seige 'marxism' and the origins of social class

7/28/2019 Seige 'Marxism' and the origins of social class.

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Seige 'Marxism' and the origins of social class

LIONEL SIMS

In my note to Sheila McGregor's article on rapei I argued that Sheila's use

of anthropological evidence weakened the Marxist defence of Engel's claim

of a primordial stage of primitive communism. My central argument was based

upon three main propositions:

1) Quoting evidence of egalitarian relationships between the sexes from some

pre-state societies cannot answer the criticism that in most of them

women are oppressed in some form.

2) Attempts to explain the male oppression of women in the majority of such

societies by the effects of colonialism, or resource stress, or warring

between males are not consistent with the evidence of colonialism etc..

3) The variation in women's status in pre-State societies can only be

understood by a thorough defence of Engels. Recent advances in

archaeology and anthropology now allow a general, rather than


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minimalist, defence of Engels to fully vindicate his view of the birth

of humanity in a classless and free society - primitive communism. This

new evidence allows us to precisely trace the rise of the family,

private property and the state.

In her reply Sheilaii rejects all of these propositions in a point-by-point

'refutation', and accuses me of capitulating to feminism. Let's look at her

arguments.

Sheila supports Chris Harman in claiming that where women's contribution

to subsistence is high in pre-State societies, then their status is high,

and vice-versa. Thus, according to this view, where gathered foods or

horticultural food crops predominate over hunted meat, then men tend not

to dominate women. "All the adult members of hunter-gatherer bands were

involved in securing food for the band. The only division of labour possible

was a sexual one with men and women undertaking different tasks to ensure

survival...[E]galitarian relations between men and women are rooted in

their autonomous economic role...[and this] sexual division of

labour...[is]...non-exploitative and non-oppressive".iii

Comrades will not find this argument of women's status linked to their

gathering role anywhere in the writings of Marx and Engels. On the contrary,

Engels explicitly points out that "[t]he division of labour between the two

sexes is determined by causes entirely different from those that determine


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the status of women in society."iv For Engels it is women's solidarity that

is the precondition for women's high status. "The communistic household,

in which most of the women or even all of the women belong to one and the

same gens (clan LS), while the men come from various other gentes, is the

material foundation of that predominancy of women which generally obtained

in primitive times." v A few seconds thought will demonstrate that the

woman-the-gatherer model is not only not part of Marxism, but that it

predicts the exact opposite to Engels for an initial situation for human

culture. It is generally accepted within archaeology, on the basis of very

strong evidence, that the first cultural humans were big game hunters. Since

most of the subsistence in these societies would have been provided by

hunting males, then women's contribution would be quite small. If that was

the case, then the woman-the-gatherer model predicts the primordial

oppression of women, exactly the opposite of Engels. Where does the

woman-the-gatherer model come from? It began with Sally Linton in 1972 and

was adopted by many other bourgeois feminist writers, including Ernistine

Friedl, from whom Chris Harman presented a distorted version in this journal

in 1984.vi But for Marx and Engels it is the mode of production which defines

power relationships. There are gatherers and hunters in many societies, just

as there are woodworkers or metal workers or traders in many societies, but

what determines their social power is their relationship to the means of

production, not their location in the division of labour.

Where does the term 'band' come from? Again, it has nothing to do with our


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tradition, since it was clans that Morgan, Engels and Marx identified as

the unit of organisation in primitive communism. The concept of a 'band'

was first developed by Julian Steward, a "bourgeois anthropologist", in 1955

to cautiously characterise the Great Basin and Western Shoshone.vii Later

writers generalised the use of the term and dropped all Steward's earlier

caution. For these writers a 'band'is a small loosely organised group

characterised by a long list of absences: the absence of sharp political

or territorial boundaries, the absence of groups larger than the village,

the absence of men's institutions, the absence of age grades, and the absence

of clans, moieties and lineages etc.. This concept of the 'band' has now

been discredited within anthropology for three main reasons. First Thomasvii

has shown that it is descriptively inaccurate of the Western Shoshone.

Second, all the pre-State societies of the Northern Americas, including the

Shoshone, are smashed cultures, and the findings of 'rescue' anthropology

cannot be generalised to other traditional cultures that preserve much of

their pre-contact institutions. It was not just hearts that were buried at

Wounded Knee. Third, the assumption of organisational simplicity of the band

equating with 'primitiveness' of historical stage commits the error of

'archaism', the assumption that traditional cultures stripped ragged by

colonialism and imperialism are an accurate image of their initial

situation. It cannot explain the Australian Aborigines which exhibit all

of the characteristics whose very absence defines a band, yet are

'pre-Neolithic' hunters and gatherers with a very simple technology.ix It

is for this reason that bourgeois anthropogists, and some of our leading


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comrades, consider the Aborigines as 'anomalous'. Of course they are only

anomalous if you have a model of primordial cultures which sees them

negatively, as simple primitives, lacking in all the things like size,

plentiful food, a rich cultural and ritual life, leisure etc. associated

with 'non-primitive'. Anthropology pricks all such smugness, since

Aboriginal societies were far richer than western mass cultures in their

complexity and leisure. When Aborigines hear of the violence of our

societies, the genocidal wars, the lack of cooperation and incessant

competitiveness, with exploitation dominating life, for them, we are the

savages.

