This
is the version I sent to the editor of Nature, Society, and Thought in June of
1988. There are minor editorial changes in the version published as:
"Anthropology for Marxists: Prehistoric Revolutions." Nature,
Society, and Thought: A Journal of Dialectical Materialism 1(4):469-499 (1988).
This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the West Coast
Marxist Scholars Conference held at the University of California, Berkeley,
April 26-29, 1984.
***********************
ANTHROPOLOGY
FOR MARXISTS[1]
There is, of course, plenty of darkness around us now, just
as there was between the two wars.
Those who wish to despair can find cause enough and more in our everyday
life. Marxism does not console
anyone by playing down difficulties, or minimizing the material and moral
darkness which surrounds us human beings today. The difference is only - but in this "only" lies a
whole world - that Marxism has a grasp of the main lines of human development
and recognizes its laws. Those who
have arrived at such knowledge know, in spite of all temporary darkness, both
whence we have come and where we are going. And those who know this find the world changed in their
eyes: they see purposeful development where formerly only a blind, senseless
confusion surrounded them. Where
the philosophy of despair weeps for the collapse of a world and the destruction
of culture, there Marxists watch the birth-pangs of a new world and assist in
mitigating the pains of labor (Lukacs [1948] 1964, 2).
These profoundly true words of Georg Lukacs have particular
relevance in the Age of Reagan. It
is only through the application of scientific socialism that humanity can
emerge from our present darkness.
And it is only through an understanding of scientific socialism that we,
as individuals, can impart to our personal lives a real sense of meaning to
guide our action. But this
understanding can only be achieved and maintained through struggle. Bourgeois forces of darkness are
continually seeking to undermine our science, just as they are continually
attempting to destroy emerging socialist societies in Central America and
throughout the world. Just
as we must defend our revolutionary comrades, so we must defend our revolutionary
science. To do this, we must
adopt a critical perspective and continually re-examine our knowledge in the
light of the latest scientific achievements.
Anthropology provides crucial insights for such a
re-examination. Although other
disciplines provide important analytical tools and data, they focus primarily
on Euro-American bourgeois society and are thus both historically and
culturally limited. Anthropology
alone provides the time depth and cross cultural perspective necessary to
locate bourgeois civilization within the full sweep of the human experience on
earth.
Marx and Engels used anthropological materials to enrich
materialist conception of history in two ways (Bloch 1983, 10). They used anthropology, first, to
demonstrate that the materialist conception of history was universally valid, that
all societies were constructed along the same general principles. Second, they used anthropology to show
that the particular institutions of bourgeois society, such as the state,
private property, and the family, were not universal, but instead were historically
limited responses to the particular material circumstances of the modern epoch.
This latter point is absolutely fundamental and underlies
the entire Marxian enterprise.
Since the institutions of class and gender oppression in bourgeois
society are products of human activity within a particular set of material
conditions, they can be changed by human activity. The struggle for socialism would be doomed to failure if
class and gender oppression were inevitable concomitants of human nature, as, indeed,
is often argued by bourgeois ideologues.
Thus, the cross-cultural data professionally controlled by
anthropologists plays a crucial role in the ideological class struggle (and, it
may be added, gender struggle).
In waging this class struggle, Marxists must utilize the
latest developments in anthropological fact and theory. This essay explores some of these
developments and their relevance for historical materialism.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL RELATIVISM
A century of further anthropological research has caused a
re-evaluation of the work of Morgan and the other nineteenth century
anthropologists regarded so highly by Marx and Engels. The past century has seen spectacular
discoveries in archaeology and human paleontology, more intensive collection
and analysis of ethnographic data, and several interrelated areas of advance in
anthropological theory which must be incorporated into a materialist
understanding of the development of our species.[2]
The establishment of a professional anthropology in the
twentieth century was accompanied by the rejection of the earlier evolutionary
perspective in favor or a relativist one.
No longer were "primitive" cultures seen as stages through
which Europeans had already passed, but rather, each culture was
seen as a separate and unique experiment in human
possibility - as if each were a differently colored, separate piece in a mosaic
of human diversity, to be studied, and valued, in its own right (Keesing 1981,
111-112).
There are three aspects to modern anthropological
relativism: 1. the separation of race and culture and the non-importance of
race; 2. linguistic relativism; and 3. cultural relativism.[3]
The separation of race and culture is fundamental to the
relativist position, as it is to all modern social science. In the modern view, the behavioral
repertoire of any society is determined by what they learn, not any innate
"racial" features. This
does not deny, of course, that humans have biological needs and drives, nor that,
within any human population, there are individual differences in physical and
mental abilities. The modern
formulation does deny that there are any significant differences between human
groups (or "races") in terms of their physical, mental, or moral
needs, abilities and capabilities.
The belief in racial equality was widespread among
Enlightenment philosophers, and is also a key feature of the Marxian
tradition. But prior to modern
anthropology, this was merely a philosophical belief, not a scientifically established
principle. This permitted the rise
of racist ideology in the 19th century when most social thought assumed the
superiority of the white race and the inferiority of colored races (Harris
1968; Drake 1980). Under the
leadership of Franz Boas, modern anthropology discredited this assumption and
provided firm scientific evidence for the modern view that all human
populations are equivalent in key human abilities to acquire, utilize, and
develop cultural information.
There are thus neither "primitive races" nor superior or
inferior "races." In fact,
many modern anthropologists have abandoned the race concept itself as not
useful for understanding human physical variation (see Livingston 1962; Brace
and Metress 1973; Littlefield et al 1982).
Another important principle of modern anthropology is linguistic
relativism. The intensive analysis
of the languages of American Indians and other "primitive" peoples
led to the recognition that all living languages are comparable in their
phonetic and grammatical structure and in their ability to express whatever
ideas are important to the people using the language (Lounsbury 1968). In the words of Sapir,
Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite
number of varieties may be spoken at any desired level of cultural
advance. When it comes to linguistic
form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the headhunting
savage of Assam (Sapir 1921, 219).
There are, in other words, no "primitive"
languages. Languages without
writing are not inferior to written languages, they merely lack this
essentially derivative linguistic form.
The third element of the relativist position is cultural
relativism itself. Cultures must
be understood and valued in their own terms and not as steps on some
evolutionary "ladder."
The family system and religion of a foraging people, for example, must
be understood in terms of the values and life-style of that people, and not
simply as stages in the development of the family system and religion of the
West. The religious ideology of
Australian aborigines, for example, is just as subtle and complex as that of
Christianity or Zen Buddhism:
Australian Aborigines have incredibly subtle,
philosophically challenging mystical cosmologies that posit a spiritual plane
of existence that was prior to the world of sensory experience (in the
"dreamtime") but now lies behind or parallel to it. Mervyn Meggitt (personal communication)
describes how the old Walbiri man who was his spiritual guide eventually told
him that he, Meggitt, had reached his philosophical depth and could follow no
further into the mysteries of the cosmos.
