Marxian Interpretation of The Historical Origin of The Surplus Product
For most of human prehistory, Marxian writers like Ernest Mandel and V. Gordon Childe argued, there existed no economic surplus product of any kind at all, except very small or incidental surpluses.
The main reasons were:
- that techniques were lacking to store, preserve, and package surpluses securely in large quantities or transport them reliably in large quantities over any significant distance;
- the productivity of labour was not sufficient to create much more than could be consumed by a small tribe;
- early tribal societies were mostly not oriented to producing more than they could actually use themselves, never mind maximising their production of output. Thus, for example, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins estimated that the utilization by tribes of the "carrying capacity" of their habitat ranged from 7% among the Kuikuro of Amazonia to about 75% among the Lala of Zambia.
- different groups of people usually did not depend on trade for their survival, and the total amount of trading activity in society stayed proportionally small.
The formation of the first permanent surpluses are associated with tribal groups who are more or less settled in one territory, and stored foodstuffs. Once some reserves and surpluses exist, tribes can diversify their production, and members can specialise in producing tools, weapons, containers, and ornaments. Modern archaeological findings show that this development actually began in the more complex hunter-gatherer (foraging) societies. The formation of a reliable surplus product makes possible an initial technical or economic division of labour in which producers exchange their products. In addition, a secure surplus product makes possible population growth, i.e. less starvation, infanticide, or abandonment of the elderly or infirm. Finally, it creates the material basis for a social hierarchy, where those at the top of the hierarchy possess pretige goods which commoners do not have access to.
Read more about this topic: Surplus Product
Famous quotes containing the words historical, origin, surplus and/or product:
“Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody’s mom in that she knows what’s best for us. But if you look at the historical record—Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages—you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Next week Reagan will probably announce that American scientists have discovered that the entire U.S. agricultural surplus can be compacted into a giant tomato one thousand miles across, which will be suspended above the Kremlin from a cluster of U.S. satellites flying in geosynchronous orbit. At the first sign of trouble the satellites will drop the tomato on the Kremlin, drowning the fractious Muscovites in ketchup.”
—Alexander Cockburn (b. 1941)
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)