Subsistence as the Cornerstone of Human Civilizational Progress: Institutional Logic from Survival Competition to Civilizational Flourishing

This paper proposes and defends a core thesis: subsistence is the cornerstone of human civilizational progress. The history of human evolution is essentially a history of the struggle for subsistence. The root causes of war, corruption, and crime are poverty. From the era of hunting and gathering to agricultural civilization, humanity has long possessed the productive capacity for self-sufficiency. Yet due to predatory power and unequal distribution, humanity has never escaped the oppression of hunger and cold. The civilizational processes of both ancient and modern times, East and West, have repeatedly demonstrated: those peoples who first secured subsistence for all their people had the most advanced civilizations; the prolonged suspension of the subsistence problem has trapped civilizations in the cycle of "rise—prosperity—corruption—collapse." The Chinese nation, though among the earliest to become civilized, was trapped for five thousand years by extractive ruling institutions that kept the population poor and uneducated. Despite possessing the Four Great Inventions, it failed to initiate modern civilization because of the persistent threat of hunger and cold. This paper argues that subsistence is not a productivity problem, but a problem of political will and institutional design. Solving subsistence for all is not charity, but a necessary condition for national economic foundation-building and civilizational transformation. In the age of AI and rapid technological development, humanity possesses for the first time the material foundation to ascend from material civilization to spiritual civilization. The key lies in whether institutional design can transform the fruits of human productivity into the subsistence and well-being of all people. This paper is part of a broader research program—what the author has termed "Free Communism"—which explores the institutional conditions for a transition from material to spiritual civilization. Its companion paper, Where Does the Money Come From? (Chen, 2026a, companion paper) addresses the institutional pathway for financing universal subsistence within this framework. Together, the two papers constitute a complete argument from civilizational premise to policy implementation.