Perhaps no Westerner has ever fully penetrated these Aboriginal
philosophical realms (Keesing 1981, 333).
The essence of anthropological relativism is a rejection of
the naive evolutionism which sees non-Western peoples as inferior to, and
simply representing stages in the development of, modern Western
civilization. Each culture has its
own methods of dealing with the environment, with social relationships, and
with the supernatural, has its own thought patterns and its own belief and
values systems which are different than, but not inferior to, those of the
West. The West clearly has a more
elaborate technological system than India or the Arunta of the Australian
outback, but this was simply because the West valued technology. The religious systems of India are far
more elaborate than the pale monotheism of Christianity, and the Arunta have
elaborated a marriage and kinship system which is truly mind-boggling in its
complexity. To say that the West
is more advanced than India or the Arunta is simply to impose our Western
values on these other cultures.
For the cultural relativist, all cultures are equally advanced and
equally human.
It is unfortunate that the positive insights of cultural
relativism were accompanied by anti-evolutionism, anti-materialism, and
anti-socialism. Cultural
relativists tended to reject and even ridicule the idea that cultures had
evolved. They did not attempt to
understand why particular cultures were patterned in different ways, why
kinship was valued by the Arunta, religion by the Hindu, and technology by the
West. The humanistic concern with
cultural differences was never applied to the Soviet Union.[4]
In spite of these shortcomings, anthropological relativism
is an important perspective, the essence of which is not only fully compatible
with the thought of Marx but also can best be understood in the framework of
historical materialism.[5]
A MATERIALIST SOCIAL TAXONOMY
The past few decades have seen a resurgence of evolutionism
and materialism in Anthropology led by people like V. Gordon Childe ([1936]
1951), Leslie White (1949, 1959), Julian Steward (1955), and Marvin Harris
(1968, 1979, 1985).[6]
A materialist view of social evolution is diagramed in
Figure 1. The major elements of
this view may be summarized as follows.
First, the transition from ape to human, what may be called
the Human Revolution, began about 5,000,000 years ago. By about 40,000 B.P. (Before Present),
humanity reached its present level of physical and mental capabilities. All living humans are thus equally
human and equally far removed from our ape-like ancestor. There are no living peoples
representative of the lower or middle paleolithic stages of human
evolution. Thus, there are no
primitive races or primitive peoples.
Second, although there has been no measurable change in our
human genetic capabilities during the past 40,000 years, there have been
dramatic changes in our culture, leading to dramatic changes in human
life-styles and in the nature of human societies. These changes may be conceptualized as a series of
"revolutions:" the Neolithic Revolution (about 10,000 B.P.) which
involved the development of plant and animal domestication and the emergence of
a settled village-farming way of life; the Urban Revolution (about 5,000 B.P.)
which involved the development of plow agriculture, systems of class rule, and
cities; and the Industrial Revolution (about 1800 A.D.), which involved the
development of machine production using the energy of fossil fuels and the
emergence of a world capitalist system.
Third, living foraging peoples can be used to reconstruct
the probable life-style of the upper paleolithic and mesolithic (from about
40,000 to about 10,000 years ago), but only with some reservations. It must always be borne in mind that
the foragers of the upper paleolithic occupied the choicest environments and
had no contact with horticultural or industrial peoples, while living foragers
and horticulturalists are usually linked into regional systems which include
agriculturalists and state-level societies. Consequently, their economic and social life frequently
cannot be understood except in relation to these regional systems (for further
discussion of this point, see Keesing 1981, 109-120). Further, all peoples studied by ethnographers have been
subject to decades or centuries of Western contact which has dramatically
altered the material conditions of their lives. In many cases this has led to the emergence of novel
cultural complexes which must be understood as products of acculturation (or
culture contact) rather than as survivals of our primitive past (see Leacock
1978; Ruyle 1973b, Keesing 1981; Wolf 1982).
The upper levels of Figure 1 deals with the kinds of
societies that have emerged since the Industrial Revolution. Although these are outside the scope of
the present discussion, a brief explanation is in order.
As Marx demonstrated in his chapters on the primitive
accumulation of capital, the Industrial Revolution was financed by the plunder
of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Although it occured in Europe, the Industrial Revolution was thus a
world-historical event which transformed the social structures not only of
European nations but of the rest of the world as well. The result was the emergence of not one
but two kinds of modern society: Overdeveloping Capitalist Nations in Europe
and North America, which, on the basis of their centuries-long exploitation of
the Third World, have developed the kinds of bourgeois affluence and irrationality
criticized by Marxists and non-Marxists alike; and Underdeveloping Capitalist
Nations, characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and backwardness, resulting from
their continuing exploitation by the Euro-American nations.[7]
The Overdeveloping Capitalist Nations and Underdeveloping
Capitalist Nations are thus interdependent rather than independent and are
locked into a single World Imperialist System. Since 1917, as portions of the formerly colonial or semi-colonial
world have broken free from imperialism, they have embarked on independent
socioeconomic development under the leadership of Communist Parties associated
with the Third International. The
result has been the emergence of Protosocialist Nations, a third type of modern
society and harbingers of a new world system. Irrespective of how one feels about the particular policies
pursued by the leaderships of the Protosocialist Nations, from the standpoint
of social taxonomy they are different from either the Overdeveloping or
Underdeveloping forms of capitalism, and must therefore be seen as a third form
of modern society.[8]
With this background, we may turn to the analysis of the
revolutions of prehistory.
THE HUMAN REVOLUTION
Since the time of Darwin, bourgeois science has generally
accepted that we are evolved from ape-like ancestors. The fossil evidence for human evolution, however, was almost
entirely discovered in the twentieth century and really understood only within
the last two or three decades.
This modern understanding, widely popularized through the bourgeois
media, may be briefly summarized.[9]
Current scientific evidence indicates fairly clearly that
humanity separated from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, between five
and ten million years ago. The
earliest hominids, the australopithecines, with ape-sized brains but
essentially human bodies capable of bipedalism, appear in the fossil record
about 4 million years ago. Stone tools appear by about two million years ago,
followed by the appearance of larger brained hominids, known as Homo
erectus. From that time on, there
is a clear progressive development of stone tools and increasing brain size,
until the appearance of modern Homo sapiens about 40,000 years ago. No significant genetic change in our
human capabilities has occurred since, and all contemporary human populations
are equally human.
Although bourgeois science is providing an increasingly
clear picture of what happened in human evolution, bourgeois ideology is
continuing to confuse the question of why it happened. Orthodox explanations of human origins
run along two lines.
The first stresses the role of mentalistic phenomena, such
as reason, conceptual thought, language, and symbols, in separating man from
beast (leaving open the question of where to place woman). The second stresses the beast in man,
and projects the institutions of capitalist patriarchy back to the very origins
of our species, giving us theories of "Man, the Hunter," who is both
a "killer ape" (Ardrey 1961) and a "family ape" tricked
into exchanging meat for sex by the wily genes of women (Lovejoy 1981).
