А. Куприн
The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings

To family

Introduction

“The level which a science has reached is determined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts” (Heidegger 1962, p. 29).

“In matters of culture, haste and sweeping measures are the most harmful” (Lenin 1975, pp. 734-735).

The theory of capital has gone through many vicissitudes. First in classical political economy. Then in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and the discussions around it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then in the works of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Frank Knight and their discussions in the 1930s. Finally in the Cambridge Capital Debate 1950s to 1970s. In fact, the investigation of the nature of capital ended with the dispute between the two Cambridges. The dispute itself has no clear conclusions other than that capital is the result of human activity, which is obvious since capital does not exist in nature outside of human culture. After the fall of the socialist camp, there were no broad discussions about the nature of capital. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), although it contains the word “capital” in its title, does not attempt to re-explain its nature. It is time to reexamine the issue of capital using the insights of economics and other sciences.

The development of the theory of capital inevitably requires reference to the works of Marx. Because of its historical influence on the thoughts and destinies of people all over the world, Marxism is a stumbling block that cannot be bypassed or pushed aside. The influence of Marxism is determined not only by the unity of its theoretical form, but also by the integrity of its ideological content. Marxism as a theory and ideology must be overcome, and this cannot be achieved by its total denial. Marxism can be overcome only by developing a more general theory and a more relevant ideology, in relation to which the results of Marx would be only a special case.

The general theory of capital requires taking into account the achievements of economic science after Marx—the Marxist, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian, neo-institutional and other schools. If a general theory of capital is possible, these competing theories must ultimately be, to some extent, special cases of it.

To understand the nature of capital, we must consider its historical, logical and practical limits. It is not enough to trace the lower historical limit of capital, the path of its emergence from traditional society. It is also necessary to chart its upper limit, the path of its transition to another society that comes after capital. What will this other society look like? This question is of great importance for the construction of a general theory of capital. Considering these two limits dictates the structure of our book. It consists of three parts devoted to the origin, the peak and the decline of capital.

The first part of the book is devoted to the lower limit, the origin of capital from traditional society. It is impossible to develop a theory of capital without a concept of money and prices. The path to capital inevitably leads through exchange value, so we must return to the labor theory of value and the marginal utility theory to find their common ground. The lower limit of capital can only be understood by turning to abstract questions about human culture, its origins and its development. Here we must repeat after Albert Einstein:

“The initial hypotheses become steadily more abstract and remote from experience. On the other hand, it gets nearer to the grand aim of all science, which is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms. Meanwhile, the train of thought leading from the axioms to the empirical facts or verifiable consequences gets steadily longer and more subtle. The theoretical scientist is compelled in an increasing degree to be guided by purely mathematical, formal considerations in his search for a theory, because the physical experience of the experimenter cannot lead him up to the regions of highest abstraction” (Einstein 1954, p. 282).

In order to clarify the starting points of the general theory of capital, we are in many cases forced to resort to formal and abstract reasoning. However, there are no mathematical formulas in our book.

The second part of the book examines capital at its peak. Paradoxically, at least since the 19th century, the opponents of capital have contributed no less to its success than the capitalists themselves. Marx developed and began to implement a strategy in favor of the working class. Antonio Negri even calls Lenin a “factory of strategy” (Negri 2014). Insofar as the ultimate goal of Marx and Lenin’s strategy was the “emancipation of labor,” it has not been yet achieved. Soviet socialism and Western capitalism have been unable to solve the problem of coordinating personal and public interests. The East could not cope with the dictatorship of the plan just as the West cannot cope with market anarchy. The mixed economy that Paul Samuelson hoped for (Samuelson and Nordhaus 2010, pp. xvi-xvii) offers no answer. The “mixed economy” is a purely external combination of planned and market approaches, it does not provide an understanding of the inherent processes and therefore does not allow us to change society. We need a new model that takes into account the deep laws underlying the advance of technologies, institutions and ideas.

There were gaps in Marx’s argument that indicated promising avenues for further research. These gaps were due to both objective factors (the state of science and society at the time), and subjective factors (that is, Marx’s ideology). We mean the following points:

● Reducing the complexity of labor to the ratio between simple and complex labor and the associated disregard for changes in the complexity of the labor power and society as a whole;

● Considering surplus value as the result of the labor of individual workers, considering gross surplus value as the result of the labor of the working class;

● Focusing on only one side of the capitalist process—socialization, without working out the other side—individualization—in sufficient detail;

● Disregarding limitations on population growth, etc.

The third part is devoted to the upper limit of capital, its final transition. Marx formulated the conditions for the capitalist reproduction to cease: a fall in the rate of profit and the demise of capitalist private property. However, neither Marx nor his followers were able to describe the reproduction mode that would replace the capitalist one. The non-economic exploitation and state ownership on which 20th-century socialism was based were more a return to what preceded capital, than an advance to what will follow it.

We propose to view Marx’s work not as a scientific or political activity, but as developing and implementing a strategy on the scale of human history. We, in turn, are not developing a strategy, but are trying to paint an image of the historic future. It would be pointless to rewrite Das Kapital without offering an image of the future after capitalism.

Let us consider Marx’s ideas not as a finished product, but as a work in progress. Friedrich Engels wrote in the preface to volume III of Das Kapital that the opponents of Marx “rest upon the false assumption that Marx wishes to define where he only investigates, and that in general one might expect fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 37, p. 16). We too do not want to give definitions that are valid “once and for all,” we do not want to form beliefs in the reader, we do not intend to speak out against the reader’s beliefs. As is well known, beliefs are what divide people, doubt unites them. This work does not offer ready-made answers or recipes. It is a research program and a set of research tools:

“The object of our analysis is, not to provide a machine, or method of blind manipulation, which will furnish an infallible answer, but to provide ourselves with an organized and orderly method of thinking out particular problems” (Keynes 2013, vol. 7, p. 297).

Marx’s theoretical works were designed for such a long-term perspective that even in the 21st century it is best to read them in a futurological context. At the same time, the 20th century witnessed such tragic experiments in their practical application that many people find it difficult to even turn to them due to moral aversion or indifference caused by years of propaganda. Before saying goodbye to Marx, however, we must make an effort to return to him once again.

Part one. Simple self-reproduction

“…Just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 3, p. 298).

“…Societies are much messier than our theories of them” (Mann 1986-2013, vol. 1, p. 4).

Chapter 1. Traditional society and simple consumption

1. Co-evolution of humans and meanings

Henrich-Popov bridge and the first needs trap

The human culture presents itself as an immense accumulation of meanings, its unit being a single meaning. The co-evolution of humans as living subjects of culture and meanings as its growing substance is the essence of all human history.

In its origin, meaning is a mutual adaptation of the natural environment and the human species living in it. In the course of this mutual adaptation, the natural environment became a toolbox for human self-reproduction, and the behavior of protohumans became its practice. Meaning is a mediation, a niche in the habitat created by the human species for survival. Humans evolved from animals because and when animals had to resort to extra-biological, meaning mechanisms of self-reproduction. Biological traits are transmitted through genetic inheritance, and cultural traits are transmitted through communication with other people, primarily in childhood. As is known, it is impossible to teach animals (including monkeys) to speak, since their body and behavior do not have the properties necessary for this. And the incidents with the feral children (Mowgli) show that it is impossible to teach a person older than about 12 years to speak, who as a child was completely isolated from communication with other people.

In the early stage of human evolution, that of natural selection, the very first meanings functioned as a continuation of the animal organs of hominids and as a differentiation of their animal signals. Just as a stick or a stone was an extension of the hand of prehistoric man, the various calls or gestures that warned of different dangers (e.g., from the ground or from a tree) were variations of animal signals. In this early stage, meanings were only a continuation of animal behavior, and their transmission occurred through so-called “animal traditions.”

As Vaclav Smil notes, the earliest feature that distinguished hominids from other animals was not the larger brain or toolmaking, but the structurally unlikely transition to upright walking, which began about 7 million years ago. Compared to chimpanzees, it saved 25 percent of energy, freeing the hands for tool-use, mouth and teeth for a more complex system of sound signals, i.e. proto-language. These changes demanded a larger brain with energy requirements three times higher than the brain of a chimpanzee (Smil 2017, pp. 22-23). Of course, upright walking itself demands an explanation that cannot be reduced to an unlikely accident. However, as Joseph Henrich notes, the precise evolutionary sequence in which meanings arose—gestures, vocal speech, social norms, tool-use—is not crucial, since cultural evolution created significant genetic pressure in all directions. If the freeing of the hands led to the development of language, then the evolution of tongue freed the hands for using tools, preparing food, and maintaining balance when chasing prey (Henrich 2016, p. 252).

Culture as an accumulation of meanings begins when an animal species goes beyond the limits of natural selection or mere adaptation to the environment and begins to adapt the environment to its needs, that is, it forms its own niche in the environment. The formation of a niche means, first, that the animal’s organs and their functions go beyond the animal’s body: part of the environment becomes a “continuation” of the organism. An ape, for example, takes a stick to “extend” its arm and pull termites—its favorite food—out of a termite mound. Second, the organism gradually changes due to its own niche-altering actions: for example, an increase in brain size in humans with the development of meaningful actions. The evolution of meanings is the evolution of indirect, roundabout, instrumental and symbolic behavior aimed at building a niche within nature, a domus for humans.

Henrich notes that cultural evolution initially faced a start-up problem: it had to provide both a bigger brain and more meanings. A small brain cannot retain too many meanings, and a bigger brain is not needed if there is nothing to learn. So, how could we jump-start the cumulative engine of cultural evolution? To make a leap over a chasm that can only be crossed in two leaps, you need a “bridge.”

“Once cumulative cultural evolution is up and running, it can create a rich cultural world, full of adaptive tools, techniques, and know-how that can more than pay the costs of building and programming up a larger brain designed and equipped for cultural learning. However, in the beginning, there won’t be much out there to culturally acquire, and what is there will be simple enough that it will still be learnable by one’s own individual learning efforts (without social learning), by trial and error for example. Thus, natural selection may not favor larger brain size or complexity, because brains are costly to develop and program” (Henrich 2016, p. 297).

According to Henrich’s hypothesis, the “bridge” problem was solved by two intertwined pathways (Henrich 2016, pp. 298 ff.). First, by multiplying meanings without notably increasing the size of the brain: in open areas with many predators large hominid groups formed for collective defense and exchange of meanings. Second, by reducing the costs of creating and maintaining larger brains. Henrich believes that female hominids, in order to avoid inbreeding, left their group upon reaching sexual maturity and moved to the neighbors, losing all family ties. The formation of stable protofamilial pairs in large groups, in which the child’s kinship could be established not only through the maternal, but also through the paternal side, made it possible to form a circle of relatives of the mother by marriage, that is, the child’s relatives (alloparents). This spread the burden of child-rearing among a larger number of individuals, thereby extending both the time in which the child could acquire a culture and the size of his brain.

Other hypotheses can also be put forward regarding the “missing link,” that is, the practices of self-reproduction that made it possible to build a bridge between the mental abilities of higher primates and the intelligence of Homo sapiens, living in the world of symbols. Evgeniy Panov believes that the entrance to the bridge has been discovered, but most of it has not been preserved, and the remains may never be found (Panov 2012, p. 383).

The problem of a bridge between animals and humans has been the subject of endless debate. Charles Darwin believed that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1981, p. 105). However, Derek Penn and his colleagues write that Darwin was wrong and that the deep biological continuity between humans and animals masks an equally deep divide between human and non-human minds and between their ability to employ systems of abstract physical symbols (Penn et al. 2008). We do not attempt to resolve this problem here. Apparently, at some point the great apes could no longer reproduce within the animal behavioral program. At this critical point, the animals resorted to cultural practices of self-reproduction and cultural needs emerged. Protohumans fell into a “needs trap” in which their animal needs became cultural needs, their animal behavior became meaningful behavior, that is, human action.

Material social abstraction in action

If behavior is an adaptation to the environment, then activity is an adaptation of the environment to one’s needs. The “needs trap” meant that proto-humans now had to again and again transform the environment, including their own organisms and behavior patterns, into means of self-reproduction based on the transmission and processing of social information. After this critical point was passed, the degree of adaptation to the environment, the degree to which the needs of proto-humans were satisfied, was determined not only by their animal instincts but also by the sociality and abstractness of their actions. Benjamin Schumacher noted that information is a paradox: on the one hand it is material, and on the other hand it is abstract. If we want to share information, we must give it the physical form of a signal—sound, light, electricity, etc. However, information is abstract in content: the messages transmitted by signals are not identical to the signals themselves (Schumacher 2015, p. 4).

As an elementary form of culture, meaning is social information in action, that is, an action (and its result) that has social, material and abstract properties. This active gist of culture is missing in most of its definitions, here is an example: “…Culture is information that is acquired from other individuals via social transmission mechanisms such as imitation, teaching, or language” (Mesoudi 2011, pp. 2-3). In fact, culture cannot be reduced to information and methods of its transmission; culture is the aggregate of human actions and their results. Unlike genes, which are bound to organisms, meanings go beyond humans: they can exist not only in bodies, but also in events. However, going beyond humans, meanings can only exist in their actions. They are reproduced in human activity just as genes are reproduced in a living organism.

The self-reproduction of man as a cultural being is based on the evolution of all three aspects of human activity: abstract, social and material.

(1) The evolution of the abstract side of activity consists in the development of thinking (intelligence or reason), i.e. complex types of adaptation based on the repetition and specialization of signals (stimuli) and an enlargement of the brain. From this side, meaning is a reflection (description, mediation) of the immediate environment in the mind and activity of an animal, that is, an abstract action.

Human thinking evolved as an abstract act, but it remains a deeply emotional act rooted in animal instincts. Human activities are meaningful—they are based on gathering, sorting and processing information, accumulating knowledge and skills (experience), applying experience to solve problems. Collectively, this is called reason or intellect. But intelligence is only the tip of a vast array of dumb processes that grow out of cultural learning (Henrich 2016, p. 12). We call practices those behaviors that are based on learning, such as morals, mores, techniques, customs, etc. Thousands and tens of thousands of generations of humans have produced practices that have proven to be “smarter” than the intelligence of any individual or even a group. Natural evolution affects simple processes—instincts—that allow animals to adapt to a complex natural environment. Cultural evolution also affects simple processes—practices—that allow humans to adapt to their complex natural and artificial environments. Instincts, practices and intelligence are three basic types of behavioral acts, the distinction between which goes back to the works of Darwin (Krushinsky 1986, p. 134; Zorina and Smirnova 2006, p. 42).

(2) The evolution of the social aspect of activity relies on the human ability to transmit complex types of adaptation through non-genetic mechanisms, through communicating, and above all, through learning. Meaning is a social abstraction: it exists only in the joint activities of humans as subjects of culture.

Sociality is not an exclusively human trait. Although communication among apes is thought to amount to the exchange of emotions, in reality they go beyond emotional contact and exchange referential signals: they do not only signal danger, but also indicate the type of approaching predator. This ability to give referential signals is not innate, but develops in apes as they learn at a young age (King 2001, p. 33). Both animals and humans exchange signals that convey messages (information). However, the form and content of human signals differ from those of animal signals. If animal signals act as stimuli that require a direct, emotional reaction, then human signals are symbols that require an indirect, abstract reaction. Although a signal shows that something has happened and what the response might be, it does not require modeling of a situation (event) or programming of an action. In contrast to a simple signal, a symbol presupposes an event model and a response model appropriate for a particular event (Friedman 2019, part 1, p. 24).

As is known, apes are able to learn symbolic language, for example, Amslen or Yerkish (Zorina and Smirnova 2006, pp. 137 ff.). But they cannot learn human language—not only because of the peculiarities of anatomy, but also because their vocal responses are involuntary and purely emotional (Zorina and Smirnova 2006, pp. 103-104). Human symbols, and especially language, evolved from gestures, sounds and other signals exchanged between animals. According to George Mead, vocal gestures were of utmost importance for the emergence of symbols, since they modeled not only the behavior of the addressees, but also that of the authors of stimuli (Mead 1972, pp. 61 ff.). According to Vladimir Friedman’s hypothesis, the stimuli shifted toward symbols when proto-symbols (“demonstrations”) differed both from animals’ immediate actions towards each other and from their emotional reactions that expressed their internal states (Friedman 2019, part 1, p. 59).

Ivan Pavlov called sensations, perceptions and mental representations of the environment the first signaling system that humans have in common with animals, and the word the second system that distinguishes humans. “But words have built up a second system of signaling reality, which is only peculiar to us, being a signal of the primary signals. The numerous stimulations by word have, on the one hand, removed us from reality, a fact we should constantly remember so as not to misinterpret our attitude towards reality. On the other hand, it was nothing other than words which has made us human” (Pavlov 1941, vol. 2, p. 179). Nevertheless, not only a word is a signal of primary signals, but every abstract, symbolic action. Both a word and, for example, a human gesture or instrumental action are types of abstract social action.

(3) The evolution of the material side of activity enlarges the niche that man occupies. From generation to generation, humans expand their domus, the part of the environment they use as a means of activity, thus extending the boundaries of their home. Meaning is a material abstraction, because meaning is both a process of interaction with things (making) and at the same time the material precondition and result of human self-reproduction.

Meaning made apes human. The coevolution of proto-humans and meanings gave rise to Homo sapiens. When we look at the universe of humans and meanings from the perspective of humans, we see society, and when we look at it from the perspective of meanings, we see culture. We call this universe culture-society.

Needs, motives and emotions

Self-reproduction of man as a living being presupposes the satisfaction of his needs. “The presence of needs in a subject is as a fundamental condition of his existence as metabolism [and signal exchange—A.K.]. In fact, these are different expressions of the same thing” (Leontiev 1971). Consumption, or the satisfaction of needs, is the beginning and end of self-reproduction. Essentially, consumption is the production of humans, since the product of consumption is man himself. In its origin, consumption was based on the search for food (foraging), appropriation of the material of nature and its minimal elaboration (mediation).

Meaning is a means that has evolved into an end. Ends and goals are the results of possible actions that subjects imagine. The ability to set goals, that is, to imagine means and to choose between them, distinguishes humans from animals, which also use the environment as a means.

“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 188).

The evolution of meanings began with the simplest actions and their results, such as the making of a chopper. The simplest chopper—a stone whose edge has been sharpened by chipping off fragments with another stone—is the result of the motions of a hominid. The sum of the motions forms a holistic action, the result of which is the chopper. A hominid, his instrumental action, and chopper itself are necessary for meaning to emerge. The moment when hominids began deliberately making choppers was also the moment when nature became their means and culture emerged. It is obvious that this “moment” is actually a bridge across time, and the spans of this bridge require further exploration.

Ants of the Attini family grow Basidiomycota fungi that process leaves they cut. The ants in turn feed on the protein-rich “ant kohlrabi” that grows on the fungi. Ants do not just use means, but engage in a whole “craft,” a kind of “agriculture.” However, the ants’ activities remain within the limits set by their genetic program. Their behavior changes only as their instincts evolve, and it cannot change through the inheritance of learning-based practices. Human behavior can change through practice: learning creates understanding, understanding creates choice. Unlike ants, humans imagine things before they act: “new technologies are constructed mentally before they are constructed physically” (Arthur 2011, p. 23).

Animals do not have ends or means, but they do have wants or needs. Need is the focus of a living being on something that does not exist. “In its primary biological forms, need is a state of the organism expressing its objective want for a complement that lies outside itself” (Leontiev 1971). Terence Deacon introduced the concept of “entention,” which can be considered a kind of generalization of the concept of “need.” Entention combines direction and lack, it is “a fundamental relationship to something absent” (Deacon 2013, p. 27). The object to which the need is directed is the motive.

“…Motives must be distinguished from conscious goals and intentions; motives ‘stand behind goals’ and stimulate the achievement of goals. If goals are not directly given in the situation, motives encourage goal formation. However, they do not generate goals, just as needs do not generate their objects” (Leontiev 1971).

Emotions are internal signals that reflect the relationship between motives and activities caused by motives. Alexey Leontiev reduced emotions to a reflection of meaning: “Emotional processes include a broad class of processes of internal regulation of activities. They perform this function by reflecting the meaning of the objects and situations that affect the subject, their significance for his life” (Leontiev 1971). It seems to us that this is not quite correct historically, because if meanings preceded emotions, then monkeys would be like robots, and we would now need to look not for a bridge from emotions to meanings, but for a bridge from meanings to emotions. In fact, meanings arose from emotions. Emotions still are a large part of the content of meanings, if only because they reflect processes in the body. “Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behavior patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.” (Denton et al. 2009). Meaning is a symbolization and mediation of emotions.

In humans, emotions, as one of the origins of meaning have gone beyond the instinctive response to signals: in the long evolutionary process of mediation, the emotional content of meanings has been partly rationalized so that meanings and emotions form a unity. Humans do not have meaningless emotions: they explain emotions in order to understand them. Meaning, in turn, has a certain emotional significance. This significance comes to the fore in values as meanings ordered by preference: Milton Rokeach called values “cognitive representations and transformations of needs” (Rokeach 1973, p. 20).

This understanding of values emphasizes their reflected and mediated nature. There is also another understanding that seeks to emphasize the continuity between the biological and the cultural in humans, according to which needs and values (as representations of needs) are not an exclusive feature of humans, but are inherent in all living beings: “Value is a more abstract category than organisms, since it is the one thing that all organisms pursue” (Frisina 2002, p. 217). Values are both subjective and objective phenomena: they are given to humans in their imagination and in their being. For the subject, the circumstances of the environment, things, events all appear as values: positive (goods or opportunities) or negative (evils or risks).

Human feelings—both direct perceptions and emotions as motive-oriented feelings—are always meaningful, they are to some extent abstract or mediated. Meanings, in turn, are to some extent sensory, they are always concrete or material. The dual nature of meaning as generalization and feeling is evident in etymology. We use the terms “meaning” and “sense” synonymously, since in Russian there is a word for both: smysl. The sensory and concrete side of smysl (sense) is indicated by its etymological origin in some European languages, where it is derived from “feeling.” The abstract and communicated side of smysl (meaning) becomes clear in Russian word smysl that is derived from “think,” “we send” (Chechulin 2011).

At the same time, motives and sociality are what distinguish meaning from mere information without sense and direction. The concept of information and the information science itself may have emerged when people began to view nature as a specific part of culture that has no agency or subject in itself.

Those motives, emotions and ideas that do not find expression in the results of an individual’s activities remain forever hidden in the depths of his mind. They do not exist for society and do not constitute meaning. They remain mental facts or mental processes that exist only for the subject of these motives, emotions and ideas. This is one extreme at which meaning disappears. The other extreme is when meaning degenerates into a dead result, detached from the society of people, their motives, emotions and ideas. In this case, it turns into a material abstraction and loses all meaning, becomes an empty artifact, an incomprehensible archaeological find. For example, any written symbol has meaning only when it is involved in human activities, that is, when it has a subjective side. Since the symbols of the Minoan Linear A script cannot be “involved” in our activities, in our context, they remain undeciphered.

The structure of culture

Mental facts and artifacts are extreme points at which all meaning vanishes. They point to two fundamental properties of meaning: determinateness (certainty) and direction. Where one of these properties disappears, the meaning itself is lost.

Depending on the direction (towards things, people or ideas), three sides of meanings can be distinguished: (1) material action, or making; (2) social action, or communicating; (3) abstract action or thinking. The identification of these three directions in human culture is in itself the result of the accumulation of meanings, of cultural evolution. Each direction has its own function: making is translated into technology, communicating into organization, thinking into psychology.

