The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings
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Every technology requires the use of energy, but changes in complexity do not depend on changes in the amount of energy used. Mastering more energy does not necessarily lead to an increase in meanings: technologies, organizations and psychologies. “…A deterministic linking of the level of energy use with cultural achievements is a highly arguable proposition” (Smil 2017, p. 3). The fact is that the complication of meanings is often based on social and abstract technologies, the development of which does not require large energy inputs:
“But even in much simpler societies than ours a great deal of labor was always mental rather than physical—deciding how to approach a task, how to execute it with the limited power available, how to lower energy expenditures—and the metabolic cost of thinking, even very hard thinking, is very small compared to strenuous muscular exertion. On the other hand, mental development requires years of language acquisition, socialization, and learning by mentoring and the accumulation of experience, and as societies progressed, this learning process became more demanding and longer lasting through formal schooling and training, services that have come to require considerable indirect energy inputs to support requisite physical infrastructures and human expertise” (Smil 2017, pp. 18-9).
An increased complexity of meanings is not necessarily the result of increased energy use, but the opposite is the case: changes in energy use depend on changes in the complexity of meanings. Increasing complexity requires a more efficient use of energy (cf. Smil 2017, pp. 417-8). Applied to culture-society, the principle of least action is first and foremost an information principle and only then an energy principle.
Productivity improvements are aimed at increasing the efficiency of activity and reducing the volume of activity required to meet needs. This can be done in two ways:
(1) by excluding redundant figurae, that is, by bringing the mass of an action closer to the possible minimum (economy of action);
(2) by complicating the meaning in a way that increases its effectiveness and/or reduces its intensity.
Productivity growth means increasing efficiency and saving labor, including through the use of indirect or roundabout production methods and tools: domestic animals, machines and mechanisms, etc.
The means of activity are an integral part of minimal actions: metal, furnace, hammer, and anvil are necessary elements of blacksmithing; wool and a spindle (or spinning wheel) are necessary for spinning. The elaboration of the means increases the complexity of the action: if means are lacking, one must first expend activity to produce them. In other words, the complexity of minimal production actions (e.g., blacksmithing or spinning) includes the complexity of the actions to produce their means of production. Similarly, the complexity of minimal consumption actions includes the complexity of consumer articles: before goods can be consumed, they must be produced.
The phase of technological development that began with the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming, brought with it a decrease in the intensity of activity and an increase in its complexity. Agricultural evolution was also the evolution of man himself: it reduced the intensity of his activity and changed his skeleton:
“A great deal of traditional farming required heavy work, but such spells were often followed by extended periods of less demanding activities or seasonal rest, an existential pattern quite different from the nearly constant high mobility of foraging. The shift from foraging to farming left a clear physical record in our bones. Examination of skeletal remains from nearly 2,000 individuals in Europe whose lives spanned 33,000 years, from the Upper Paleolithic to the twentieth century, revealed a decrease in the bending strength of leg bones as the population shifted to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. This process was complete by about two millennia ago, and there has been no further decline in leg bone strength since then, even as food production has become more mechanized, an observation confirming that the shift from foraging to farming, from mobility to sedentism, was a truly epochal divide in human evolution” (Smil 2017, p. 53).
In contrast to small foraging groups, large agricultural communities are more complexly organized and can better reduce labor intensity through the allocation of labor and energy. Productivity growth in traditional farming is based both on more intensive use of land and on more complex labor through the use of draft animals, irrigation, fertilization and crop diversification:
“No quest for higher yields could succeed without three essential advances. The first one was a partial replacement of human work by animal labor. In rice farming this eliminated usually only the most exhaustive human work as tedious hoeing was replaced by deep plowing using water buffalos. In dryland farming animal labor replaced human labor and sped up considerably many field as well as farmyard tasks, freeing people to pursue other productive activities or to work shorter hours. This prime mover shift did more than make the work quicker and easier; it also improved its quality, whether in plowing, seeding, or threshing. Second, irrigation and fertilization moderated, if not altogether removed, the two key constraints on crop productivity, shortages of water and nutrients. Third, growing a greater variety of crops, either by multicropping or in rotations, made traditional cultivation both more resilient and more productive” (Smil 2017, p. 65).
The use of draught animals, irrigation and fertilization make activities more complex, as they require growing fodder, building canals, collecting fertilizer, etc., so the size of the minimal action strings increases. At the same time, the intensity of agricultural labor decreases, which is reflected in the human skeleton.
Socio-cultural order and justice
Meaning as action produces products. Meaning as activity produces culture-society and its order. Socio-cultural order as a set of technological, organizational and psychological norms provides the context in which the evolution of meanings occurs. Cultures-societies are products of evolution and as such they are as ordered (or messed) as is appropriate for their functioning. Like all meaning, order cannot be reduced to a minimal action; it always contains redundant figurae—the remains of past orders and the sources of future orders. This means that in a culture-society there are always several competing orders.
Marx identified three modes of production in pre-capitalist societies: the Asiatic, the ancient (slave-holding) and the feudal. However, the order is not limited to modes of production. Kojin Karatani proposed to look at the economy in terms of modes of circulation rather than modes of production. Historically, the mode of circulation in the earliest societies was based on the reciprocity of gifts. With the formation of the state, the mode of circulation based on the exchange of obedience for protection, tribute for redistribution, increasingly became the most important (Karatani 2014, p. 70). For a traditional society, there are many orders that depend not only on the mode of production or circulation, but also on the form of consumption—for example, on the type of staple food:
“…I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. So long as subsistence is spread across several food webs, as it is for hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators, marine foragers, and so on, a state is unlikely to arise, inasmuch as there is no readily assessable and accessible staple to serve as a basis for appropriation” (Scott 2017, p. 22).
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: