This is the sixth of a multipart series on the past and future of capitalism. Part I is here. Part II is here. Part III is here. Part IV is here. And Part V is here.
The world at 20,000 BC is inhospitable, a cold, dry and windy planet with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere… People survive wherever they can, struggling with freezing temperatures and persistent drought…[their] dwellings are igloo-like but built from mammoth bone and hide rather than blocks of ice… Life is tough: hauling the bones, building and repairing dwellings, cutting and breaking tusks into sections…
Two things always strike me when I think about ancient Gravettians hauling mammoth bones across the tundra. The first is that despite the popular stereotype that our prehistoric ancestors were mentally primitive, the human brain has remained virtually unchanged for over 200,000 years. Intellectually, the Gravettians would have been absolutely indistinguishable from the humans who roam the earth today. If you put one in a suit and cut his hair no one would have any idea that he lived twenty millennia ago.
Conversely, if you travelled back in time, you would experience the ice age exactly as he did. Your body would quickly acclimate to the cold, but you would still feel it during unusually harsh weather. You would get tired of the backbreaking labor of butchering and hauling game and the endless walks back and forth to the nearest spring. You would probably be dealing with a couple of nagging injuries, a toothache, and eventually something really nasty, like a serious concussion, that would leave you dead by thirty. It would have been an extraordinarily difficult life: as Thomas Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish, and short.
The second thing that strikes me about the Gravettians: the unfathomable length of time they endured this. Their culture persisted essentially unchanged for more than 10,000 years – longer than human civilization. They watched fish flit about in the river and it never occurred to them to invent a hook. They cupped water with their hands but it never occurred to them to carve out a bowl or a pot. And all the while, they lived in those morbid mammoth bone huts.
Looking back at our deep past, anthropologists cannot help but be confronted by what Colin Renfew calls the sapient paradox: the fact that humans with thoroughly modern brains endured the burdens of unsettled life for at least 60,000 years before they finally decided to build cities. What were they doing all that time? Why did they endure the disadvantages of living as foragers during the ice age rather than building permanent settlements?
Anthropologists have advanced a wide range of explanations for the sapient paradox, but one that I would like to focus on here is what I call an adaptive coordination problem. This is what happens when a population can only adapt to problems in their ecosystem by making multiple behavioral and/or technological changes simultaneously. Making only some of those changes, in contrast, will be maladaptive.
The transition to civilization faced ancient man with a serious adaptive coordination problem. One could not for example adopt farming and then develop a concept of personal ownership of land later, because this might result in losing your farm. But neither would you have any incentive to claim personal ownership of land in a foraging society before you became a farmer. To make the transition work you had to change your entire mode of production and deeply rooted cultural ideas about property simultaneously. And in fact, agriculture required adopting a whole suite of changes, from the technological (one had to make, use, and repair new tools) to the cultural (new rules of kinship and reciprocity).
Even now, workers under capitalism face a serious adaptive coordination problem. As with the neolithic revolution, socialism will require dramatic cultural changes in our ideas about property. It will require a shift to a collective mode of production that hardly anyone has any real skill or experience with. It will require cultural egalitarianism and a sense of “kinship” (in the anthropological sense) with other workers. It will require techniques (and likely technologies) for democratic governance that we still have not developed. And it may very well require a profound shift from the political passivity that marks contemporary capitalist culture to the kind of intentionality and agency that will make these changes happen.
All of this may eventually happen, but the lesson of the sapient paradox is that it need not happen soon. Marx’s immiseration hypothesis supposes that workers will make these changes out of sheer misery and desperation, but prehistoric man suffered miseries well beyond the modern imagination for tens of thousands of years. And in the end, collective agency likely played only a minor role in the neolithic revolution. Climate change played a major role simply by thawing the ground and making large scale farming viable. Population growth made the intergenerational transmission of knowledge more likely and likely unlocked cognitive capacities for social reasoning and communication that long lay dormant. Farming tools like the sickle which were necessary for high-volume farming depended on the prior invention of technologies like microlithic blades.
It is entirely possible that the future will see, for centuries and even millennia on end, long periods of widening inequality occasionally punctuated by mass leveling events like wars and pandemics. The end of this cycle may have little to do with the revolutionary ambition of workers and everything to do with a confluence of material conditions that we cannot possibly anticipate.