History, since the agricultural revolution, can be usefully conceptualized as an offensive-defensive arms race between technologies of abundance and social structures of expropriation.
Until the appearance of agriculture, human society didn’t produce a large enough surplus to support much in the way of social organization above the hunter-gatherer group. Agriculture was the first technology of abundance sufficiently productive to support parasitic classes on a large scale. With agriculture came a superstructure of kings, priests, martial castes and landlords who milked the producing classes like cattle.
We now seem to be nearing the end of an interval of ten thousand years or so between two thresholds. The first threshold was the appearance of the first large-scale technology of abundance — agriculture.
Since then we have been in that aforementioned arms race. Sometimes technologies of abundance produce an increase in the social surplus faster than the class superstructure can expropriate it, and things become better for the ordinary person — as in the late Middle Ages, when the horse collar and crop rotation caused a massive increase in agricultural productivity, the craftsmen of the free towns developed new production technologies, and the decay of feudalism resulted in falling rents and de facto emancipation of large sectors of the peasantry. Sometimes the advantage shifts to the social structures of expropriation, and things get worse — as in the case of the absolute monarchies’ suppression of the free towns, what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “long sixteenth century,” and the Enclosures.
We’re approaching the second threshold, when the technologies of abundance reach a takeoff point beyond which the social structures of expropriation can no longer keep up with the rising production curve.
The interval between the two thresholds has been comparatively brief, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that homo sapiens has existed in something like its present form and the billion years or so that the sun will likely be able to support human life. Seen in that light, this interval is a brief initial adjustment period in the early stages of human productivity. The state was an anomaly in this early stage of the technological explosion, in the childhood of the human race, by whose means the parasitic classes were briefly able to piggyback on the revolution in productivity and harness it as a source of income for themselves.
During this brief interval, parasitic classes — bureaucrats, usurers, landlords, and assorted rentiers — used the state to create scarcity by artificial means, in order to enclose the increased productivity from technologies of abundance as a source of rents for themselves. But after these first few millennia, the productivity curve has shifted so sharply upward that the increases in output will dwarf the rentier classes’ ability to expropriate it. What’s more, new technologies of abundance are rendering artificial scarcities unenforceable.
Around forty years ago, it was fashionable to say that humanity was entering the “Age of Aquarius.” There is a sense in which the 1970s really were the beginning of a new age of human liberation. They saw the birth of the two technologies of abundance — the desktop computer and cheap numerically-controlled machine tools — which will eventually free us from the grip of the corporate state and its artificial scarcities.
The apparent reaction of the decades since — neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, Reaganism and Thatcherism, the jackbooted police state of the Drug War and War on Terror, the neocons’ wet dream of a Thousand Year Reich enforced by the Sole Remaining Superpower, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — can be seen as a desperate rear guard action by the corporate state, the death throes of a dying system, a last-ditch effort by the forces of artificial scarcity to suppress the forces that will destroy them.
This effort will fail. What file-sharing has done to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has done to the national security state, are only the dimmest foreshadowings of what technologies of abundance and freedom will do to the old authoritarian institutions.
Encryption and darknets are destroying the power of the music, publishing, and movie industries to collect rents on their so-called “intellectual property,” and eliminating economic transactions as a tax base to support bureaucrats.
New physical production technologies, by extracting greater outputs from ever smaller inputs, are rendering the privileged classes’ huge supplies of land and capital utterly useless as a source of income.
Ordinary people, with cheap means of informational and physical production, will soon be able to meet our needs through peaceful production and trade in a fraction of the present workweek, and dump the rentiers off our backs.
If this framing of human history is valid, we’re just finishing the dawn of humanity’s brief childhood, and entering the long afternoon of its maturity.
Translations for this article:
- Spanish, El Fin de la Infancia de la Humanidad.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, La fin de l’enfance pour l’homme?, Contrepoints (France), 06/10/11
- Kevin Carson, Childhood’s End for Humanity?, Quebecois Libre, 05/15/11
- Kevin Carson, Childhood’s End for Humanity?, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 05/07/11
9 comments
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White Indian on May 1, 2011, 8:50 pm:
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Bones on May 3, 2011, 1:02 pm:
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Ben H. on May 4, 2011, 5:03 pm:
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AJ. on May 1, 2011, 8:57 pm:
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Cory Moloney on May 1, 2011, 9:18 pm:
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Marja Erwin on May 1, 2011, 9:38 pm:
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Brian M on Jun 7, 2011, 6:17 pm:
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thorolyfedup on May 9, 2011, 9:08 pm:
» Comments RSS Feed| "social organization above the hunter-gatherer group"
It is a common error of "progress" that hierarchy is somehow "above" the Paleolithic egalitarian and individualistic (both!) characteristics of The Original Affluent Society.