Considerations of space prevent any serious discussion of
these views here. Marxists should
not have to be reminded, however, that the question of the origin of our
species is as much a political as an academic issue. Our views on the origin of humanity both reflect and
reinforce our views on human nature and on such social questions as aggression,
territoriality, war, private property, the family, and gender relations. Marxists, accordingly, need to view the
evidence on human origins from the perspective of historical materialism.
As human beings, we differ from our primate relatives in
both our bodies and our heads. Our
bodies are unique in that we habitually walk on two legs, thereby freeing our
hands. A complex set of
adaptations in our feet, legs, pelvic girdles, spines, and skulls are all
related to our bipedalism.
We are also unique in our heads, in the size and complexity
of our brains and in what we do with our brains, namely engage in symbolic
thought and communication.
Although one may cite examples of behavior that may be called
"symbolic" among some other species, especially chimps, such behavior
is no more like human symbolizing than the hopping of kangaroos is like the
flight of birds. Only human beings
engage in massive and continuous symbolic thought, to the extent that we may
properly be said to live in a symbolic world of our own creation, just as birds
continuously soar and live in the air (Fried 1967, 5-7,48; Langer 1942).
As intellectuals in bourgeois society, we naturally tend to
believe that this mentalistic characteristic is the distinctive feature of our species. The problem with such a view, however,
is that it provides no explanation of the transition from the thought processes
of apes to the thought processes of human beings. The solution to this problem lies in recognition of a third
distinctive feature of our species, our dependence on social labor.[10]
All human beings are absolutely dependent upon the use
values produced by social labor.
Our food, clothing, houses, and word processors are all produced by
human labor, and, importantly, by other people's labor. Even if, as Marx points out, human life
is reduced to a mere stick, there is still the necessity of producing that
stick. It is this dependence on
social labor that is the distinctive feature of our species, from which the
others, our bipedalism and our mental capabilities, are derived.
The fossil record indicates clearly that our bodies became
human before our heads. The
australopithecines were bipedal millions of years before there was any
significant increase in brain size.
Bipedalism, however, didn't just happen. Bipedalism involves major structural changes in the feet,
legs, pelvic girdle, spine, and skull which are disadvantageous in terms of
structural strength, speed of locomotion, and childbearing. The only advantage of bipedalism
sufficient to overcome its maladaptive qualities is that bipedalism frees the hands
for labor activities. Bourgeois
anthropologists, of course, do not pose their explanations of bipedalism in
quite these terms. The
explanations they do suggest, however, such as tool use and the transport and
sharing of food, all involve aspects of the labor process (Kurland and
Beckerman 1985).
The fully elaborated labor process, including use of tools
and social relations of production (cooperation, sharing) occurs only among
humans. Approximations to the
labor process that we see in other species, from the webs of spiders and hives
of bees to the group hunting of social carnivores and the nest-building and
tool-making of chimps, may be called protolabor.[11]
Our closest animal relatives, the chimps, exhibit several
sorts of protolabor in their life processes: nest-building, tool-making, group
hunting, and sharing of meat. But,
although the total life process of chimps appears to include all of the aspects
of the fully elaborated human labor process, they are not all included in any
single process among chimps. Chimp
tool-making is an individual activity; chimp hunting occurs without tools. Further, and most importantly,
protolabor among chimps is an incidental part of their total life process. Chimps, like people, must eat, but most
of their food comes from individual browsing. Food obtained through protolabor accounts for only a small
portion of their total caloric intake.
Consequently, the protolabor of chimps does not generate significant
selective pressures on the gene pool of the chimp population.
Among humans, by contrast, the situation is quite
different. Nearly all the food
eaten by humans, in even the simplest foraging societies, is produced by social
labor and shared according to socially established rules. This dependence on social production
generates powerful selective pressures which have transformed our ape-like
ancestors into human beings.
There are thus clear differences in the life processes of
apes and humans. Among apes,
typically, there is direct, individual appropriation of naturally-occurring use
values. Apes simply browse, eating
food where they find it. All
humans, by contrast, from the simplest foraging society to the most complex
industrial civilization, consume use values which have been produced by social
labor. This difference is
absolute. All human societies are
dependent upon a definite mode of production. None of the non-human primates exhibit anything more than
the most rudimentary productive processes.
The Human Revolution, then, was initiated when apes began to
produce their means of subsistence.
This in turn produced Homo faber, a
small-brained human whose body was already adapted to social labor in a
rudimentary foraging mode of production.[12] The processes at work may be briefly
summarized.
About ten million years ago, in Africa and probably throughout
the Old World tropics, there were populations of apes similar to modern
chimpanzees in their behavioral way of life. These apes, like modern chimpanzees, were well adapted to a
semi-terrestrial life on the forest floor characterized by a frugiverous diet,
social life in troops of 10 to 20 individuals, dependence on trees for nesting,
and a certain degree of tool use (nest making, use of sticks and stones for
defense and other purposes). About
five million years ago, some of these ape populations moved out of the forest
and onto the open plains, a shift which required changes in their behavioral
way of life. This shift from the
forest floor to the open plains initiated the Human Revolution. Life on the open plains required an
increased degree of social cooperation and increased use of tools, in short,
dependence on social production.
Dependence on social labor meant, first of all, that the
hands must be free to serve as organs of labor rather than of locomotion. Hence, selective pressures favored
bipedalism: the human foot became a specialized organ of locomotion and the
hand a specialized organ of labor.
The Human Revolution, then, was accomplished by apes who
transformed their browsing existence into foraging, the earliest mode of
production of our species, and thereby transformed themselves into the earliest
humans, Homo faber. As Homo faber developed her forces of social production, so too did she
evolve toward Homo sapiens. The earliest
instruments of production were crude sticks for digging and hunting and
containers for carrying seeds and roots.
Stone tools appear about two million years ago with larger-brained
humans, and fire somewhat later.
Increasingly complex stone tools are found with increasingly
large-brained fossils. Finally,
with what Gilman (1984) calls the "Upper Paleolithic Revolution,"
modern Homo sapiens appear with elaborate tool
kits and fully human cultural complexes.
The archaeological and paleontological record thus provides clear
evidence of the dialectical relationship between the developing forces of
social production and increasing brain size.
