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 (cf. Scott 2017, pp. 147-8).
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. 122-3).
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. 171-2).
