A Course of History

This was a stupid idea. I thought it would be handy to talk about the transition from feudal to capitalist society to get a better basis for an elf game economy, and ended up writing about economic development from the origin of organized society (according to some) to the state of the world since about the twentieth century.

The section about pre-society is mostly speculative about how mass organization originated and why, but afterwards I talk in more general terms about a historical path from feudal or tributary society (whatever) to a capitalist one, and also the impact of capitalist imperialism on undeveloped or developing nations. I was wanting to do something like this for Traveller, so this is kind of killing two birds with one stone.

I apologize for teetering the line between speculation and painting with too broad a brush, but at least it felt engaging to write. Enjoy?

Pre-Society

See: Engels (1884), Mumford (1967), Irigaray (1979), Diamond (1997), Scott (2017)

It is not a given that human beings should be organized into vast social machines. For most of 200,000 years, human beings lived in bands of a couple dozen members: some nomadic, some sedentary; some agricultural, some herders, some hunter-gatherers. We should not take for granted that anyone lifestyle should have been the direct predecessor to organized society, which is characterized not only by large groups of people but also a social division of labor which organizes individuals into hierarchical classes [1]. After all, because so many worlds have converged into the modern capitalist one, it stands to reason that there is more than one way to arrive at this penultimate endpoint.

One option is that cereal crops could not have been desired to cultivate except by force, since the initial drawbacks of the urban sedentary lifestyle are greater than any benefits, according to Scott (2017); thus organized society was from the onset built on agriculture forced onto ur-serfs by ur-state violence. Like Diamond (1998), Scott attributes the political development of human organization not to any intrinsic characteristics but to geographical circumstance. However, cereal crops alone do not a state make; there is no guarantee that the cultivation of cereal crops necessarily results from forceful agriculture or vice versa. There are likely one or more other factors that tipped the scale to result in social organization, forced labor, and state formation.

My friend John B. from The Retired Adventurer suggested to me that the discovery of bronze or similar materials could have led to much greater social formation (or disruption) than did the cultivation of cereals. Bronze was hard to acquire from mining copper and tin, such that mining was an slave industry from very early on. Unlike organic products, metal doesn’t rot or decompose (at least, not as quickly), which makes it easier to transport over long distances. Finally, bronze is used for domestic and military purpose; with bronze comes weapon smithing and, likely, organized warfare (at least, they seem to originate around the same time in the archaeological record). This locates bronze and similar materials as a candidate for the origin of forced labor, commodity exchange, and society, or it is a clearer path to those things than from cereal crops alone.

John B. and I also both agree that some notion of property must have preceded the origin of the patriarchy or the family (along with property inheritance et cetera) since it seems more likely a side product of an existing economic system than something which was invented or which had emerged for its own sake. If not without notions of property and exchange, what would the rationale be to exchange and own women? Graeber (2011) suggests that slavery emerges from a sort of social death that tears people away from their social networks; if an origin of slavery is to be found in the bronze industry, then an origin of patriarchy in controlling property by commodifying women as slaves would seem a possible candidate as per Irigaray (1979).

Whatever the case, at some point the following things emerged alongside, resulted from, or were constitutive of organized society and perhaps each other: a family unit centered on paternal authority; a division of labor within the family unit; a social division of labor; private property; exchange of property. Not all these things emerged everywhere or in the exact same way, of course, but with respect to organized societies these factors are very common and operate on similar bases. It also tends to be agreed upon that the earliest states did not exist to maintain an economic system, like we think of them now, but they themselves were social machines of mass production and distribution. As such, I think it is fair to begin a more general course of history with tributary, feudal, or palatial society to speak broadly about social organizations which extracted produce (and value) from its members in the form of rent.

Tributary Society

See: Marx (1867), Graeber (2011)

In societies where rent predominates over other possible economic relations, money originates as a unit of account to levy taxes with respect to some measure of average value, e.g. the average produce generated per unit (of land, of population, etc.) over some measure of time.

In medieval England, the annual productivity of a hide (an abstraction of average family holdings of 120 acres) was 1 pound sterling, divisible into 20 shillings or 240 pence. Yet this tax was levied as food rent, that is, harvested crops rather than in currency. The tax was itself a progression of an earlier tax based on concrete land holdings rather than the abstract measure of the hide; counting heads is easier than keeping track of which family has what.

Being a unit of account, money lends itself for exchange of items of equivalent value. Such exchange already took place at various scales, whether between families or between fiefs, but generally between folks of equal status rather than of varying status (between whom rent takes place); however these exchanges were at most based on recording favors expressed in money, rather than there being a direct and immediate exchange of money for the thing. Barter is relatively uncommon except between strangers who cannot guarantee that a favor can be repaid.

Throughout these contexts, however, money already serves in the capacity as a unit of value qua average productivity; that equivalences are being made is given even if there is no exchange of currency. Human activity is already abstracted and compared on the basis of what value one activity proffers versus another. The law of value, even if it does not yet predominate society (though, considering value tax, this is difficult to argue), is germinating.

Early-to-Middle Capitalist Society

See: Marx (1867), Graeber (2011)

Currency does not originate to facilitate barter, but to facilitate exchange on the basis of an existing notion of value which has already constituted organized society hitherto. States often invent currencies to compensate soldiers during war, giving them tokens promising a fraction of the state’s inventory of value to exchange for equivalent values with others: an I.O.U. Even better, the state then extracts taxes in the form of currency, forcing conquered peoples to sell to occupiers and then pay back the occupying power in rent. Currency rapidly proliferates across the society wherever it will be accepted, which expands through conquest or when the volume of purchasable produce is so great that the value of the currency as a medium of exchange is intuitive. Finally, it is not until money makes the world turn that we begin to understand that, despite appearances, land has always been a metaphor—an expression, a representation, a substitution—for social value.