Just as the labor energy expended by modern wage slaves
becomes embodied in commodities, so the labor energy that Homo faber expended in producing use values (meat, fruit, nuts, roots,
etc.) became embodied in those use values. And in consuming those use values, Homo faber was consuming a definite amount of labor energy, her own and
that of other members of the group who also participate in production. The energy expended in production, and
embodied in use values, thus flows from producer to consumer. The ensemble of reciprocal energy flows
in the Homo faber commune, in which all members were
equally both producers and consumers, thus formed the essential thermodynamic
substratum of Homo faber existence, just
as it has for all subsequent human existence.[13]
We do not know when our human mental capabilities for
language and religion first appeared, since they leave few traces in the
archaeological and paleontological record. It seems clear, however, that these mental abilities are
also related to our human dependence on labor. Dependence on social labor required a more powerful system
of communication, and thereby favored the development of language. First labor, and then alongside with
it, language, created additional selective pressures favoring greater mental
abilities and hence, larger brains.
These improved mental abilities in turn permitted the development of
more powerful productive systems and more powerful communication systems which
in turn demanded still greater mental abilities. Finally, magico-religious belief systems emerged on the base
developed by labor and language (Ruyle 1976).
Foraging is by no means a crude or parasitic way of life, as
is sometimes supposed. In fact,
foraging requires extensive knowledge of the environment and natural process
and demanding skills. The
abilities required to make and use bows and arrows are the same as those
required to make and operate spaceships.
Further, foraging requires a high degree of cooperation and sharing
between the men and women of society.
Our human abilities, both technological and social, were formed during
millions of years of adaptation to the foraging mode of production which was
technologically progressive for most of human existence.
By about 40,000 years ago, then, the Human Revolution was
complete. Our ancestors had made
the transition from an ape way of life in the forest to a human mode of
production, foraging. Further
transitions, the Neolithic, Urban, and Industrial Revolutions, have changed our
modes of production and consequently our life-styles and the kinds of societies
we live in, but they have not altered our basic human nature.
In concluding this discussion of the Human Revolution,
certain points may be stressed.
First, the paleontological record confirms Marx and Engels'
insight that people make themselves - the evolution of humanity was a process
of self-creation through social production. The labor theory here is in conformity with, confirms, and
extends the basic postulate of historical materialism, that the mode of
production in real life determines the consciousness of humans, rather than
vice-versa. Human consciousness
itself was created by our dependence on social production.
Second, foraging formed the base for a primitive communist
social order. Bourgeois
anthropology has come to acknowledge that our ancestors were apes but it
refuses to consider that they were communists. But communists they were, and it is important for us to bear
in mind that not only our physical bodies, but our mental abilities and moral
sensibilities were formed through millions of years of adaptation to a
communist social order.
Third, all living humans are equally far removed from our
ape-like ancestors and are equally human.
There are no "primitive" races, and no "primitive"
languages, family patterns, or religions.
The technology of foraging peoples may be less powerful than ours, but
it endured and served humanity well for millions of years, which is more than
we can say for our system of industrial capitalism. There are, indeed, those who would say that the invention of
agriculture was humanity's "greatest mistake" (Diamond 1987).
Finally, just as the instruments of class oppression were
absent from foraging society, so too was gender oppression undeveloped. Instead, relations between the sexes
were characterized by mutual interdependence and complementarity, with women
controlling their own productive and reproductive abilities.[14]
Humanity, then, evolved under conditions of liberty,
equality, and solidarity in the foraging commune. These conditions were transformed into male chauvinism and
oppression in the Neolithic and Urban Revolutions.
THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION
By about 15,000 years ago, foraging was no longer meeting
the needs of humanity. The precise
reasons for this are not entirely clear, but the most plausible explanation
lies in what Cohen calls the "food crisis of prehistory" (M. Cohen 1977). Population growth throughout the
paleolithic, Cohen argues, was slow but real, and humanity had expanded
throughout the habitable earth, into the Americas and Australia as well as the
Afro-Euro-Asiatic land mass. The
nomadic foraging of the paleolithic evolved into a more sedentary foraging of
the mesolithic. Flannery (1969,
1974) calls this the "Broad Spectrum Revolution" because humans began
utilizing a broader range of environmental resources. Human populations began more intensive utilization of local
environments including maritime and riverine resources such as fish, marine
mammals, and shellfish. Such
mesolithic foraging permitted larger populations which settled into mesolithic
villages. But although fishing and
shellfishing temporarily solved the food crisis, population was still
limited. Fishing societies
utilized a new food resource, but they did not control the reproduction of that
resource.
Other populations began utilizing wild grains (in Southwest
Asia and Mesoamerica) and yams and root plants (in Southeast Asia). It was out of these new relationships
between the human population and natural biota that the Neolithic Revolution
emerged.[15] Human populations began to control the
reproduction of the wild foods upon which they depended, and through this
process, the wild foods became domesticated. A new mode of production emerged, horticulture, which was
capable of almost unlimited expansion.
The horticultural mode of production was to have
revolutionary consequences. It did
not, as far as well can tell, reduce human toil, for this was not particularly
onerous under a foraging mode of production (Sahlins 1968). Neither did it contribute to the
biological well being of members of the human population, for there is no
evidence to suggest that people were healthier or lived longer. Nor is there any reason to believe that
it increased human happiness or the fulfillment of the human potential, for
foragers are as fully human as horticultural peoples. The advantage of horticulture, rather, is that it permitted
the primitive commune to harness more calories from a given area of land. Although this solved the prehistoric
food crisis, it led to population increase and new crises in the form of
competition for land and wealth.
The revolutionary feature of the new horticultural mode of
production was that it formed the base for a settled village-farming way of
life which permitted the accumulation of wealth. New wants and new technologies for satisfying these wants
appeared - pottery, weaving, architecture - and the wealth associated with
neolithic populations far exceeds that of foragers.
But the Neolithic Revolution did more than make human
populations wealthier. It
radically transformed the conditions of life of humanity. The possibility of accumulation
stimulated what Marx called "the most violent, mean and malignant passions
of the human breast, the Furies of private interest" ([1867] 1965,
10). The passions for wealth, for
power, for privilege, in a word, human greed, which found little scope for
expression under the nomadic conditions of the foraging commune, found fertile
soil in the settled conditions of horticultural society. The Lenski and Lenski speak of an
"ethical regression" associated with the transition to settled
horticultural society:
it is one of the great ironies of evolution that progress in
the technological and social organizational spheres is often linked with
ethical regress. The emergence of horticultural
societies provides several striking examples. Some of the most shocking, by the standards of modern
industrial societies, are the increased head hunting, scalp taking,
cannibalism, human sacrifice, and slavery, all of which are much more common in
the technologically and organizationally progressive horticultural societies
than in the more backward hunting and gathering societies.
Another development that can be
regarded as ethical regression is the decline in the practice of sharing and
the growing acceptance of economic and others kinds of inequality (Lenski and
Lenski 1978, 176).
Although Lenski and Lenski and most bourgeois
anthropologists attribute this increase in warfare to competition for land, it
seems clear that the desire for plunder, women, and slaves were also important
(Ruyle 1986).
Horticulture, then, created new conditions which led to the
dissolution of the primitive commune.
It did not happen at once.
In some cases primitive communism persisted in horticultural
society. The Iroquois, usually
considered the type example of primitive communism, were a horticultural
people. Nonetheless, in some cases
at least, it did happen. Some men
developed techniques for exploiting the labor of others, and in this way began
to break up the primitive commune and construct the earliest systems of class
rule.
This unleashing of the "Furies of private
interest" was the force that tore asunder the primitive commune and led to
the emergence of the predatory ruling classes which have dominated human
history.[16] The liberty, equality, and solidarity
of the primitive commune were transformed into the male chauvinism, oppression,
and class struggles of civilization in the Urban Revolution.
THE URBAN REVOLUTION
Bourgeois anthropology sees the Urban Revolution as merely
the emergence of a new kind of society, civilization, with distinctive cultural
features: cities, centralized state organization, writing, full-time
specialization in arts of crafts, and so on. Underlying the Urban Revolution, however, was a structural
transformation: the overthrow of the primitive commune and the establishment of
patriarchy and class rule. This
transformation may be understood in thermodynamic terms.
As discussed above, humans are interdependent in a way that
sets them off from all other primates and we may speak of a thermodynamic
substratum underlying human society.
People pump energy into this substratum when they produce use values;
they withdraw energy from it when they consume those use values. It is possible to measure this energy,
however rough and approximate such measurement may be. If I spend four hours digging up,
cleaning, and cooking yams, there are four hours of my labor energy embodied in
those yams. When I eat them, I am
consuming, in addition to the caloric energy of the yams, four hours of labor
energy.
If someone else eats the yams, they are consuming four hours
of my labor energy, and we can speak of energy flowing from producer to
consumer. The energy flows between
members of a population, between groups, and between classes, are an
indispensable element of human social life. In measuring and analyzing the social thermodynamics of a
human population, we are analyzing "the real foundation, on which rises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness" (Marx [1859] 1981, 3).
Viewed thermodynamically, human societies fall into two
great categories.
On the one hand, there are thermodynamic systems,
represented by the primitive communism of foragers and tribal horticulturists,
in which 1. all members of the population participate, more or less equally, in
production through the expenditure of their own labor energy for most if not
all of their lives, and 2. all members of the population have more or less
equal access to the social product and consume more or less equal amounts of
labor energy through their lives.
On the other hand, there are thermodynamic systems,
represented in incipient form by chiefdoms and in developed form by historic
and contemporary civilizations, in which some members of the population 1. do
not directly participate in production but nevertheless, 2. consume labor
energy at a much higher rate than the remainder of the population. Such systems are systems of class rule,
and the labor energy consumed by the ruling class is the surplus. The surplus comes from the direct
producers who expend more energy in production than they consume.
The flow of energy from the direct producers to the ruling
class occurs because members of the ruling class are expending energy into a
mode of exploitation, an institutionalized system of instrumental techniques of
exploitation, violence, and thought control whose purpose is to direct the flow
of social energy to the ruling class.
This mode of exploitation is the "mode of production" of the
ruling class.
A mode of exploitation has three sets of components (the
analysis here is of precapitalist modes of exploitation; modern modes of
exploitation require a somewhat different analysis). First of all, there are exploitative techniques, the precise
instrumentalities through which surplus is pumped out of the direct producers
and into the ruling class: simple plunder, slavery, taxation, corvee, rent,
managerial exploitation, and various forms of market exchange, including wage
labor. Second, there is the State,
which monopolizes legitimate violence and is thereby able to physically coerce
the exploited classes. Third,
there is the Church, which monopolizes access to the sacred and supernatural
and is thereby able to control the minds of the subordinate population, keeping
them obedient and docile by legitimizing the status quo and threatening
supernatural sanctions for misbehavior.
The State and the Church, then, form twin agencies of oppression whose
purpose is to support and legitimate the differentials of wealth and privilege
resulting from ruling class exploitation.
These elements, or functions, of the mode of exploitation
are combined in different ways by different ruling classes. The State and the Church, for example,
may be institutionalized separately, as in medieval Europe and Japan, or they
may be combined into a single unitary institution, as in many bronze age
civilizations.[17]
The mode of exploitation is the instrumentality through
which a predator-prey relationship is established within the human species in
which the stakes are human labor energy rather than the energy locked up in
animal flesh. The differentials of
wealth, privilege, and prestige which characterized all historic civilizations
are created by this predatory relationship between ruler and ruled.
Once this predatory relationship is established, the system
of exploitation become larger and more complex, with a complex division of
labor developing not only in the sphere of production (between agricultural
workers and workers in the industrial arts, metallurgy, textiles, pottery,
etc.) but also in the sphere of exploitation (warriors, priests, scribes,
etc.). The result is an
elaboration of occupations and statuses among the different kinds of producers,
exploiters, parasitic groups, and so on.
In addition to the ruling class itself, there are typically privileged
retainer classes (officials, scribes, priests), various divisions within the
producing class (between peasants and artisans and between rich and poor
peasants, for example), and finally an underclass (composed of outcastes,
outcasts, beggars, and thieves), which may not be directly exploited (since no
surplus is extracted from them) but which nonetheless plays an important role
the the overall system of exploitation.
The surface structure of developed class societies may thus
be quite complex, and the fundamental class opposition between ruler and ruled
is likely to be overlaid and concealed by a more diversified arrangement of
classes attached to the flow of social energy in a variety of ways. This complexity of surface structure,
however, does not negate the underlying predatory relationship between rulers
and ruled.
Two additional points need to be made. The first is that exploitation
necessarily generates resistance so that class rule is invariably accompanied
by class struggle. The history of
civilization, as Marx correctly pointed out, is the history of class
struggle. Class struggle, together
with the progressive development of the forces of social production, have been
the motive forces of cultural evolution during the period of historic civilizations.
The second is that systems of class rule are invariably
patriarchal. The oppressive
agencies of State and Church are typically staffed by men, and men are both the
prime movers and primary beneficiaries of the system of exploitation. Women, typically, are defined by their
relationship to men, and their place in the system is determined by their
relationship to their fathers, husbands, and sons. Women are also typically reduced to an inferior position in
class societies. But just as class
oppression breeds class struggle (the history of which was largely hidden
before the birth of Marxism), so gender oppression breeds gender struggle (the
history of which has been largely hidden until the emergence of feminism, see,
e.g. Carroll 1976).
As class society develops, so does patriarchy. Men and women develop different,
complementary maximizing strategies within the overall system of inequality.
It was men, not women, that took advantage of the predatory
opportunities opened up by the Neolithic Revolution. Men were in a sense preadapted for this by their hunting
specialization which involved weapons and traveling. Women no doubt formed the earliest exploited group as the
women of defeated groups were enslaved or taken as "wives" (Ruyle
1986).