Sheila seems unaware that she is supporting a position that has been taken

wholesale from bourgeois anthropology. This position was developed largely

by feminists in the seventies to combat male supremacist theories. They

pointed to a few examples of societies with egalitarian relationships, such

as the !Kung & Mbuti. Of course these examples (not their theories!) are

crucial evidence against any universal claims of male domination, and to

suggest that I do not support this minimalist defence of Engels is absurd

and simply a deliberate distortion of my position. My point is the opposite

of the feminist attack on Engels. How can we explain the majority (not all!)

of cases of pre-State societies where in spite of women contributing the

majority of gathered or domesticated foodstuffs they suffer male

domination? This is not an abstract or esoteric issue. Many people,

including those mobilised by feminism, want to know how women's oppression


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and class oppression began. At present, so long as we refuse to engage with

this evidence, the left has not provided a rigorous answer to the question.

Think how much stronger we will be if we can do this as Marxists. Then we

would have enormously strengthened Engels and thus ourselves in the battle

against right-wing ideas. If we can do that, then we would have opened the

path for many more people to move towards Marxism. But we cannot begin to

do this unless we have proper scientific respect for the evidence, and Sheila

fails lamentably in this respect.

It is for this reason that I called attention to Sheila's misuse of Sanday's

statistics. In her reply she compounds her first error with yet another

distortion of Sanday, by claiming that 'mythical male dominance' excludes

rape. This is just after quoting Sanday to the exact opposite! "When [male

aggression] exists in the presence of [women's exercise of political and

economic power], the term mythical male dominance will be employed to

describe the relationship between the sexes." x. Out of a sample of 93

pre-state societies, 39 fit this label of 'mythical male dominance', but

as comrades will see from Table 8.1 on pages 166-167 of Sandayxi, 20 of these

39 societies institutionalise rape as a means of disciplining women. If

comrades are still unsure, and since Sheila seems incapable of stating the

true position, I reproduce another of Sanday's table below for your own

inspection.

The left hand row titles in Table 1 are a Guttman scale of male aggression,


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such that after the initial null category, each indicator is included in

the next one up the scale in a cumulative index. Thus if a society is found

with interpersonal violence (scale value 4), then there will also be men's

houses and/or machismo (scale values 2-3) in that society. Similarly if

there is frequent or institutionalised rape (scale value 5), then there will

also be interpersonal violence, men's houses and/or machismo, and so on.

This means, for example, that rape (scale values 5 & 6) is used by men to

discipline women in 47 (14+33) out of 93 (51%) of these societies. But Sanday

defines equality between the sexes in a manner unacceptable to Marxists.

She collapes the scale of male aggression into a simplified two-fold

distinction between societies in which rape regularly occursTable 1 Relationship between male aggression and women's

economic and political power and authority.xii________________________________________________________________

Females have no Females have Females have Rowecon. or pol. econ. power econ. & pol. tot.power or auth. or auth. power or auth.

(1-4)a (5)a (6-7)a% % % (N)c

Male aggression________________________________________________________________

No indicators(1)b 7 (2) 7 (1) 24(12) (15)Men's houses arepresent and/ormachismo(2-3)b 21 (6) 20 (3) 24(12) (21)Interpersonalviolence(4)b 11 (3) 7 (1) 12 (6) (10)Frequent or inst-itutionalised rape(5)b 21 (6) 13 (2) 12 (6) (14)

Wives taken fromhostile groups(6)b 39(11) 53 (8) 28(14) (33)

Column totals 99(28) 100(15) 100(50) (93)


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________________________________________________________________NoteA. Sanday's scale values for women's economic and political power orauthority.B. Sanday's scale values for male aggression.

C. All other figures in brackets in the body of the table are actual casenumbers. All other figures are in percentages.

and all the rest. Her definition of sexual equality is then all those

societies in which women have economic and political power or authority and

in which rape does not occur. But this includes those societies in which

there are men's houses, machismo and interpersonal violence. If we wish to

defend Engels view that primitive communism was a condition of complete

equality between the sexes then this is an unacceptable simplificationxiii.

From the table we see that the contemporary evidence shows that in only 12

out of 93 societies is there no indicator of male aggression and in which

women have economic and political power or authority.

This means that in roughly 13% of contemporary pre-State societies thereis no evidence of male aggression and women have economic power or authority.