Depending on the determinateness, three planes of meaning can be detected: content, expression and norm. Meaning is inextricably linked to natural language. As Roy Harris said, a language community is not a congregation of talking heads, a tongue cannot be considered in isolation from the physical actions of humans. Humans are not just language-users, but language-makers (Harris 1980, preface). If humans make language through their actions, the opposite is also true—they define their actions through language. The idea of distinguishing between the planes of content and expression in languages comes from Louis Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943). We develop his idea further:

● First, the environment is reflected in humans, their instincts, practices and intellects, thus forming the content of meanings. The plane of content embraces the significance of meanings. Meaning as such is often identified with the signification or signified. However, although the signified is in some ways closest to the human mind, meaning cannot be reduced to it.

● Second, humans, their motives, preferences and goals are reflected in the environment, shaping the expression of meanings. The expression plane contains signs as material aspects of meaning or signifiers. Man himself as a biocultural being, as a product of both biological and cultural evolution, is also to some extent an expression of meaning.

● Third, stable moments of interaction between humans and the environment are reflected in human activity and its results, forming its norms. The norms plane compiles the stable ways of functioning or principles and rules of meanings.

Three functions and three planes of meaning reveal the structure of culture. The following “table” demonstrates the nodal points at which functions and planes of meaning overlap. We do not give detailed explanations for the “table,” but invite the reader to look into it for himself. It should be noted that the actual structure of culture is of course much less ordered than shown in the “table,” which only serves to simplify and visually explain our theses.

Illustration 1. The structure of culture

* Programs and techniques are understood here in the broadest sense, like any program and any method of material action. W. B. Arthur uses the term “design” in this case (Arthur 2011, p. 91).

The initial stage of the evolution of meanings was characterized by a small variety of actions and their results. Stone and wooden tools, rules of nomadic life, knowledge and skills of hunting and gathering, simple oral language and fetishistic ideas made up the meager stock of Paleolithic meanings. The actions of Paleolithic man were limited to the appropriation and consumption of natural objects, and the means of his activity were reduced to consumer articles. He was just beginning to form a cultural niche, his home in the natural environment.

2. Uncertainty, selection and learning

Uncertainty and meaning

Reality is given to man through his actions. Uncertainty is the degree of adaptation (or, what is actually the same thing, inadaptation) of human needs and actions to reality. It is the discrepancy between reality and human needs. Complete adaptation would mean that the satisfaction of needs does not require human actions, in which case there would be no uncertainty at all. In practice, however, there are hardly any situations of complete certainty, so that man must act. Frank Knight argued that human wants are those needs that cause goal-directed action.

“We ‘need’ iodides and vitamins, and an infinite number of things of whose existence the race at large has been blissfully ignorant; but we do not ‘want’ them, because they give rise to no conflicts and hence no ‘conduct.’ The common basis of conflict, and we may say of the existence of wants at all, is the limitation in the means of gratifying some impulse or need” (Knight 1964, p. 60).

In school economics, uncertainty comes down to limited resources, to a lack of resources compared to human needs. But resource scarcity is just a special case of uncertainty. Another case is, for example, asymmetric knowledge, when one person knows something that another person does not know and uses this to deceive. Both are just special cases of uncertainty, that is, randomness, surprise, unpredictability.

Meaning as determinateness aims to adapt people and reality to each other, to overcome uncertainty. This gives meanings a great deal of inertia: people prefer to adapt and interpret meanings rather than abandon them. Talcott Parsons wrote that interpretation is the reason why sudden changes in the environment do not lead to the abandonment of the “symbolic formulae” and “elements of cultural tradition” on which social systems are based. Parsons (1964, p. 296) called this mechanism “adaptation by interpretation.” This mechanism has a long history that probably goes beyond humans: practices are derived from traditions and values of animals, simple causal models are older than intelligence itself:

“… Morality derives from values, rather than reason. Jonathan Haidt has found evidence for just this dominance. People try to justify their values by citing reasons for them, but if our reasons are demolished we conjure up others, rather than revise our values. Our reasons are revealed as a self-deceiving charade, a sham called ‘motivated reasoning.’ Reasons are anchored on values, not values on reasons” (Collier 2018, p. 35).

The inertia of meanings leads to the formation of stable meanings—norms—and to the creation of a socio-cultural order consisting of these norms. Meanings in their normative mode are those traditions and “social contracts” that enable society to function as a single whole. Order is constantly undermined by changes in the environment. In the early stages of cultural evolution, when the environment was still largely reduced to nature, order responded mainly to events and phenomena in the natural habitat. Adaptation to the environment occurs faster than the adaptation of the environment to human needs (Livi Bacci 2000, p. 4). Appropriation and consumption precede production. However, as the cultural niche expanded and developed into a cultural environment, order too had to change under the influence of cultural events and phenomena. Over time, cultural events have occurred more frequently and became increasingly unpredictable.

“Economists, typically, do not ask themselves about the structure that humans impose on themselves to order their environment, and therefore reduce uncertainty; nor are they typically concerned with the dynamic nature of the world in which we live, which continues to produce novel problems to be solved. The last point raises a fundamental issue. If we are continually creating a new and novel world, how good is the theory we have developed from past experience to deal with this novel world?” (North 2005, p. 13).

Events and phenomena are a source of uncertainty. From the perspective of order, an event is news if it represents a deviation from the norm: “An occurrence, a meaningful departure from the norm, (that is, ‘news,’ since the fulfillment of a norm is not ‘news’) depends on one’s concept of the norm” (Lotman 1977, p. 234). The socio-cultural order aims to eliminate uncertainty of events by transforming them into facts (patterns of events) and norms (programs of action). Historically, the more meaningful the appropriation process became, the more meaning humans discovered in nature. But while the uncertainty of nature slowly decreased, cultural uncertainty just as slowly increased.

Knowledge or causal models of events and phenomena are not the exclusive prerogative of humans. The presence of elementary reason (i.e. understanding) in animals is demonstrated by their capacity to comprehend the simplest empirical laws of the environment, which enables them to develop programs of action for new situations. This is the difference between reason or intellect and any form of practice based on repetition or learning (Krushinsky 1986, p. 27). Animals have a mental representation of causality and the foundations of goal-directed behavior:

“When Pavlov began studying the behavior of great apes in his laboratory in the last years of his life, he was already talking quite definitely about a special type of association that can be considered concrete thinking: ‘And when an ape builds his tower to get a fruit, then you cannot call it a ‘conditioned reflex.’ This is a case of knowledge formation, of capturing the normal connection of things. This is a different case. Here it must be said that this is the beginning of knowledge, of understanding a constant connection between things—what underlies all scientific activity, the laws of causality’” (Krushinsky 1986, p. 10).

Human causal models are universal and allow the construction of action programs that are applicable to all situations encountered by a culture-society. In this respect, humans differ from animals, which construct empirical models that are only valid for a specific situation and create probabilistic rather than deterministic action programs (Krushinsky 1986, p. 11).

Knowledge is usually defined as “justified true belief.” However, knowledge cannot be reduced to belief without action. Belief is only justified if it enables action.

“Man is in a position to act because he has the ability to discover causal relations which determine change and becoming in the universe. Acting requires and presupposes the category of causality. Only a man who sees the world in the light of causality is fitted to act. In this sense we may say that causality is a category of action. The category means and ends presupposes the category cause and effect” (Mises 1996, p. 22).

As a cause-effect model or pattern of events, knowledge also implies a set of skills, that is, an action program.

Populations under mixed selection

The evolution of proto-humanity was based on the self-reproduction of its populations. The ability to reproduce is a property of life, but a cell or an organism can only reproduce as a whole: selection cannot act within them. A population as a collection of organisms of one species in a relatively closed habitat is the actual sphere of action of natural selection: the self-reproduction of a population is not based on the reproduction of the whole, but on self-renewal, on the alternation of generations of individuals (Berg 1993, p. 251).

Early human populations remained at the mercy of natural selection, but with the accumulation of culture, the self-reproduction of populations changed its character: populations became cultures-societies that reproduced themselves not only through natural but also through cultural mechanisms—not only through the transmission of genes and the interaction of organisms with the habitat, but also through the transmission of meanings and interaction of humans with the domus. Natural selection was gradually supplemented and expanded by cultural selection. Modern man is the result of a mixture of natural and cultural selection, he represents the unity of genotype and meaning type.

During the millions of years of mixed selection, the evolution of practices went hand in hand with the evolution of organisms, ensuring the adaptation of proto-human populations to a changing natural and cultural milieu—to changes in climate and natural landscape, as well as to changes in the landscape of meanings. Mixed selection has left clear traces in the human body.

“…Culturally accumulating communicative repertoires put selective pressures on genes for communicating: they pushed down our larynx to widen our vocal range, drove axonal connections from our neocortex down deep into our spinal cords to improve the dexterity of our hands and tongues, whitened the sclera of our eyes to reveal our gaze direction to cue others, and endowed us with reliably developing cognitive skills for vocal mimicry and communicative cueing, like pointing and eye gaze” (Henrich 2016, p. 251).

The brain, as a central part of the nervous system, plays a key role in the metabolism of primates and especially humans, in whom the second signaling system is built upon the first. A larger brain was crucial for the accumulation of culture. The modern human brain consumes 20 to 25 percent of an organisms’ metabolic energy, as opposed to 8 to 10 percent in other primates and only 3 to 5 percent in other mammals. To increase brain mass, it was necessary to reduce the mass of other metabolically expensive tissues—primarily the digestive organs—which was achieved by changing the diet (Smil 2017, p. 23).

Lighting a fire and cooking on it are not instinctive animal actions; they are practices passed down from generation to generation through learning. And these practices, which largely moved the digestion process outside the human body, greatly influenced the way our jaws and digestive system are constructed. Henrich writes (2016, pp. 65-69), referring to the work of Richard Wrangham, that mastery of fire radically reduced the energy used to function the digestive organs, which in turn affected the structure of the nervous system and the volume of the human brain, which was a prerequisite for the further accumulation of meanings. James Scott says, that mastery of fire not only led to changes in the human body, but also allowed man to greatly expand his ecological niche. Humans used fire to modify natural landscapes, thus creating conditions for the reproduction of animals and plants of interest to them. Over time, this led to a concentration of favorable flora and fauna, the emergence of more abundant and predictable food sources within walking distance of human dwellings, and subsequently to sedentarization and domestication (Scott 2017, pp. 58-60).

Mixed natural and cultural selection brought about genetic and meaning changes, shaped the biocultural traits of proto-humans, strengthened some of their aspects and weakened others, resulting in psychophysiological, moral-volitional and cognitive distortions in proto-humans. In short, mixed selection shaped human propensities. The new propensities in turn influenced subsequent selection, which in turn strengthened these propensities. Thus, human domestication gradually took place. Long before humans began to selectively breed animals, they began to culturally select themselves. As Matt Ridley says, humans are self-domesticated apes (Ridley 2003, p. 348).

“… Man of his own accord mediates, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 187, translation corrected).

As a result of millions of years of mixed selection, meanings are inscribed in nature itself, in human genes. With the emergence of culture, it begins to influence nature by creating a cultural environment (domus) within the natural environment and domesticating proto-humans to slowly transform them into the modern type of Homo sapience. “In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself” (Berger and Luckmann 1991, p. 204).

Evolution of learning

The transmission of meanings between people, that is, learning, is based on imitation or mimesis, not on copying. Imitators do not have access to the content of the meanings they must acquire and cannot copy it. Therefore, the learning of meanings relies on active communication with other people, on the acquisition of norms through their expression. From norms, the imitators gradually arrive at the content, that is, understanding. In this way, imitators penetrate new cultural areas and learn meanings that were previously inaccessible to their understanding.

“… The cultural equivalent of the genotype is the information stored in people’s brains that represents their beliefs, attitudes, values, skills, knowledge, and so on. The cultural equivalent of the phenotype is the expression of that information in the form of behavior, speech, and artifacts. It is the latter—the phenotype equivalent—that is copied during cultural transmission: we do not directly acquire neural patterns of activation in people’s brains; we copy people’s behavior, we listen to what they say, and we read what they write” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 44).

In nature, inheritance occurs in a direct order: first, genetic content is copied, and then the genotype, in interaction with the environment, shapes the phenotype, the external characteristics of organisms. Cultural inheritance is indirect: imitation, that is, copying the expression in the plane of norms, precedes the understanding of the content. An idea is passed through the medium. Understanding this difference between the direct transmission of genes and the indirect transmission of meanings was one of the initial problems of memetics, which, starting from the scientific apparatus of genetics arrived at the concept of the meme. “[A] significant worry for memetics is that when the same ideas do spread through a population, it is rarely because they are literally copied from each other” (Lewens 2018).

The evolutionary variation of meanings depends on their correct repetition by successive human generations. The inability of people to authentically repeat a meaning leads to its demise. Therefore, as Henrich shows, people tend to “over-imitate,” mimicking meanings with excessive accuracy (Henrich 2016, pp. 108-109). The ability to improve meanings (or at least not allow them to degrade) depends, all other things being equal, on the size and sociality of the human population. Thus, the size and quality of a society influence the path of its cultural evolution and the adaptive landscape of its meanings.

The difference between indirect cultural transmission and direct transmission of genes means that meanings can negatively affect human survival. If the survival of genes depends entirely on the survival of organisms that possess those genes, then meanings are not strictly tied to their carriers, allowing harmful meanings to spread throughout the human population. “…Oblique transmission opens up the possibility that some traits may spread through a population in spite of the fact that they reduce the fitness of the individuals who bear them” (Lewens 2018). Well-known examples include alcoholism and drug addiction.

The evolution of social learning went through two phases: (1) early social learning, which transmitted simple meanings that each individual could rediscover through individual learning (that is, independent discovery or invention), and (2) cultural learning, which transmitted meanings, that an individual, regardless of his abilities, could not rediscover independently in his entire life.

Social learning is characteristic of the early stages of cultural selection, when meanings were conveyed between hominids on the basis of their herding behavior, that is, their animal sociality. The early meanings themselves were still part of the animal behavior and appeared as animal signals and tools. If meanings got lost in the course of transmission, they could be rediscovered or reinvented through self-learning. In the later stages of cultural selection, meanings had left the realm of nature and formed an independent realm in which active abstractions in their shape of a word and a tool gradually decoupled from immediate animal behavior. Now meanings were transmitted through cultural learning; the complexity of meanings no longer allowed them to be simply reinvented if the community had lost them for some reason. At the same time, cultural learning enabled the transition from the collection of individual experiences to the growing accumulation of meanings from generation to generation.

Meaning as a common language of all humans

Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb noted that “the transition to human societies with linguistic communication required changes in anatomy and sensorimotor systems and an increase in cognitive ability, but the part of the transition that is most difficult to explain is how humans acquired the capacity to quickly master the complex rules of grammar when young” (Jablonka and Lamb 2006, p. 243). They suggested that this ability may have arisen in the course of the co-evolution of genes and culture. Originally, linguistic information was transmitted through social learning. However, as linguistic communication became more crucial for proto-human groups, cultural selection of individuals took place based on their ability to learn the basics of language, leading to partial genetic assimilation of those basics. Given this assumption, the question arises: how can it be that every child today can learn any of the five or six thousand human languages. The answer could be either that by the time the genetic capacity for language evolved, all proto-humans had the same language and that no change in the genetic capacity was required for further language evolution, or that the genetic capacity evolved relative to a base common to all languages.

The first option, according to which the same language existed for hundreds of thousands and millions of years in different pre-human groups, seems unlikely. The evolution of languages over the last few thousand years is well studied from written sources and shows that languages diverge rapidly as their speakers spread geographically. The second, more likely, option assumes that the genetic ability to learn languages evolved in relation to their common base. Individual languages form the plane of expression of this base. Damian Blasi and his colleagues, after analyzing the “basic vocabulary” of 40 to 100 lexical items from 62 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages, showed that there is a stable connection between sound and meaning: lexical items with similar meanings have similarities in sound. This similarity may be due to the origin of different languages from a common ancestor, to borrowings between languages, or to other reasons that make certain sounds preferable for expressing certain meanings (Blasi et al. 2016).

At one time, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed not only differential calculus but also the idea of a single human language based on the nature of things themselves. Newton wrote: “The dialects of each language being so divers and arbitrary a general Language cannot be so fitly deduced from them as surely as from the natures of the things themselves, which is the same for all Nations and by which all Language was at the first composed” (Elliott 1957, p. 7). Leibniz believed that there is an alphabet of human thought, made up of simple concepts or “letters” and that innate language is based on this alphabet (Wierzbicka 2011, p. 379).

Strange as it may seem, thoughts are not made of concepts, not of images, not of letters, not of words. Thoughts are made of meanings. Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop (2007):

“No one has trouble with the idea that ‘the same novel’ can exist in two different languages, in two different cultures. But what is a novel? A novel is not a specific sequence of words, because if it were, it could only be written in one language, in one culture. No, a novel is a pattern—a particular collection of characters, events, moods, tones, jokes, allusions, and much more. And so a novel is an abstraction, and thus ‘the very same novel’ can exist in different languages, different cultures, even cultures thriving hundreds of years apart” (Hofstadter 2007, p. 224).

Meaning, or social and material abstract action, is the common content of all languages, it is the base in relation to which languages function as elements of the plane of expression. Meaning is connected with its linguistic expression through an active linguistic norm and is transmitted thanks to this norm. Evald Ilyenkov wrote in his Considerations on the Relationship between Thinking and Language (1977):

“The ‘deep structures’ identified by Chomsky actually take shape in ontogenesis, in the process of a child’s development before he can speak and understand speech. And one does not have to be a Marxist to recognize their obvious, one might say, tangible reality in the form of sensorimotor schemes, i.e. schemes of the direct activity of a developing human being with things and in things in the form of a purely bodily phenomenon—the interaction of a body with other bodies located outside it. These sensorimotor schemes, as Piaget calls them, or ‘deep structures,’ as linguists prefer to call them, are precisely what philosophy has long called logical forms or forms of ‘thinking as such’” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 5, pp. 243-244).

Can a human being understand things without using words? Can language be reduced to gestures and tactile sensations rather than words? Although the Zagorsk experiment on teaching deaf-blind children did not provide a definitive answer to this question, we are inclined to believe that this is probably impossible. Meanings and words are inextricably linked for humans.

Studying the language development of a child is a key to understanding the language development of all humanity. A child learns language through a socially activated plane of expression, saturated with active norms. Active norms in this case are sensorimotor schemes and the event models and action programs built on them: connections between symbols (words, gestures) and actions: “eat,” “drink,” “sleep,” “walk,” etc. A child is predisposed to internalize these connections.

3. Traditional choice and cumulative culture

Meanings, counterfacts and choices

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once said that the concentration of energy in stars preceded the evolution of organisms (Tsiolkovsky 2004, p. 105). Life with its laws of selection has its origin in the inanimate nature with its laws of collection (or gravity). Culture, in turn, has its origin in life. Organic evolution occurs through selection within populations: genetic variability requires a change of generations of individuals. Cultural evolution begins as an extension of natural selection, as a mixed selection of individuals, which occurs not only on the basis of variations in genes, but also on the basis of variations in meanings. However, if genes, as elements of biological information, are rigidly tied to populations of individuals and cannot change independently of the organisms as their carriers, then meanings, as elements of cultural information, as socially transmitted material abstract actions, can change independently of human organisms within the framework established by the active power of man, his instincts, practices and reason.

As Leonid Krushinsky has shown, in the lower stage of biological evolution, the behavior of animals is mainly influenced by instincts, while as the nervous system becomes more complex, learning (practice) plays an increasingly important role in adaptive behavior. In modern humans, with their differentiated cerebrum, behavior is largely determined by reason (Krushinsky 1986, pp. 135-136). At the same time, “the basis of intelligent action is an extremely broad norm of reaction; behaviors performed with the participation of reason can go far beyond the forms of behavior that arose as adaptations to specific living conditions” (Krushinsky 1986, p. 80). Since intelligence, as a late product of mixed selection, has not been refined by it as much as learning, the frequent solving of new problems can lead to neuroses (ibid., pp. 228-229).

Practice and intelligence are not exclusively human characteristics. Animals also have their own animal “traditions” and their own “intelligence.” However, the difference between an animal and a human is not purely quantitative, as Darwin saw it. The difference is qualitative: animals use means but remain in nature. Their means and methods do not form a domus that would separate itself from the natural habitat.

Robert Sapolsky points out that the broad reaction norm underlying human intelligence is itself a result of evolution (we would say mixed selection) that has freed the human brain from the tight control of the genetic program:

“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes” (Sapolsky 2017, p. 173).

The development of reason, with its broad norm of reaction, is synonymous to the development of counterfacts (counterfactuals). Counterfacts are, one might say, alternative facts—actions and things that could have been but were not done, that were not added to the stable cultural repertoire and were not passed on through learning. Counterfacts arose along with meanings as their random versions brought about by variations in plans and actions. In itself, this randomness was only the intersection of existing patterns: “what we see as fundamental randomness may be the result of simple interacting rules” (Page 2009, p. 38). As meanings evolved, counterfacts began to acquire their own meaning, transforming into an alternative world of “as ifs.” In his Book of Why (2018), Judah Pearl cites as an example of a counterfact a figurine carved from the tusk of a mammoth 40,000 years ago—the “Lion Man” as a fantastic cross between man and animal (Pearl and Mackenzie 2018, pp. 34-35).

Pearl identifies three rungs on the ladder leading to knowledge of causes: “seeing,” “doing,” and “imagining.” On the first rung are animals and computers, which learn through association (Ivan Pavlov spoke of conditioned reflexes here). On the second rung are early humans who intervene in events, use tools, and act according to a plan rather than simply imitating, and children who experiment and learn from experience. Finally, on the top rung are “counterfactual learners” who “can imagine worlds that do not exist and infer reasons for observed phenomena” (Pearl and Mackenzie 2018, p. 28).

The evolution of meanings began as mixed selection but continued as choice (cultural election, to use a Latin term). Unlike cultural selection, cultural choice is an evolutionary variation of meanings, achieved by the alternation of generations not of humans, but of meanings. At this stage, the development of meanings gets independence from the development of the human body. Meanings cease to be an extension of the human organism and become a substance external to it. From the object of biocultural co-evolution, man transforms to its subject, taking on the function of denying facts, generating counterfacts and accelerating their selection. The evolving ability to deny the facts raised human understanding to reason. Nikita Moiseev called this the transition “from the strategy of nature to the strategy of reason” (Moiseev 1990, p. 223). If mixed selection was a joint action of the forces of nature and culture, then choice is a purposeful human action. Choice is both an action and a result of an action, that is, the choice between counterfacts is itself a (counter)meaning.

In his lecture course Understanding Complexity (2009), Scott Page makes a fourfold distinction between systems in which diversity is the result of selection and systems in which diversity is the result of choice (Page 2009, p. 14):

● The size of the jumps: selection proceeds in small jumps; choice can occur in large jumps: in the evolution of living things, an elephant and a tiger cannot be crossbred, but in the evolution of meanings they can;

● Viability of intermediate states: in selection, all intermediate stages must be independently viable; in choice, intermediate stages may not be able to function independently: the main thing is that the final state is viable;

● Method of representation: selection is “tied” to a single coding method—for example, genetic—and choice can be made in various symbolic systems;

● Continuity: selection is continuous and is carried out by a random search through all possible options; choice is discrete and bound to a finite set of options.