As ambitious men developed the techniques of exploitation,
they became capable of extracting more surplus than any one individual could
consume. The predatory,
patriarchal male acquired wives and retainers to help him, in a Veblenesque
manner, consume his surplus. This,
of course, gave him greater power over them. Less ambitious men, or men not so well endowed for
exploitation or less well placed by birth, either attached themselves to ruling
males as a retainers or lived as exploited direct producers.
Ambitious women may attempt to pursue male predatory
activities, and in rare cases may be successful. More commonly, women support and encourage men in their
predatory activities. In this
situation, women develop techniques of manipulation in an effort to achieve indirectly,
through men, what is denied to them directly through patriarchy. For the most part, however, women are
reduced to supporting their men at whatever level they may be in the
exploitative system.
Such were the origins of patriarchy and class rule. They were brought into being by the
same forces that presently maintain them: the self-interest of the male
rulers. Patriarchy and class rule
began when some men discovered that they could pursue their interests at the
expense of others. The preconditions
for this discovery was the transition to a settled way of life based on
horticulture, but this was not its cause.
Its cause lies in the greed and avarice of men.
Developed class societies first appear in Mesopotamia by
3000 B.C., slightly later in Egypt and then in the Indus Valley and North
China. Still later, after about
1500 B.C., systems of class rule begin to develop independently in the New
World. The new ruling classes had
cities built and developed writing to record their activities and we begin the
period of human history. Following
McNeil (1965), the history of class society, or civilization, may be divided
into three eras: an era of Middle Eastern dominance, down to about 500 B.C.,
when the civilizations of the Middle East were clearly the most advanced, but
peripheral civilizations were developing in the mediterranean region, India,
and China; an era of Eurasian Cultural Balance, from about 500 B.C. to 1500
A.D., when there was a rough balance between the civilizations of the Middle
East, China, India, and Mediterranean Europe; and finally the rise of the West,
after 1500 A.D., when the modern imperialist world system was constructed by
the rising European bourgeoisie.
This modern imperialist system cut short the independent development of
patriarchal class rule by Native American men in Mesoamerica and Peru.
The main line of cultural advance down to 1500 A.D., then,
was in the agrarian civilizations of Asia, not Europe. This point is worth stressing in view
of the fact that Marx lumped these societies together under the rubric of the
"Asiatic Mode of Production," and regarded them as static and
unchanging. In this, he was simply
reflecting a common Nineteenth Century prejudice which has become outmoded with
the growth of our understanding of Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern
history. Contemporary Marxists
would be well advised to pay more attention to the actual history of Asiatic
societies and less to trying to figure out what Marx really meant in his
scattered remarks on the Asiatic Mode of Production (cf. Cameron 1985,
35-65). The ethnocentrism of
regarding the Roman Empire and feudal Europe as the center of human development
during the precapitalist period may be seen by listing some of the achievements
of Chinese civilization: paper and paper money, printing, civil service
examinations and bureaucracy, the compass, and gunpowder. Modern bourgeois civilization would be
impossible without these contributions, just as it would be impossible without
the Afro-Asian achievements of agriculture, writing, and decimal
arithmetic. For most of human
history, Europe, not Asia, was a cultural backwater.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As Lukacs remarked in our opening quote, a scientific
knowledge of whence we have come can help us guard against the philosophy of
despair and guide our action in assisting the birth of a new world. Anthropology has given us an
increasingly clear picture of whence we have come. We have seen that there were important revolutions in the
prehistory of our species, revolutions that transformed the material conditions
of life for our species.
We are now living through a revolution of similar
importance. The Industrial
Revolution, led by the modern bourgeoisie, has created new forces of social
production undreamt of even in Marx's time. These new forces give us the power to banish the misery,
hunger, and want that have been the lot for so many people throughout human
history and with them, exploitation and oppression. Yet the philosophy of despair tells us that this is
impossible. Exploitation,
oppression, and misery, we are told, will continue to be the lot of men and
women.
But Anthropology shows clearly that inequality,
exploitation, oppression, and male chauvinism are not universal features of
human social life, but instead are products of human action within a particular
set of material conditions.
Today, material conditions are changed and we are now in a
position where the struggle to eliminate both patriarchy and class rule shows
every promise of success. It must
be recalled that the ruling classes have been perfecting their systems of
exploitation and oppression for thousands of years. We socialists have only had about a century to construct new
systems to eliminate poverty and oppression. There are no guarantees of success, but there are good
reasons to believe that both evolution and revolution are on our side. Objective appraisals of existing
socialist nations have indicated that through revolution oppressed people can
reduce inequality and improve their material and social well being, and that
they can do so with an increase in democracy and political freedom (Cereseto
1982; Cereseto and Waitzkin 1986; Szymanski 1979, 1984). In short, revolution is good for human
beings, and the oppression, inequality, and alienation of class rule can be
reduced and, in time, eliminated.
As Lewis Henry Morgan observed,
The time which has passed away since civilization began is
but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of
the ages yet to come. The dissolution
of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is
the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of
self-destruction. Democracy in
government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and
universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which
experience, intelligence, and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form,
of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes ([1877] 1963,
467).
This higher
plane of society, socialism, will not appear automatically. Just as patriarchal systems of class
rule were developed by the conscious activity of men, so the overthrow of class
and gender oppression will be the result of the conscious activity of working
class men and women. By better
understanding the prehistoric revolutions through which primitive communism was
overthrown and patriarchal class rule was constructed, perhaps we can participate
more fully in our present revolution, and assist in the construction of a new
socialist system which will prevent the re-emergence of male chauvinism,
exploitation, and oppression.
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[1] This
is a revised version of a paper presented at the West Coast Marxist Scholars
Conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, April 26-29,
1984. I would like to thank those
who commented on earlier drafts.
[2] A
full assessment of the anthropological views of Marx and Engels is out of the
question here; for critical evaluations of Engels' work, see Aaby 1977; Gough
1977; Harris 1968; Lane 1976; Leacock 1972; Ruyle 1986; Sacks 1976; Schein and
Lopate 1972). Good summaries of
modern views on prehistory are widely available in both introductory
Anthropology textbooks (particularly recommended are Harris 1985; Keesing 1981;
Kottak 1982) and in texts on Prehistory (Fagan 1983; Wenke 1985). Also useful is the introductory
Sociology text by Lenski and Lenski (1978) which uses anthropological data
extensively. For a review of
prehistory by a Marxist, see Smith (1976). For Marxists, the best history of Anthropology is that of
Harris (1968), but also see Brew
(1968) and Honigmann (1976).
The rethinking of
Marxism must involve more than simply changing a few dates in prehistory. The criticisms that Marxism is
gender-blind, color-blind, and environmentally naive must be taken seriously. The relationship between Marxism and
feminism, for example, has been variously termed a "curious
courtship" (Weinbaum 1978), an "unhappy marriage" (Hartmann
1981), and an "impossible marriage" (Burnham and Louie 1985). For Third World critiques of Marxism,
see Means (1980) and Karenga (1983).
