The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 45

Barbarians were not just primitive hunters and gatherers, they were the “dark twins” of the states that evolved alongside them. The barbarians formed sprawling chiefdoms, confederations of nomadic pastoralists who lived from raids on grain-growing centers, from mercenaries and from trade:

“The barbarians, broadly understood, were perhaps uniquely positioned to take advantage—and in many cases direct charge—of the explosion in trade. They were, after all, by virtue of their mobility and dispersion across several ecological zones, the connective tissue between the various sedentary cereal-intensive states” (Scott 2017, p. 248). “The early agrarian states and the barbarian polities had broadly similar aims; both sought to dominate the grain-and-manpower core with its surplus. The Mongols, among other raiding nomads, compared the agrarian population to ra’aya, ‘herds.’ Both sought to dominate the trade that was within reach. Both were slaving and raiding states in which the major booty of war and the major commodity in trade were human beings. In this respect they were competing protection rackets” (ibid., pp. 244-5).

The transition from community to chiefdom and state is closely linked to the growth of human population and its density, as well as to the clash of communities among themselves. For a member of an isolated community, the tribe is identical with all of humanity: there are no people outside it. In a community, trust and justice are based on blood ties and common destiny. “Pastoralists in particular have remarkably flexible kinship structures, allowing them to incorporate and shed group members depending on such things as available pasture, number of livestock, and the tasks at hand—including military tasks” (Scott 2017, p. 235). However, the kinship-based socio-cultural order has limits beyond which formal order begins. The transition from a family community to a society of strangers undermines the natural order as the basis of trust and justice and requires a human-made order based on administration and religion.

In contrast to a community, a society is not humanity, it is not the unity of all human beings. Society is a mechanical and abstract association of a few, not an organic and concrete association of all. Ferdinand Tönnies famously distinguished between community and society:

“The relationship itself, and the social bond that stems from it, may be conceived either as having real organic life, and that is the essence of Community [Gemeinschaft]; or else as a purely mechanical construction, existing in the mind, and that is what we think of as Society [Gesellschaft]. … All kinds of social co-existence that are familiar, comfortable and exclusive are to be understood as belonging to Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft means life in the public sphere, in the outside world. In Gemeinschaft we are united from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse. We go out into Gesellschaft as if into a foreign land” (Tönnies 2001, pp. 17-8).

Trust is the necessary condition of coordinated action and cooperation both in the personal community and in the impersonal society. However, the impersonal order requires new foundations for trust. Administration does not create political power as a counter to the power of society. In fact, it creates society itself for the first time, transforming people—priests and rulers—into the meanings and centers around which the formation of society took place. Laws and dogmas changed the sources of identity and trust, that is, they extended social norms to an indefinite circle of people united by a common citizenship and faith. With their emergence, trust went beyond the narrow circle of the community and extended to an unlimited circle of the fellow citizens and fellow believers: