Simple self-reproduction is characterized by a relatively slow growth of both human population and meaning complexity. In a traditional culture-society, productivity hardly improves; population growth regularly tops production growth. At the same time, the uncertainty of the natural and socio-cultural environment causes fluctuations in the volume of production, primarily food, which from time to time prevents the culture-society from maintaining the achieved socio-cultural complexity and leads to its collapse.

The complexity of culture-society grows along with the complexity of the persons who compose it, although the rate of growth is not comparable for society and persons. Over the last few thousand years, the properties of the human brain have remained practically unchanged, while the complexity of both learning and culture-society has increased. At the same time, the complexity of personal active power has increased, mainly due to the lengthening of learning time. The main contribution to the increase in aggregate complexity lies in the division of order, the specialization of activity, and the complication of the means of activity, that is, in socio-cultural rather than personal complexity.

As we have seen, the difference between the complexity of a culture-society and the complexity of the persons who compose it is the source of surplus activity / product. In an agrarian society, the vast majority of the population is employed in agriculture, so the surplus is predominantly in the form of agricultural activities and their products. The agricultural surplus was a prerequisite for the development of cities and non-agricultural activities:

“Though most farmers and peasants individually produced very little surplus, the aggregated surplus of millions of agricultural workers was easily enough to support a large number of towns and to foster the development of industry, commerce, and banking. Much as they admired agriculture and depended on it, the Romans literally identified ‘civilization’ with cities (civitates)” (Lopez 1976, p. 6).

The slow complication of traditional culture-society led to the stagnation of agricultural surplus and thus to the stagnation of non-agricultural activities—crafts and trade—and of the cities in which these activities were concentrated.

Why did traditional culture-society reproduce itself in a simple way, why did its complexity and productivity increase so slowly? There were several reasons for this:

● Low sociality / isolation of communities, limited communication outside a narrow circle of acquaintances and relatives;

● Monotony of cultural and individual experience, low specialization of both activity and active power under subsistence farming and personal dependence;

● Rigidity of order that prevented the growth of personality, its complexity, learning and creativity;

● Inertia of traditional choice and socio-cultural norms and values that limited rationality and choice between counterfacts.

By nature, simple self-reproduction is the way small communities reproduce themselves under subsistence farming and personal dependence. In these small communities, consumption is reduced to the satisfaction of the simplest needs of existence and communication, production is small-scale and artisanal, circulation is limited mainly to gifts, tributes and local trade. Almost all social relations here boil down to communication with familiar people:

“The kind of exchange that has characterized most of economic history has been personalized exchange involving small-scale production and local trade. Repeat dealing, cultural homogeneity (that is a common set of values), and a lack of third-party enforcement (and indeed little need for it) have been typical conditions. Under them transactions costs are low, but because specialization and division of labor is rudimentary, transformation costs are high. The economies or collections of trading partners in this kind of exchange tend to be small” (North 1990, p. 34).

The merging of communities into chiefdoms and states did not change their local and inert character. Nor could the traditional order rooted in the community be overcome at the imperial level. Robert Lopez lists some of the obstacles that prevented the ancient Roman economy from going beyond the limits of simple self-reproduction. In our opinion, this list can be applied to all traditional states:

● Total or partial state monopoly on the production and circulation of salt, grains, metals, marble, etc.;

● Restrictions on foreign trade, total prohibition on the export of gold, strategic materials, foodstuffs;

● Lack of demand for foreign goods due to almost total self-sufficiency;

● Weak internal trade due to the unification of production and consumption;

● “The most serious obstacle to commercial development, however, was a psychological one. Trade was regarded as a base occupation, unworthy of gentlemen though not really unbecoming for commoners who would be unable to find a more dignified means of support” (Lopez 1976, pp. 7-8).

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. 34-35).

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. 152-153).

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.