For critiques from the standpoint of Liberation Theology, see McGovern
(1980) and Miranda (1978). Good
summaries of the competing models within Marxism and of the feminist and Green
critiques may be found in Barratt Brown (1985). For an excellent modern statement of Marxism in light of
modern data and critiques, while retaining a basically pro-Soviet orientation,
see Cameron (1985).
[3] The
anthropological concept of culture is much broader than what most Marxists
understand by the term. For most
American anthropologists (the British and French use the term more narrowly),
culture is the central organizing concept of our discipline. As defined by Tylor in 1871:
Culture or
Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (Tylor 1871, 1).
For anthropologists,
culture thus includes the mode of production as well as legal and political
superstructures and forms of consciousness (as well as unconsciousness and
subconsciousness). Although this
may seem unnecessarily and unworkably broad, the culture concept underscores
the fact that all of these constitute learned, as opposed to genetically
determined, behavior and that they form parts of a holistic system in which
each part is related to all others.
For further discussion, see Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952), White (1954),
Harris (1964), and Worsley (1981).
[4] For
discussions of the anti-evolutionary and anti-materialist aspects of cultural
relativism, see White (1949, 1959) and Harris (1968, 1979). On socialism, I know of no textbooks
nor any journal articles within anthropology that attempt to apply the
perspective of cultural relativism to the Soviet Union. Socialism is clearly a cultural
construct (in the anthropological sense), however, and for a discipline that
claims to study "the full range of cultures, past and present"
(Keesing 1981, 4), this omission is curious.
The concept of
cultural relativism has been a vital part of the anthropological critique of
naive ideas about "primitive" and "backward" peoples which
served to legitimate early forms of colonialism and imperialism. It would seem that a central task of
contemporary anthropology would be the criticism of equally naive ideas of
communism as a totalitarian "Evil Empire" which serve to legitimate
contemporary U.S. imperialism. But
when I suggest this to my colleagues (e.g., Ruyle 1977, 1983), I am treated
with polite silence, as if I were insane.
[5] Marxists,
of course, are quite aware that human nature is always modified by definite
historical circumstances, as in Marx's criticism of Bentham (Marx [1867] 1965,
609-610). Where cultural
relativism fails is in not inquiring into the reasons why the Arunta elaborated
kinship and the Hindu religion. To
paraphrase Marx, the Arunta could not live on kinship nor the Hindu on
religion. On the contrary, it is
the mode of production that explains why here kinship and there religion
becomes the focus of social life (Marx [1867] 1965, 82). Harris makes a similar point:
The central theme in Patterns
of Culture is simply that each culture "selects" or
"chooses" from the infinite variety of behavioral possibilities a
limited segment which sometimes conforms to a configuration and sometimes does
not. . . . One searches in vain
through Patterns of Culture for any explanation. There is not even the saving grace of
earlier diffusionistic "explanations" by which Apollonian patterns
might be traced back to an originating tribe (the Greeks?). All that we get by way of accounting
for the cultural differences and similarities is the myth of the Digger
Indians: "God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup
they drank their life. . . . They
all dipped in the water but their cups were different" (Harris 1968, 403,
citing Benedict 1934).
For all its
shortcomings in terms of scientific explanation, cultural relativism is an
important methodological tool.
Before a cultural pattern can be scientifically explained, it must be
adequate described and understood in its own terms. Perhaps this principle could be useful in some of the
sectarian debates between political lines within the working class movement.
[6] The
explanatory frameworks developed within anthropology by cultural materialists
(e.g. Y. Cohen 1974; Harris 1979; Lenski and Lenski 1978; Ruyle 1973a) are as
useful as much of the work by Marxists of a structural orientation (see Ruyle
1987). Where the cultural
materialists err, I believe, is in ignoring exploitation and the class struggle
(see Ruyle 1975, 1987).
[7] The
concept of overdevelopment is an important one. Too frequently, even Marxists err in regarding the
"advanced" capitalist nations as the norm by which
"primitive" and "backward" societies are judged, the sun
around which they revolve. We
need, as Clastres suggests, a copernican revolution: "ethnology until now
has let primitive cultures revolve around Western civilization in a centripetal
motion, so to speak. . . . It is
time to change suns, time to move on" ([1974] 1977, 17). The concept of overdevelopment provides
a framework for the incorporation of the Green and Third World critiques into
the corpus of historical materialism.
[8] The
concept of protosocialism is also important, in two ways. First, it is important to distinguish
between the socialist future envisioned by Marx and the working class movement
prior to the 1920s and what some have termed "existing
socialism". Second, it is
important to understand that, just as social change within the world capitalist
system is multilineal rather than unilineal, so it is essential to understand
that social change out of the world capitalism system into socialism will also
be multilineal. Revolutions in the
Overdeveloping Capitalist Nations will follow a different path from that
followed by revolutions in the Underdeveloping Capitalist Nations, simply
because they will face markedly different material conditions. For fuller discussion of the concept of
protosocialism, see Ruyle (1988).
[9] Perhaps
the best source, which includes citations to the recent literature, is Poirier
(1987), also useful are the works by Campbell (1982) and Wolpoff (1980).
[10] This
was recognized by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology over a decade before Darwin published Origin of Species:
Men can be
distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you
like. They themselves begin to
distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their
means of subsistence ([1846] 1939, 7).
Engels amplified this
view in the light of the then-existing scientific evidence in his 1876 essay,
"On the Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man,"
First labor, after it
and then with it, speech - these were the two most essential stimuli under the
influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man
(Engels [1876] 1972, 255).
Although many of the
details in Engels' essay need to be modified, the evidence accumulated during
the past century, and especially since WWII, have confirmed the broad outlines
of Engels' labor theory of human origins
(Ruyle 1976; Woolfson 1982).
[11] To
clarify this distinction, it is necessary to examine more closely the human
labor process. As Marx explains,
We pre-suppose labour
in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a
weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her
cells. But what distinguishes the
worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his
structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we
get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
commencement.... The elementary
factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work
itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments.... No sooner does labour undergo the least
development, than it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone
implements and weapons. In the
earliest period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have
been bred for the purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labour,
play the chief part as instruments of labour along with specially prepared stones,
wood, bones, and shells. The use
and fabrication of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among
certain species of animals, is specifically characteristic of the human
labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a tool-making
animal. Relics of bygone
instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of
extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of
extinct species of animals. It is
not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that
enables us to distinguish different economic epochs (Marx [1867] 1965,
179-180).
Marx uses a
mentalistic feature ("the architect raises his structure in the
imagination") to distinguish between human production and that of bees or
spiders. A more modern formulation
would stress that bee production is based on genetically-encoded information
while human production is based on culturally-learned information. This is significant because bees cannot
produce anything other than that which their genes tell them to produce, while
humans have, in the course of their evolutionary development, learned to
produce a wide variety of increasingly complex use values.