This is much smaller than the 32% that Sanday calls 'sexually equal'. But

why is Sheila so keen to minimise the true extent of rape and general male

aggression in these societies, so much so that she is prepared to either

mistate the evidence or blindly follow Sanday? Because evidence such as this

is 'anomalous' to the 'woman-the-gatherer' theory which she and Chris Harman

have adopted from anthropology. Sheila is only prepared to admit that small

part of anthropology congenial to her position, and turns a blind eye to


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the enormous weight of contrary evidence. This is the politics of seige

defence. In her original article Sheila claimed that "Hunter

gatherer...bands...are free from sexual oppression"xiv . Yet in her reply

Sheila says "...I nowhere claimed that 'all "band"' societies are free from

"sexual oppression"'xv. Exactly, we are just left with confusion as soon as

her (feminist!) model is challenged with evidence. While it is the first

job of Marxists to call attention to those 13% of societies which refute

male supremacist or patriarchy theories, it is the responsibility of

Marxists to move beyond this minimalist defence of Engels and to explain

how and why women are not equal in the vast majority (87%) of them. It is

here, on my second proposition, that Sheila's arguments are especially weak.

Sheila has not answered the main point of my note. The issue is not just

whether colonialism, resource stress or warring can explain the oppression

of women amongst the Yanomamo, but whether these factors are sufficient to

explain the widespread global ethnographic evidence for the oppression of

women. In my note I set out a number of scientific tests using comparative

evidence for these factors. For example a similar group of horticulturalists

to the Yanomamo are the Baruya in Papua New Guinea. They were not subjected

to the Spanish conquest (neither were the Yanomamo!), they are not resource

stressed (although the Yanomamo are), they are engaged in regular warfare

(as are the Yanomamo) and women's oppression is systematic. According to

this comparative evidence, therefore, the absence of resource stress

removes it from the equation as sufficient cause of women's oppression. A


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better comparison is with the Australian Aborigines, whose cultures were

not destroyed by colonialism before they were studied, who were not resource

stressed, and were not engaged in warfare and again in which women are

oppressed. Critical experiments like this are the method of scientific

testing, and Sheila's attempt to dismiss the Yanomamo type evidence fail

those tests. Sheila does not appear to understand this well known procedure.

She claims that I am repeating the feminist attack on Marxism "whose main

concern is to establish a norm of male behaviour across all time and

regardless of historical change". Yet at the end of her reply she attacks

me for holding a theory for the revolutionary origins of humanity in a lunar

scheduled menstrual sex-strike. Whatever comrades will think of the theory

of a sex-strike, and I have not had the opportunity to elaborate this theory

in the Journal although Sheila feels free to attack me for it, I cannot be

accused of both being a feminist (which I am not) and supporting a theory

of the origins of primitive communism within matriarchal relations of

production (which I do). I cannot simultaneously hold an ahistorical theory

of universal male domination and a theory of initial women's rule through

sex-striking! Sheila had better sort out what she is accusing me of before

confusing comrades who read the Journal. In my note I was therefore pointing

out to Sheila that a general defence of Engels requires much more robust

arguments than previously used by herself or Chris Harman. How does Sheila

respond?

First she says that Chris Harman referred to such evidence in his 1984


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article. This is not the case. Chris dismissed such evidence in that article

in very much the same terms as Sheila is doing now.

Secondly, Sheila insists that the Spanish conquest did have an effect on

the Yanomamo, and refers to Leacock's discussion on the issue. I am surprised

Sheila is impressed with Leacock's weak claims on this, and can only assume

that Sheila wants to believe such arguments for her own purposes. An

encounter with one Spanish raiding party in 1758 tells us nothing about the

structure of Yanomamo society, which rests on the systematic and brutal

oppression of women. Leacock's arguments were examined in a scholarly debate

in anthropology in the mid- eighties and were decisively rejectedxvi. Another

test is to look at the Kogi Indians of the north Colombian coast, the last

survivors of the Tairona civilisation destroyed by the Spanish in the

seventeenth centuryxvii. Almost wiped out, they retreated into the mountains

at 'the heart of the world'. According to Sheila such a society should

oppress its women, but instead there is no evidence for male aggression.

So although the Khogi suffered terribly from the Spanish conquest, they do

not abuse their women, while the Yanomamo were hardly touched by the Spanish

conquest but do abuse their women. This is not to claim that colonialism

has no effect on such societies, but that on its own it cannot explain the

structure of women's oppression in these societies. Theory must move on to

other types of explanation.

Thirdly, Sheila extends her claims from the Spanish conquest to the


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insidious effects of all class societies, particularly capitalism, in

undermining traditional societies. Because of this "...levels of violence

and subordination of women may well be the result of external

violence..."xviii. Well they "may well be" as Sheila suggests, but I wasn't

disputing that at all. My point was quite a different one that Sheila again

fails to respond to, and that is to question whether the reactionary effects

of class societies is the sole cause of women's oppression in pre-State

societies. The argument can be simply tested because of the well known

historical uneveness of this external penetration. If Sheila were correct,

then we would expect that the more a pre-State society is in contact with

outside class societies, then the more its traditional institutions would

be undermined and that, in particular, women's status will be lower.

