From prehistory to history

Stockbreeding and agriculture led to civilization

Below is an excerpt from Understanding History: Marxist Essays by George Novack, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for October. Workers, farmers and youth involved in today’s resistance to the capitalists’ assaults on living standards and political rights will find useful Novack’s discussion of how the social organization of labor has shaped the evolution of society, ideas, and human beings—from food gathering to today’s capitalist mode of exploitation. Copyright © 1972 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY GEORGE NOVACK
The immediate animal forerunners of mankind went through a prolonged period of restricted growth as a lesser breed compared to others. Mankind arrived at its phase of “explosive expansion” only in the past million years or so, after the primate from which we are descended acquired the necessary social powers. However, the further development of mankind will not duplicate the cycle of animal evolution because the growth of society proceeds on a qualitatively different basis and is governed by its own unique laws… .

The development of social organization, and of particular social structures, exhibits unevenness no less pronounced than the life-histories of biological beings from which it has emerged with the human race. The diverse elements of social existence have been created at different times… .

Archaeologists divide human history into the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages according to the materials used in making tools and weapons. These three stages of technological development have had immensely different spans of life. The Stone Age lasted for around 900 thousand years; the Bronze Age dates from 3000-4000 B.C.; the Iron Age is less than four thousand years old. Moreover, different sections of mankind passed through these stages at different dates in different parts of the world. The Stone Age ended before 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, about 1600 B.C. in Denmark, 1492 in America, and not until 1800 in New Zealand.

A similar unevenness in time-spans marks the evolution of social organization. Savagery, when men lived by collecting food through foraging, hunting or fishing, extended over many hundreds of thousands of years while barbarism, which is based upon breeding animals and raising crops for food, dates back to about 8000 B.C. Civilization is little more than six thousand years old.

The production of regular, ample and growing food supplies effected a revolutionary advance in economic development which elevated food-producing peoples above backward tribes that continued to subsist on the gathering of food. Asia was the birthplace of both domestication of animals and of plants. It is uncertain which of these branches of productive activity preceded the other, but archaeologists have uncovered remains of mixed farming communities which carried on both types of food production as early as 8000 B.C.

There have been purely pastoral tribes, which depended exclusively on stock-raising for their existence, as well as wholly agricultural peoples, whose economy was based on the cultivation of cereals or tubers. The cultures of these specialized groups underwent a one-sided development by virtue of their particular type of production of the means of life. The purely pastoral mode of subsistence did not, however, contain the potentialities of development inherent in agriculture. Pastoral tribes could not incorporate the higher type of food production into their economies on any scale, without having to settle down and alter their entire mode of life, particularly after the introduction of the plough, which superseded the slash-and-burn techniques of gardening. They could not develop an extensive division of labor and go forward to village and city life, so long as they remained simply herders of stock.

The inherent superiority of agriculture over stockbreeding was demonstrated by the fact that dense populations and high civilizations could develop on the basis of agriculture alone, as the Aztec, Inca and Mayan civilizations of Central and South America proved. Moreover, the agriculturalists could easily incorporate domesticated animals into their mode of production, blending food cultivation with stockbreeding and even transferring draft animals to the technology of agriculture through the invention of the plough.

It was the combination of stockbreeding and cereal cultivation in mixed farming that prepared inside barbaric society the elements of civilization. This combination enabled the agricultural peoples to outstrip the purely pastoral tribes and, in the favorable conditions of the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China, to become the nurseries of civilization.

Since the advent of civilization, peoples have existed on three essentially different levels of progress corresponding to their modes of securing the necessities of life: the food-gatherers, the elementary food-producers, and the mixed farmers with a highly developed division of labor and a growing exchange of commodities.