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. 34-5).

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. 152-3).

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.

“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).

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. 407-8).

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.