Similarly, we would expect the reverse to hold, that the more and longer

isolated the pre-State society, then the higher the status of women. Again

Sheila's argument fails this simple test. The Mbuti have been in contact

with agriculturalists since Pharonoic timesxix yet Mbuti women have high

status. The !Kung are a similar case, and have suffered enormously at the

hands of colonialism, yet again !Kung women have high status. But some

societies have only very recently been in any contact with class societies,

and anthropologists have been able to obtain accounts of pre-contact life

in these societies. Andrew Strathern recorded the recollections of Ongka,

a hill tribesman in Papua New Guinea, on the traditional practices of warring

males long before any direct or indirect contact such as trading:


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"We burnt houses, slashed banana trees, tore the aprons off women and raped

them, axed big pigs, broke down fences, we did everything...Men came

to find [our women], chasing them down to the edges of streams till

they seized hold of them...Twenty men might lay hold of the same woman,

pulling her around for a day and a night, and then letting her go, saying

"We've had intercourse with you, but you're not dead, so it doesn't

matter, you can go home now"".xx

Sheila herself quotes from an earlier reference I made to a work of Godelier,

even though she is much exercised by the thought that he is an Althusserian,

which describe another Papua New Guinea hill tribe, the Baruya, who became

drawn into the world market by trading salt for steel axes. This began in

the decade before actual contact, and Sheila suggests that this accounts

for the oppression of women amongst the Baruya, and presumably all the hill

tribes of Papua New Guinea. Now of course, in time, the commodification of

tribal production would transform the internal relations of that society,

but in less than ten years it can hardly explain the extraordinarilly

elaborate ritual oppression of women that exists in this society. Women's

oppression is coded in the traditional architecture of the Baruya village,

with the isolation and atomisation of the women contrasting with the central

and large men's hut which pre-dates all contact, whether direct or indirect.

The intricate ideological justification for male rule based upon the

beneficial powers of semen and the poisonous effects of female sexual fluids

and especially of menstrual blood can hardly be caused by a few years trading


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in salt bars! And anyway, has Sheila never heard of the lag between the

relations of production and the forces of production? We would expect family

forms to change much more slowly than economic arrangements. Is this not

the ABC of Marxism?

A similar order of criticism can be applied to Sheila's fourth defence.

Apparently I am "completely confused" about the role of "scarcity" amongst

the Yanomamo. The Yanomamo are permanently on the edge of starvation, and

this type of scarcity accounts for the extreme nature of gender oppression

amongst them. This should not be confused, Sheila says, with Engels view

of scarcity as an inability to create a surplus, and this second type of

scarcity keeps all 'pre-class' societies at a primitive level of division

of labour between the sexes. Again Sheila misses my point entirely as she

seems unable to grasp the procedure of comparative method. Comrades can read

my note in ISJ 49 to see that I did not deny that Yanomamo are resource

stressed, but raised another point altogether - that there are other

horticulturalists living in similar tropical habitats who are not resource

stressed that also oppress their women, namely all the tribes of Papua New

Guinea (whether or not studied by Althusserians!). As to Engels claim that

the earliest human societies lived in scarcity because they were unable to

produce a surplus, this is wrong on two main counts. Recent writers have

shown that Middle and Upper Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers lived in

conditions of mass plenty, and these were the material preconditions to

matriarchal relations of production. It is not even true of some


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'contemporary' hunters and gatherers who use large-scale food storage, such

as the Northwest Coast and California Indians in North America. xxi This

evidence allows a position much more consistent with Marxist method, in

which we can link early communism with mass plenty.xxii

There are not just good factual reasons why equating early communism with

scarcity is wrong. We can see this by the way it leads Sheila into believing

that a mode of production does not exist in hunting and gathering societies.

According to Sheila, humanity lives "off" nature, and all people have to

ceaselessly forage without the ability to create a surplus, otherwise face

the threat of starvation.xxiii If that were true primitive communism would

be no different from animals' societies.xxiv But this goes entirely against

the Marxist method.

We cease to be animals only when we have a mode of production. But what does

'labour' and 'production' mean for hunting and gatherering societies? Such

societies, which account for all human society until the end of the last

ice age, simply took wild food from their environment. They did not produce

food in the sense that horticulturalists or farmers can be said to produce

food. So what is the difference between a human hunter and an animal hunter

such as a lion? Let's look at the negative case, when an isolated individual

eats some food. "It is clear that in nutrition...which is but one form of

consumption, man produces his own body...For an individual production and

consumption appear as different aspects of one act...The individual


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produces a certain article and turns it again into himself by consuming

it...Consumption thus appears as a factor in production."xxv But when Marx

speaks of 'labour' or 'production' as the basis of human life, he does not

mean this. He takes society, not the individual, as his standpoint. An

activity is therefore judged as 'productive' or 'unproductive' by its

relationship to society. A person who, by eating or working to obtain food,

merely produces or reproduces his or her own private existence is

unproductive as far as society is concerned. In that sense, he or she cannot

be said to be engaging in labour. Any animal, including pre-cultural

hominids, in a sense 'produces', as Marx admits, but "it only produces what

it needs immediately for itself or its offspring...it produces only under

the pressure of immediate physical need, whereas man produces free from

physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free..."xxvi In our

writings so far we have failed to specify the relationships which determine

the consumption of food, the 'primitive' relations of production, and so

our analysis remains focussed on what for Marx was an animal level of

existence. The 'primitive' part of 'primitive communism' was never intended

to stretch that far! "In society, however," writes Marx, "the relation of

the producer to his product, as soon as it is completed, is an outward one,

and the return of the product to the individual depends on his relations

to other individuals. He does not take immediate possession of it. Nor does

the direct appropriation of the product constitute his purpose, when he

produces in society. Between the producer and his product distribution steps

in, determining by social laws his share in the world of products; that is


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to say, distribution steps in between production and consumption." xxvi

