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?
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).