As Jean-Luc Nancy said, the subject is “what (or the one who) dissolves all substance—every instance already given,” “the subject is what it does, it is its act, and its doing is the experience of the consciousness of the negativity of substance” (Nancy 2002, p. 5). Man, considered from the perspective of his agency or active power, is the (counter)meaning that denies culture as given, creates something new and is itself this new. Election is an accelerated selection. With its transition to the choice of meanings, the evolution of culture accelerated in relation to the evolution of the human body. The evolution of culture-society proceeded from this point on faster than the evolution of the human body and psyche. To which section of the Henrich-Popov bridge can the emergence of counterfacts and choice be attributed? To the emergence of modern man about 200,000 years ago? Or much earlier? Or much later? We just do not know.

Traditional society and the accumulation of experience

Both natural and cultural selection (the latter arising from the former) occur in two steps: the first step is mutation, that is, a random change in genes/meanings, and the second step is inheritance, that is, the transmission of genes/meanings that ensure successful adaptation to the environment. The difference between selection and choice is that choice essentially occurs in one step, combining ideas about possible actions (counterfacts) and the action itself (meaning). In this one step, the chosen action is carried out. With the advent of choice, the evolution of meanings followed Lamarck, not Darwin: people began to select meanings purposefully, while retaining the meaning features they needed. Now the figurative “giraffe” actually began to grow a neck as it reached up for leaves, because people kept the offspring of just such a “giraffe.”

“Biological evolution is a bad analogue for cultural change because the two systems are so different for three major reasons that could hardly be more fundamental. First, cultural evolution can be faster by orders of magnitude than biological change at its maximal Darwinian rate—and questions of timing are of the essence in evolutionary arguments. Second, cultural evolution is direct and Lamarckian in form: The achievements of one generation are passed by education and publication directly to descendants, thus producing the great potential speed of cultural change. Biological evolution is indirect and Darwinian, as favorable traits do not descend to the next generation unless, by good fortune, they arise as products of genetic change. Third, the basic topologies of biological and cultural change are completely different. Biological evolution is a system of constant divergence without subsequent joining of branches. Lineages, once distinct, are separate forever. In human history, transmission across lineages is, perhaps, the major source of cultural change. Europeans learned about corn and potatoes from Native Americans and gave them smallpox in return” (Gould 1992, p. 65).

Biological evolution is based on the variability and inheritance of genes and the natural selection of organisms with a genotype that promotes adaptation to the environment. Man as a living being is the basis of society and culture. Therefore, in primitive communities, the mechanism of natural selection continues to operate, influencing the instinctive behavior of people. People are still guided by instincts and emotions, which are to some extent restricted by cultural norms: traditions and prejudices relayed through learning overlay instincts and override them. Cultural evolution is based on the inheritance of meanings, their variation and the selection of people with meaning types that contribute to adaptation to the environment:

“Here’s the idea, broken down into its simplest form. We’ve established that from a very young age, humans focus on and learn from more skilled, competent, successful, and prestigious members of their communities and broader social networks. This means that the new and improved techniques, skills, or methods that emerge will often begin spreading through the population, as the less successful or younger members copy them. Improvements may arise through intentional invention as well as from lucky errors and the novel recombinations of elements copied from different people” (Henrich 2016, pp. 212-213).

While cultural selection was the selection of facts based on implicit norms, traditional choice is the choice of counterfacts based on explicit norms. Traditional choice was still heavily dependent on norms and relied on practices transmitted through cultural learning. But even this traditional choice, based on the random drift of meanings and a deliberate retention of chance, eventually allowed humans to move to artificial selection, that is, the choice of animals and plants. About 30,000 years ago, the supposed domestication of the dog began the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming.

The rise of traditional choice as a driving force of social change did not lead to any “primitive revolutions.” We prefer to call the domestication of animals and plants agricultural evolution because this process took thousands and tens of thousands of years. Early human inventions and discoveries were happy accidents that were able to persist through the selection of the populations that made those discoveries and inventions. In a traditional society, intelligence and purposeful choices of individuals contributed to cultural evolution but did not yet play a prominent role. Human practices and prejudices dominated traditional society and ensured its survival.

It is hard for modern humans to accept the idea that developed intelligence is not a competitive advantage. However, this was well understood by members of traditional societies who relied not on intelligence but on practices in order to adapt to their environment. Joseph Henrich illustrates this with the example of Franklin’s expedition frozen in the Arctic ice in the 1840s:

“…Inuit snow houses look designed and are clearly functionally well fit to life in the Arctic. In fact, they appear to call for a team of engineers with knowledge of aerodynamics, thermodynamics, material science, and structural mechanics. Not surprisingly, facing the real threat of freezing to death in their tents, Franklin’s men didn’t figure out how to make snow houses. No single individual or even a group of a hundred highly motivated men in this case, could figure this out. It’s a product of cumulative cultural evolution and contains features that many or most Inuit builders just learn as ‘that’s the way you do it’ without any big causal model” (Henrich 2016, p. 115).

Traditional society accumulates cultural experience through practices passed down from generation to generation. Socio-cultural order and causal models are prerequisites for counterfacts and choice: in a situation of total uncertainty, choice is impossible. In this society, individual intelligence and counterfactual choice play a significant but subordinate role. They cannot accelerate the accumulation of cultural experience to the speeds to which modern people are accustomed.

Meanings, genes and memes

The idea that culture is made up of elements is nothing new. We will not review the entire long history of such research here, but will focus on memetics. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins hypothesized a unit of cultural transmission that he called a meme: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins 1976, p. 206). Dawkins introduced the concept of a meme by analogy with a gene.

Genes do not divide or mix, they are particles. At the same time they appear on the surface as continuous phenotypic traits: a person’s height or skin color can take on any value within a certain interval. Dawkins raised the question of whether memes are particulate (Dawkins 1976, p. 209; Mesoudi 2011, pp. 41-42). According to Alex Mesoudi, units of cultural heredity are not particulate, unlike genes:

“Memetics makes the neo-Darwinian assumption that culture can be divided into discrete units that are inherited in a particulate fashion, like genes. It also assumes that memes are transmitted with high fidelity, this being one of the defining characteristics of a replicator according to Dawkins. However, whereas genetic inheritance is particulate, cultural inheritance in many cases appears to be nonparticulate” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 42).

In reality, meanings have the properties of both a discrete and a continuous set. The discreteness of meaning is reflected in the fact that a single meaning can be isolated and defined. The continuity of meaning is reflected in the fact that meanings exist only in their movement: unlike a meme, meaning does not exist separately from human society, like a “cultural gene” that may or may not be transmitted between humans. Meanings are not “cultural genes” but human actions and their results, the totality of their material, social and abstract aspects.

Meaning is not an analogue of a gene, since it does not come from another meaning or even from a discrete set of meanings, but from their continuous set, which in the process of transmission and elaboration forms a culture. In essence, Culture represents a single Meaning that is both an inherited and an acquired property. While new genes can only arise from existing genes, new meanings—counterfacts—arise from the interaction of the subject and his culture with the natural and cultural environment: counterfacts arise from a set of meanings and non-meanings. Counterfacts come not only from variations in cultural traditions transmitted through learning, but also from an intellect solving problems in a changing environment. In other words, meaning as the substance and determinateness of culture depends on man as its subject and direction:

“Ideas and items of technology also have no stable analogue to the genome, or germline, because different elements within cycles of technological reproduction, including ideas, behaviors of artisans, and material elements of technologies themselves, can all temporarily acquire the status of replicators depending on the attention that human agents happen to be paying to them. Accidental variations in one’s mental plan for constructing a pot, or in one’s actions in producing the pot, or in the made pot itself, can all conceivably be reproduced when another artisan comes to make a resembling item” (Lewens 2018).

Biologists studying a minimum genome that would allow organisms to exist and reproduce assume that such a genome consists of 256 active genes (Hutchison et al. 2016). In nature, the bacterium mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest known genome among self-reproducing organisms—525 genes. The human genome contains 20,000 to 25,000 active genes. To date, there is no research on the minimum set of meanings that would trigger cultural evolution. Human culture began with a scanty set of primitive meanings, perhaps with a few simple tools, causal mini-models and an elementary tongue. However, by the time when Ötzi lived 5,300 years ago—a man from the Copper Age whose mummy and personal effects were discovered in the Alps in 1991— the meanings had multiplied to the point that a multi-story museum building is required to store and research them. And modern human culture is an immense accumulation of meanings that would require an encyclopedia of thousands of volumes to describe.

Simple consumption and unfolding of needs

The accumulation of meanings begins when proto-humans transform their habitat into a means and adapt it to their needs. The accumulation of meanings, in turn, leads to the unfolding of needs (Korotaev 2003, pp. 32-33). The unfolding of needs implies, first, that animal needs become more cultural and, second, that new more cultural needs emerge. Above, we called this transition the “needs trap” with which human history began. “…The satisfaction of the first need, the action of satisfying and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired, leads to new needs; and this creation of new needs is the first historical act” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 5, p. 42). In this transition, not only animals but also their needs are transformed into a mixture of life and meaning.

The unfolding of needs initially takes place within the framework of cultural selection. As humans advanced from cultural selection to choice, the satisfaction of needs unfolded into a meaningful process of consumption, that is, an increasingly targeted appropriation and elaboration of the material of nature. Traditional/simple consumption is based on the gradual expansion of the domus, the cultural niche of humans within the natural environment. Primitive people are still firmly embedded in nature and follow its rhythms:

“Close observers of hunter-gatherer life have been struck by how it is punctuated by bursts of intense activity over short periods of time. The activity itself is enormously varied—hunting and collecting, fishing, picking, making traps and weirs—and designed in one way or another to take best advantage of the natural tempo of food availability. ‘Tempo,’ I think, is the key word here. The lives of hunter-gatherers are orchestrated by a host of natural rhythms of which they must be keen observers” (Scott 2017, p. 88).

As the domus expanded, a cultural rhythm of its own evolved. The nomadic life of hunters and gatherers gave way to the more settled life of farmers. Technological changes, which were very slow, were accompanied by equally slow changes in organization and psychology. Tribes became chiefdoms and chiefdoms became states. Fetishism and animism were augmented, though not superseded, by totemism and polytheism.

The more meaningful consumption is, the more the needs are cognitively represented as values. Emotional behavior is gradually supplemented by traditional behavior as a prelude to rational action. “The line between meaningful action and merely reactive behavior to which no subjective meaning is attached, cannot be sharply drawn empirically. A very considerable part of all sociologically relevant behavior, especially purely traditional behavior, is marginal between the two” (Weber 1978, pp. 4-5).

William Durham has noted that cultural variants (we would say, meanings and counterfacts as alternative meanings) are socially transmitted, so they are not necessarily reproduced at the individual level, but can be retained or rejected by social choice (Durham 1991, p. 192). In fact, what needs to be explained is not how individual choice creates social choice, but where individual decisions come from and how they are possible. Historically, traditional choice began not with decisions made by individuals, but with social choice based on order and inherited practices.

Needs are not satisfied on the basis of a single norm or a single emotion. The unfolding of needs occurs within a broad framework of many norms, within the socio-cultural order. Values are the result of a choice in which different norms and emotions, morals and motives compete with each other. A person finds himself between norms and emotions. In the evolutionary process of selection and choice, norms and emotions as well as needs unfold.

For the vast majority of the population, simple consumption is limited to the satisfaction of needs essential to survival. These minimum needs, the satisfaction of which is necessary for the continuation of existence, play a central role in simple consumption. We call this first type of need subsistence needs. They ultimately develop into utilitarian motives.

The second type is communication needs. Simple consumption takes place in relatively small and isolated communities of several dozen or hundreds of people. In small communities, the satisfaction of the need for sociality, respect and social contacts serves primarily to maintain cohesion, distinguish between “us” and “them,” and establish social status.

The third type is the need for self-expression. In a traditional society, this is the least developed type: it arises later than the first two types and plays a minor role. Since primitive meanings are the result of cultural selection, not choice, and their main content is stability and not change, the need for self-expression remains inessential and sometimes harmful to the self-reproduction of traditional societies. Dreamers and inventors are ignored or even persecuted.

For anarcho-primitivists like John Zerzan, the reason for the slow progress of primitive societies makes no mystery. The answer for him is that the primitive dreamers could not think of anything better than their simple life.

“During the vast time-span of the Paleolithic, there were remarkably few changes in technology. Innovation, ‘over 2½ million years measured in stone tool development was practically nil,’ according to Gerhard Kraus. Seen in the light of what we now know of prehistoric intelligence, such ‘stagnation’ is especially vexing to many social scientists. ‘It is difficult to comprehend such slow development,’ in the judgment of Wymer. It strikes me as very plausible that intelligence, informed by the success and satisfaction of a gatherer-hunter existence, is the very reason for the pronounced absence of ‘progress.’ Division of labor, domestication, symbolic culture—these were evidently refused until very recently” (Zerzan 2012, p. 7).

Rather, the reason for the lack of “progress” was not intelligence, but its subordinate position: the intellect was suppressed by tradition. Practice, not the intellect, was the main source of the most effective causal models. Increasing the degree of adaptation in a simple society meant bringing the causal models closer to reality and thus strengthening man in his relationship with nature. The unfolding of needs, motives and activities requires an expansion of choices, but under cultural selection and traditional choice this expansion advanced extremely slowly.

Chapter 2. Simple production and necessary activity

1. Development of production from consumption

Agricultural evolution and increasing meanings

If Homo sapiens were simply a large mammal, like a wolf or a bear, its total population would not exceed several hundred thousand (Kapitsa 2009, p. 15). For example, the number of gray wolves in the world is about 300,000 individuals, the same number applies to chimpanzees. The transformation of man into a cultural being allowed him to exceed the limits set by nature. 100,000 years ago, 1 million people lived in the world. 10,000 years ago, when agricultural evolution began, 5 to 10 million people lived, and many of them depended on (semi-)domesticated animals and plants for reproduction. The further agricultural evolution advanced, the more people there were. At the turn of our era, there were about 250 million people living on Earth, most of whom were farmers and herders, not hunters and gatherers. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the world’s population was about 1 billion people (Malanima 2009, pp. 1 ff.).

The accumulation of meanings first led to the separation of culture from nature. Subsequently, the same process led to the separation of production from consumption. Agricultural production arose approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago through the domestication of plants and animals. Neolithic evolution may have been a rapid event by Paleolithic standards, but by the standards of modern socio-cultural change it was a very slow, gradual development of a productive economy. Recent research suggests that domestication itself was a long process:

“First, it makes the identification of a single domestication event both arbitrary and pointless. Second, it reinforces the case for a very, very long period of what some have called ‘low-level food production’ of plants not entirely wild and yet not fully domesticated either. The best analyses of plant domestication abolish the notion of a singular domestication event and instead argue, on the basis of strong genetic and archaeological evidence, for processes of cultivation lasting up to three millennia in many areas and leading to multiple, scattered domestications of most major crops (wheat, barley, rice, chick peas, lentils)” (Scott 2017, p. 12).

There was no clear boundary, but rather a transition between foraging and agriculture, between food appropriation and food production. James Scott calls this transition “illegible” production (Scott 2017, p. 33). “Illegible” production was characterized by two moments. First, meanings grew in objects, means of activity and the subject itself: plants, animals, and humans transformed from products of pure nature into products of human action. Second, the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming changed the rhythm and patterns of activity.

The advent of a relatively warmer and more stable climate at the beginning of the Holocene meant that in some areas, such as the Fertile Crescent region humans could reproduce without being nomadic. It became possible to obtain food by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants while remaining sedentary. The possibility of large seasonal food surpluses led to increased population density in areas with fish spawning grounds or natural grain fields. Seasonal food surpluses and the need to store food required long-term planning:

“A food supply dependent on a few seasonal energy flows required extensive, and often elaborate, storage. Storage practices included caching in permafrost; drying and smoking of seafood, berries, and meats; storing of seeds and roots; preservation in oil; and the making of sausages, nut-meal cakes, and flours. Large-scale, long-term food storage changed foragers’ attitudes toward time, work, and nature and helped stabilize populations at higher densities. The need to plan and budget time was perhaps the most important evolutionary benefit. This new mode of existence precluded frequent mobility and introduced a different way of subsistence based on surplus accumulation” (Smil 2017, p. 39).

The transition to sedentism did not depend on the unique characteristics of a particular area. Within a few thousand years, populations became sedentary not only in many regions of the Old World (Middle East, India, China), but also in the New World. The fact that this transition occurred almost simultaneously (at least, by prehistoric standards) in different parts of the world suggests that it was the result of some crucial changes in the evolution of culture-society that coincided with the climate changes at the beginning of the Holocene.

The shift to a food-producing economy was gradual and based on the use of a natural effect that reduced the labor intensity required for growing grain. Just as fire enables the clearing of forests and slash-and-burn creates a nutrient layer for plants and animals useful to humans, periodic ebb and flow in the floodplains of large rivers creates a layer of nutrients for sowing grain. Floods were the natural effect that intelligent and work-shy hunter-gatherers used for agriculture in alluvial plains (Scott 2017, p. 67):

“The general problem with farming—especially plough agriculture—is that it involves so much intensive labor. One form of agriculture, however, eliminates most of this labor: ‘flood-retreat’ (also known as decrue or recession) agriculture. In flood-retreat agriculture, seeds are generally broadcast on the fertile silt deposited by an annual riverine flood. The fertile silt in question is, of course, a ‘transfer by erosion’ of upstream nutrients. This form of cultivation was almost certainly the earliest form of agriculture in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, not to mention the Nile Valley. It is still widely practiced today and has been shown to be the most labor-saving form of agriculture regardless of the crop being planted” (Scott 2017, p. 66).

Agriculture was initially just an additional source of food for hunters and gatherers, who settled in the lower reaches of the rivers along the sea coast near rich food sources. For primitive communities, however, abundant food was not the rule, but rather a rare exception:

“For some groups the total foraging effort was relatively low, only a few hours a day. This finding led to foragers being portrayed as ‘the original affluent society,’ living in a kind of material plenty filled with leisure and sleep (Sahlins 1972). Most notably, Dobe !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, living on wild plants and meat, were thought to provide an excellent window on the lives of prehistoric foragers, who allegedly led contented, healthy, and vigorous lives. This conclusion, based on very limited and dubious evidence, must be—and has been—challenged. … A reanalysis of energy expenditure and demographic data collected in the 1960s found that the nutritional status and health of Dobe !Kung ‘were, at best, precarious and, at worst, indicative of a society in danger of extinction’ (Bogin 2011)” (Smil 2017, p. 37).

The subsequent spread of agriculture (at least in Europe) occurred due to the migration of members of agrarian communities, rather than due to hunter-gatherers willingly adopting the agricultural practices of their neighbors (Smil 2017, pp. 43-44). This may suggest that agriculture had no clear advantages over hunting and gathering. The shift to farming represented, in a sense, the collapse of primitive society. James Scott notes that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture entails a more monotonous rhythm and simpler activities:

“I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, ‘What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins.’” (Scott 2017, p. 92). “It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks” (ibid., p. 90).

Primitive societies were not societies of affluence. Hunter-gatherers did not lead lives of idleness, but neither were they forced to work hard or monotonously. With the exception of flood farming, agriculture constitutes a much more laborious occupation than hunting and gathering:

“As Ester Boserup and others have observed, there is no reason why a forager in most environments would shift to agriculture unless forced to by population pressure or some form of coercion” (Scott 2017, p. 20). “Why would foragers in their right mind choose the huge increase in drudgery entailed by fixed-field agriculture and animal husbandry unless they had, as it were, a pistol at their collective temple? We know that even contemporary hunter-gatherers, reduced to living in resource-poor environments, still spend only half their time in anything we might call subsistence labor” (ibid., p. 93).

If the transition from hunting and gathering to herding and farming involved an obvious simplification of life and more arduous work, why did it happen at all? The reason may have been the creation of surpluses or reserves that reduced environmental uncertainty, allowed time and resources to be allocated more efficiently, and thus freed up for activities other than food production. Religion, war, crafts and trade were the causes of farming and herding, at least insofar as farming and herding were their causes. Since the simplification of the individual live was accompanied by the complication of community live, individuals had to adapt to the rhythms of culture rather than nature. The transition to agricultural production occurred at the level of culture-society rather than at the level of individuals, many of whom suffered from this transition. The main driving force behind the transition was competition between communities, their leaders, and their meanings.

The prerequisite and at the same time consequence of the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and agriculture was the increase in population density. While the average population density in hunter-gatherer communities was 25 people per 100 square kilometers (Smil 2017, p. 28), slash-and-burn agriculture made it possible to feed 100 times more people: from 2,000 for corn farmers in North America to 6,000 for rice and tuber farmers in Southeast Asia (ibid., p. 45). Finally, in such developed agricultural production as the rice fields of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the corn plantations of the Aztecs, or the potato fields of the Incas, the population density reached tens of thousands of people per 100 square kilometers of cultivated area (ibid., pp. 95, 98-99).

Scott shows that the domestication of humans, plants and animals and their crowding into the domus, worsened their health and increased the mortality rate. At the same time, the transition to sedentary life increased the birth rate so much that it more than compensated for the increased mortality: the value of children as labor force is higher for a peasant than for a hunter-gatherer. So the rise of agrarian societies led to the displacement of hunter-gatherers (Scott 2017, pp. 82-83, 113-114).

We saw above that the emergence of culture became the first “needs trap”: when hominids resorted to meanings for self-reproduction, they could no longer remain animals, but had to evolve into humans. The transition to agriculture proved to be the second “needs trap.” Once an agrarian culture-society had emerged, it could not return to the hunter-gatherer state since it would not have been able to feed itself.

More people meant more meaning and faster evolution. We can identify four variables that influence the level of complexity and speed of evolution of a culture-society: (1) diversity; (2) connectedness; (3) interdependence; (4) adaptation or learning (Page 2009, pp. 10-12). The increase in population size and density in early agrarian societies affected all four variables.

“Human population grew in a sort of chain reaction in which greater density of occupation of territory tended to produce new opportunities for specialization and thus led to an increase of individual productivity and in turn to a further increase of numbers. There also developed among such large numbers of people not only a variety of innate attributes but also an enormous variety of streams of cultural traditions among which their great intelligence enabled them to select—particularly during their prolonged adolescence” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 126).

The increase in population, its density and specialization associated with the development of agricultural production led to greater diversity, connectedness and interdependence: people became more different, the number and intensity of their contacts expanded.

“Prehistoric changes brought about by better tools, the mastery of fire, and better hunting strategies were very slow, unfolding over tens of thousands of years. The subsequent adoption and intensification of permanent farming lasted for millennia. Its most important consequence was a large increase in population densities, leading to social stratification, occupational specialization, and incipient urbanization” (Smil 2017, p. 407).

Nevertheless, increasing population density, coupled with the concentration of livestock, domesticated plants and parasites, often led to massive epidemics and the collapse of entire civilizations. In an agrarian society, the vast majority of the population can only satisfy their minimum needs through subsistence farming. The primitive economy relied mainly on agriculture, on the achievements of which the slow evolution of society largely depended. We would not be mistaken if we said that about three-quarters to four-fifths of the traditional labor force was employed in agriculture (cf. Livi Bacci 2000, p. 12).

According to Thomas Malthus, in a traditional society, the population grows geometrically, while food production grows arithmetically. Geometric population growth with arithmetical production growth is a path to the Malthusian trap, that is, to the crisis and death of the entire society or that part of it that cannot feed itself. An agrarian society remains, to a large extent, part of its natural environment: the development of its meanings constantly encounters natural constraints—be they environmental disasters, crop failures or epidemics.

