Human production
systems for supplying goods and services can be considered from two
aspects; how things are made by organising materials and how people
are organised to make things. The topics dealing with making are
respectively, natural economy and political economy. In terms
of the makers, political economy has been since the early 19th
century at the centre of the the debate about mass production
versus craft production. In the former process a worker
becomes part of the machinery and in the latter the worker is in
charge of the total production process.
Patterns of
society through production
Wherever we find a
community—however primitive, however complex—we find
more than an association of individuals, each pursuing his own life
and possessing his own ideas; we find a social pattern, a coherent
body of customs and ideas, an integrated unity or system in which
each element has a definite function in relation to the
whole.
But what determines
the pattern? It is, says Radcliffe-Brown, 'the necessary conditions
of existence of the social organism'. To this the social
institutions must correspond. In turn the necessary conditions of
existence, at any stage of social development, depend on the
geographical situation and the level of technology. This is true
from the Stone Age to the present age of
industrialism.
Basic to every form
of social organization is the method of obtaining those items
essential for human survival. In other words, how do the people of
a particular society produce their food, clothing, tools, and other
items, such as works of art, that they need in order to live as
human beings ?
These 'necessary
conditions of existence' shape the relationship of people to each
other. Individuals utilize nature, directly or indirectly, to
produce the necessities of life, not in isolation from each other,
not as separate individuals, but in common groups and
societies.
Human
inventiveness
The history of human
evolution occupied a biological phase that covers all the steps
that separate us from our ape ancestors. Those occupied some
millions of years. Then there is a unique cultural history: the
phase that we call civilisation that separates us from the few
surviving hunting tribes of Africa, or from the food- gatherers of
Australia. The latter cultural gap is in fact compressed into only
about twelve thousand years. The last twelve thousand years
resulted in the change from a species, dependent, like other
primates, on an uncertain environment, to a more secure life in
communities where goods were made and exchanged on an ever
increasing scale. Somewhere along this time-line, our ancestors
escaped from an absolute dependence to primeval ecosystems. The
human economy was defined as the careful management of resources to
avoid unnecessary expenditure of time and energy on gathering food.
General and specific behaviours were adopted to achieve the maximum
effect for the minimum effort. Artists and scientists, city
builders, and planners for the future, appeared.
The first signs of
this economy that we recognise best began to form in the most
recent Ice Age, within the last hundred, or even fifty thousand
years. That is when we find the elabourate tools that point to
sophisticated forms of hunting: the spear-thrower, for example; the
fully barbed harpoon; and the flint master tools that were needed
to make the hunting tools.
It is clear that
then, as now, inventions may be rare, but they spread fast through
a culture. For example, the Magdalenian hunters of southern Europe
fifteen thousand years ago invented the harpoon. In the early
period of the invention, the Magdalenian harpoons were unbarbed;
then they were barbed with a single row of fish hooks; and at the
end of the period, when the flowering of cave art took place, they
were fully barbed with a double row of hooks. The Magdalenian
hunters decorated their bone tools, and they can be allocated to
precise periods in time and to exact geographical locations by the
refinement of style which they carry. They are, in a true sense,
cultural fossils that recount early stages of the human hunter
economy in an orderly progression.
Evidently the Ice
Ages worked a profound change in day to day life. They forced
hunter gatherers to depend less on plants and more on animals. The
rigours of hunting on the edge of the ice also changed the strategy
of hunting. It appears to have been seen to be less cost- effective
to stalk single animals, however large. The better alternative was
to follow herds and not to lose them - to learn to anticipate, and
in the end to adopt their habits, including their wandering
migrations. This is the adaptation called trans-humance, a mode of
life on the move.
Twenty thousand
years ago communities in all parts of the world they had reached
were foragers and a hunters, whose most advanced technique were to
attach himself to a moving herd. By ten thousand years ago that had
changed, and peoples had begun in some places to domesticate some
animals and to cultivate plants
Early humans
survived the Ice Ages because they had the flexibility of mind to
recognise inventions and to turn them into community property.
There are indications that these stone age peoples devised
economies to barter and thereby gain goods they could not make.
Then there came an equally powerful social revolution that is
usually called the 'agricultural revolution'. The human primate
that had roamed for a million years saw the advantages of ceasing
to be a nomad and become a villager. There was intertwined in this
shift to a settled economy the cultivation of plants and the
interdependent domestication of animals. Beneath this change ran
the crucial creation of a man-dominated environment in its most
important aspect, not physically, but at the level of living things
— plants and animals.
Almost ten thousand
years ago, not long after the beginning of the settled communities
of agriculture, communities in the Middle East began to use copper.
But the use of metals could not become general until there was
found a systematic process for getting them. That is the methods
had to be invented to extract metals from their ores, which we now
know was begun about the year 5000 BC in Persia and Afghanistan. At
that time, green stone malachite was put into a fire and from it
flowed the red metal, copper. They recognised copper because it is
sometimes found in raw lumps on the surface, and in eroded sea
cliffs. In that form it had been hammered and worked for over two
thousand years already.
Metalworkers went on
to make the extraction of minerals the backbone of civilised life.
Suddenly the range of environmental control increased immensely.
Industrial skills are developed for moulding, drawing, hammering,
casting. Copper was made into a tool, an ornament, a vessel; all of
which can be thrown back into the fire and reshaped. Copper has
only one shortcoming. It is a soft metal which will not take an
edge. The invention of bronze as an alloy of copper and tin made a
hard metal with a cutting edge. From then on agriculture and metal
working were harnessed to create the material economies of human
history in rapid succession.
From these early
days of human culture manufactured objects have an aesthetic appeal
that has come down through the ages. This raises questions
about the origins of art in societies of makers where individual
craft objects can be scaled according to their aesthetic
appeal. In this context, a market in art goods can be said to
have emerged very early in human evolution. when it would be
expected to have had a unifying effect on the cultures of both
makers and buyers.
Civilisation itself
-the art of living in cities - is only about six thousand years
old. Particular civilisations grew up wherever the soil was rich
enough to permit farming with a surplus capable of supporting
rulers with an army of clerks. This was usually in the river
valleys where periodic flooding renewed fertility. Each
civilisation thought of itself as a complete world, and was only
dimly aware that others existed.
Associated with the
early bronze age cultures, organised religion appears as a belief
in, worship of, or obedience to a supernatural power or powers
considered to be divine or to have control of human destiny. This
pattern first took shape some 5,000 years ago, and has been in full
vigour for the last three millennia. Some features of the pattern
appear to be shared by all the Indo-European and Semitic
civilisations, while other features are limited to particular
regions. The first feature of the mould which shapes and patterns
what may loosely be described as 'Western' thought, is the belief
that the world, and indeed the entire universe, was the work of a
divine creator. Belief in a creator god leads remorselessly to the
idea that he administers within his Law all that he has created,
requiring the elect to fight the good fight against evil. Their
indestructible souls were thereby judged worthy of eternal bliss
after the final victory. Developments from the Western idea of the
almighty creator as king and lawgiver have been important factors
in the rise of the current European domination of the global
economy.