If big and hierarchical are good, then the Soviets and US Corporate/Military complexes excel at "progress."
Hierarchy is evolutionary regression to being hierarchical like our red-ass baboon cousins with smaller brains. Our brains got big to handle the more complex egalitarian relationships among a group (within the neurobiological limit of Dunbar's number.) Our low sexual dimorphism biologically manifests our evolution to egalitarianism.
You do make some good observations – agriculture supports the "parasite" elite. As a favorite author of mine states, "Agriculture creates Government." ~Richard Manning, Against the Grain, p. 73
As Daniel Quinn notes, agriculture is a system where food is put under lock and key, and people made to work for it or starve. While that stands, there will always be economic power groups (Marx to Mises) struggling over who gets the key.
Food is POWER.
Anthropologists divide humans primarily by how they get food.
Foragers (gatherer-hunters) have their own Key to the Food and hold their own Power.
Horticulturalists/Permaculturists (small village dwellers)have their own Key to the Food and hold their own Power.
Agriculturalists let a few "own" the land and control the Key to the Food. Industrial agriculture is even worse. Agriculture and agricultural civilization are inherently hierarchical and totalitarian.
The way to freedom is how we get our food.
"Agriculture and agricultural civilization are inherently hierarchical and totalitarian."
What about farming cooperatives? Or does an egalitarian & libertarian group using technological advancements to produce abundant food not square with your romantic view of prehistory (or your insinuation that everyone, everywhere, should individually and independently produce their own food)?
What about Mohenjo-Daro? It was one of the earliest cities, by any definition of a city, and one of the largest of its time. Outside of your own ideological conjecture, there has been to date no evidence of hierarchical organization of its inhabitants.
Inherently is a strong word. Especially when one subject (agriculture) is primarily a technological advancement, not a social one, and the other (civilization) is so broad as to be meaningless, except in a pejorative context. Especially when you provide no basis for your assertions, aside from more baseless assertions.
Where did you get the idea that the Harappans of Mohenjo-Daro did not have hierarchy? Do you have sources?
All the literature I have found suggest they did not have large temples or palaces, and probably did not have kings. However that does not mean they did not have hierarchy, from what I have read they had social classes, and especially men had dominion over women. Its possible that they had democracy, but democracy can be hierarchical and totalitarian.
If it is true that they did not have hierarchical social relations that would be of great interest to anarchist since the majority of human population lives in cities. Such a study would be of great interest in organizing anarchist societies in our current urban context.
Nicely laid out and explanation of how the 10000 year batte against the ruling classes.
My recent post Destructive Monopoly
Arthur C. Clarke reference? And to think people call you an anti-technologist!
I hope so. But the arms race continues, and it's not clear that abundance will overtake expropriation. And environmental degradation and resource depletion also challenge abundance.
So far, while expropriation has often had the upper hand, it has never had it worldwide, and abundance has been able to develop somewhere. But as the world is more tightly bound together, it is, for the first time, possible that expropriation will get the upper hand worldwide.
My recent post Its May Day everyone!
This all sounds a little too millenarian to me, but maybe I'm just too cynical and/or pessimistic. I have a feeling that your works will be influential to a great many libertarians in the future, Kevin, as they have been for me and many others already, so I would hate for your detractors in the future to point to writings like this should things not go in the direction you predict, and discredit your work on those grounds, just as all of Marx's writings (which did have at least *some* value) were discarded out of hand when his Great Proletarian Revolution never came about within the 50 or so years he predicted. Similarly, what if your Great Abundance Revolution never comes to pass? What if what we have seen thus far is just a brief peak in abundance before the next long era of stagnation and tyranny? Marx couldn't foresee the changes in the early 20th century, WW1 and it's consequences especially. Who's to say a similar change isn't just beyond the horizon now? Wouldn't it then be better to speak of these developments with more caution, to say these *could* lead in such and such a direction should the trends continue, rather than framing it with such finality?
*Note that this is just friendly criticism; I deeply respect you and your impressive body of work.
Peak oil? A drastic decline in easy energy from hydrocarbons will certainly make industrial civilization less abundant.
I'm sure you had a point or message in there somewhere, but it got lost in all the jargonism and thousand-dollar words. Sounds more like someone talking 'cuz they like to hear themselves talk.
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