Re: population and stratification

Richard,

A few points in regard to this post and your previous one:

There is no disagreement that there is a *correlation* between population 
size and density on the one hand and degrees of political centralization 
and 
degrees of economic intensification and integration/division of labor on 
the other. The disagreement between us is how we understand causation.

There is also no disagreement that, in actual history, the most complex 
divisions of labor, political centralization, and developments of science 
and other "high culture" have arisen with with exploitation, the brutal 
extraction of surplus production from food producers and other laborers. 
The disagreement is about what this history means and whether it leaves 
open a communist possibility. This is related to the previous issue.

Of course, states do not arise ex nihilo. They arise from semi-state 
formations, which in turn have almost certainly developed out of ranked 
societies which were economically more egalitarian. But, I have argued, 
those more egalitarian societies, which did not centralize force, were 
limited in their ability to intensify production as were chiefdoms, when 
compared with states.

In Stone Age Economics, in his essays on the domestic mode of produciton, 
Sahlins (in his mature period) argues that limitations on production are 
often political, so that societies lacking institutions of political 
integration and centralization greatly underproduce their potential 
and support much smaller populations than their food producing technology 
would seem to suggest. This is part of a dialogue with Marvin Harris on 
how to interpret Marxist materialism. Harris's version is more 
mechanical; he tends to argue that culture can be understood as as an 
adaptation to the technology of production and the limitations of the 
resources for calories of a particlar environment. Hence this dialogue 
represents a replay of economic determinist versus political tendencies 
in the Marxist tradition, Sahlins' argument (in SAE) representing the 
latter.

I have argued that the state does not have a cause. There is nothing 
mechanically inevitable about the rise of state level societies out of 
complex chiefdoms or of chiefdoms out of more egalitarian and less 
politically centralized systems. Some peoples remained at a given level 
of political centralization (or decentralization) presumably for 
extremely long times. The only thing that favors social innovations that 
lead to intensification, including the development of the state and the 
consolidation of exploitation, is that societies that have adopted these 
have been able to support larger populations and hence supplant societies 
that did not adopt them. Under natural conditons, without coercion, 
people tend to limit their populations and spend less time on productive 
labor. (This leaves open the possibility that 
self-concious communist political and economic organization could combine 
economic complexity with the abolition of the state and exploitation.) 
This fits with Sahlins' point of the previous paragraph that among many 
peoples production falls far short of its potential.

Population pressure is not a cause of social change because, under what 
Marx called "natural" conditons of human society, it is a constant. Of 
course, states arise from societies which, because they are already 
complex and centralized to a great degree, contain other characteristics 
such as scarcity of new land to settle, etc. This shows nothing about the 
cause of the state.

Population-centered theories of state formation, whether advanced by 
Ronald Cohen or Johnson and Earle, are advanced from a very conservative, 
pessimistic political viewpoint. (I can support this with quotes, if you 
wish.) But the pessimism is not supported by 
the data. It is just bad science. Nowhere else in the study of natural 
populations is population pressure given as a cause of change.

Paul



On Mon, 5 Jun 
2000, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:

> Paul-
> 
> Another point I neglected to make is that the horticultural societies with
> "big man" redistribution are quite small, although somewhat larger than
> typical g&h bands.  I would also think it makes sense to see the big man
> systems as transitional to chiefdoms, rather than as an alternative.
> 
> So it is a huge leap to think that that sort of non-coercive system would
> be possible in a complex planetary society.
> 
> I'm all for optimism, but I don't think you've given cause for it yet on
> the issue of the possibility of pure egalitarianism in complex society.
> 
> Richard
> 
>