Distribution steps in. For the first fully cultural humans, the big game

hunters of the Palaeolithic, some social law of distribution had to be

instituted to differentiate us from social systems still mainly governed

by primate selfishness. Some rule of exchange had to be discovered for

'labour', for a mode of production, to begin. "Although isolated

labour....can also create use-values, it can create neither wealth nor

culture."xxviii Man produces free from physical need within social laws of

distribution. Sheila's image of primitive communism is of a society of

itinerant vagabonds, driven by need. And she is absolutely silent on the

social laws of distribution which govern a hunting and gathering mode of

production. It is both empirically and methodologically wrong.

The lack of surplus does not mean the inability to make a surplus, nor does

it mean living in scarcity. Hunting and gathering relations of production

do not normally require the accumulation of a surplus. Indeed it would be

completely mad to do it. Every mode of production has its own laws of motion,

and what looks like poverty to us is affluence to a hunter and gatherer.

When game is plentiful and in 'large packets', then that is a rich hunting

and gathering society which affords, to our standards, enormous leisure.xxi

The Yanomamo are resource-stressed compared to big game hunters in the

Palaeolithic, but we cannot see that until we define primitive communism

not as 'band' society living "off" nature, but as a mode of production of


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lunar scheduled big game hunting forces of production within matriarchal

relations of production. Privatised hunting and gathering is a lower order

of forces of production than that of collective hunting in the initial

situation of mass plenty of big game animals. Fully egalitarian relations

of production can not be supported with the withering away of big game

hunting forces of production.

Sheila's fifth and final main response to my note is to dispute that she

ever claimed that warring is a universal cause of the oppression of women,

and that the rise of the State "in Sumer cannot be used to explain a

horticultural and trading people like the Baruya today."xxx Exactly Sheila

, that was my point! For warring also occurs in Papua New Guinea and they

also oppress their women, yet they have no state. Sheila "fail[s] to

understand how Sims could even imagine the one might have a bearing on the

other"xxxi. The "bearing" is that the formation of state structures is not

an adequate explanation for warring, and to isolate warring as a cause of

women's oppression in Sumer can lead to the very dangerous and extreme

right-wing position that " military male prowess"xxxii is the sole basis for

women's oppression. This is the logical extension of warring as a sufficient

cause for women's oppression if comparative data is used in testing the

hypothesis. The woman-the-gatherer model, if it is extended globally,

collapses into patriarchal notions of male power. This theory is a dangerous

departure from Marxism, and one that needs an honest and open debate in our

Party. In my view it should be rejected outright.


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Which brings me on to my final, third, proposition. In one sense Sheila's

reply is a complete waste of Journal space, since instead of answering these

tests in my first note she amalgamates me with the feminist claim that this

evidence proves universal male domination. But as I have been making the

very opposite claim for the past 25 years, her dishonest amalgam technique

only succeeds in delaying a scientific and constructive approach to the

problem. But why does Sheila make such intemperate, uncomradely charges?

Why is Sheila creating an acrid atmosphere from such a seemingly esoteric

issue? Comrades will notice that Sheila begins with the assumption that all

pre-contact societies are 'pre-class' societies within which, by

definition, there is no oppression, particularly the oppression of women.

Class societies "arose approximately 6,000 years ago as the result of the

development of agriculture...involv[ing] land coming under permanent

cultivation, settled populations, urban civilisation, trade and so on"xxxiii,

according to Sheila. This new process disturbs all societies and begins to

undermine 'pre-class' societies all over the globe. Therefore every

contemporary 'pre-class' society is a complicated combination of original

'pre-class' elements and more recently introduced class elements such as

the oppression of women.

This position is a tautology; it is impervious to scientific test. Any

evidence of women's oppression in such 'pre-class' societies must be the

result of outside disruption since by definition 'pre-class' societies do


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not oppress anybody! If this concept of 'pre-class' society is correct, then

of course it is axiomatic that anyone, including "Sims", who then presents

evidence of women's oppression that cannot be explained by factors external

to these societies, must be coming from another intellectual tradition!

Whenever I present such evidence I can only be heard as attacking 'Marxism',

and since this evidence is of men oppressing women, then it follows I must

be a feminist! But facts do not respect 'Party lines'. A party line can only

hope to be in tune with reality, and this party line is completely out of

touch with at least 87% of the reality of 'pre-class' societies.