Marx's mentalistic
feature, however, does not serve to distinguish human production from the nest
building or tool-making behavior of chimps, who also appear to exhibit
foresight and imagination (Kohler [1916] 1926; Van-Lawick-Goodall 1971, 36-37;
Poirier 1974, 335-337). It is
possible, however, to distinguish apes and humans in a purely materialist
manner. First, the human labor
process is far more complex than anything seen among apes; and second, humans
are completely dependent upon social production, while apes are not. Let me examine each of these more
closely.
In order to see more
clearly the differences between the human labor process and the life processes
of other creatures, we must elaborate on Marx's discussion. The human labor process includes:
1. the
personal activity of human beings, i.e. work itself, or the expenditure of
human energy;
2. the
subject of that work, which is transformed through human activity;
3. the
instruments of labor, or tools;
4. the
conception of what is to be produced, which is a cultural construct learned by
humans as members of society;
5. the
social relations of production, including both cooperation in the productive
process and sharing of the product according to established social conventions;
and
6. the
separation, both spatial and temporal, of production and consumption.
This fully elaborated labor process
occurs only among humans, but numerous other species exhibit some, but not all,
of these features. Such
approximations to the human labor process may be termed protolabor. Protolabor is quite common in the
animal world, from the nest of birds and stored nuts of squirrels to the group
hunting of lions and hyenas and the tool using of chimpanzees.
[12] Homo
faber here includes the various "species" of Australopithecus (afarensis,
africanus, robustus, and boisei) and pre-sapiens Homo (habilis and erectus).
Paleoanthropologists do not agree on the taxonomy of early hominids (for
discussion of the major contending views, see Boaz 1983; Skelton, McHenry, and
Drawhorn 1986). It is beyond the
scope of this paper to enter into an extended discussion of bourgeois
paleoanthropology. It must be
noted, however, that the entire terminological apparatus which
paleoanthropologists use to discuss early hominids is outmoded and
unscientific. A further problem
lies in the pecuniary politics of paleoanthropology. Finding a new species is more prestigious than merely
finding more bones of already named species, and prestige means research
grants. Thus Richard Leakey's
latest find, KNM-WT 17000, has been heralded as overturning "all previous
notions of the course of early hominid evolution.... No better argument can be made to support the time, trouble,
and cost of field work than this new skull" (Shipman 1986, 89,93). It is a remarkable find, but it does not overturn any of the
discussion in the body of this paper.
A final consideration
is that paleoanthropologists still wear class blinders (as well as gender
blinders, see Slocum 1975) which prevents their understanding the importance of
social labor. As Engels pointed out,
scientists continue to be influenced by
that idealistic world
outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has
dominated men's minds. It still
rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists
of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin
of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognize the part
that has been played by labor (Engels [1876] 1972, 259).
[13] My use
of the term thermodynamic may cause some raised eyebrows, particularly among
physical scientists, as we are clearly not talking about the joules and
calories of classical thermodynamics.
A number of scientists have attempted to apply the concepts of
thermodynamics to living systems in general and human societies in particular
(for reviews of such attempts, see Ruyle 1977a; White 1959), and my own usage
is inspired by White's discussion of culture "as a thermodynamic
system" (1959:38-40). I have
used both "ethnoenergetics" (Ruyle 1973b, 1977a) and "social thermodynamics"
(Ruyle 1987) to refer to my efforts to generalize Marx's labor theory of value
to non-capitalist societies. I
would be happy to consider more felicitious terminology for what I consider an
important analytical tool and a useful addition to historical materialism.
[14]
Although the absence of class oppression among foragers is clear, the
question of gender oppression is more complex. Leacock has presented abundant ethnographic documentation
for her egalitarian model of gender roles in foraging societies, and suggested
that evidence to the contrary is best explained as due either to acculturation
or viricentrism among ethnographers, or both (1972, 1975, 1977, 1978). But others suggest that women are universally
subordinate, in some degree, in all societies, including foraging societies (De
Beauvoir [1949] 1972; Firestone 1971; Gough 1975; Harris 1977; Ortner 1974;
Rosaldo 1974). Even those who take
this latter view, however, acknowledge that women's oppression is less among
foragers than in class society.
Gough, for example, stresses that:
In general in hunting
societies, however, women are less subordinated in certain crucial respects
than they are in most, if not all, of the archaic states, or even in some
capitalist nations. These respects
include men's ability to deny women their sexuality or force it upon them; to
command or exploit their produce; to control or rob them of their children; to
confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in
male transaction; to cramp their creativeness; or to withhold from them large
segments of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments (1975, 69-70; also
see Briffault 1931, 207-208; Fleur-Lobban 1979, 347).
To the best of my
knowledge, no one has suggested that patriarchal institutions comparable to
those of historic civilizations existed in foraging societies, although male
chauvinism does characterize some village societies (such as the
Yanomamo). Rather, gender roles
among foragers are characterized by free and equal access to strategic
resources and the social product by "the complementarity and
interdependence of male and female roles" (Caufield 1985, 97).
[15]
Although most archaeologists believe that plant domestication developed
in the New World completely independently of the Old, a few criticize this view
and present challenging arguments for diffusion from the Old World (see Carter
1977; Lathrap 1977). Further,
although it seems reasonable that horticulture arose from the gathering
activities of women, there is little ethnographic or archaeological support for
this view (Pryor 1986, 886-88).
[16] There
is a vein in Marxist thought that sees class relations as growing out of
production and that would argue that my view here is sheer idealism (see Engels
[1878] 1939, 197-201; Classen and Skalnik 1978, 7; Dunn 1971, 829; Krader 1975,
275; Khazanov 1978, 82-83,86).
Needless to say, I do not concur, and neither would Engels:
civilization achieved
things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in
motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the
expense of all his other abilities.
From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of
civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of
society but of the single scurvy individual - here was its one and final
aim. If at the same time the
progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art
dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not
have completely realized its achievements ([1884] 1972, 235-236).
There is, of course, a
complex dialectic between the progressive development of the forces of social
production and the exploitative relations that support the ruling class in
every epoch of human history.
However much they may be intertwined, the relations of production must
be kept analytically distinct from the mode of exploitation if we are to
understand them scientifically, rather than apologetically (Ruyle 1975; for an
evaluation of my views on this, see Moseley and Wallerstein 1978, 273-274).
[17] This
discussion of the functions of the State and Church is taken from White (1959)
and refers primarily to precapitalist systems of class rule. In capitalism, many of the thought-control
functions of the Church have been taken over by the educational system and mass
media. Nevertheless, the Church
continues to support the status quo (see Ruyle 1973b; 1975). The central role of liberation theology
in the Central American revolution, of course, should remind us to distinguish
carefully between religion and the Church. The former is an arena of class struggle; the latter an
institution which attempts to control this class struggle for the benefit of
the ruling class.