The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - читать онлайн

The third needs trap and the consumer society

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. 407-408).

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.

Illustration 4. Simple (“horizontal”) and expanded (“vertical”) self-reproduction of mankind (plotted from data in: Maddison 2007, pp. 376, 382; van Zanden et al. 2014, pp. 42, 65).

The transition from the simple to the expanded mode of self-reproduction took place simultaneously in all three elements—consumption, production and circulation. Although we distinguish these elements of self-reproduction for our analysis, in practice they are inseparable. Consumption mediates production and circulation in the same way that these mediate consumption. Jean Baudrillard (The Consumer Society