Emergence of the Village Commune and its Surplus Production

Discussion

Benjamin Suriano:

"Therefore, if the so-called “Axial” age, or the age of the “State’s emergence” within the ANE, was an attempt to reorganize society around new “transcendental visions” of the whole, as some recent accounts describe it, this then requires elaborating some basic features of the village commune’s self-transcending trajectories that both enabled, and were distorted by, such shifts.279 Three progressive qualities here must then be pointed out with regard to the village commune in its Near Eastern pre-state origins. Firstly, it is with the rise of the village commune that humanity not only emerged from the prehistory of the Paleolithic era and into the Neolithic era, but also began to surpass this latter age. The revolutionizing of horticulture and the domestication of animals within the village commune provided a permanent food source and freed up surplus labor for developing new productive and information technologies that would anticipate the advances of the Bronze and Iron Ages. With nature being transformed in new ways beyond anything possible by bands of hunters and gatherers, the village, then, brought to the fore labor’s anti-entropic essence—in subsisting through the village form as both a newly stable household and laboratory of innovation, humanity was now beginning to reproduce itself through the reproduction of the whole of nature in a new way, rather than surviving episodically from the flux of a given environment.280 This stability and inventiveness enabled, for the first time in history, enough social surplus product not only for advanced craft specialization but also for developing progressive social capacities by which to reorganize society itself toward higher levels of integrated complexity. Secondly, the radical nature of this new social body in its integrated complexity was based in the development of new institutions of allocation and redistribution, yet without any political structures of top-down sovereignty.281 The emergence of the village formation was brought forth through developing structures of communal ownership of the land and its periodic reallocation, collective organization of labor, the centralization of surplus and its redistribution, new storage systems as communal banks, and ceremonies around harvest seasons for more directly celebrating and sharing the fruits of labor.282 Thus the village commune not only newly produced a significant social surplus but it also reproduced itself primarily as a new social system of rational allocation that reinvested this surplus back into cultivating the social capacities of its body of producers and their optimal relation to transforming nature. These are then the two major progressive qualities by which the village materially emerged as an enduring social formation, since without the production of social surplus or the ability to centralize and rationally redistribute it back into reproducing the social body of labor, there could be no sustained creation of organized complexity.

The third quality pertains to how these revolutions in the forces and relations of production not only opened a radically new religious consciousness of human agency, but also how this new view dialectically mediated the rise and endurance of the village. To better understand this progressive religious involvement, however, we must first get a better idea of what compelled the shift toward a production of social surplus in the first place. Here, as elsewhere, the common assumption about labor as a bare efficient cause, which we have been challenging, continues its distorting influence within the literature on the Neolithic age. Thus in much of the discussion on the rise of the agricultural revolution and the village commune, the mode of subsistence production is assumed to be essentially bound to a path of least resistance, lacking an internal orientation toward producing for anything more than immediate needs, unless externally and irrationally compelled. The question then as to why relatively well-fed and leisured hunters and gatherers would take up the labor-intensive pursuit of agricultural production, as well as radically reorganize society, becomes an enigma. This assumption regarding productive activity has then led to reductive explanations of the original production of social surplus as an accident to human nature, either provoked solely by external environmental pressures or by an arbitrary ideological consciousness, thus obscuring any intelligible relation between religion and its material origins in the modes of production.

(https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1643&context=dissertations_mu)