Civilizations, Organizing Production and Political Control

Civilization, Organizing Production, & Political Control

	One of the first terms with which we must come to grips is that of society.
  Basically, a society is an organized collectivity of interacting people whose
 activities become centered around a set of common goals.  A society attempts to
 share common beliefs, attitudes, and modes of action.  But societies are
 continually changing allignments of groups and subgroups and classes.
	One must also distinguish the meaning of culture from these other terms.
  Culture refers to a series of processes that construct, reconstruct and
 dismantle cultural materials in response to identifiable needs and causes.   It
 is the human-made part of our environment.  It is the human adaptation to the
 environment; i.e., the way of life.  Culture comprises the habits, attitudes,
 values, and institutions of a society.   Institutions may be defined as any
 significant practices, organized ways or systems of doing things, highly
 formalized habits or structures in a society or culture.

	Civilization is another term with which we must deal. Civilization denotes a
 complex culture shared by many people and characterized by cities and writing.
  It is also associated with a more complex division of labor (the textbook speaks
 of complex hierarchical societies) and monumental architecture.  A
 civilization may be conceived as a zone of cultural interaction pivoted on an
 hegemonic tributary society.  Usually, an ideology is involved in the hegemony.
  Confucianism in China is an example:
 
	All the ideological models paralleling the tributary mode have similar
 characteristics, according to Eric Wolf:  they postulate an hierarchical cosmos;
  real relations between exploiters and producers are displaced to those
 between a superior deity and "subjects".
  
         
	The term mode of production indicates a way to conceptualize how societies or
 cultures organize their production.  Each specific, historically occurring set
 of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from
 nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge represents a mode
 of production. Modes of production and societies are not the same:  they
 apply to two levels of abstraction about human pluralities.  Society has to do
 with the real or imputed interactions among people.  Mode has to do with
 economic relationships that underlie, orient and constrain interaction.
 
	We are going to postulate that there were three general modes of production
 apparent in the history of civilization:   these were a kin-ordered mode in the
 less developed areas, a tributary mode in the major traditional cultures, and
 a capitalistic mode in the modernizing world.

	With kinship mode, access to the means of production, that is, to livelihood and
 wealth, is controlled by kinship.  Materials, lands, labor and other things
 are supplied by people who have moral obligations to one another.  A sense of
 kinship supplies the motivation for production.  People work, produce, and
 cooperate to satisfy moral obligations, not because they are compelled by force
 and not for commercial profit or to `get rich.'
  
	Climate and topography favorable to agriculture spawned greater wealth and,
 therefore, made civilization possible.  In turn, in this setting, the tributary
 mode of production arose.  The tributary mode was the mode of the major
 traditional civilizations.  The tributary mode of production is associated with
 the following:

1)	The market-exchange system.  Most exchange of goods and services transpires at
 the public marketplace; the marketplace is transparent because of rules and
 because exchange is mostly local or regional.
 
2)	The local regional market region that is "a relatively self-sufficient
 economic nodule." (I. Wallerstein) .  More precisely there is a local regional
 market for goods.
 
3)	Labor is expended for production of goods that will be consumed locally (not
 for profit maximization on an abstract world-market). Social labor relates to
 a regional market where consumers and producers are known.   Moreover, this
 probably has value implications; e.g., village-orientation, communal
 allegiances, family and communal solidarity as morality.
   
4)  Social labor is mobilized and committed to the transformation of nature by
 domination; that is, through political process.  We commonly think of this as
 involving the political side of things.  With the tributary mode, surplus wealth
 produced by primary producers is extracted from them by political and
 military rulers or elites.  However onerous such a state of affairs may appear
 to us, it did represent a mode of production,  "...in which a primary
 producer, whether cultivator or herdsman, was allowed access to means of
 production, while tribute is extracted from him by political and military
 means," in order to pay administrative costs.
  {Note, under the capitalist mode, the producers or workers have
 surplus extracted from them by economic means and they do not own the means of
 production.}


	Political control, as you should learn in World Civilizations I, provides
 one important means of creating civiliation and of providing people with a
 higher standard of living.  The earliest form of political control was based on
 the tributary mode of production and comprised a simple form of domination or
 political process.    It took two polar forms:  A.  diffuse power;  local
 elites exercise much power.   This is the polar form in medieval Europe and in
 early modern Japan.  This form is identified as feudalism.  B.   concentrated
 power in the hands of a central, imperial elite which strongly controls local
 elites.   This is the polar form  in Ming and Ch'ing China and Mogul India.  This
 form is identified as the imperial or universal monarchy. [These two polar forms
 correspond to Marx's idea that there was a feudal and an Asiatic mode, thus
 two separate modes of production:  but they are not two modes, but rather
 polar ends of one mode.  Moreover, they have nothing to do with European and
 Asiatic cultures or societies, necessarily.]

	The capitalist mode of production is defined and characterized in this way.
 Capitalism is a system of production for maximum profit in a world-market.  That
 means that social labor is expended for production of goods that will be
 sold on the abstract, impersonal world-market.  The world-market, the large
 area in which economic interaction occurs is not controlled by a single political
 entity, but crosses the borders of many states.  In contrast to the market-exchange
 system, exchange of goods is private, not public, and there is no necessary
 regulation or transparency in exchange.  Moreover, regional markets
 tend to become less and less self-regulating as they are implicated
 in world-market patterns.


	With the capitalist mode of production, social labor is mobilized
 economically, rather than by domination.  But while this appears to make people
 free, on the one hand, it enslaves them on the other, for land tends to be
 commercialized, and more importantly, labor tends to be turned into a commodity.
  With capitalist accumulation and production for the world-market, the means
 of production come into the hands of capitalists who direct and determine
 these means of production.  Labor is denied control, and in some cases,
 even access to the means of production, and hence labor, itself,
 becomes a commodity separate from products, raw materials, and sales.
 
	Moreover, one must agree with the incisive book by Eric Wolf,
 Europe and the People Without a History, a prominent sociologist,
that maximization of profits or surplus produced by wage labor leads to,
 "ceaseless accumulation accompanied by changes in methods of production,"
 by the capitalists.  Wolf has shown the meaning of ceaseless introductions of
 new technologies and the associated mass migrations of labor.  [Wolf citing Sweezy,
1935, and Mandel, 1978, 103-107]  Moreover, it must be noted that capitalism grew
 historically by entering into working relationships with other modes of production,
 siphoning off wealth and people and turning them into capital and
 labor power. This is much the same thing as described by Braudel in the
 analogy of humankind living in a three-level economic house. 

[For further reading and the origins of many of the above ideas see the
 following books:  Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1973;
 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and
 the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century,
 1974;
 and, most important, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without
 History, 1982.]