Quality and quantity of meanings

Meanings change according to the laws of probability. On the one hand, they can increase and complicate when people (re)combine them trying to get different results. On the other hand, they can decrease and simplify when people lose them during transmission. Culture is an ongoing experiment based on experience:

“Larger populations can overcome the inherent loss of information in cultural transmission because if more individuals are trying to learn something, there’s a better chance that someone will end up with knowledge or skills that are at least as good as, or better than, those of the model they are learning from. Interconnectedness is important because it means more individuals have a chance to access the most skilled or successful models, and thereby have a chance to exceed them, and so can recombine elements learned from different highly skilled or successful models to create novel recombinations”(Henrich 2016, p. 220).

The quality and quantity of meanings depend on the strength, diversity and sociality of human populations, and population numbers depend on the quantity and quality of meanings:

“… If some one man in a tribe, more sagacious than the others, invented a new snare or weapon, or other means of attack or defense, the plainest self-interest, without the assistance of much reasoning power, would prompt the other members to imitate him; and all would thus profit. The habitual practice of each new art must likewise in some slight degree strengthen the intellect. If the new invention were an important one, the tribe would increase in number, spread, and supplant other tribes. In a tribe thus rendered more numerous there would always be a rather better chance of the birth of other superior and inventive members” (Darwin 1981, p. 161).

The same mechanisms that lead to an increase in the complexity of a culture-society can, under certain conditions, also lead to a loss of complexity. When a population shrinks or gets isolated, it can lose its adaptive cultural information. Joseph Henrich gives the following example. When Europeans first encountered Tasmanians, their tools looked primitive compared to the tools of other Paleolithic communities. Archaeological excavations have shown that Tasmanians had more complex instruments tens and even hundreds of thousands of years ago, until about 12,000 years ago, when the island was cut off from Australia by rising sea levels. Under conditions of isolation, Tasmania’s relatively small population was unable to maintain the previous complexity of its tools (Henrich 2016, pp. 220-222).

Human activity is a set of material social abstract actions, the result of which are humans themselves. The quality of meanings determines the quality of people, and the quality of people determines the quality of meanings. In this “subject—meaning” cycle, the quality of both the subject and the meaning is determined by their materiality, sociality and abstractness. The quality of material action (making) and its means depends on the community size and the specifics of communication:

“The size of the group and the social interconnectedness among these individuals plays a crucial role in this process. The most obvious way that the size of a group can matter is that more minds can generate more lucky errors, novel recombinations, chance insights, and intentional improvements” (Henrich 2016, p. 213). “The power of a group’s collective brain depends on its social norms and institutions. … In humans, sociality and technological know-how are intimately interwoven” (ibid., p. 322).

Both materiality and sociality are closely related to abstractness, that is, the ability to understand causes and motives, to calculate and compute in the broadest sense. In primates, the size of the prefrontal cortex depends on the community size: the more social connections, the larger the cortex (Sapolsky 2017, p. 51). The mind is the same layering of different periods and epochs as the brain. We can trace the entire sequence from the oldest to the later elements and functions in it:

“Thus, in looking at a bacterium under the microscope, it answers with a continuous ‘computo ergo sum.’ One has to know how to listen. But what could it mean to say, ‘I compute for myself?’ It means that I place myself at the center of the world, the center of my world, the world that I know, to process it, to consider it, and accomplish all the measures of protection, defense, etc. It is here that the notion of the subject makes its appearance, along with the computo and its egocentrism. The notion of the subject is indissociable from this act of computation, where one is not only one’s own finality, but where one also constitutes one’s own identity” (Morin 2008, p. 73).

In living nature, a subject arises where “biomechanical calculation” takes place. In a culture-society, a subject (an economic unit) arises where “economic calculation” begins. A Paleolithic clan community, a king’s court, a modern firm are economic units. Calculation or choice is an evolutionary process that evolves within human self-reproduction and ensures its continuation. As a comparison of past, present and future costs and benefits, calculation preceded any production: a community of hunters and gatherers had its own way of calculation and its own relationship of individuals, based on this way. Indirect reciprocity is a method of calculation in which after a successful hunt, the prey was divided among all members of the clan. This secured a share of the pray in case of an unsuccessful individual hunt and solved the problem of storing the excess meat (Sapolsky 2017, pp. 324-325). The growth of agricultural production expanded the range of man-made values that were not present in nature but were necessary for the self-reproduction of human communities. This increased the importance of economic calculation and governance, that is, the role of reason compared to that of instincts and practices.

Man is both the subject and the object of his own activity, nature and culture are its means. “The elementary factors of the labor process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 188). To these factors one must add man himself as the driving force of activity and his needs as the source of this driving force. The evolution of meanings is associated with the unfolding of needs and the development of material, social and mental values. As we said above, values are, on the one hand, a representation of needs in the minds of people, and on the other hand, a projection of needs onto things and circumstances. “Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment” (Mises 1996, p. 96). Projections can be positive and negative, good and evil.

As the driving force of activity, man is an active power. Man reproduces himself through activities that consist of an immense quantity of actions. Meanings increase in cumulative cultural evolution by being divided, added and multiplied. Human activity accumulates more and more meanings; its starting point and result are man himself (his active power) and the means of his activity. Man and the means of activity together form the means of self-reproduction. The means of activity, in turn, are divided into means of production and means of consumption (consumer articles). In the course of agricultural evolution, the means of production gradually separated from consumer goods, and the experience of appropriating the creations of nature was supplemented by the experience of creating the products of culture.

Illustration 2. Means of self-reproduction

Unlike consumption, production does not aim at satisfying immediate needs, but at satisfying indirect, future needs. Economists traditionally reduce means of activity to goods. According to Carl Menger, lower-order goods aim at satisfying human needs (consumer goods), and higher-order goods (means of production) aim at producing lower-order goods in the future: “Goods of higher order acquire and maintain their goods-character, therefore, not with respect to needs of the immediate present, but as a result of human foresight, only with respect to needs that will be experienced when the process of production has been completed” (Menger 2007, pp. 81-82). In fact, however, means of activity are not reduced to goods, since people consume not only goods, but also evils (both productive and non-productive).

Besides their ability to satisfy human needs (directly as consumer articles or indirectly as means of production), means of activity have in common the fact that they are themselves products of activity. Marx introduced the concept of “abstract labor” in volume I of Das Kapital (1867) to bring all concrete types of activity to a general equivalent so that the quantity of labor can be calculated: “If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 48).

Marx introduced the concept of “abstract labor” but did not explain what its substance is. Georg Simmel wrote in his The Philosophy of Money (1900) that unlike energy, which is essentially unchanging but can manifest itself in different ways (such as heat, electricity, mechanical motion), different types of labor do not have a general equivalent or substance that would allow comparisons between, for example, “muscular” and “mental” labor. At the same time, Simmel admitted that such an equivalent might exist:

“From the outset I admit that I do not simply rule out the possibility that in the future the mechanical equivalent for the psychic activity will be discovered. Of course, the importance of its content, its factually determined position in logical, ethical and aesthetic contexts is completely separate from all physical movements, roughly in the same manner as the meaning of a word is quite separate from its physiological-acoustic sound. Yet the energy that the organism must expend upon the thought of this content as a cerebral process is, in principle, just as calculable as that necessary for a muscular exertion. If this were to be achieved one day, then one could at least make the amount of energy necessary for a specific muscular exertion a unit of measurement on the basis of which the mental use of energy would be determined. Mental labor would then be dealt with on the same footing as manual labor, and its products would enter into a merely quantitative balancing of value with those of the latter” (Simmel 2004, p. 421).

As Simmel correctly assumed, the general equivalent that makes it possible to treat mental and manual labor on the same footing is not mechanical in nature. Nor is it energy or time. Rather, it is directed information: meaning is the sought-after substance of all human activity and its results.

Figurae as elements of meaning

As a building block of culture, meaning is social information in action. In genes, information is recorded in the form of nucleotide sequences. How then is information recorded in meanings? An individual meaning is made up of figurae—changes and differences. Meanings consist of both continuous and discrete figurae. Meanings are therefore similar to light, which has a wave-particle nature.

The quantity of meaning is determined by the number of figurae, or changes and differences. It applies to all functions of meaning—be it making and things, communication and communities, thinking and symbols. The quantity of meaning is in all cases determined by the number of figurae necessary for its reproduction. It is impossible to reduce meaning only to expression, only to content, or only to a norm, since every meaning is a material and social abstraction in action, taken in the unity of all the changes and differences necessary for its reproduction. As a social and material abstract action, meaning is based on the expenditure of energy and time. However, energy and time are constraints, not measures of meaning. Its quantity is measured by the number of figurae it contains.

Information theory calls changes and differences bits and measures information in bits. A bit is a change or difference that is reduced to being a change or difference and nothing else: “1” or “0,” “on” or “off,” etc. The simplest element of meaning, the simplest figura, is not just a bit (“0” or “1”) but a bit that has a valuation attached to it. The cultural bit has not only a modulus (“0” or “1”), but also a sign (“+” or “–”). Information is certainty, meaning is directed, value-based information. A meaning can be visualized as a string s consisting of figurae. The criterion for defining the size or quantity of the meaning is the number of figurae in the string s.

A string of figurae forms a meaning, a bundle of meanings forms a context. Since meanings exist in context, they function not as a discrete, but as a continuous set. There is no clearly defined, fixed boundary between figurae and meanings; this boundary is mobile and is determined by the context. The same human movement can, depending on the context, be either part of an action or an independent action with its own meaning—a gesture. Every meaning acquires its specifics in context. Meaning is always a specific action and the result of such an action. An abstract expression is a meaning only insofar as it is found in the context of concrete social actions.

Aristotle said that “art in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature” (Aristotle 1984, vol. 1, p. 340). Completeness or perfection is the main characteristic of a meaning and of culture as a whole, as compared to figurae. A finished biface is a meaning, a stone fragment is a figura. A finished phrase is a meaning, an unfinished phrase is an assortment of figurae. A well-thought-out book is a meaning; an ill-thought-out book is an assortment of figurae. Wisdom is the highest form of completeness of an action, enabling one to begin a fundamentally new action.

The relationship between figurae and meanings in their linguistic (symbolic) forms, a kind of “sense of meaning,” is the basis of the common language of all humans, which enables us to learn new languages in adulthood and to guess the purpose of rubble found during archaeological excavations. “Such non-signs as enter into a sign system as parts of signs we shall here call figurae; this is a purely operative term, introduced simply for convenience. Thus, a language is so ordered that with the help of a handful of figurae and trough ever new arrangements of them a legion of signs can be constructed” (Hjelmslev 1969, p. 44).

When we say that bits are “building blocks” of information, and figurae are “building blocks” of meaning, we imply that figurae, unlike bits, have qualitative properties and that the set of figurae can be divided into subsets, or that we can distinguish between basic types of figurae. This applies to meanings as such, but it was first noted for linguistic signs. Hjelmslev considered the identification of these types to be a necessary condition for understanding both the expression and the content of languages.

“Such an exhaustive description presupposes the possibility of explaining and describing an unlimited number of signs, in respect of their content as well, with the aid of a limited number of figurae. And the reduction requirement must be the same here as for the expression plane: the lower we can make the number of content-figurae, the better we can satisfy the empirical principle in its requirement of the simplest possible description” (Hjelmslev 1969, p. 67).

As we saw above, meanings are not reduced to signs and symbols. Meanings manifest themselves in the mental, social and physical existence of a person, but meanings are not born in this existence. Abstractions are not a product of the human intellect, neither in its affirmative form of understanding nor in its negative form of reason. Rather, it is understanding and reason that are the result of the evolution of social and material abstractions in action. Meanings only reproduce fundamental definitions, states, relationships, changes, directions in nature and society: “If we’re able to learn language from a few years’ worth of examples, it’s partly because of the similarity between its structure and the structure of the world” (Domingos 2015, p. 37). Hence the universality of meanings, the ability of people to understand each other, to translate each other’s languages—and this after tens of thousands of years of isolated life. During the Age of Discovery, Europeans found a common language with the Indians or Australians. All people act, talk and think in one language—the language of meaning:

“In Leibniz’s view, if we want to understand anything, we should always proceed like this: we should reduce everything that is complex to what is simple, that is, present complex ideas as configurations of very simple ones which are absolutely necessary for the expression of thoughts” (Wierzbicka 2011, p. 380). “…’Inside’ all languages we can find a small shared lexicon and a small shared grammar. Together, this panhuman lexicon and the panhuman grammar linked with it represent a minilanguage, apparently shared by the whole of humankind. … On the one hand, this mini-language is an intersection of all the languages of the world. On the other hand, it is, as we see it, the innate language of human thoughts, corresponding to what Leibniz called ‘lingua naturae’” (ibid., p. 383).

Mathematics as a domain of meaning is also a reflection of the fundamental definitions of the world. The similarities between the world and mathematics make it possible to solve scientific problems. This similarity did not arise overnight. Mathematics is a result of the evolution of meaning from the order of the universe up to the reflection of this order in the minds of people. On the scale of millions and billions of years, the difference between Turing and Wittgenstein disappears: “Turing thought of mathematics as something that was essentially discovered, something like a science of the abstract. Wittgenstein insisted that mathematics was essentially something invented, following out a set of rules we have chosen—more like an art than a science” (Grim 2017, p. 151). In fact, both mathematics and logic in general are the result of cultural evolution that occurs through selection and choice. It could be, that the logical contradiction between meanings expresses the historical and practical discrepancy of meanings in relation to the environment and the subject, and the resolution of such a contradiction reflects the overcoming of this discrepancy.

The simplicity of early meanings did not only concern making. Thinking and communicating were just as simple, relying on crude motions of body and mind. Primitive making has left us its direct results: stones, bones, etc. Unfortunately, the direct products of communicating or thinking no longer exist, so we can only judge them indirectly. In the process of social and then cultural learning, as the norm of first learned and then rational reaction expanded and cultural selection turned into traditional choice, the complexity of meanings and of the culture-society as a whole increased, as did the number of figurae and meanings.

The gradual complication of meanings becomes clear, for example, when we consider the evolution of stone tools: from the simplest Paleolithic choppers to the polished and drilled Neolithic axes, which are characterized by a much higher level of workmanship. Cultural evolution consists in the division of meanings, that is, in the emergence of ever new types of actions and their results. By dividing their activity and knowledge, people specialized in those types of actions in which they had a competitive advantage due to the characteristics of the environment or their active power. Hunting and gathering divided into farming, herding, crafts, trade. Not only the complexity of making grew, but also of communicating and thinking. Languages were more complex. Learned actions became a more important part of self-reproduction relative to instinctive behaviors, rational actions grew more vital relative to learning.

2. Complexity of meaning

Minimal subject and minimal action

That the complexity of meanings increases as they evolve may be intuitively obvious, but it was only in the middle of the 20th century that the concepts of the quantity of information and information complexity were rigorously substantiated in the works of Claude Shannon and Andrey Kolmogorov.

Shannon introduced the concept of information entropy. According to him, entropy H is a measure of the uncertainty, unpredictability, surprise or randomness of a message, event or phenomenon. In terms of culture, such a message or event is a counterfact. Without information losses, Shannon entropy is equal to the amount of information per message symbol. The amount of information is determined by the degree of surprise inherent in a particular message:

“According to this way of measuring information, it is not intrinsic to the received communication itself; rather, it is a function of its relationship to something absent—the vast ensemble of other possible communications that could have been sent, but weren’t. Without reference to this absent background of possible alternatives, the amount of potential information of a message cannot be measured. In other words, the background of unchosen signals is a critical determinant of what makes the received signals capable of conveying information. No alternatives = no uncertainty = no information. Thus Shannon measured the information received in terms of the uncertainty that it removed with respect to what could have been sent” (Deacon 2013, p. 379).

Thus, the average amount of information H a culture-society contains can be measured by the number of (counter)facts it generates and the probability of their occurrence. The Shannon entropy H is an indicator of the complexity of a culture-society as a whole. If we look at the history of human cultures-societies, we see that their complexity has consistently grown: from a meager set of primitive meanings (tribal community, elementary language, simple stone tools, causal mini-models, animism and fetishism) to a complex arsenal of meanings characteristic of agrarian societies (fields and livestock, agricultural and craft tools, city-states and empires, writing and literature, ancient and Arabic science, world religions).

Cultural evolution has increased the complexity of entire cultures-societies as well as individual meanings. As mentioned earlier, the complexity of a meaning is determined by the minimum number of figurae required to reproduce it. Suppose we have a meaning s that can be represented as a string with a certain number of figurae. The length of this string is L(s). In this case, the complexity of a meaning s is defined by the length of the shortest program s* that can describe this meaning. The length of the program s* is called the algorithmic entropy of s or Kolmogorov complexity K(s):

“The key concept of algorithmic information theory is that of the entropy of an individual object, also called the (Kolmogorov) complexity of the object. The intuitive meaning of this concept is the minimum amount of information needed to reconstruct a given object” (Vinogradov et al. 1977-1985, vol. 1, p. 220).

We call the program s* the least or minimal action necessary to reproduce the meaning s. The complexity of the meaning s depends on the length (size) of the minimal action required to reproduce it. For example, the string asdfghjkl can be described only by itself. Its length is 9 non-repeating figurae. However, if a string s has a pattern—even a non-obvious one—it can be described by a minimal action s* that is much shorter than s itself. For example, the string afjkafjkafjkafjk can be described by the much shorter string afjk repeated as many times as necessary.

“The distinction between simplicity and complexity raises considerable philosophical difficulties when applied to statements. But there seems to exist a fairly easy and adequate way to measure the degree of complexity of different kinds of abstract patterns. The minimum number of elements of which an instance of the pattern must consist in order to exhibit all the characteristic attributes of the class of patterns in question appears to provide an unambiguous criterion” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 15, p. 260).

The complexity of a given meaning is determined by the size of the minimal action necessary to reproduce that meaning. As a product of culture, man himself is also a meaning. In order to be able to transmit more and more cultural experiences, he must become more complex. With each generation, the minimal action required to reproduce man as a cultural being grows, and with it the complexity of learning.

The complexity of a minimal action converges to the entropy of its source, that is, the minimal subject. As we saw above, the complexity of a culture-society is determined by the number of alternative meanings (counterfacts) it can generate. At the same time, the complexity of a culture-society is defined by the size of the minimal action necessary for its reproduction. Thus, the entropy of the culture-society considered as a source of messages (counterfacts) is approximately equal to the average complexity of all possible messages from this source:

“Shannon’s entropy does not make sense for a particular string of bits. Entropy is a property of an information source. There are many possible messages, each with its own probability. Entropy measures the size of that universe of possibilities. In contrast, the algorithmic entropy makes sense for any particular string of bits. The strings themselves can have a higher or lower information content, according to whether they require longer or shorter descriptions. The two entropies are related to each other. For a source that produces binary sequences, the Shannon entropy is approximately the average of the algorithmic entropy, taking an average over all the possible sequences that the source might produce: H ≈ ave(K). Shannon entropy is a way to estimate the algorithmic entropy, on average” (Schumacher 2015, p. 231).

In other words, the complexity of meaning, when measured in cultural bits, converges on average to the entropy of the subject, be it culture-society as a whole or an individual taken as a source of (counter)facts. As Protagoras said, “man is the measure of all things: of the things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not” (Plato 1997, p. 169). The minimal subject is a measure of the complexity of man, that is, of the unpredictability, uncertainty, randomness and surprise of his actions performed and not performed. The minimal subject is both the source and the product of the minimal action, and together they constitute the minimal meaning.

The historical increase in the complexity of a culture-society is reflected in the increase in both the number of (counter)facts it produces and the average size of the minimal action required to reproduce an individual meaning. The transition from cultural selection based on the alternation of human generations to traditional choice based on the alternation of generations of meanings raised both the entropy of the source of (counter)facts and the complexity of the (counter)facts themselves.

When we apply the achievements of information theory to culture, we must note the difference between the terms “information” and “meaning.” Information is determinateness in general or certainty, its measure is the reduction of uncertainty. The unit of information is a bit, “1” or “0.” In contrast to information, meaning is directed certainty, an act of change in a certain direction. Examples of directed certainty are the evolution of living beings and the evolution of meanings. Humans process information (certainty) into meaning (mediated, that is, directed certainty) by matching information with needs. The unit of meaning is the cultural bit—not just “1” or “0,” but also “+” or “–.” Meaning is information in human action that reproduces the patterns of the world.

“The orderly structures and patterns of which we are most immediately aware are those within our own minds, bodies, and behavior, but virtually all human beings have a strong conviction that corresponding to these patterns of mind and body are similar patterns in what might be called the ‘real world’” (Boulding 1985, p. 9).

At the same time, meaning is not limited to a mental act that operates with abstraction. Thinking in itself is not an interaction with meanings as with some “supramundane” entities. Meaning is a material action and the result of an action. When we compare meanings with each other, we can distinguish between their general and particular properties. A clock is a device for measuring time. But this general property of being a clock does not exist in itself. It exists in the context of human activities related to clocks. The abstraction of a clock only makes sense in action, for example when you read and think about what is written in this book.

Is the watchmaker blind, is culture left to chance?

In his book The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (1986), Richard Dawkins cited 18th-century theologian William Paley’s argument that if we find an object as precise and complex as a clock on a heath, we can assume that it did not come into being spontaneously, but was designed. Paley applied this argument to nature to prove the existence of God. Dawkins believed that Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided an answer to Paley’s argument:

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (Dawkins 1996, p. 5).

Dawkins argued that natural selection could have created the animal world even without the will of God, and Donald Campbell argued that cultural selection could have created knowledge and civilization even without the will of man. In his works of the 1950s and 60s, Campbell put forward the theory of “blind variation and selective retention,” according to which man creates cultural variations randomly, without foreseeing the future course of events, and these variations are then subjected to selection in which only those variations that have proven useful are stored and passed on through learning. Learning is “the retention of adaptive response patterns for subsequent utilization, thus abbreviating the trial and error process” (Campbell 1959, p. 158). Taking Dawkins and Campbell’s argument further, we can conclude that man is not a subject of culture at all, that culture does not need human design, that meanings develop on their own: they arise randomly and are passed on through involuntary learning. However, some people feel uneasy with this assumption:

“…Historical analyses of scientific and technological change suggest that cultural change is not quite so directed, and foresight not quite as accurate, as commonly assumed. Historical figures often claim retrospectively to have guided cultural change in particular directions, yet such claims may have the benefit of hindsight and be self-servingly exaggerated. However, there is a general lack of systematic evidence regarding this issue, at least compared to the careful experiments conducted by Luria and Delbrück in biology. We should therefore be prepared to accept that cultural evolution may, at least in some instances, be directed rather than blind and that there is a valid difference here between cultural and biological evolution” (Mesoudi 2011, p. 46). [Luria and Delbrück’s experiments in the 1940s showed that mutations in bacteria are not the result of selection pressure, but occur by chance.—A.K.]

So, is any new meaning a matter of chance? Henry Quastler once posed this question as follows: “How does one know that at least some new information has emerged or that the new work is more than a rearrangement, according to existing laws, of previously existing patterns?” (Quastler 1964, p. 17).

We showed above that a meaning s can be reduced to a minimal action s*. A minimal action is the shortest description of a meaning that allows its reproduction. Obviously, a new meaning emerges if it cannot be reduced to another meaning. It is known from information theory that the closer the length of string s is to the length of the minimal action s*, the more random the meaning is: “Among all the descriptions of s, there is a shortest one called s*, and the length of s* is the algorithmic entropy K(s). This led to a neat definition of randomness: A string s is random if it has no description much shorter than itself. Its entropy is about equal to its own length: K(s) = L(s*) ≈ L(s)” (Schumacher 2015, p. 240).