For Sheila there cannot be "class societies which are stateles", either

because this is "a departure from Marxism" or "it is precisely the kind of

fudged terminology which allows others to depart from a clear understanding

of Marx and Engels"xxxiv. According to this view there are just two conditions,

'pre-class band society' and 'class' society. First there was a 'simple'

division of labour, and then with agriculture there was a 'complex' division

of labour releasing some members of society from involvement in food

production.xxxv If this were true, how does Sheila explain the rise of the

oppression of women? First we are told that the division of labour between

male hunting and female gathering is the condition for complete equality

between the sexes, then we are told that "[c]lass society arose

approximately 6,000 years ago as the result of the development of

agriculture". xxxvi How did it "arose"? Two pages later we are told "the

transition from egalitarian pre-class society to a fully fledged class


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society is a lengthy one. In the process transitional forms combining

elements of egalitarian relationships with new forms resulting from the

development of oppression and exploitation will have occurred. More of this

later".xxxvii Another two pages after that Sheila favourably quotes Rohrlich's

account of the rise of the Sumer state, in which male military prowess (!LS)

overthrows "kinship structures"xxxviii. Remarkably Sheila says nothing else

in her entire article about the origins of women's oppression, despite that

being the sole point of my note.

Sheila's position is contradictory. If it were the case that there were

"transitional forms" from "egalitarian" to "fully fledged class society"

during a period of "lengthy transition", then that must mean that there can

be types of class society with or without types of state structures which

precede "fully fledged class society". In which case the term "pre-class"

society is a fudge which amalgamates fully egalitarian primitive communism

with these "transitional forms". The conceptual naivety of a simple

distinction between 'pre-class band societies' and fully fledged class

societies, already complete with the oppression of women and the state,

disallows investigating the precise intermediate forms by which we can

locate the exact mechanisms of women's oppression and the origins of social

classes. Sheila fails to understand that the establishment of the state is

the final moment in that transition which is a historical recognition of

the irreconcilability of the social classes which already exist.xxxix


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"The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare,

in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of

the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these

primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and

finally antagonistic classes" xl

The first counter-revolution in history was a process, just as the next

revolution will be a process. To view the next revolution as an instantaneous

leap from capitalism to communism is, of course, infantile. But with

concepts that view "egalitarianism" being replaced with societies with "the

family, social classes and the state" all fully formed and simultaneously

in place we are led to make the same type of error.

The key problem in this debate is not just evidence, but concepts. We have

failed to come to grips with a key insight of Engels - that the rise of the

family, social classes and the State was a process, not a single simultaneous

event. The rise of the family and the oppression of women is how class

oppression began, but this process was not completed until the rise of

agriculture and the state.

Before looking at the ethnography, let's look at an analogy where the

evidence is more familiar - the collapse of the Russian Revolution and the

rise of bureaucratic state capitalism in that country. The Stalinist

bureacracy did not finally rule, as a class-for-itself, until 1928 with the


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first Five Year Plan. But the working class had ceased to rule in Russia

as a class by the winter of 1919, by which time they were dispersed and

decimated and the soviets were no longer the organisations of the Russian

working class. Between 1919 and 1928 the new bureaucratic ruling class was

in the process of becoming. Other classes, such as the peasantry, were also

vying for power. But this osmotic process of filtering out those social

forces that would coalesce as new class formations was all predicated on

the condition that working class solidarity was already gone. It is

impossible to understand Stalinism without understanding how it is

qualitatively different to the worker's power that preceeded it, and whose

collapse was Stalinism's own precondition. All of this is the common

understanding of members of the SWP. xli The collapse of working class

solidarity in Russia is not immediately replaced with a new ruling class.

There is nothing contentious in saying that the emergence of an oppressive

ruling class is a historical process extending over a decade or so, during

which time separate classes are coalescing and practising their various

forms of oppression.

This analogy is useful, like all analogies, as long as we understand its

limits. Firstly, Russia in 1917 carried the accumulated crap of thousands

of years of class rule, while human culture in its initial situation was

completely free and equal. In particular monogamy and the oppression of

women did not exist in primitive communism, while it did in Russia. Secondly,

Russia in 1917-1919 was a worker's state isolated and under attack, it was


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not a communistic world order as was primitive communism for much of the

Middle and Upper Paleolithic (M&UP). Thirdly, twentieth century capitalism

is based on the industrial manufacture of products made artificially scarce,

whereas the naturally-given mass plenty of big game animals for the M&UP

battue hunters lasted, along a moving frontier rippling out from a central

area probably in the Levant, until roughly 10,000 years before the present

(BP). This mega-fauna extinction was a very long drawn out process, with

optimal hunting conditions around 70,000 years BP and then a gradual

deterioration continuing up until the collapse of the big game herds by a

combination of over-hunting and climatic change some 10,000 years ago. And

the fourth main difference is that as the first cultural humans followed

the large herds of game they populated a globe uninhabited except for the

Neanderthals in Europe. They therefore did not face any competition for

resources, with the very important exception of Europe, until roughly the

end of the Palaeolithic around 10,000 years BP, by which time virtually the

whole planet had been populated by hunting societies.xlii At this point, so

long as hunting and gathering was clung to, resource stress became

population pressure. Since matriarchal communism based upon big game

collective hunting was on a much higher base than the Russian worker's state,

since the pressures to adapt to depleted big-game resources were much less

than those of invading counter-revolutionary armies during 'war communism',

and since inter-tribal competition for scarce resources varied according

to the local ecological circumstances unlike the mass famine in Russia, the

process of collapse of matriarchal communism and the separation out of new


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class formations could be strung out over, in many areas, not a decade as

in Russia but over thousands of years.

