The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 24

The subsequent spread of agriculture (at least in Europe) occurred due to the migration of members of agrarian communities, rather than due to hunter-gatherers willingly adopting the agricultural practices of their neighbors (Smil 2017, pp. 43-44). This may suggest that agriculture had no clear advantages over hunting and gathering. The shift to farming represented, in a sense, the collapse of primitive society. James Scott notes that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture entails a more monotonous rhythm and simpler activities:

“I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, ‘What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins.’” (Scott 2017, p. 92). “It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks” (ibid., p. 90).

Primitive societies were not societies of affluence. Hunter-gatherers did not lead lives of idleness, but neither were they forced to work hard or monotonously. With the exception of flood farming, agriculture constitutes a much more laborious occupation than hunting and gathering:

“As Ester Boserup and others have observed, there is no reason why a forager in most environments would shift to agriculture unless forced to by population pressure or some form of coercion” (Scott 2017, p. 20). “Why would foragers in their right mind choose the huge increase in drudgery entailed by fixed-field agriculture and animal husbandry unless they had, as it were, a pistol at their collective temple? We know that even contemporary hunter-gatherers, reduced to living in resource-poor environments, still spend only half their time in anything we might call subsistence labor” (ibid., p. 93).

If the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming involved an obvious simplification of life and more arduous work, why did it happen at all? The reason may have been the creation of surpluses or reserves that reduced environmental uncertainty, allowed time and resources to be allocated more efficiently, and thus freed up for activities other than food production. Religion, war, crafts and trade were the causes of farming and herding, at least insofar as farming and herding were their causes. Since the simplification of the individual live was accompanied by the complication of community live, individuals had to adapt to the rhythms of culture rather than nature. The transition to agricultural production occurred at the level of culture-society rather than at the level of individuals, many of whom suffered from this transition. The main driving force behind the transition was competition between communities, their leaders, and their meanings.

The prerequisite and at the same time consequence of the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and agriculture was the increase in population density. While the average population density in hunter-gatherer communities was 25 people per 100 square kilometers (cf. Smil 2017, p. 28), slash-and-burn agriculture made it possible to feed 100 times more people: from 2,000 for corn farmers in North America to 6,000 for rice and tuber farmers in Southeast Asia (ibid., p. 45). Finally, in such developed agricultural production as the rice fields of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the corn plantations of the Aztecs, or the potato fields of the Incas, the population density reached tens of thousands of people per 100 square kilometers of cultivated area (cf. ibid., pp. 95, 98-9).