Surplus activity and its norm
A culture-society reproduces itself through added activity. A hunter-gatherer society, with its modest cultural experience and comparatively low complexity of meanings, produced activities that only enabled it to reproduce itself on a constant scale. The added activity of a primitive society was approximately equal to the sum of the necessary activity of the individuals who composed it. The accumulation of cultural experience, the division, addition and multiplication of meanings during the transition to agriculture, enabled the culture-society to carry out more complex activities and to produce more means of activity—more than was required for the simple reproduction of the active power of the individuals:
“At the dawn of civilization the productiveness acquired by labor is small, but so too are the wants which develop with and by the means of satisfying them. Further, at that early period, the portion of society that lives on the labor of others is infinitely small compared with the mass of direct producers. Along with the progress in the productiveness of labor, that small portion of society increases both absolutely and relatively” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 513).
In its ability to give more than it gets, a producing culture-society resembles nature. Just as the land can produce a harvest in excess of the amount sown, so an agrarian culture-society can produce more than is required for its self-reproduction. However, an agrarian culture-society is not able to maintain stable productivity, let alone stable productivity growth. Due to sudden changes in both socio-cultural and environmental conditions, population growth could be replaced by a sharp decline. Epidemics and crop failures led to the collapse of cultures-societies, that is, to a drop in their complexity. The ascending and descending phases of the demographic cycle replaced each other:
“With the huge population losses caused by the Black Death in many parts of Afro-Eurasia, cities shrank, farmlands were abandoned, and economies contracted. However, as had happened so many times in the past, growth soon resumed to kick-start a new Malthusian cycle that would last well into the 18th century” (Benjamin 2016, p. 267).