To continue to assert, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that

all pre-contact 'pre-class' societies are free of all gender oppression,

is no different from the dogma of those 'Marxists' who continue to assert

that Russia remained a worker's state just because there had once been a

revolution. To understand what happened in Russia we look first at the

revolution, not at Stalinism. So also with the counter-revolution which

oppressed women. We can only understand it by first looking at the revolution

by women that made us culturally human.

Engels does not commit the error of simultaneity for the rise of the family,

private property and the state. They are a process of becoming, beginning

with the rise of monogamy and the oppression of all women, and that's how

social classes begin. "The first class antagonism which appears in history

coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in

monomogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the

female sex by the male. Monogamy...is...the cellular form of civilised

society, in which we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and

contradictions which develop fully in the latter."xliii

As long as the term 'pre-class' society is used, then we commit the error

of amalgamating matriarchal communist society with the pre-State societies


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within which separate social classes are being formed. The material

pre-condition to matriarchal communism was lunar scheduled big-game

hunting. Once the big game herds disappeared so did the material conditions

for the collective solidarity of clan brothers and sisters. Matriarchal

communism has ceased to exist all over the globe, and the recent and

contemporary record of pre-State societies is of proto-class societies.

Women's collectivity collapsed when privatised hunting became necessary

under the new resource-stressed conditions. We cannot begin to talk of the

oppression of women and the rise of social class unless we accept that

women's solidarity had already collapsed as, in another way, worker's

solidarity began to collapse in Russia around 1919 as new class forces

started to take over. To amalgamate classless matriarchal communism with

proto-class societies and call them all 'pre-class' society therefore

confuses primitive communism with these first forms of class oppression.

It is for this reason that I use the term pre-State society, which does allow

that class formation begins before the rise of the state.

The contemporary and historically recent record of pre-State societies is

an immensely varied picture of women's status strung out between all of the

possible levels between matriarchy and patriarchy, with the point of origin,

matriarchal communism, having gone. To the extent that women retain

collectivity in some of these societies, although they do not rule, then

their status is high. (Women's "rule", of course, can only be on the basis

of equality.) The more resource stress, competition for resources and


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colonialism has acted upon these societies, then the less women's

collectivity and the lower their status. This is the acid which acts upon

a society which has already lost women's clan solidarity. How was social

solidarity retained when the first leaders of society, women, lost theirs?

By men's solidarity appropriating women's power. Men's huts, men's secret

societies, male monopolisation of ritual power, these are the means by which

men rule women and alienate their labour in Papua New Guinea and Australian

Aboriginal societies. If we do not accept that this is a condition of

counter-revolution against women's rule in primitive communism, then men's

collectivity is taken for granted, as part of the natural order of things.

The Aborigines know differently. As one of Berndt's informants amongst the

Kunapipi of north - western Australia put it:

"Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women.

All that belonging to those Wawilak, the baby, the blood, the yelling,

their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to

trick them. Women can't see what men are doing, although it really is

their business. But really we have been stealing what belongs to the

women, for it is mostly all women's business; and since it concerns

them it belongs to them...all the Dreaming business came out of

women-everything. In the beginning we had nothing, because men had been

doing nothing; we took these things from the women."xliv

But these organisations and rituals are the forms which allow the practice


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of rape as one means of men's control of women, and this is the first form

of class oppression. Monogamy at this stage does not mean the modern nuclear

family, but the isolation and atomisation of women. This can still take place

within wider kinship structures, but which are now not normally matrilineal

and matrilocal, but any of the many possible combinations between that

egalitarian extreme to the other of patrilineal and patrilocal. The

collective of men is the proto-class from which will arise a private

propertied class of landowners and/or a state in the agricultural

revolution. The monogamous isolation of women and the solidarity of men is

the "cellular form" of social class and the state.

Sheila cannot admit this with her present revisionist concepts. It is a

double dialectical irony that while the feminists are no longer interested

in their own woman-the-gatherer model, this ghost of feminism lives on

within the SWP propounded by the most ardent opponents of feminism who are

accusing me of their 'crime'! Caught within a model that leads in entirely

different directions to those that Sheila intends, she fights its logical

implications with bluster and bad manners.

