The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 111

“Under the demographic conditions of early state formation, when the means of traditional production were still plentiful and not monopolized, only through one form or another of unfree, coerced labor—corvée labor, forced delivery of grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom, communal bondage and tribute, and various forms of slavery—was a surplus brought into being. Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor, as we shall see, but it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus on the one hand and the risk of provoking the mass flight of subjects on the other, especially where there was an open frontier. Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus” (Scott 2017, pp. 152-3).

The vicious circle of simple self-reproduction was broken by the transition to a new, expanded mode of self-reproduction, which is associated with the self-expansion of capital and is therefore usually called capitalism. The second part of the book is devoted to considering expanded self-reproduction, in which both the human population and the complexity of meanings grow relatively rapidly.

Over the course of about 10,000 years of agricultural evolution, the Earth’s population has grown from 5 or 10 million to 1 billion people, but the complexity of culture-society has changed little during this time. How little the meanings have increased can be seen from the fact that at the beginning of the 19th century the vast majority of the population was employed in agriculture, which was based on the physical strength of humans and domestic animals. “As long as animate labor remained the sole prime mover of field work, the share of the population engaged in crop cultivation and animal husbandry had to remain very high, more than 80%, commonly over 90%” (Smil 2017, pp. 407-8).