Suppose someone asked you: “I want to keep living, like everyone else. But, tell me, what does that mean, ‘to keep living?’”

How equivocal the phrase is: it can mean to go on living, to let living go on, to keep it (living) alive, but also to keep it as one keeps something in the garage or in storage, to keep it secure under lock and key. All these uses and still others are possible. “What does it mean to keep living?” There’s more than one way to answer the question.

Cultural anthropologists and paleoanthropologists suggest humanity has always divided around the question of how best to keep living. Look, they say, for instance, at the indispensable role storage practices played in the development of sedentary, agrarian societies. People really couldn’t settle down in one place until they figured out reliable storage methods for the fruits of their labors. Because they don’t store food in any quantity, hunter-gatherers have to keep moving to better hunting and foraging grounds. The anthropologist James Woodburn has made the distinction between “immediate return” and “delayed return” economies, terms he uses to classify foraging societies that consume their food within a day or two, as if there were no tomorrow, as distinct from social organizations that practice some kind of food storage. Most anthropologists agree that immediate-return societies are typically nonhierarchical and egalitarian, more egalitarian at any rate than delayed-return societies. Which suggests that social inequality couldn’t really get a foothold until people developed a storage capacity.

Marx would no doubt be the last to disagree with that suggestion. He fulminates against the way what he calls primitive accumulation has been written off by other political economists as something as fated as original sin:

This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell o...