emerge in the west (the most successful being England under Alfred and Edward, which had money-rents and kicked people off their land if they couldnt pay leading to re-concentration of wealth).