Any truly new information is therefore random and unpredictable. However, new information is not yet new meaning. Through their actions, people strive not only to create new information, but also to satisfy their needs. Meaning is not only determinateness or certainty, but also direction. New information must be inscribed in the existing culture in order to make sense. Any new meaning is both random and necessary. Quastler sees this as the answer to his question:

“The answer may be in the composer Pierre Boulez’s definition of artistic creation: ‘To make the unpredictable inevitable.’ To restate this beautifully succinct saying: if there is a truly new element in a work, then it should have been quite impossible to predict this element beforehand, on any basis; if the work is to be successful, then this unpredictable element must acquire the unavoidability of a law” (Quastler 1964, p. 17).

Meanings arise by chance and are transmitted by necessity. All meanings are accidental, but once established they become the norm. Quastler calls this “random and remembered choice.” “The ‘accidental choice remembered’ is a mechanism of creating information and very different in nature from mechanisms of discovering information” (Quastler 1964, p. 16).

If meanings evolve on their own, and not through human agency, then is not all culture the result of the evolution of meanings, their random changes, and selective retention? The stage of mixed natural and cultural selection lasted for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years; the stage of traditional choice lasted for thousands or tens of thousands of years. During this period, proto-human and early human populations self-reproduced by collective rather than individual action. Collective existence overshadowed the lives of individuals, their plans, and their destinies. Alfred Kroeber wrote that looking back over thousands of years of history, one might come to believe that hidden forces control individuals who have no influence over their lives:

“When one has acquired the habit of viewing the millennial sweeps and grand contours, and individuals have shrunk to insignificance, it is very easy to deny them consequential influence, even any influence—and therewith one stands in the gateway of belief in undefined immanent forces; a step more, and the forces have become mysterious” (Kroeber 1952, p. 9).

The difficult questions arise as to whether the individual is the origin of all action, whether he plays a significant role in the evolution of culture and whether man has free will at all.

Hard problem of subject

As with natural selection, in the early stages of mixed selection, individuals were not its agents but merely inactive elements of self-reproducing populations—imitators and followers of first animal and then human traditions. A single human cannot reproduce himself. A human alone cannot give birth to or raise another human. He cannot even retain his common sense when alone. But as meanings accumulated in the course of mixed selection, the experience and sophistication of primitive communities increased, and with it the agency of individuals.

The increasing complexity of technologies, organizations and psychologies implies the emergence of consciousness and personality as its manifestation. Man becomes (self-)conscious and is a personality when he detaches himself from the community and at the same time searches for himself in a community of which he is a part. Michael Graziano writes that consciousness is a model of attention: we attribute attention to other people and therefore attribute it to ourselves (Graziano 2013). We would rather say that consciousness is a model of meaning: we attribute it to others and therefore attribute it to ourselves. Consciousness is a function that results from mental activity, that is, thinking:

“It is the ability to extract from mental activity its algorithms (methods), to evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy, the quality of one’s actions, to program, regulate and control them. A person extracts the criteria of consciousness from the environment, from its phenomena and moral and ethical standards accepted in the family, the environment and society as a whole” (Wiesel 2021, p. 136).

Consciousness was not given to humans from the beginning. Julian Jaynes wrote in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) that humans originally had no consciousness and that it only emerged in historical times, perhaps in the age of writing. (Self-)consciousness arose when the “voices” that told a person what to do became the voice of his own mind. He finds confirmation of this in the poems of Homer and other ancient authors:

“In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god,’ or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself” (Jaynes 1976, p. 75). “Once established, once a man can ‘know himself,’ as Solon advised, can place ‘times’ together in the side-by-sideness of mind-space, can ‘see’ into himself and his world with the ‘eye’ of his noos [mind], the divine voices are unnecessary, at least to everyday life. They have been pushed aside into special places called temples or special persons called oracles. And that the new unitary nous (as it came to be spelled), absorbing the functions of the other hypostases, was successful is attested by all the literature that followed, as well as the reorganization of behavior and society” (ibid., pp. 287-288).

Robert Sapolsky suggests that free will is determined by a person’s ability to resist biological impulses (Sapolsky 2017, p. 597). But where does this ability come from? It comes from the dual nature of humans—as animals and as social beings. In the Phaedrus, Plato compared the soul to the union of a pair of winged horses and their charioteer (Plato 1997, p. 524). In the Republic, he wrote that man is the unity of three principles: rational, affective (rage and desire for competition) and natural (passion and lust). “Do we learn with one part, get angry with another, and with some third part desire the pleasures of food, drink, sex, and the others that are closely akin to them? Or, when we set out after something, do we act with the whole of our soul, in each case?” (Plato 1997, p. 1067).

Socio-cultural experience is an accumulation of accidental and remembered choices transmitted through learning. An individual is able to choose at all because he has an essential part of this experience. Man as a cultural microcosm is a copy of society as a macrocosm. “…The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 5, p. 4). “Society” and “individual” are only two opposite points of the same “man” when considered as an abstraction. “Individuals may carry out actions traditionally indexed as ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’; however, these actions may properly be viewed as forms of relationship carried out on the site of the individual” (Gergen 2001, p. 119).

An individual accumulates individual experiences that enable him to make a choice between (counter)facts—provided they lie within the limits of his individual experience. A striking example is professional experience: the greater this is, the higher the person’s ability to make decisions in uncertain situations related to his occupation. In traditional agrarian societies, not only the society as a whole, but also an individual is capable of making decisions, that is, he has free will.

People develop through learning, through the accumulation of meanings that are passed on from generation to generation in the form of cultural experiences: norms, knowledge and skills. Increasing meanings are revealed in the complication of causal models, which reflect the relationships between goals and results of actions and are an accumulated prerequisite for new actions. A person becomes a subject when his experience allows him to reason and choose. In the beginning, the causal model (i.e. knowledge) is a means of activity, and at the end it becomes the subject himself (i.e. consciousness).

Free will is based on the multiplicity of meanings, on the human ability to invent counterfacts. Freedom is found at the intersections of necessities. In other words, the transition from selection to choice did not occur when (proto-)humans acquired the ability to choose, but when they learned what to choose from. Choice arose simultaneously with the ability to create counterfacts. Where, then, did the counterfacts come from? It is reasonable to assume that choice arose when contacts between communities began, so that members of the communities got to know each other and could compare and exchange meanings. Thus, the accumulation of cultural experience provided humans with the opportunity to choose actions.

Free will is the human ability to create random options at the intersection of necessities—natural and socio-cultural programs—and to choose from the options. Without accurate data on the spans of the bridge connecting primates and humans, we cannot say at what exact moment the “voices” in a person’s head became the voice of his own mind. But we can say with some confidence that the human mind is the result of the interaction of three forces: primary emotions, meanings, and random but remembered choices. The mind is not a program, but an evolutionary process, it is not reducible to instincts and learning. “…Culture is not equatable directly to the environment or econiche. … The human brain is a selectional system, not an instructional one” (Edelman 2006, p. 55). The changes in animals depend mainly on changes in environmental conditions and genes. The changes in humans depend not only on the environment, but also on the human mind and the (counter)facts it creates. Freedom consists, for example, in the ability to choose between meanings that are detrimental to one’s own chances of survival and the chances of survival of one’s species. “The habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited genetically” (Dawkins 1976, p. 213).

Mutual evolutionary selection of subjects and meanings occurs when people choose between strategies. Choosing here means not only making a decision but also implementing it. Competition of meanings occurs in choosing between them, and competition of people occurs in action, i.e. in implementing chosen strategies. In the marshmallow experiment, children were given the choice of eating one candy immediately—or two, but only after waiting 15 minutes. The child chose a strategy—eat one candy or wait for two—and the strategy chose the child. A survey conducted 20 to 30 years later found that those who could wait until the second candy as children were more successful as adults.

However, as we saw above, the fate of the Franklin expedition shows the limitations of the minds of people of the industrial age compared to the cultural experience of hunter-gatherers, accumulated by many generations of people and meanings. Rational strategies of individuals lose out to simple learning algorithms. Algorithms of socio-cultural self-reproduction do not imply individual decision-making, but a whole evolutionary process of division, addition, multiplication, complication and increase of meanings. The increase of meanings, including activity, its norms and active power itself, is aimed at overcoming uncertainty.

3. Division, addition and multiplication of meanings

Activity and efficiency

The same action can bring different results depending on the circumstances in which it is performed and the natural and cultural phenomena on which it relies. If the same seed is thrown on a rock or on fertile soil, it can yield two different effects. But the complexity of the result will be the same in both cases. The effect can be the result of chance (as in Robinson Crusoe who threw the seed in a good place) or of necessity revealed by knowledge, that is, in a causal model:

“The archetype of causality research was: where and how must I interfere in order to divert the course of events from the way it would go in the absence of my interference in a direction which better suits my wishes? In this sense man raises the question: who or what is at the bottom of things? He searches for the regularity and the ‘law,’ because he wants to interfere” (Mises 1996, p. 22).

Knowledge reveals the causes of phenomena and enables people to master them and turn them into effects. Every technology is based on the transformation of natural and cultural phenomena into effects:

“… The base concept of a technology—what makes a technology work at all—is always the use of some core effect or effects. In its essence, a technology consists of certain phenomena programmed for some purpose. I use the word ‘programmed’ here deliberately to signify that the phenomena that make a technology work are organized in a planned way; they are orchestrated for use. This gives us another way to state the essence of technology. A technology is a programming of phenomena to our purposes” (Arthur 2011, p. 51).

The programming of phenomena is done by constructing causal models—event patterns and action programs. In an event pattern, the cause is related to the phenomenon; in an action program, the action is related to the effect.

Material technologies are based on material phenomena. For example, the efficiency of a watermill depends on how it uses the fall of water under gravity. The undershot wheel can be placed directly in the water flow, simplifying the design of the mill but increasing the likelihood of breakdowns. The overshot wheel requires the construction of a dam and canal to bring water to the top of the wheel. Historically, undershot wheels preceded overshot wheels and were long considered more efficient until John Smeaton showed in 1759 that the efficiency of overshot wheels was 52 to 76 percent, compared to 32 percent for the best undershot wheels (Smil 2017, p. 152).

Social technologies are based on social phenomena—for example, we will show that money is based on the phenomena of use and exchange value.

Abstract technologies are based on abstract phenomena. The Antikythera mechanism, with its gears and algorithms, is based on the phenomena of celestial mechanics. This mechanism, developed in the 2nd century BC and recovered from a sunken ship in 1900, made it possible to calculate the dates of 42 astronomical events, including the dates of future solar and lunar eclipses.

The same level of complexity may be characterized by different levels of efficiency: there can be more and less effective workers with the same skills and tools. Increasing efficiency does not require greater complexity. But increasing complexity requires greater efficiency. Based on the principle of least action, people increase the complexity of their activities only when it is necessary to increase efficiency. The complexity of meanings increases to the extent necessary to increase their effectiveness, that is, to more extensively master phenomena.

By economy we understand the relationships between people with respect to technology, and the activities that arise from these relationships. The economy is the process by which people accumulate, select and apply technologies: it is the result of a long history of the division of activities or, as it is commonly called, division of labor. It must be clarified that the division of activities consists in a multiplication of material, social and abstract technologies. The division and addition of activities is not reduced to specialization and cooperation: every day new features of this or that activity appear, but not all of them are retained in the socio-cultural order as separate types of activity. Economic activity is not limited to production, it also includes consumption and circulation—insofar as they arise from relationships related to technology and its products.

Social production cannot be based on chance, it requires repeated results and is based on cultural experience and socio-cultural order. Historically, to determine the relationship between needs and products of actions, a notion of normal activity was developed. The norm is a socially determined action that must be performed to reproduce meaning. The plane of the norm connects the plane of content and that of expression and includes both figurae of content and figurae of expression. There is a temptation to equate minimal actions with meanings as such. However, an individual meaning s should not be reduced to the minimal action s*, since it always includes “redundant” figurae of expression and content—the remains of the past and the sources of the future, mistakes and successes of learning or creativity.

We call the mass of meaning the number of figurae in a single meaning, that is, the length of the string L(s) that includes the “redundant” figurae. On the one hand, the mass of meaning depends on the individual characteristics of the acting subject. On the other hand, the necessary mass of meaning depends on the general standard of action. The socially necessary mass of meaning corresponds to the notion of “normal” productivity, defined as the relation of complexity, efficiency and intensity of meaning, where intensity is the number of repetitions of an action per unit of time.

Productivity is the relation of the result of an activity to its actor, process and means. It is a juxtaposition of meaning against itself, a comparison of an action and its result. The nature of meaning implies a certain contradiction, a consistency or inconsistency between an action and its result. One could say that productivity is an indicator of meaningfulness—insofar as meaning can be reduced to the result of an action.

To increase productivity often requires more action, but people are generally unwilling to do more. The principle of least action is one of the fundamental laws of human history:

“Once a particular agricultural system reaches the limits of its productivity, people can decide to migrate, to stay and stabilize their numbers, to stay and let their numbers decline—or to adopt a more productive way of farming. The last option may not be necessarily more appealing or more probable than the other solutions, and its adoption is often postponed or chosen only reluctantly because such a shift almost invariably requires higher energy inputs—in most cases of both human and animal labor. Increased productivity will support larger populations by cultivating the same (or even smaller) areas, but the net energy return of intensified cropping may not increase and may actually decline. Reluctance to expand permanently cultivated land (a choice that entailed higher energy inputs, beginning with the clearing of primeval forests, the draining of swamps, or the building of terraced fields) led to much delayed reclamation of marginal lands” (Smil 2017, pp. 49-50).

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. 18-19).

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. 417-418). 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:

“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—possession. Possession is the disposal of the user, not tied to the process of use. The possessor disposes of the thing on the basis that he uses it from time to time. Finally, the third form is property. The owner disposes of the thing, although he himself may not use it at all.

Political organization evolves hand in hand with economic organization. Command over people develops along with disposal over things. The first form of political organization (or polity) is a community in which activities are carried out more or less cooperatively. It is a common economy that grows in the context of application and administration based on experience. The second form of polity is chiefdom, in which application is complemented by possession, and the rule of the experienced is complemented by the domination of the strong. Mansur Olson’s concept of the “stationary bandit” can be applied to chiefdom. When a nomadic band becomes sedentary, it begins to take only a portion of the products of the population and provides protection from other bands, increasing production in the area it controls:

“In fact, if a roving bandit rationally settles down and takes his theft in the form of regular taxation and at the same time maintains a monopoly on theft in his domain, then those from whom he exacts taxes will have an incentive to produce. The rational stationary bandit will take only a part of income in taxes, because he will be able to exact a larger total amount of income from his subjects if he leaves them with an incentive to generate income that he can tax” (Olson 1993, p. 568).

The chiefdom is less dependent on experience and tradition than the community, and it allows people more opportunities to choose their institutions. It thus sets the stage for the third form of political organization—the state. In the state, application and possession are complemented by property, and power relations are built on tradition and violence as well as formal administration and religion. No state arose without a turn to the supernatural. Like chiefdoms, states did not arise as a result of one-off actions. “‘Stateness,’ in my view, is an institutional continuum, less an either/or proposition than a judgment of more or less” (Scott 2017, p. 23). James Scott notes that one of the main tasks that the first states had to solve was to prevent the flight of the population. The border, along with the administrative apparatus, is the distinguishing feature of the state as a political organization (cf. Scott 2017, p. 118). “Some have even argued that state formation was possible only in settings where the population was hemmed in by desert, mountains, or a hostile periphery” (Scott 2017, p. 23).

As the state developed into a comprehensive domain of abstract and social technologies, norms, and mechanisms for their implementation, the formal order became more homogeneous, pushing alternative patterns into the geographical and socio-cultural periphery of a culture-society. The periphery, in turn, refused to adopt complex technologies and organizations from the core of the state for fear of enslavement (Scott 2017, pp. 148-149). States themselves, however, were islands in a sea of non-state populations and had to be wary of their peripheries:

“…The very first states to appear in the alluvial and wind-blown silt in southern Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Yellow River were minuscule affairs both demographically and geographically. They were a mere smudge on the map of the ancient world and not much more than a rounding error in a total global population estimated at roughly twenty-five million in the year 2,000 BCE. They were tiny nodes of power surrounded by a vast landscape inhabited by nonstate peoples—aka ‘barbarians’” (Scott 2017, p. 14).

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. 244-245).

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. 17-18).

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:

“One current theory holds that modern world religions, such as Christianity and Islam, were able to spread precisely because they effectively enculturated norms of prosocial behavior which galvanized large-scale cooperation among relatively anonymous strangers (Atran and Henrich, 2010). According to this view, followers of modern world religions, such as Christianity and Islam, will be more likely to have internalized these norms of prosocial behavior and will thus treat anonymous others with greater fairness and generosity” (Hruschka and Henrich 2013, p. 5).

Trust is based on common norms: legal, religious, ethical, etc. It is common morality that ensures the unconstrained and unconditional unity of human beings, which results from belonging to a common culture, that is, to a single universe of norms and identities. Morality as a practice that takes shape in the space between instincts and reason is part of what Hayek called “extended order,” a spontaneous result of human action but not of human design:

“I prefer to confine the term ‘morality’ to those non-instinctive rules that enabled mankind to expand into an extended order since the concept of morals makes sense only by contrast to impulsive and unreflective conduct on one hand, and to rational concern with specific results on the other” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 12).

The community is a unity of individuals and humanity; society creates a gap between them. This gap is filled by social categories that develop on the basis of common identities of people and their common social actions. Social classes are only one kind of social categories. The development of culture-society is not driven by the struggle of classes, but by the gap between society as a whole and individuals; and social categories are the necessary mediator that holds society and individuals together, connects individuals with each other. The pursuit of the ideal, of the unity of individuals and humanity, is the driving force of all socio-cultural development:

“Man is characterized by a free, i.e. consciously performed action in accordance with the universal, general goal of humanity. The ideal is this idea of the ultimate perfection of humanity. It thus includes the awareness that man is the end of his own activity in itself and in no way a means for someone or for something, be it God or a thing in itself. According to Kant, the ideal as a state of achieved perfection of the humanity, which we imagine today, is characterized by the complete overcoming of the contradictions between the individual and society, i.e. between the individuals who make up society (humanity)” (Ilyenkov 2019-, vol. 6, pp. 56-57).

Each moment in the evolution of culture-society is characterized by its own ideal, its own norms and its own choices that people make. By social necessity we understand a counterfactual result of social choice, of the activities and actions of people carried out within the framework of an imagined ideal socio-cultural order. By individual necessity we understand the case when a person (or a small group) makes a choice not only for himself but also for others. Justice is the degree of correspondence between social and individual choice, between social and individual necessity. Trust, justice and reciprocity are key elements of sociality that allow culture-society to reproduce itself. As Karl Polanyi noted, reciprocity and reputation, centralization and redistribution of goods were the basis of the socio-cultural order of early traditional communities: “Reciprocity and redistribution are able to ensure the working of an economic system without the help of written records and elaborate administration” (Polanyi 2001, p. 51).

The socio-cultural order is not a totality or a whole in relation to which individuals act as its parts. However, there are domains of order—for example, the state and other types of political and economic organization—that tend to become a totality. By combining economic and political power, the state becomes a self-sufficient meaning. By separating individuals from humanity and standing between them, states and social categories make justice and trust dependent on their functioning.

Active power and freedom

There are generally two approaches to the application of the term “culture.” In the first case, culture is defined as everything that is opposed to “nature,” and it is precisely in this sense that we have used this term so far. In the second case, culture is defined as that which goes beyond the boundaries of economics and politics. We will call the first, broader meaning “culture” and the second, narrower meaning “culture*.” The division of culture into politics, economics and culture* is itself the result of the evolution of meanings, their division, addition and multiplication.

Our broader understanding of culture differs from the approach that is characteristic of many representatives of the social sciences. For example, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson reduce culture to culture*, that is, ideas, beliefs, values, morals:

“The culture hypothesis, just like the geography hypothesis, has a distinguished lineage, going back at least to the great German sociologist Max Weber, who argued that the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant ethic it spurred played a key role in facilitating the rise of modern industrial society in Western Europe. The culture hypothesis no longer relies solely on religion, but stresses other types of beliefs, values, and ethics as well” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, p. 56-57).

Reducing culture to culture* might make sense if we assume that culture* is in some way a minimal description of culture as a whole. By culture* we mean relationships between people with respect to thinking. Thinking is not limited to working with symbols and concepts; at its core, thinking is a deeply emotional and thus psychophysical process; this is evident, for example, in religion, art and play. Nor is thinking limited to the processes of the brain; it is the activity of the entire human body, insofar as this activity is aimed at human psychology, at the mental world. Culture* is, if you will, a choice of thinking.

Here we need to clarify a difference between an individual and a personality. Personality is not the same as an individual: individuals form the population, personalities form the culture-society. Personality is “a special quality that an individual acquires in society” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 1, p. 385).

“Personality is not a genotypically determined integrity: one is not born a person, one becomes a person. Therefore, we do not speak of the personality of a newborn or the personality of an infant, although personality traits appear no less clearly in the early stages of ontogenesis than in later age stages” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 2, p. 196).

We wrote above that meaning as an activity creates culture-society. The part of the aggregate activity that is performed by an individual shapes his personality. The reproduction of culture-society in the population becomes the reproduction of personality in the individual:

“…The real basis of an individual’s personality lies not in the genetic programs inherent in him, not in the depths of his natural makings and inclinations, and not even in the skills, knowledge and abilities he has acquired, including professional ones, but in the system of activities implemented through his knowledge and skills” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 2, p. 202).

We could probably say that personality is active knowledge. “Knowledge is action, because the correction of knowledge entails the renovation of ourselves” (Frisina 2002, p. 76). From this point of view, the increase of the subject—both of a culture-society and of a personality—consists in the increasing complexity of knowledge, its division, addition and multiplication. When Hayek introduced the concept of the “division of knowledge,” he wanted to go beyond the “division of labor” as a collection of existing activities. The division of knowledge, according to Hayek, is the set of all possible activities in a given state of the culture-society, that is, a set of counterfacts:

“Knowledge in this sense is more than what is usually described as skill, and the division of knowledge of which we here speak more than is meant by the division of labor. To put it shortly, ‘skill’ refers only to the knowledge of which a person makes use in his trade, while the further knowledge about which we must know something in order to be able to say anything about the processes in society is the knowledge of alternative possibilities of action of which he makes no direct use. It may be added that knowledge, in the sense in which the term is here used, is identical with foresight only in the sense in which all knowledge is capacity to predict” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 15, p. 73).

However, the set of possible activities is not determined only by knowledge. Personality is not reduced to cognitive functions or technologies. The principle of least action is not about minimizing technology, but about minimizing effort in general. The least technological action can result in social and psychological losses and costs that more than outweigh any saving in material effort—this applies, for example, to morality, reputation and criminal law (cf. Polanyi 2001, p. 49). Many actions are not based on knowledge, but on unfounded and false ideas, on creative impulses, prejudices and affects. “Our moral/aesthetic frameworks are complicated constructions that combine broad cultural inheritances with dense mixtures of abstract reasoning and the immediacies of concrete experience” (Frisina 2002, p. 14). Moral/aesthetic frameworks influence consciousness and personality no less than cognitive ones.

The activities of an individual form an active power within him, namely his personality and identity. If personality sets individuals apart, then identity embeds them in a society by specifying how they should behave depending on their position within the social context (Akerlof and Cranton 2010, p. 10). George Akerlof and Rachel Cranton identify three parts of identity: 1) social categories, 2) norms and ideals, 3) gains and losses (identity utility). People choose their identity in both the long and short term; this choice is not necessarily conscious. Social categories are social roles and groups with which individuals identify; norms and ideals define right and wrong; gains and losses are the ability to conform to norms and ideals (a particular social role/position) and the resulting benefits or harms to the individual (Akerlof and Cranton 2011, pp. 17-19).