In the face of free exchange of value, the rent extracted from feudal and absolutist states on the basis of divine right seemed unjust and exploitative. Bourgeois revolutions were headed by peasants and the middle class (consisting of merchants) to overthrow their overlords. After these uprisings, there were already individuals with more valuable holdings than others; yet primitive accumulation would ensue to forcibly privatize common lands and force the peasantry to become increasingly landless, with nothing of value except their capacity to produce more; this is the basis of a working class (proletariat) which sells their time in order to survive, and a capitalist class (bourgeoisie) with the capital to purchase their time and sell the new value they generate.

Peasants who still owned land were yet at risk of proletarianization, i.e. the process of losing their capital assets and being forced to join the working class. This same holds true for artisans who own their own capital and can employ their own time, but over time risk losing their market share and livelihood to increasingly large firms. These members of the petite bourgeoisie may have left their homelands while they still had their chance, to colonize other worlds and take from indigenous people there what would have been taken from themselves by big capitalists or the state. Rinse and repeat all that had happened. The world bleeds with colonization and industrialization.

Middle-to-Late Capitalist Society

See: Marx (1867), Luxemburg (1909), Lenin (1917), Fanon (1961), Debord (1967)

Industries industrialize. Or, in order to compete with other firms or to make large-scale production possible, machines powered by steam (and later electricity) are invented to increase productivity. Such machines employ "dead labor" in the sense that capitalists do not pay wages to employ them, but only pay the cost of purchasing them at their market value. Once a machine becomes commonplace in an industry (or, rather, the productivity granted by the machine), the value of the final product is partly pegged to the value of the machine. Some reactionary workers blame machines for worsening the human condition, or for turning what was once an artisan craft into a mass industry. Others realize it is not the machines to blame, but capital which seeks its own expansion blind to any other factor.

Firms which have attained a degree of international success may find themselves having more capital than they know what to do with. They export goods and capital to undeveloped nations, commanding the markets there by wielding control over their productivity. For nations without any previous capitalist relations, this economic imperialism accelerates the development of capitalism therein—at the whim of the international firm rather than the national bourgeoisie if one even exists. Nationalist revolutions, class collaborationist unions of bourgeoisie and peasantry and even proletariat, strive to ostensibly retake control of the nation from outside forces; in reality, the nation at this stage is in the middle of its own creation.

In developed countries, firms invent new needs to create new markets. It becomes more apparent than ever before that value was never about creating something useful, but creating something demanded; and now demand can be created ex nihilo, by asserting the value of what has been invested in its production. Mass media proliferates and culminates in a topsy turvy society of spectacle, a world of images detached from the physical world and subject to commodity logic alone. Similar to how value seized upon every product once human activity could be measured, the spectacle seizes upon every image, every signifier, to reconcile it with the world of spectacular demand.

Conclusion

The outline above is not inclusive of every possible organization of human society or, more broadly, lifestyle. It also does not represent a path which necessarily had to happen. The most we can do is look at the past and understand what circumstances determined history’s course in retrospect. Being conscious that this is but one path, yet one path which history actually took, we can refer to it to situate the social and historical contexts of our fictional worlds.

I hope it’s clear, though, that this is at least not a taxonomy of discrete time periods or socioeconomic organizations or whatever. Each of these periods, whether or not their inhabitants are aware, are always transitioning (if not collapsing) into new states of “history”. For example, I have chosen to distinguish between different stages of capitalism not as early, middle, and late, but as early-to-middle and middle-to-late. That is because these phases are not really distinct but always developing into the other as market forces intensify and advance themselves. Even more important is that late stage capitalisms depend on earlier stage capitalisms in order to continue to valorize themselves (what Lenin called the imperialist stage), the latter often also being engaged with feudal society such as in pre-revolutionary Russia and China [1]. I am also reminded of the bronze age collapse in Mycenaean Greece, where the palatial city states collapsed into a peasant economy that would later develop into the city states we now associate with Classical Greece [2]. History is about constantly failing, and I hesitate to say it fails upward. The task is thus to figure out exactly in what (non-vertical) direction it fails.

Post Script: I wrote this two months before learning about and playing Disco Elysium by the now-defunct ZAUM. However, in hindsight, I would absolutely recommend reading "Disco Elysium Outro" by co-creator Robert Kurvitz [3].

Endnotes

[1] I’ll be the first to say that I think most of the post-1917 revolutions are better described as national bourgeois movements rather than proletarian ones, since their struggle was mostly against international economy and national feudalism. I just don’t really care; I find it more interesting than anything else.

[2] The iconic ones being democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, both having vast slave economies to support their citizens.

[3] Kurvitz, Robert. 2020. "Disco Elysium Outro", Disco Elysium Artbook.

Bibliography

Debord, Guy. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle.

Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Engels, Frederich. 1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

Fanon, Franz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth.

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Lenin, Vladimir I. 1917. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1909. The National Question.

Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital, Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital.

Mumford, Louis. 1967. The Myth of the Machine, Volume I: Technics and Human Development.

Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.