The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 43

The characteristics of such a staple food are (1) the possibility of being taken away from the producer; for example, wheat, which must be harvested in time, and not tubers, which remain in the ground for years and are edible; and (2) a specific harvest time; here, too, it is wheat, and not, for example, legumes (Scott 2017, p. 22). The measurability and divisibility of the harvest, the possibility of calculating yields and taxes, is a key prerequisite for the emergence of the state. Wheat, barley, rice, millet and corn were the “premier political crops” (Scott 2017, p. 131):

“One might be tempted to say that states arise, when they do, in ecologically rich areas. This would be a misunderstanding. What is required is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can he easily administered and mobilized” (Scott 2017, p. 24). “…The embryonic state arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation” (ibid., p. 116).

The technologies necessary for the emergence of political organization are not limited to the use of purely natural effects such as grain cultivation. Social and abstract technologies based on cultural effects (e.g., writing) were crucial both for centralized recording and calculation and for the formalization of political norms:

“The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardization and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations. Essential to that standardization is the very invention of a standard nomenclature, through writing, of all the essential categories—receipts, work orders, labor dues, and so on” (Scott 2017, p. 144). “Claude Levi-Strauss wrote thus: Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself … Writing is a strange thing … The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals … into a hierarchy of castes and classes … It seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind” (ibid., p. vi).

Meanings, including writing, do not arise and grow for the enlightenment or exploitation of humanity. They increase insofar as is necessary or sufficient for the self-reproduction of cultures-societies. Economy emerges in relation to technology, policy—in relation to organization: economic action means choosing technology, political action means choosing organization. Politics is the selection of institutions in the competition between people, their needs and motives. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson say, “politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 79). The division and addition of technology goes hand in hand with the division and addition of order, with the emergence of new norms and the increasing complexity of order.

If technology is based on the use of effects, then organization is based on the regulation of relations between people, i.e. on command or disposal. Historically, the first form of economic organization was application or disposal in the process of use: if a thing is not used immediately, it can be taken by someone else. When the natives tried to take things from the ships of the Europeans in the Age of Discovery, they were thieves to the Europeans, although the natives themselves only wanted to use things that the Europeans were not using. Further division and addition of order lead to the second form—