However, when economists try to extend the theory of utility to a real person and his active power, the limitations of neoclassical theory become clear. Akerlof and Cranton themselves show that identity cannot be reduced to “gains and losses in utility.” In his life, a person is driven not only by the needs of existence, ordered by utilitarian preferences. A person is also driven by norms and ideals, by needs for communication and self-expression. Utility, norms and ideals are not ordered among themselves—they often conflict. The principle of least action implies that, along with the requirements of utility, a person also takes into account the norms of justice and the ideals of freedom. Freedom is the ability of a person to choose between activities. The meaning of life consists of those meanings that a person has chosen for himself from culture-society. In his activity, a person is guided not by the function of utility, but by the function of meaning, in which utility is only one of the arguments. Besides, unlike neoclassical “utility,” which has no historical dimension, meaning evolves. Neoclassical utility can be “maximized” here and now, and increasing meaning may require a process of personal and socio-cultural evolution.

Simple examples of a person’s actions against his own benefit are actions committed for religious or ethical reasons. When a person enters the realm of the possible thanks to counterfacts, the formation of personality leads him to the edge of his everyday life and to the premonition of death. The fear of death itself is the result of the evolution of meanings: “Knowledge of death, of the inconceivable possibility that the experiences of life will end, is a datum that only symbolic representation can impart” (Deacon 1997, p. 436). At the edge of his personal existence, man comes to the supernatural and to religion. Religion is one of the most motivating domains of meaning in the history of culture.

Morality is another domain of meaning that we have inherited from traditional society. It is the result of consistent learning over many generations and is therefore a practice that lies between instinct and reason. It is closely linked to immediate emotional, affective reactions:

“Once we view morals not as innate instincts but as learnt traditions, their relation to what we ordinarily call feelings, emotions or sentiments raises various interesting questions. For instance, although learnt, morals do not necessarily always operate as explicit rules, but may manifest themselves, as do true instincts, as vague disinclinations to, or distastes for, certain kinds of action. Often they tell us how to choose among, or to avoid, inborn instinctual drives” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 13).

Darwin’s theory of the evolutionary origin of emotions led Herbert Spencer and some of his followers to conclude that people would become less emotional in the future—it is the so-called “rudimentary” theory of emotions. James Scott notes that as domestication progressed in both humans and animals, their limbic systems, responsible for producing hormones and responding to threats and other stimuli, shrank and they became less emotional. The creation of the domus as a cultural niche meant that cultural selection factors—the ability to get along with one’s neighbors in the house—began to play a larger role compared to factors of the natural environment (Scott 2017, pp. 81-86). Although we can probably speak of the evolution of emotions, emotions were and remain the oldest and most fundamental element of thinking.

Tradition itself is not only the result of learning and cultural selection, but also of choice based on both emotion and reason. In the course of its evolution, tradition gradually but surely crossed the line between mere reactive behavior and meaningful action. It has changed from an animal to a human tradition and has become an accumulation of religious and moral practices, a value-rational action “determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success” (Weber 1978, pp. 24-25).

The foraging economy consisted of activities arising from natural necessity, with the rhythm and content of human life determined by the rhythm and content of natural processes. An individual essentially could not choose and had no choice within this fixed set of activities. The transition to agriculture led to two major changes. (1) The multiplicity of activities increased: an individual could choose—at least potentially—who he wanted to be and what activities he wanted to perform. (2) The technologies of foraging were relatively simple and each member of the tribe learned them and could reproduce them with some degree of success. The technologies of an agrarian society were more complex: the peasant, the artisan and the warrior did not learn the technologies that the other possessed and thus could not reproduce them. At the same time, an increase in the traditional order meant that most people were at the mercy of another human: natural uncertainty was supplemented and replaced by socio-cultural uncertainty generated by the state and social categories:

“It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality of bondage, in one form or another, in the development of the state until very recently. As Adam Hochschild observed, as late as 1800 roughly three-quarters of the world’s population could be said to be living in bondage. In Southeast Asia all early states were slave states and slaving states; the most valuable cargo of Malay traders in insular Southeast Asia were, until the late nineteenth century, slaves. Old people among the so-called aboriginal people (orang asli) of the Malay Peninsula and hill peoples in northern Thailand can recall their parents’ and grandparents’ stories about much-dreaded slave raids. Provided that we keep in mind the various forms bondage can take over time, one is tempted to assert: ‘No slavery, no state’” (Scott 2017, pp. 155-156).

The transition from foraging to farming, paradoxically, accelerated the growth of meanings and at the same time slowed it down. An increase in activities meant an acceleration, an increase in order—a slowing down of cultural evolution. The entire history of traditional society is a very slow and gradual increase in the proportion of people who are subjects of choice. Why was this process so slow? Perhaps because personal freedom depends on the progress of personality, that is, consciousness. It is personal freedom, the ability to choose for oneself, that is the main condition for the growth of meanings and for the acceleration of this growth:

“Locke says that ‘Freedom of Men under Government’ means ‘not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another man.’ Uncertainty in general and man’s inconstancy in particular therefore become the arch-enemy that needs to be exorcised” (Hirschman 1977, p. 53).

We would not reduce the complication of thinking and consciousness to the division and addition of knowledge, personality or identity. We are talking about the division and addition of active power as a whole. The division, addition and multiplication of active power means an increase in the complexity of the subject, both the individual human being and the culture-society as a whole. An increase in the number of counterfacts with which a culture-society or an individual operates means an increase in the entropy of the source of meanings, i.e. an increase in the minimal subject.

The division of active power develops along with the division of activity and the division of order that we discussed earlier. Historically, the division, addition and multiplication of meanings leads to a gradual and eventually major divergence between the complexity of the individual and the complexity of the culture-society. An individual takes part in only some of the activities produced by culture-society and operates within only a small part of the socio-cultural order. As a result of this divergence in the growth of meanings, a culture-society creates more counterfacts and produces more complex activities than any one person, or even all of them individually, could create and produce.

We have seen that meaning is not reducible to a minimal action: it contains “redundant” figurae. Likewise, the subject is not reducible to a minimal subject: it also contains “redundant” figurae. The mass of the subject, that is the length of the string of figurae or cultural bits by which it is described, depends on the mass of meanings of which it is the product. The result of the historical division, addition and multiplication of meanings is a growing multiplicity and mass of activities and meanings. However, the multiplicity and mass of meanings necessary for the reproduction of a culture-society as a whole are much greater than those necessary for the reproduction of the individuals who make up that society. We call the multiplicity and mass of activities that reproduce a culture-society the added activity, and the multiplicity and mass of activities that reproduce individuals the necessary activity.

Chapter 3. Simple circulation: surplus activity and exchange value

1. The origin of exchange value and money

Cooperative, administrative and competitive circulation

At the Paleolithic site, appropriation was inextricably linked to consumption: hunters and gatherers consumed where and when they derived their livelihood from nature. In the Neolithic village, agricultural production was isolated in space and time from the consumption of agricultural products: cultivated fields were located away from housing, harvests were stored to be consumed throughout the year. With the growth of crafts unrelated to agriculture, production became further separated from consumption. Production separated from consumption gave rise to circulation. Circulation is the direct or indirect exchange of actions and their results between economic units in the form of a gift, tribute or exchange of goods.

As long as the subjects of production and consumption coincide, there is no circulation. It arises where the subject of production is separated from the subject of consumption. Economic theorists usually link the separation of the subject of consumption and the subject of production with the emergence of exchange:

“As long as the development of a people is so retarded economically that there is no significant amount of trade and the requirements of the various families for goods must be met directly from their own production, goods obviously have value to economizing individuals only if the goods are themselves capable of satisfying the needs of the isolated economizing individuals or their families directly. But when men become increasingly more aware of their economic interests, enter into trading relationships with one another, and begin to exchange goods for goods, a situation finally develops in which possession of economic goods gives the possessors the power to obtain goods of other kinds by means of exchange” (Menger 2007, pp. 226-227).

But in reality, the division between producing and consuming subjects did not come about through exchange. Circulation arose through production in excess of necessary consumption, that is, through the production of goods to be given away as voluntary gifts or forced tribute. The emergence of chiefdoms and states obviously preceded the emergence of markets, and production for giving preceded production for exchange. Production for exchange arose from production for self-consumption (i.e. household or subsistence economy) via production for giving.

Every economy combines three forms of relations between its participants. There is cooperation based on reciprocity (that is, on morality and gifts as a means of maintaining reputation), administration based on a plan, and competition based on conflict. Accordingly, the three main types of circulation are (1) cooperative circulation based on the exchange of gifts, (2) administrative circulation based on redistribution, and (3) competitive circulation based on the market (or occasionally on barter).

“Karl Polanyi analyzes the diversity of economic systems and identifies three logics of exchange: reciprocity or exchange through gifts; redistribution, which presupposes the existence of a center where goods are stored before being distributed; and market exchange. He notes that these logics of exchange most often coexist with what he calls householding, which consists of production for one’s own use” (Aglietta and Orléan 2002, p. 39).

Householding has always functioned on a social, not an individual level. In subsistence economy, the economic unit was the entire community (originally the extended family), which produced and (re)distributed products. The small family, separated from the extended family, is a later product of cultural evolution:

“The individualistic savage collecting food and hunting on his own or for his family has never existed. Indeed, the practice of catering for the needs of one’s household becomes a feature of economic life only on a more advanced level of agriculture; however, even then it has nothing in common either with the motive of gain or with the institution of markets. Its pattern is the closed group. Whether the very different entities of the family or the settlement or the manor formed the self-sufficient unit, the principle was invariably the same, namely, that of producing and storing for the satisfaction of the wants of the members of the group” (Polanyi 2001, pp. 55-56).

The development of the competitive circulation has economic and political conditions. The economic condition is the division of activities. When economic units specialize, they compete with each other and move from internal to external exchange. The political condition is the autonomy of economic units. When they become more independent of the community and more sovereign in their choices, the circulation of gifts and tributes turns into the circulation of goods produced for exchange. As economic units specialize and become independent, they require a neutral place for a more or less regular exchange of goods.

“A market is a meeting place for the purpose of barter or buying and selling. Unless such a pattern is present, at least in patches, the propensity to barter will find but insufficient scope: it cannot produce prices. For just as reciprocity is aided by a symmetrical pattern of organization, as redistribution is made easier by some measure of centralization, and householding must be based on autarchy, so also the principle of barter depends for its effectiveness on the market pattern” (Polanyi 2001, p. 59).

Circulation is “embedded” in production, and production is “embedded” in consumption. As the division of meanings advances, circulation becomes detached from production. At what point can we speak of production for circulation, that is, for giving or exchange, rather than for self-consumption? This is the moment when circulation becomes so different from production that it is considered its opposite. Historically, this moment can be described as the moment of the written record of gifts and tributes. Money is, in fact, also a form of record.

When production for giving passes into production for exchange, products become commodities. Simple commodity production develops from householding or self-consumption through various forms of production for giving. It presupposes the division, addition and multiplication of meanings: the development of agriculture, writing, cities, crafts and trade. Within commodity production, circulation forms a separate process, it is an intermediary between consumption (consumer choice) on the one hand, and production (producer choice) on the other.

Utility and use value

Neoclassical economic theory reduced the purpose of all human activity to consumption, and the means and methods of satisfying needs to utility. Originally, it defined utility as a measure of pleasure or happiness and later as an order of preferences between alternative consumption options. However, meanings are not limited to utility—whether it is understood as pleasure, happiness or ordered preferences. Moreover, utility is not the same as pleasure: through the process of socialization, people learn to find pleasure in things that would otherwise disgust them (cf. Henrich 2016, pp. 112, 143, 345). Pleasure itself is the result of socio-cultural evolution: people form their “concept of pleasure” as they learn meanings.

Meaning can be both useful and harmful; it does not necessarily have to be associated with usefulness. Objects of needs can be useless meanings: beauty, love, justice, wisdom and many others. Meanings often are not ordered by preferences. When choosing, people take into account opportunities, risks, ethical and aesthetic norms and other meanings that are not ordered among themselves. Moreover, people do not just choose between existing alternatives. The choice process creates alternatives—counterfacts. Counterfacts are formed not only in the space of consumption options, but also in the space of consumption criteria. This means that a person not only chooses what he consumes, but the person himself is also an object of choice: rivalry of needs creates choice, rivalry of people creates selection.

We said in Chapter 1 that the three types of needs (i.e. needs of subsistence, sociality, and self-expression) did not emerge simultaneously. Perhaps it would be possible to establish an evolutionary sequence of their emergence. However, such a sequence does not mean that a person has a respective hierarchy of needs. Clayton Alderfer identified three groups of needs that have no fixed order of preference or hierarchy between them:

“…A human being has three core needs that he strives to meet. They include obtaining his material existence needs, maintaining his interpersonal relatedness with significant other people, and seeking opportunities for his unique personal development and growth” (Alderfer 1969, p. 145).

We develop Alderfer’s approach further and apply it to values as cognitive representations of needs. We identify three groups of values: existence values, communication values and self-expression values. A preference order can be found between values within these groups, but not between the groups.

Existence values are meanings that are ordered among themselves according to preferences, in which the material or utilitarian aspect dominates over social and abstract ones. For example, social status is an existence value insofar as it depends on material wealth, and not on the qualities of a person. The luxurious meal of a medieval monarch was no different from a piece of stale bread in the hands of his last subject, since it served the same purpose—the prolongation of his material, social and psychological existence. In his material existence, man is moved by the consequences of his actions, that is, by effect or utility. The animal principle in man speaks the language of efficiency.

Communication values are meanings ordered among themselves according to preferences, in which the social aspect dominates the material and abstract—for example, friendship or justice. In his social relationships, man is guided by norms, or δέοντα. The sum of the norms is a socio-cultural order. The social principle in man speaks the language of justice.

Self-expression values are meanings ordered by preferences, in which the abstract aspect dominates over the social and material—for example, dreams, fears, hopes and other creative values. In his personal development, man is guided by virtues and ideals. The cultural principle in man speaks the language of freedom.

Human action is the result not only of individual but also of social choice. A person not only pursues benefits, but also follows his duty and strives for virtues:

“To live is for man the outcome of a choice, of a judgment of value. It is the same with the desire to live in affluence. The very existence of ascetics and of men who renounce material gains for the sake of clinging to their convictions and of preserving their dignity and self-respect is evidence that the striving after more tangible amenities is not inevitable but rather the result of a choice” (Mises 1996, p. 20).

A situation in which a person must choose between utility and morality, between morality and ideal, between ideal and utility, is a situation of existential choice, a choice between conflicting groups of values. People do not maximize utility—they make individual and social choice, and in making choice they create meaning.

Illustration 3. Structure of values

It is difficult to say where cultural selection ends and social choice begins. In many cases it can be the same thing. Social choice is determined not only by the coordination of individual choices, which is often impossible in the absence of a “dictator,” but also by the presence of impersonal norms and ideals. Society is impossible without morality and sublime feelings; it is equally the result of the actions of materialists, utilitarians and pragmatists, as well as idealists, moralists and romantics. People are not reduced to identifying preferences and maximizing utility, they are not “economic” but “socio-cultural” people. Their actions are based not only on calculation, but also on mutual likes and dislikes, on duty and obligations arising from reciprocity. “Morality stems from our sentiments, not our reason” (Collier 2018, p. 35). Human actions cannot be reduced to consumption, human values cannot be reduced to utility.

If utility is an individually necessary set of existence values, then use value is a socially necessary set of these values. Utility arises from the needs and desires of individuals, use value from socio-cultural norms:

“René Girard’s hypothesis is crucial for understanding the nature of human institutions and the logic of their functioning. According to this hypothesis, institutions arise from the violence of human desire and their normalizing effect on it arises from their external relationship to the clash of conflicting desires” (Aglietta and Orléan 2002, p. 15).

Utility and use value are two complementary processes: utility is the process of individual calculation that creates culture-society, and use value is the process of social choice that creates the active power of the individual.

“…An order arising from the separate decisions of many individuals on the basis of different information cannot be determined by a common scale of the relative importance of different ends. … Order is desirable not for keeping everything in place but for generating new powers that would otherwise not exist” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 79).

Use value is not a sum of occasional utilities; it is the socially necessary set of existence values. The history of production and exchange has consisted of the normalization or averaging of utilities, their transformation into socially necessary use values. In order for grain, cattle, precious metals, etc. to be transformed into use values, they had to become abstractions of utility. The end point of this process of social abstraction is commodities, exchange values, and money.

Use value, exchange value and money

In Marx’s analysis of commodity production, commodities resulting from productive activities are opposed to immediate producers. Commodities, or dead labor, dominate living labor, or the workers themselves. To analyze human history in a broader perspective than commodity production, a generalization of concepts is necessary. We generalize the concept of labor to the concept of activity (action), the concept of commodity to the result of an activity (result of an action), thus eliminating the opposition between labor and commodity and uniting them in the concept of meaning.

Marx also distinguished between the activity that creates use values, or concrete labor, and the activity that creates exchange values, or abstract labor, in which the characteristics of specific types of labor disappear:

“If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labor. But even the product of labor itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labor of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labor. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labor embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labor; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labor, human labor in the abstract” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 48).

By abstracting from specific kinds of labor, we do not create a new kind of labor. Abstract labor and its products do not exist in themselves; they are found in concrete labor processes and their products. But if concrete labor creates use values and commodities, then abstract labor creates exchange values and money. As we have shown, use value is not an individual utility but a socially necessary set of existence values. Use value is, so to speak, a prologue to a commodity in demand on the market and its exchange value. For a commodity to have an exchange value it should have a use value, that is, satisfy socially necessary needs. Commodities are wealth because they accumulate both use and exchange values.

We will distinguish between the multiplicity and the mass of meanings. The multiplicity of meanings consists of a set of meanings. In terms of commodities, these could be: two rolls of cloth, three bulls, ten tons of steel, etc. The mass of meanings is the set of cultural bits contained in a given multiplicity of meanings. Concrete labor creates commodities, abstract labor defines their mass. As Marx said, the abstract labor that forms the substance of value is homogeneous labor. However, since at the time of Marx there was neither information theory nor the concept of the bit, he had to measure abstract labor in terms of labor time:

“A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labor, contained in the article. The quantity of labor, however, is measured by its duration, and labor time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, pp. 48-49).

Marx measured the exchange value of a product by the amount of labor that was socially necessary to produce it, and he measured the amount of labor by its duration: “The labor time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 49). Since it is obvious that more complex labor creates more value than simpler labor of the same duration, he reduced complex labor to simple labor by applying a multiplier:

“Skilled labor counts only as simple labor intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labor, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most skilled labor, but its value, by equating it to the product of simple unskilled labor, represents a definite quantity of the latter labor alone” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 54).

Marx did not know, and could not have known, that there is no multiplier that can reduce a more complex meaning to a simpler one. Only later in the 20th century was it shown by information theorists that there is no such algorithm that could eliminate “redundant” figurae and compress the meaning s to the minimal action s* to find out the complexity of s:

“The difference between the length of a string L(s) and its algorithmic entropy K(s) can be thought of as a kind of “algorithmic redundancy.” It’s a measure of how many extra bits we use to write s rather than s*, its shortest description. When we go from s down to s*, we squeeze out all that redundancy, leaving none in s*. That’s what makes it algorithmically random. … A program that could do perfect data compression—that could convert any string s into its minimal description s*—would be a very useful thing. But as we will see, such a program is impossible. … The problem here is that there is no program k that can compute algorithmic entropy. K(s) is an uncomputable function” (Schumacher 2015, pp. 241-247).

Since there is no algorithm that would reduce complex labor to simple labor, time cannot be a measure of abstract labor. However, different activities and their results can be reduced to a common equivalent, if not through the concept of time, then through the concept of cultural bits. Exchange value is measured not by the duration of time but by the amount of cultural bits contained in a set of use values. Use values are socially necessary existence values; exchange values is the socially necessary amount of cultural bits embodied in these values. Hereinafter, by value we mean exchange value in the context of use values, unless otherwise specified. Meanings became value as episodic exchange has turned into regular one, as small communities cohered into larger societies, as social necessity evolved.

According to the principle of least action, changes in the socially necessary multiplicity of existence values are linked to changes in the socially necessary mass of these values. We call this relationship between the set and the mass of existence meanings ordered by preferences the allocation of meanings. It takes activity to reproduce meaning, it takes meaning to reproduce activity. Value is the allocation of the only truly limited resource people have—their actions and results, that is, meanings—between competing goals. As an allocation of meanings, value has two sides: the side of benefits (meanings gained) and the side of costs (meanings expended). The socially necessary set and mass of meanings are determined not by some average but by the best alternative allocation that is foregone:

“In economics, the cost of an event is the highest-valued opportunity necessarily forsaken. The usefulness of the concept of cost is a logical implication of choice among available options. Only if no alternatives were possible or if amounts of all resources were available beyond everyone’s desires, so that all goods were free, would the concepts of cost and of choice be irrelevant” (Alchian 1968, p. 404).

The allocation problem and the choice problem are the same. The allocation problem implies choosing between counterfacts (benefits and costs), and the value is the best allocation to forego.

Philip Mirowski wrote that the transition from classical political economy with its “labor theory of value” to neoclassical economics with its concept of “marginal utility” is associated with the transition of physics from the concept of “substance” to the concept of “field” and with the penetration of mathematical methods into economic theory (Mirowski 1989, pp. 176-177, 194-195). If classical political economy and neoclassical economics considered physics as a model, then the economics of the 21st century is guided for this purpose by the sciences of information, evolution, and complexity. The theory of marginal utility reduced value to the perception of utility by a person and did not take into account social necessity. This theory was unable to establish an objective measure of economic indicators, in particular, it could not measure utility and show how and why utility depends on social mores and ideals. The concept of value as a socially necessary multiplicity and mass of existence values is a generalization of two competing theories of value: the classical labor theory of value and the neoclassical theory of marginal utility.

Exchange value is an abstract phenomenon that cannot be observed directly. But value has a tangible representation, its history can be traced through the history of money, since money is the material expression of value and a social instrument for calculating the necessary set and mass of existence values.

Money and prices

Money is both a process and a result of the historical evolution of economic calculation. As a material expression of exchange value that links past and future activities, money evolves through the entire sequence of forms of circulation from gifts and tribute to commodity exchange. The first function of money is a means of calculation and circulation. In a subsistence economy, calculations are carried out directly, the quantity and allocation of activities are directly linked to the future consumption of their products. Money appears in tribal societies as an indirect way of accounting for gifts and tribute: one can recall the rai stones on the Yap Islands. In a tribal society, however, money does not link production and consumption, past and future activity. Truly methodical calculation began with the advent of the state with its accounting and planning. The Chessboard Chamber controlled the treasury of medieval England using simple means such as checkered cloth and wooden tokens.

Value is a measure of the socially necessary activity and its results, money is the material expression of value. In practical terms, money is both a means of calculating value on the basis of the individually necessary amounts of activity and a means of calculating the consumption share of individuals and groups. Value is a socio-cultural phenomenon, and money and prices are a technology that builds on the programming of this phenomenon and mediates the evolution from the simplest to more complex forms of exchange.

