Pre-historic human societies (CG Estabrook)

[Greg Schofield]

You are absolutely right (see below) "progress" came about through social stress, people went to enormous lengths to preserve the communal nature of their societies, however, stressed societies looked towards technical innovation as a last resort and in a finely balanced system of exchanges of necessary-labour-time such innovation wrought social tensions which could only be resolved by social innovations which often created new contradictions in place of the old.

The by-product of stress was technical innovation, the cost was social cohesion and eventual alienation, the product was socities that could maintain an intense presense (socially, militarily and economically). Progress is in this sense inevtiable in human social evolution as it is uneven in historical appearance. Eventually some social configuration would concentrate enough technical power, social disjunction and hunger to propel it to havest the world - this is not the norm in history but nevertheless the expected outcome of it.

The path of progress has always been contradictory, the very social dislocation steming from attempts to even-out and re-adjust social antagonisms but in the end creating new contradiction which only worsen the problem - this too has a logical end-point.

Greg Schofield
Perth Australia

--- Message Received ---
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 00:28:14 -0600
Subject: Re: Pre-historic human societies

The reason perhaps being that the switch was not progress but a necessary
reaction to a dwindling per capita food supply.  Marshall Sahlins' classic
article on the paleolithic as an affluent society warned us away from the
"onward and upward" view of the neolithic.  Why raise crops (and stay
around to guard them) if you're sure there'll always be enough to eat?  
After affluence comes 10,000 years of scarcity, which we call
"civilization."  And that's not wrong if we see agriculture, urbanization,
and class divisions as responses to scarcity.

Ernest Gellner had it right, I think, when he wrote that the Neolithic
Revolution "was a tremendous trap. The main consequences of food
production and storage was the pervasiveness of political domination ...
The moment there is a surplus and storage, coercion becomes socially
inevitable, having previously been but optional. A surplus has to be
defended. It also has to be divided. No principle of division is either
self-justifying or self-enforcing: it has to be enforced by some means and
by someone."  --CGE