“The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft. … The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is ‘consumed’ in leisure and cultural elaboration. Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed” (Scott 2017, pp. 171-2).
The ratio between surplus and necessary activity (and their products) forms the rate of surplus activity. The more the complexity of the culture-society exceeds the complexity of the individuals, the higher the rate of surplus activity.
Since, as we have seen above, Marx did not yet know and could not know that complex labor cannot in principle be reduced to simple labor, he could not have known either that added activity cannot be reduced to necessary activity. If for Marx surplus labor and surplus product were produced by the workers and other exploited classes, and appropriated by the exploiting classes, then from our point of view the surplus activity and its products are produced by culture-society as a whole, and the manner of their appropriation depends on the relative political, economic and cultural* power (or authority) of the state, social categories and individuals.
As long as the surplus product was redistributed for the benefit of officials and the army, states were satisfied with a vertical, i.e. centralized, calculation and accounting. The growth of crafts and cities led to a horizontal, i.e. decentralized, circulation of the surplus product. Surplus activity and the need to put its product into circulation were the driving force behind the long process of value and money development. Money spread where the surplus product was extracted from the immediate producers and transferred to an indefinite number of people through the mechanisms of competitive circulation.