Individual needs can only coincide with socially necessary needs by chance, otherwise individuals would be only an external manifestation of society as a kind of “superorganism.” Thus, the totality of individually necessary meanings can only coincide with the totality of socially necessary meanings by chance. In the general case, the aggregate of individually demanded goods and their prices should not be equal to the set of use values and their exchange values. “Through the mediation of money, subjects maintain relationships with what is not themselves, with the social as an institution” (Aglietta and Orléan 2002, p. 19).

Exchange value is the substance of money; price is the sum of money that an individual consumer, producer or intermediary is willing to pay for a given good. Exchange value is the measure of use value, price is the measure of utility. Although the meanings of existence are ordered among themselves, they are not ordered with the meanings of communication or self-expression. Exchange value is not the measure of dreams, morals and ideals, they cannot be bought with money. But exchange value and money are impossible without dreams, morals and ideals, since they make social choice possible and hence social necessity and value as a socially necessary mass of cultural bits embodied in use values. Loves and hopes, morals and ideals are not for sale, money is not paid for them. But goods are sold (or not sold) at a price determined with loves and hopes, morals and ideals in mind.

Value as a socially necessary mass of use values evolves in the process of self-reproduction of culture-society, while price as an individually necessary mass of utility develops in scattered acts of individual or collective self-reproduction. Value and price are linked through money: “Economists have the habit of thinking about prices starting from value, while for us their basis is to be found in money” (Aglietta and Orléan 2006, p. 27).

The evolution of value and money, commodities and prices depends on the evolution of meanings in general. The increase of meanings is manifested in their complication: division, addition and multiplication. The opposite is also true: the evolution of value and money, commodities and prices is a prerequisite for the evolution of all other meanings, since circulation is a necessary phase of the self-reproduction of culture-society. The complication of competition, cooperation and administration is necessary for socio-cultural development. Activity, order and knowledge are divided by purposeful choice and by spontaneous cultural selection:

“The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a co-ordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 15, pp. 101-102).

With the advent of money, people had the opportunity to hoard it instead of spending it on goods, that is, not to consume goods but to store value and spend it later. The second function of money is therefore a means of accumulation, that is, a vehicle for saving and investing value. Money is a way to establish a relationship between a resource and the future costs and benefits it brings.

Since money is both a means of calculation and circulation and a means of saving and investing, it requires, first, cooperation and trust, that is, an agreement between subjects, and, second, administration and coercion, that is, institutions that ensure compliance with this agreement. Money and the state formalize the duties and obligations of members of society. Money is a horizontal way of formalizing mutual obligations. The state is a vertical way of formalizing the responsibility of the individual to society as a whole.

Originally, money had to have the properties of utility and scarcity, later it also had to be portable, divisible and long-storable, which is why precious metals were used as currency. As money evolved, it shifted from hard material form to abstract social content, from gold or silver coins to fiat money.

2. Profit and interest

Surplus activity and its norm

A culture-society reproduces itself through added activity. A hunter-gatherer society, with its modest cultural experience and comparatively low complexity of meanings, produced activities that only enabled it to reproduce itself on a constant scale. The added activity of a primitive society was approximately equal to the sum of the necessary activity of the individuals who composed it. The accumulation of cultural experience, the division, addition and multiplication of meanings during the transition to agriculture, enabled the culture-society to carry out more complex activities and to produce more means of activity—more than was required for the simple reproduction of the active power of the individuals:

“At the dawn of civilization the productiveness acquired by labor is small, but so too are the wants which develop with and by the means of satisfying them. Further, at that early period, the portion of society that lives on the labor of others is infinitely small compared with the mass of direct producers. Along with the progress in the productiveness of labor, that small portion of society increases both absolutely and relatively” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 513).

In its ability to give more than it gets, a producing culture-society resembles nature. Just as the land can produce a harvest in excess of the amount sown, so an agrarian culture-society can produce more than is required for its self-reproduction. However, an agrarian culture-society is not able to maintain stable productivity, let alone stable productivity growth. Due to sudden changes in both socio-cultural and environmental conditions, population growth could be replaced by a sharp decline. Epidemics and crop failures led to the collapse of cultures-societies, that is, to a drop in their complexity. The ascending and descending phases of the demographic cycle replaced each other:

“With the huge population losses caused by the Black Death in many parts of Afro-Eurasia, cities shrank, farmlands were abandoned, and economies contracted. However, as had happened so many times in the past, growth soon resumed to kick-start a new Malthusian cycle that would last well into the 18th century” (Benjamin 2016, p. 267).

Cumulative cultural evolution continued through successive rises and falls of cultures-societies. Paradoxically, social collapse is an inherent element of cultural evolution. Increasing meaning complexity is like climbing the peaks of an adaptive landscape: the higher meaning climbs, the more complex it is. But neither people nor meanings know in advance which peaks are the highest and most promising. Sometimes a collapse is necessary to come back down and begin climbing a new, possibly higher peak.

The collapse of culture-societies meant a fall in socio-cultural complexity, but for the people who formed these societies, it meant the restoration of justice and freedom, which were necessary for any further development:

“What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to ‘normalize’ collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order” (Scott 2017, p. 210). “There may well be, then, a great deal to be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of the dispersion that characterizes them is likely to be a flight from war, taxes, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription. As such, it may stanch the worst losses that arise from concentrated sedentism under state rule. The decentralization that arises may not only lessen the state-imposed burdens but may even usher in a modest degree of egalitarianism. Finally, providing that we not necessarily equate the creation of culture exclusively with apical state centers, decentralization and dispersal may prompt both a reformulation and a diversity of cultural production” (ibid., p. 217).

Collapses and dark ages also create conditions for meaning drift. Meaning drift is a random change in the frequency of a meaning due to the small population among which this meaning is common. Meaning drift results in a small number of meanings being distributed among a disproportionately large number of people. After their dark ages, the Greeks did not return to Linear B script but adopted the Phoenician alphabet (Scott 2017, pp. 147-148).

Collapses break down the dead ends of cultural evolution and open up paths to meanings that allow for more efficient adaptation. The division of activity, order and active power enables the creation of new counterfacts. The traditional choice between counterfacts, in turn, increases the variety of men and meanings, albeit slowly:

“It is, then, not simply more men, but more different men, which brings an increase in productivity. Men have become powerful because they have become so different: new possibilities of specialization depending not so much on any increase in individual intelligence but on growing differentiation of individuals—provide the basis for a more successful use of the earth’s resources” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, pp. 122-123).

The evolution of meanings accelerated due to the accumulation of cultural experience and the expansion of the set of counterfacts on the basis of which the traditional choice was made. Traditional society and order became more complex. As socio-cultural development progressed, the multiplicity and mass of activities required for the reproduction of culture-society gradually exceeded the multiplicity and mass of activities required for the reproduction of individuals. In other words, the complexity of the culture-society increasingly surpassed the complexity of its individuals. Since the mass of added activity exceeded the mass of necessary activity, a difference arose between them—surplus activity and surplus product.

“If the laborer wants all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and his race, he has no time left in which to work gratis for others. Without a certain degree of productiveness in his labor, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such superfluous time, no surplus labor and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords, in one word, no class of large proprietors” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, p. 512).

The entire product is made in production, but its division into necessary and surplus products occurs in circulation, in the relations of gift-giving, redistribution and commodity exchange. This means that the growth of surplus activity and surplus product is linked not only to the division of activity and active power, but also to the division of order: chiefdoms and states based on voluntary and forced tributes evolved as they “learned” to increase and extract the surplus product:

“The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft. … The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus is less important in this context than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to nonproducing elites. Such a surplus does not exist until the embryonic state creates it. Better put, until the state extracts and appropriates this surplus, any dormant additional productivity that might exist is ‘consumed’ in leisure and cultural elaboration. Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed” (Scott 2017, pp. 171-172).

The ratio between surplus and necessary activity (and their products) forms the rate of surplus activity. The more the complexity of the culture-society exceeds the complexity of the individuals, the higher the rate of surplus activity.

Since, as we have seen above, Marx did not yet know and could not know that complex labor cannot in principle be reduced to simple labor, he could not have known either that added activity cannot be reduced to necessary activity. If for Marx surplus labor and surplus product were produced by the workers and other exploited classes, and appropriated by the exploiting classes, then from our point of view the surplus activity and its products are produced by culture-society as a whole, and the manner of their appropriation depends on the relative political, economic and cultural* power (or authority) of the state, social categories and individuals.

As long as the surplus product was redistributed for the benefit of officials and the army, states were satisfied with a vertical, i.e. centralized, calculation and accounting. The growth of crafts and cities led to a horizontal, i.e. decentralized, circulation of the surplus product. Surplus activity and the need to put its product into circulation were the driving force behind the long process of value and money development. Money spread where the surplus product was extracted from the immediate producers and transferred to an indefinite number of people through the mechanisms of competitive circulation.

Possession, investment and profit

The multiplication of meanings implies a specialization of subjects (artisans, officials, priests, etc.) and an increase in the complexity of their active power—experience and personality. New types of norms arise that regulate communication; human relationships are increasingly mediated by meanings and turn into relations of social roles. When the subjective side of activity is mediated and becomes an abstraction, the objective side also becomes an abstraction: things as means of activity become rights and duties. With the further division of the socio-cultural order, possession develops as a right of disposal, which is associated with the obligation to use. Possession complements and replaces application. If application is the disposal of a thing in the process of use, then possession is the disposal of the user, not tied to the process of use. This applies to both private and community possession.

The quantity of cultural bits contained in the subject and in the means of activity constitutes their meaning mass. The composition of meaning is the ratio between the mass of meanings contained in the subject (actor) and the mass of meanings contained in the means of activity. The mass of meanings in the activity itself depends on this ratio. The lower the meaning composition, the more complex the subject in relation to the means of activity, the smaller the mass of meanings in the means of activity relative to the mass of meanings in the subject—for example, if a skilled worker uses simple tools. And vica versa, the more complex the means of activity in relation to the subject, the greater the mass of cultural bits in things in relation to that in people, the higher the composition of meaning.

Forms of organization such as application and possession are characteristic of activities with a low composition of meaning, when an individual or a family is able to independently create or acquire the means necessary for the activity. The means here remain small, dwarfish by nature:

“Before capitalistic production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor—land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool—were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 24, pp. 307-308).

However, possession presupposes more complex tools than application. The transformation of application into possession is associated with the complication of activity and its product and an increase in the rate of surplus activity. Application is widespread as long as the surplus product is insignificant and the means are no more than simple tools. As meanings increase, private appropriation of the surplus product develops. The more surplus product an individual or family can obtain, the more interested they are in organizing private production and securing their rights:

“But the vital thing is parcel labor as a source of private appropriation. It gives way to the accumulation of personal chattels, for example cattle, money and sometimes even slaves or serfs. This movable property, beyond the control of the commune, subject to individual exchanges in which guile and accident have their chance, will weigh more and more heavily on the entire rural economy. There we have the destroyer of primitive economic and social equality” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 24, p. 367).

As the surplus product grows, meanings accumulate and the composition of meaning becomes higher, possession replaces application. However, possession is still based on the labor of the immediate producer himself. Marx and Engels called possession “property based on one’s own labor”:

“Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which one rests on the producers’ own labor, the other on the employment of the labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its tomb only” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 35, pp. 751-752).

The growth of surplus product leads to the transformation of production for consumption and giving into commodity production based on money relations. Use value and exchange value as socially necessary multiplicity and mass of existence values find their way through the immense variety of individual opinions about required activities and products. The further production for exchange advances, the more money relations spread, the more added activity becomes added value, necessary activity becomes the value of active power and surplus activity becomes profit.

The surplus activity and its product represent the difference between the quantity of production and the quantity of consumption. Thus, the surplus product is the source of all accumulation. The higher the value of the surplus product, the greater the possibilities for saving and investing, i.e. making means of production. The rate of surplus activity determines the potential for accumulation of meanings. However, saving does not necessarily mean investing. The amount of investment is defined by expectations regarding the surplus activity and its product, i.e. profit.

The relationship between investment and surplus activity/product constitutes the essence of profit. Although profit arises in traditional society, here it is not yet the basis for the organization of self-reproduction and is thus completely random in nature. At this early stage, it is obvious that the source of profit is uncertainty. The primitive division of meanings and the low rate of surplus activity characteristic of subsistence economy limit the possibilities of making profit. Here, production is viewed as a means of consumption rather than as a means of exchange and profit:

“Aristotle insists on production for use as against production for gain as the essence of householding proper; yet accessory production for the market need not, he argues, destroy the self-sufficiency of the household as long as the cash crop would also otherwise be raised on the farm for sustenance, as cattle or grain; the sale of the surpluses need not destroy the basis of householding. … In denouncing the principle of production for gain as boundless and limitless, ‘as not natural to man;’ Aristotle was, in effect, aiming at the crucial point, namely, the divorce of the economic motive from all concrete social relationships which would by their very nature set a limit to that motive” (Polanyi 2001, pp. 56-57).

Possession emerges at a very low rate of surplus activity. At this stage, small possessors cannot yet achieve a sufficient rate of surplus activity to set in motion a cycle of expanded self-reproduction; the appropriation of surplus activity/product remains the prerogative of the state and the nobility, who collect the surplus and spend it on status consumption (palaces and temples) or large-scale structures and administration (irrigation systems, standing army, tax apparatus, etc.):

“At the time of the Spanish conquest the Texcoco, Chaco, and Xochimilco lakes had about 12,000 ha of chinampa fields. Their construction required at least 70 million man-days of labor. The average peasant had to spend no less than 200 days a year to grow enough food for his own family, so he could not work more than about 100 days on large hydraulic projects. As a good portion of this time had to be devoted to the maintenance of existing embankments and canals, seasonal labor of at least 60 and up to 120 peasants was needed to add 1 ha of a new chinampa. The means were different—but the pre-Hispanic basin of Mexico was clearly as much a hydraulic civilization as Ming China, its great Asian contemporary. Long-term, well-planned, centrally coordinated effort and an enormous expenditure of human labor were the key ingredients of its agricultural success” (Smil 2017, p. 99).

The complication of activity implies an increase in mediation, i.e. a growing mass of meanings materialized in the means of activity. A growing meaning mass per unit of product affects both the production of consumer articles and the making of means of production (investment). The prerequisite for increasing mediation is accumulation—saving surpluses and investing them in means of production. Accumulation implies that both the means of production and their making become more complex and the composition of meaning is higher. More complex means of production require broader cooperation and more sophisticated administration.

“Undoubtedly the most important, and lasting, contribution to intensified cropping in China was the design, construction, and maintenance of extensive irrigation systems. The antiquity of these schemes is best shown by the fact that nearly half of all projects operating by the year 1900 had been completed before the year 1500. The origins of perhaps the most famous one, Sichuan’s Dujiangyan, which still waters fields growing food for several tens of million people, go back to the third century BCE. … The construction and unceasing maintenance of such irrigation projects (as well as the building and dredging of lengthy ship canals) required long-range planning, the massive mobilization of labor, and major capital investment. None of these requirements could be met without an effective central authority. There was clearly a synergistic relationship between China’s impressive large-scale water projects and the rise, perfection, and perpetuation of the country’s hierarchical bureaucracies” (Smil 2020, pp. 93-94).

Investment is, by its definition, not production for consumption, since it is aimed at producing means of production and not consumer articles. The larger the investment, the less it is production for consumption and more it is production for exchange. Robert Lopez showed that although water mills were already used in antiquity, their relatively high cost meant that they did not spread in Europe until the Middle Ages, when slave labor was transformed into peasant labor. Greater freedom was a condition for greater efficiency. The deficit of slave labor forced the search for mechanical methods of grinding grain, while at the same time the lord of the manor forced the peasants to grind their grain in his mill. The shortage of rivers and streams to support waterwheels, in turn, led to the spread of windmills, which were not used in antiquity (Lopez 1976, pp. 43-44). An increase in meaning is an increase in mediation, the latter requires more freedom for the subjects, and more freedom requires a more complex socio-cultural order.

Property, debt and interest

Property arose as the disposal of the non-user in parallel with and in place of possession as the disposal of the immediate user. If the origin of possession is to be sought in the possessor’s own labor, then the origin of property is to be sought in political and economic norms. Property arises as political property when one group of people is able to subjugate another group, when one part of the population rises as a political force over another part. Property makes it possible to create elaborate means of production, to invest on a large scale, to maintain a sufficient duration of the production and circulation, to calculate and distribute risks. If possession is a feature of a low composition of meaning, then political property is a feature of an activity with a high composition. Political property is associated with the rise of chiefdoms and states. Irrigation systems, military installations, massive ancient and medieval architecture are its material evidence.

“Thus, in tribal hydraulic societies property is simple, but it is simple with a specific tendency toward the predominance of political, power-based, property. This tendency increases with the size of the community. It becomes decisive in simple hydraulic commonwealths that are no longer directed by a primitive (tribal) government, but by a state” (Wittfogel 1957, p. 238).

Changes in the rate of surplus activity, in value saving and investment, draw a line between application, possession and property. The value of a surplus product is a “quantitative expression” of disposal and use: the transition from application to possession and from the latter to property is associated, first, with an increase in the size and rate of the surplus product, and, second, with a shift in the mechanisms of alienation and appropriation of the surplus product—from brute physical force to customs and from there to laws. Political ownership enables the appropriation of the surplus activity or its product in direct natural form—for example, in the form of corvée labor or rent in kind.

Simple self-reproduction is characterized by unstable accumulation. Periods in which increased surplus allows the large-scale making of means of production—irrigation systems, for example —are often followed by periods in which what has been achieved is consumed and destroyed. The very structure of the traditional order, with its political ownership, its communal and private possession, implies that investment is either reduced to the activity of the all-powerful king (or chief), who is unable to implement the many projects necessary for the division of meanings, or that investment is reduced to the petty activities of individuals and families who cannot raise enough funds for significant projects.

Appropriation in kind contains a contradiction in itself: on the one hand, it is a condition for the existence of the polity; but on the other hand, by appropriating labor or its product in kind, the polity hinders the development of a competitive commodity exchange. Overcoming this contradiction required the transformation of political or state property into economic or private property, the development of written laws, fiat money and interest.

Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger showed that debt and interest arise when possession turns into private property. In their view, possession is a physical or material concept, while property is an immaterial or legal concept:

“Possession always means the right to dispose of certain goods or resources and thus to use them physically, and is independent of whether property rights exist or not” (Heinsohn und Steiger 2009, p. 91). “Property never arises naturally. It can only be created by a legal, i.e., non-material action. Once property is created, it carries an unearned and intangible premium, the property premium. This premium exists in addition to the physical use of the goods or resources held and consists of two forces: (i) it is capable of supporting the issue of money, which can only be created in a loan agreement, and (ii) the right to this premium serves as collateral to obtain a loan” (ibid., p. 471).

Since its very inception, money has served the purpose of accumulation, i.e. saving and investing value. For a long time, this function was limited to precious metals as a tangible form of money. Fiat money emerged with the advent of credit. Medieval states needed money for their projects, especially to wage war and pay mercenary armies. They obtained money by borrowing it from creditors. However, political property is the prerogative of the state, and the sovereign often considered what he had borrowed as his property, i.e. he did not repay the debt. Creditors, suffering from the arbitrariness of the state, developed a new form of property—economic or private:

“Montesquieu describes here first how commerce was hampered by the prohibition of interest-taking by the church and was consequently taken up by the Jews; how the Jews suffered violence and constant extortions at the hands of nobles and kings; and how eventually they reacted by inventing the bill of exchange (lettre de change). The final portion of the chapter draws striking conclusions: ‘…and through this means commerce could elude violence, and maintain itself everywhere; for the richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere without leaving any trace. … In this manner we owe … to the avarice of rulers the establishment of a contrivance which somehow lifts commerce right out of their grip’” (Hirschman 1977, p. 72).

The transition from political to private property, i.e. the emergence of bills of exchange and the development of sovereign debt, led to monetary transactions as a special type of commodity transactions in which it is not goods that are traded, but money itself. The payment for money is interest.

“… Money as a whole takes on a very distinctive character in specific monetary transactions; that is, when it does not function as a medium of exchange to other objects, but as the central content, as the object of a transaction sufficient to itself. Money is an end in itself in the purely bilateral financial operation not only in the sense that it has suspended its qualities as a means, but also in the sense that it is, from the outset, the self-sufficient center of interest, which also develops its own distinctive norms and, at the same time, completely autonomous qualities and a corresponding technique” (Simmel 2004, p. 309).

Debt and interest commercialized traditional society. As more mercenaries were hired, the concept of wage activity spread. As products became commodities, consumers depended more on the market and monetary income than on subsistence production. As private property took hold, there was less room for communities or communal forms of possession. Robert Lane distinguished between warm and cold societies. He called societies based on emotional support, empathy and reciprocity “warm”, and societies based on impersonal relationships and money “cold”:

“From Marx and Engels’s statement that ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, then callous cash-payment,’ to Tönnies’ ‘in Gesellschaft every person strives for that which is to his own advantage and affirms the action of others only in so far as and as long as they can further his interest,’ to Weber’s alleged movement from the communal relationship ‘based on the subjective feelings of parties… that they belong together,’ to the more impersonal interest-based associative relationship, to Sebastian de Grazia’s view that the contemporary commercial ‘competitive directive’ requires us to reduce all affective relationships, to Fromm who argues that capitalism at least, and perhaps all modernity, leads us to treat each other as machines—we find in all these sources and their many epigones expressed the idea of the modern cold society” (Lane 1978, p. 453).

A warm society is based on a material community: unity of place and time of life, joint action and joint possession of the basic conditions of life—a forest, a river, a field. Warm societies are those of personal communication, passion, repute and rumors. A cold society is based on an abstract community: the unity of socio-cultural order and ideas, that is, on impersonal communication, money and private property.

Historically, the more specialized the activity and the active power, the more fragmented the socio-cultural order is. This can be seen in the division of property rights. Internal effects are those results of an activity that are appropriated by the subject of the activity, and external effects (that is, externalities) are results that are appropriated by someone else. James Meade described externalities using the example of farmers who grow more apple trees and neighboring beekeepers who benefit from increased nectar sources. Increased sources are the external effects of the farmers’ activity on the beekeepers. This example shows that externalities occur when one economic unit benefits from the actions of another at no cost to itself. Meade called these the “unpaid factors of production” (Meade 1952, pp. 56-57). Externalities can be either positive (goods) or negative (evils).

In a traditional economy that was based on common possession, the growing of apple trees and the keeping of bees were combined within one unit. In this case, externalities did not arise or they were appropriated by the unit itself. An external effect occurs only when the farmer and the beekeeper run private enterprises, that is, when the rights to apple trees and the rights to bees are divided between them.

The beekeepers’ benefits can also be transformed into property rights if they have to pay for the use of the increased nectar sources. The increase in meanings requires as its condition the division of effects and property, but such a division in turn requires more complex cooperation and more complex administration: the evolution of private property shows that rights cannot be completely divided. There always remains an indivisible residual, resulting from the uncertainty of the environment, from the fact that such a division itself requires expenditure.

3. Limits of simple self-reproduction

Adaptive efficiency and the race against uncertainty

Man lives under uncertainty, unpredictability of events; his activities are aimed at overcoming uncertainty, at ensuring that reality serves human needs and that needs correspond to reality. Unpredictability arises from the action of natural forces and other people, as well as man himself: sometimes man surprises himself. Armen Alchian suggested starting with the uncertainty of the environment and human motives when building an economic model:

“It is straightforward, if not heuristic, to start with complete uncertainty and nonmotivation and then to add elements of foresight and motivation in the process of building an analytical model. The opposite approach, which starts with certainty and unique motivation, must abandon its basic principles as soon as uncertainty and mixed motivations are recognized” (Alchian 1950, p. 221).

However, the approach that starts with uncertainty does not consider that the entire coevolution of humans and meanings is directed towards overcoming it. “…Humans have a ubiquitous drive to make their environment more predictable” (North 2005, p. 14). Culture-society never acts in a state of complete uncertainty, as it always has a certain stock of meanings. Humans resolve uncertainty through meanings and bear the associated costs. In other words, the amount of uncertainty that must be eliminated from an event in order to obtain a fact can be measured by the cost of action. To understand what costs must be expended, we can refer to the five types of uncertainty identified by Douglas North:

“1. Uncertainty that can be reduced by increasing information given the existing stock of knowledge. 2. Uncertainty that can be reduced by increasing the stock of knowledge within the existing institutional framework. 3. Uncertainty that can be reduced only by altering the institutional framework. 4. Uncertainty in the face of novel situations that entails restructuring beliefs. 5. Residual uncertainty that provides the foundation for ‘non-rational’ beliefs” (North 2005, p. 17).

Accordingly, several types of costs can be distinguished. First, there are technological / transformation costs. As we have seen, people discover patterns in the natural and cultural environment (habitat and domus) through causal models, that is, knowledge. Current technological expenses reduce the uncertainty within the existing knowledge stock. But sometimes, to reduce uncertainty, it is necessary to increase the stock of knowledge, that is, to invest in technology.

In addition to technological costs, there are inevitably costs for coordinating activities and making decisions. We call them organizational and psychological costs, respectively. Organizational expenses and investments are losses caused by distrust and injustice, which require activities to create and maintain institutions and change the existing institutional framework. Psychological costs are losses caused by prejudice, false beliefs and indecision, which require actions to change the belief structure, motivate and stimulate.

Organizational and psychological costs thus differ from technological costs. In the new institutional economics, organizational and psychological costs are summarized under the term transaction costs. Although transaction costs are defined as the costs of running institutions, they also include the costs of decision-making (cf. Coase 1988, p. 6; Richter and Furubotn 2005, p. 12). In what follows, we will always keep this dual nature of transaction costs in mind.

“Residual uncertainty” that cannot be eliminated by spending and investing is the basis for irrational beliefs and profits. Uncertainty has a dual nature. On the one hand, it is a necessary condition for the existence of profit. If everyone knew everything, no one could make a profit. On the other hand, “in the presence of uncertainty—a necessary condition for the existence of profits—there is no meaningful criterion for selecting the decision that will ‘maximize profits’” (Alchian 1950, p. 212). Profits are always based on chance and their size is always random.

Profit is an uncertainty that is integrated as an inherent part in the process of self-reproduction of culture-society; therefore profit is also a meaning. Like any meaning, profit cannot always be “maximized” here and now: for its maximization, decisions by individuals are not enough, but socio-cultural evolution is required:

“There is an alternative method which treats the decisions and criteria dictated by the economic system as more important than those made by the individuals in it. By backing away from the trees—the optimization calculus by individual units—we can better discern the forest of impersonal market forces. This approach directs attention to the interrelationships of the environment and the prevailing types of economic behavior which appear through a process of economic natural selection. Yet it does not imply that individual foresight and action do not affect the nature of the existing state of affairs” (Alchian 1950, p. 213).

Hence, the self-reproduction of culture-society is built upon both certainty and uncertainty. The process of production, circulation and consumption of goods is a process of overcoming uncertainty. At the same time, as Robert Sapolsky shows, uncertainty is the very condition that makes cooperation between people possible. The prisoner’s dilemma can only be solved on the assumption that the players do not know how many rounds the game will have and therefore behave irrationally (Sapolsky 2017, p. 634).

In the space between certainty and uncertainty, there arises probability (risk). Probability should not be confused with either necessity or accident. According to Keynes’s famous definition, which borrowed from Knight, an event is uncertain if there is no basis for calculating the chances of its occurrence or non-occurrence; in contrast, a probable event is an event whose chances can be calculated (Keynes 2013, vol. 14, pp. 113-114).

Probability lies between necessity and accident. Unlike strict necessity, it is variable. However, unlike accident, it is finitely variable. Profit is an accident, while cost is a necessity. In between lies probability, or interest. Property and interest have the same root, they are interrelated results of an increase in meanings, the gradual transformation of uncertainty into risk and the division of rights and risks. In the early stages of their evolution in a traditional culture-society, profit and interest are almost equally uncertain: the amount of interest roughly corresponds to the amount of expected profit. The evolution of interest led to its decline in relation to profit. This expresses the nature of interest and property—it is part of the uncertainty that can be transformed into risk.

The transformation of uncertainty into risk and then into certainty occurs in the process of activity—that is learning and imitation, trial and error. During socio-cultural evolution, a “double adaptation” occurs: men adapt to the environment by changing meanings, and meanings adapt to the environment by changing men. The quality of this mutual adaptation is determined by the effectiveness of feedback. People learn when they receive rapid and frequent feedback on their actions—be it making things, keeping promises, or discovering new laws of nature. Learning occurs through the repetition of events and actions, the formation of stable meanings—norms or routines. The efficiency of adaptation depends on the norms that regulate the activities of the culture-society, that is, on the socio-cultural order:

“Adaptive efficiency, on the other hand, is concerned with the kinds of rules that shape the way an economy evolves through time. It is also concerned with the willingness of a society to acquire knowledge and learning, to induce innovation, to undertake risk and creative activity of all sorts, as well as to resolve problems and bottlenecks of the society through time. We are far from knowing all the aspects of what makes for adaptive efficiency, but clearly the overall institutional structure plays the key role in the degree that the society and the economy will encourage the trials, experiments, and innovations that we can characterize as adaptively efficient” (North 1990, pp. 80-81).

Culture and meanings emerged as a means of overcoming the uncertainty of the natural environment, the mutual inadaptation of habitat and protohumans. As an adaptation process, cultural evolution reduced natural uncertainty, leading to the emergence of an agrarian culture-society with its traditional order, possession and political ownership. However, the same cultural evolution has led to an increase in the uncertainty of the domus, the culture itself. The more complex the culture, the more variable it is. The more information, the higher the uncertainty: the random grows faster than the probable:

“On the other hand, a string is random if there is no short way to describe it. Of course, you can always describe a binary string just by listing it: the program that says “Print s, then halt.” That program has about the same length as s itself. Therefore, s is random if there is no shorter way than that to describe it. K(s), in other words, is about equal to the length of s: K(s) ≈ L(s). This definition of randomness has nothing to do with probability. Indeed, Kolmogorov believed that the idea of information was more fundamental than the idea of probability” (Schumacher 2015, pp. 231-232).

By multiplying meanings, culture-society raises randomness and uncertainty. The increasing complexity of human activities is a race against uncertainty. By complicating their activities, humans eliminate the uncertainty that prevents them from satisfying their needs, but in doing so they create even greater uncertainty. To eliminate this new uncertainty, they must complicate their activities even more. This phenomenon is called the “Red Queen’s Race”:

“This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress” (Ridley 2003, p. 18).

The race against uncertainty meant that traditional culture-society gradually reached the technological, organizational and psychological limits of simple self-reproduction. When it went beyond these limits, it either collapsed, disintegrated and lost complexity (which often happened) or had to change its foundations.

Evolutionary rationality and the limits of traditional thinking

Herbert Simon once pointed out that theorists of human behavior tend to go to extremes in their interpretations of rationality: economists tend to exaggerate the capabilities of the human mind, and psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists tend to downplay them, emphasizing the role of motivations, emotions and culture (Simon 1957, pp. 1-2):

“Traditional economic theory postulates an ‘economic man,’ who, in the course of being ‘economic’ is also ‘rational.’ This man is assumed to have knowledge of the relevant aspects of his environment which, if not absolutely complete, is at least impressively clear and voluminous. He is assumed also to have a well-organized and stable system of preferences, and a skill in computation that enables him to calculate, for the alternative courses of action that are available to him, which of these will permit him to reach the highest attainable point on his preference scale” (Simon 1957, p. 241).

An example of extreme rationalism is the theory of Graham Snooks. Snooks believes that the basis of economic development is not to be found on the side of “supply” or culture, but exclusively on the side of “demand” or the subject. He argues against basing economic theory on the concept of “evolution” that the new institutionalists borrow from biology, noting that “economists seek assistance from other deductive disciplines rather than from history” (Snooks 1997, p. 5). Instead, according to Snooks, economic theory should be based on the concept of “dynamic strategy”:

“At its center is materialist man who, in a competitive world characterized by scarce resources, attempts to maximize the probability of survival and prosperity. To do so, the strategist pursues one of the four timeless dynamic strategies: family multiplication (involving procreation and migration to new lands), conquest, commerce, and technological change” (Snooks 1997, p. 6).

Choosing a strategy is a rational action that involves imitating successful people and their practices. Snooks considers the “intellectual ability” of strategists to be the most limited resource (Snooks 1997, pp. 52-53). Unlike cultural evolution theorists, he believes that individuals are capable of “inventing” the necessary solutions. Accordingly, he considers cultural evolution to be the result, not the driving force, of social development (Snooks 1997, p. 68). He derives changes in institutions and economic growth from the demand of strategists and competition among their groups, and considers cultural change to be the sum of institutional change and economic growth. He distinguishes between “strategists” or innovators (profit seekers), “non-strategists” or followers, and “anti-strategists” or rent seekers (Snooks 1997, p. 63). Snooks reduces human motives to material consumption and culture to a vague collection of “everything that contributes to the complex structure of human civilization” (Snooks 1997, p. 68). He does not seem to understand that “strategies” are elements of culture, that strategists develop culture and thus develop themselves in the process of mutual imitation. The third thesis about Feuerbach fully applies to Snooks’ point of view:

“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 5, p. 4).

Herbert Simon noted that people are not omniscient and cannot solve all problems with reason alone, and introduced the principle of bounded rationality:

“The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality” (Simon 1957, p. 198).

What could be the cause of the limitations of the mind? Thinking combines instincts, practices and reason, which are developed to varying degrees by natural and cultural selection. Actions based on instincts and the consistent learning of many generations of people are performed faster and more easily than actions that have emerged relatively recently or require reasoning. Daniel Kahneman calls fast intuitive thinking System 1, and the slow conscious thinking System 2. System 1 is associative, metaphorical, deterministic thinking that comes easily and is automatic, and System 2 is probabilistic statistical thinking that requires a lot of reasoning and reflection. Humans strive to reduce problems to what they supposedly know, to automatic associative and causal correlations. The limitations of reason and our deviations from rationality are explained not by instincts or emotions interfering with reason, but by the mechanism of thinking itself, in which reason is only a later, albeit important, element. This prevents us from recognizing “a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in” (Kahneman 2011, pp. 13-14).

According to Ken Binmore, rationality is not determined by the ability of humans to foresee the consequences of their actions, but by whether these actions enable humans to reproduce themselves:

“Even when people haven’t thought everything out in advance, it doesn’t follow that they are necessarily behaving irrationally. Game theory has had some notable successes in explaining the behavior of spiders and fish, neither of which can be said to think at all. Such mindless animals end up behaving as though they were rational, because rivals whose genes programmed them to behave irrationally are now extinct. Similarly, companies aren’t always run by great intellects, but the market is often just as ruthless as Nature in eliminating the unfit from the scene” (Binmore 2007, p. 2).

In this case, we are dealing with the other extreme, the opposite of Snooks’ views: an individual need not be rational, a population is rational. Populations can make mistakes and still evolve, but individuals do not evolve: unlike populations, individuals are mortal. One extreme exalts reason, reduces all of history to the results of free choices, and does not recognize the evolution of strategies. The other extreme reduces reason to consistent activity: individuals simply follow programs to maximize utility, and evolution selects the most successful programs.

The limitations of thinking are no cause to deny people their ability to make choices, although instincts and practices that have fused together over hundreds of thousands and millions of years are a set of powerful programs that people follow. Human thinking is a combination of selection and choice, of strategy and reason. “The mixing of custom and choice at any one time produces, almost tautologically, the existing culture” (Jones 2006, p. 261).

Like biological evolution, the evolution of meaning does not seek the “best” or “maximum” solution; it only seeks the “sufficient,” “minimum” solution. This applies equally to making, communicating, and thinking. Evolutionary rationality is not based on utility and its maximization, but on preferences and propensities that allow us to choose a necessary and sufficient option. Moreover, utility is only one of the types of meanings between which a person chooses—along with morals, dreams, ideals and other meanings that are not always ordered among themselves. People’s needs and thinking are shaped by culture-society, and people behave rationally not only when they maximize utility, but also when they strive to comply with norms—that is, with the socio-cultural programs they have internalized:

“Rational conduct means that man, in face of the fact that he cannot satisfy all his impulses, desires, and appetites, foregoes the satisfaction of those which he considers less urgent. In order not to endanger the working of social cooperation man is forced to abstain from satisfying those desires whose satisfaction would hinder the establishment of societal institutions” (Mises 2005, p. 163).

Evolutionary rationality does not assume that reason is limited, but rather that reason and choice play different roles at different stages of socio-cultural and personal development. A child’s mind begins with an uncritical perception of another person’s actions, but as it matures, critical ability develops. The human brain and intelligence did not evolve to choose, but to persuade others, but now we try to use reason to make decisions:

“In what is already recognized as a major advance, in The Enigma of Reason Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber show that reason itself has evolved for the strategic purpose of persuading others, not to improve our own decision-taking. Motivated reasoning is why we developed the capacity to reason, and how we normally use it. Yet more fundamentally, the massive brain expansion of the past two million years has been driven by the need for sociality” (Collier 2018, p. 35).

Traditional choice accelerated the progress of meanings compared to cultural selection. Nevertheless, it still was constrained by customs, traditions, and other practices transmitted through cultural learning. Cultural evolution increased the sophistication of reason and enabled people to solve complex problems. However, in the race against uncertainty, the complexity of problems also grew. At the limits of traditional thinking, customs and other practices became an obstacle to cultural evolution. Simple self-reproduction ended when meanings proved to be an obstacle to their own growth and culture-society found ways to overcome this obstacle.

The rise of traditional complexity and its limits

Simple self-reproduction is characterized by a relatively slow growth of both human population and meaning complexity. In a traditional culture-society, productivity hardly improves; population growth regularly tops production growth. At the same time, the uncertainty of the natural and socio-cultural environment causes fluctuations in the volume of production, primarily food, which from time to time prevents the culture-society from maintaining the achieved socio-cultural complexity and leads to its collapse.

The complexity of culture-society grows along with the complexity of the persons who compose it, although the rate of growth is not comparable for society and persons. Over the last few thousand years, the properties of the human brain have remained practically unchanged, while the complexity of both learning and culture-society has increased. At the same time, the complexity of personal active power has increased, mainly due to the lengthening of learning time. The main contribution to the increase in aggregate complexity lies in the division of order, the specialization of activity, and the complication of the means of activity, that is, in socio-cultural rather than personal complexity.

As we have seen, the difference between the complexity of a culture-society and the complexity of the persons who compose it is the source of surplus activity / product. In an agrarian society, the vast majority of the population is employed in agriculture, so the surplus is predominantly in the form of agricultural activities and their products. The agricultural surplus was a prerequisite for the development of cities and non-agricultural activities:

“Though most farmers and peasants individually produced very little surplus, the aggregated surplus of millions of agricultural workers was easily enough to support a large number of towns and to foster the development of industry, commerce, and banking. Much as they admired agriculture and depended on it, the Romans literally identified ‘civilization’ with cities (civitates)” (Lopez 1976, p. 6).

The slow complication of traditional culture-society led to the stagnation of agricultural surplus and thus to the stagnation of non-agricultural activities—crafts and trade—and of the cities in which these activities were concentrated.

Why did traditional culture-society reproduce itself in a simple way, why did its complexity and productivity increase so slowly? There were several reasons for this:

● Low sociality / isolation of communities, limited communication outside a narrow circle of acquaintances and relatives;

● Monotony of cultural and individual experience, low specialization of both activity and active power under subsistence farming and personal dependence;

● Rigidity of order that prevented the growth of personality, its complexity, learning and creativity;

● Inertia of traditional choice and socio-cultural norms and values that limited rationality and choice between counterfacts.

By nature, simple self-reproduction is the way small communities reproduce themselves under subsistence farming and personal dependence. In these small communities, consumption is reduced to the satisfaction of the simplest needs of existence and communication, production is small-scale and artisanal, circulation is limited mainly to gifts, tributes and local trade. Almost all social relations here boil down to communication with familiar people:

“The kind of exchange that has characterized most of economic history has been personalized exchange involving small-scale production and local trade. Repeat dealing, cultural homogeneity (that is a common set of values), and a lack of third-party enforcement (and indeed little need for it) have been typical conditions. Under them transactions costs are low, but because specialization and division of labor is rudimentary, transformation costs are high. The economies or collections of trading partners in this kind of exchange tend to be small” (North 1990, p. 34).

The merging of communities into chiefdoms and states did not change their local and inert character. Nor could the traditional order rooted in the community be overcome at the imperial level. Robert Lopez lists some of the obstacles that prevented the ancient Roman economy from going beyond the limits of simple self-reproduction. In our opinion, this list can be applied to all traditional states:

● Total or partial state monopoly on the production and circulation of salt, grains, metals, marble, etc.;

● Restrictions on foreign trade, total prohibition on the export of gold, strategic materials, foodstuffs;

● Lack of demand for foreign goods due to almost total self-sufficiency;

● Weak internal trade due to the unification of production and consumption;

● “The most serious obstacle to commercial development, however, was a psychological one. Trade was regarded as a base occupation, unworthy of gentlemen though not really unbecoming for commoners who would be unable to find a more dignified means of support” (Lopez 1976, pp. 7-8).

To overcome simple self-reproduction as a whole, what was needed was not the mere growth of the agricultural surplus in its natural form of corvée or rent-in-kind. The surplus had to take the form of exchange value/money so that it could be accumulated—saved and invested—and thus used not to increase consumption but production. Surplus activity had to be recast into surplus value and surplus value into capital. Capital, the complex types and means of activity in which it appears, could not be created only in agriculture; it required the advance of trade and crafts:

“Without capital, and hence with modest tools, a craftsman soon reached the ceiling of the production he could achieve single-handedly. This in turn tended to create a closed circle: he produced little surplus because he lacked labor-saving devices and money to hire many assistants, and could not buy the devices or hire the assistants because he produced little surplus. No doubt the circle could be broken if he found somebody willing to lend him capital; but the low return of the investment made it impossible for him to obtain credit at reasonable terms” (Lopez 1976, p. 9).

In the second part of this book we will look more closely at how the vicious circle of simple self-reproduction was overcome. The increase in meanings could not be stopped because the race against uncertainty did not stop. The evolution of meanings continued incessantly, bringing with it a gradual growth of efficiency and productivity. The gradual, if very slow, development of agriculture was one of the necessary conditions for the commercial and industrial revolution:

“Even as demographic growth was a prime motor of agricultural progress, so agricultural progress was an essential prerequisite of the Commercial Revolution. So long as the peasants were barely able to insure their own subsistence and that of their lords, all other activities had to be minimal. When food surpluses increased, it became possible to release more people for governmental, religious, and cultural pursuits. Towns re-emerged from their protracted depression. Merchants and craftsmen were able to do more than providing a fistful of luxuries for the rich and a very few indispensable goods for the entire agrarian community. From this point of view, it is proper to say that the revolution took off from the manor” (Lopez 1976, p. 56).

The impersonal market and commodity production gradually grew where the advance of cold sociality led to the overcoming of episodic utilities and prices and their transformation into use value as an ever higher standard of consumption and exchange value as a monetary standard and potential for wage labor:

“As the size and scope of exchange have increased, the parties have attempted to clientize or personalize exchange. But the greater the variety and numbers of exchange, the more complex the kinds of agreements that have to be made, and so the more difficult it is to do. Therefore a second general pattern of exchange has evolved, that is impersonal exchange, in which the parties are constrained by kinship ties, bonding, exchanging hostages, or merchant codes of conduct. Frequently the exchange is set within a context of elaborate rituals and religious precepts to constrain the participants. The early development of long-distance and cross-cultural trade and the fairs of medieval Europe were built on such institutional constructs. They permitted a widening of the market and the realization of the gains from more complex production and exchange, extending beyond the bounds of a small geographic entity” (North 1990, pp. 34-35).

The increasing sociality of traditional cultures-societies was also seen in the spread of states and their ideologies, the displacement of barbarism and paganism, the gradual destruction of traditional communities and their possessory order, the spread of political and private ownership of the means of production, the transition from personal dependence to wage labor:

“Under the demographic conditions of early state formation, when the means of traditional production were still plentiful and not monopolized, only through one form or another of unfree, coerced labor—corvée labor, forced delivery of grain or other products, debt bondage, serfdom, communal bondage and tribute, and various forms of slavery—was a surplus brought into being. Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor, as we shall see, but it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus on the one hand and the risk of provoking the mass flight of subjects on the other, especially where there was an open frontier. Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus” (Scott 2017, pp. 152-153).

The vicious circle of simple self-reproduction was broken by the transition to a new, expanded mode of self-reproduction, which is associated with the self-expansion of capital and is therefore usually called capitalism. The second part of the book is devoted to considering expanded self-reproduction, in which both the human population and the complexity of meanings grow relatively rapidly.

Part two. Expanded self-reproduction

“An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted” (Victor Hugo).

“Theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 3, p. 182).

Chapter 4. Commercial society and expanded consumption

1. Commercial revolution and system-society

The third needs trap and the consumer society

Over the course of about 10,000 years of agricultural evolution, the Earth’s population has grown from 5 or 10 million to 1 billion people, but the complexity of culture-society has changed little during this time. How little the meanings have increased can be seen from the fact that at the beginning of the 19th century the vast majority of the population was employed in agriculture, which was based on the physical strength of humans and domestic animals. “As long as animate labor remained the sole prime mover of field work, the share of the population engaged in crop cultivation and animal husbandry had to remain very high, more than 80%, commonly over 90%” (Smil 2017, pp. 407-408).

Over the next 200 years of the industrial revolution, the world population grew from 1 billion to 8 billion while the share of people employed in agriculture declined, with the magnitude of the decline varying across countries. In the 2010s, employment in agriculture was about 40% of total employment in India, 30% in China, 6% in Russia, and 1.5% in the United States.

“The [US] rural labor fell from more than 60% of the total workforce in 1850 to less than 40% in 1900; the share was 15% in 1950, and in 2015 it was just 1.5%. For comparison, agricultural labor in the EU is now about 5% of the total, but in China it is still around 30%” (Smil 2017, p. 307).

The rapid growth of the world population and the decline in the proportion of people employed in agriculture over the last 200 years indicate not only an increase in efficiency and complexity of meanings, but also fundamental changes in consumption. When the majority of the population was employed in agriculture, consumption was largely limited to the minimum of food and household items necessary for survival. The migration of the population to the cities, the enormous complication of meanings and the growth in productivity have required an equally enormous unfolding and expansion of material needs. The unfolding of material needs is expressed in the growth of value added per capita.

Illustration 4. Simple (“horizontal”) and expanded (“vertical”) self-reproduction of mankind (plotted from data in: Maddison 2007, pp. 376, 382; van Zanden et al. 2014, pp. 42, 65).

The transition from the simple to the expanded mode of self-reproduction took place simultaneously in all three elements—consumption, production and circulation. Although we distinguish these elements of self-reproduction for our analysis, in practice they are inseparable. Consumption mediates production and circulation in the same way that these mediate consumption. Jean Baudrillard (The Consumer Society

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