We have to be at the forefront of ideas. We have to work hard at keeping

in touch with new research findings that continually invigorate Marxism with

the new life of discovering our past and thus our future. And we have

everything to play for. A leading member of our Party recently stated our

present position on these matters in stark terms:


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"I do not accept that we have a party line on any of these things. It has

never been debated and certainly never voted on. Nor should we. It is

a scientific/historical question. I, certainly, will not be bound by

a general view."xlv

Exactly! Let the real debate begin.

Notesi. L Sims, 'Rape and pre-state societies: a note on Sheila McGregor'santhropology' International Socialism, Winter 1990, 49, pp123-128.

ii. S McGregor, 'A reply to Lionel Sims', ibid., pp129-136.

iii. Ibid, p133 and footnote 13 on p136..

iv. F Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,(Moscow, 1968), p50.

v. Ibid, p49.

vi. See L.Sims, 'Engels Revisited: a new look at the matriarchy thesis'(unpublished,1989).

vii . R.L.Bettinger, 'Aboriginal Socio-Political Organisation inOwen's Valley: beyond the family-band' in E.Tooker (ed.)(1983)Political Organisation in Native North America (Proceedings ofAmerican Ethnological Society).

viii . Thomas (1983) 'On Steward's Models of ShoshonianSocio-Political Organisation: a great bias in the basin' in Tooker,ibid, p63.

ix. And if it is claimed that western influence has so modified the


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Australian Aborigines that they are exceptional, how would suchinterference have introduced men's institutions, age grades, clans,moieties and lineages?

x. McGregor, ibid, p134.

xi. Sanday, P.R. (1981), Female Power and Male Dominance: on theorigins of sexual inequality(London: Cambridge University Press)

xii. Sanday, ibid, pp166-167.

xiii. Or are there some comrades who believe that wife-beating, malechauvinism and men's houses are part of primitive communism?

xiv. S McGregor, 'Rape, pornography and capitalism', InternationalSocialism, Winter 1989, 45, p7.

xv. McGregor (1990), ibid, p134.

xvi. B. Hayden, M. Deal, A. Cannon & J. Casey, (1986), 'EcologicalDeterminants of Women's Status Among Hunter/Gatherers', HumanEvolution Vol1 - N. 5 (449-474) - 1986.

xvii. Alan Ereira (1990), The Heart of the World(London: Cape).

xviii. McGregor (1990), ibid, 132.

xix. E.M. Zeusse, Ritual Cosmos: the sanctification of life in Africanreligions (Ohio University Press, 1979).

xx. Strathern,A.(Trans.) 1979. Ongka: a self-account of a New Guineabig-man. London, Duckworth.

xxi . A. Testart, 'The Significance of Food Storage amongHunter-Gatherers: Residence Patterns, Population Densities, andSocial Inequalities', Current AnthropologyVol 23, No. 5, October1982, pp 523-537.

xxii. Sheila failed to make any response to my reference to one of manyauthorities who have discussed this - M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics(London,1974), who, by the way, was a 'Leacock-type' Marxist when hewrote this work.


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xxiii. McGregor,1990, ibid, p133.

xxiv. Or it means that there has never been such a thing as primitivecommunism.

xxv. D.McLellan (1971), Marx's Grundrisse (London:Macmillan), p24 andp27.

xxvi. D.McLellan (ed.)(1971), Karl Marx Early Texts (Oxford: BasilBlackwell), p140.

xxvii. D.McLellan (ed)(1971), op cit, pp27-28.

xxviii. Marx, K.(1875)(1951), Critique of the Gotha Programme, inK.Marx and F.Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign LanguagesPublishing House) Vol. 2, p18.

xxix. See Sahlins, ibid.

xxx. McGregor (1990), ibid, p134.

xxxi. ibid, p134.

xxxii. ibid, p134. I am amazed that a Marxist can isolate warring asa cause of women's oppression without substantial qualification. Butthen as Sheila says of herself "I may have been wrong to quote her"!

xxxiii. Ibid, p130. The term is Rohrlich's, quoted favourably bySheila.

xxxiv. ibid, pp129-130.

xxxv. Ibid, p130. This theory that the replacement of a 'simple'division of labour by a 'complex' divisions of labour causes anincrease in social differentiation, such as a leisure class, comes,by the way, from the bourgeois sociologist Emile Durkheim. (E Durkheim,The Division of Labour(Free Press, 1964)). It has nothing to do withMarxism, or the evidence. The most complex, or differentiated, extantkinship systems in the world are the section systems amongst theAustralian Aborigines, yet they have the 'simplest' division oflabour. Further, the !Kung's contemporary 'band' organisation is arecent development. Alan Barnard has shown that they, along with most


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of the pre-state societies of the South West African highlands, hada patrilineal localised clan moiety system combined with across-descent name group. What commentators used to characterise asa 'loose informal band' system, is now considered to be a product of

colonial contact and contact with more 'advanced' herders from thenorth. Their earlier social organisation hinged on a lineage systemmore complicated than that of the Australian Aborigines. It followsfrom this that the contemporary !Kung are 'falsely archaic'. Barnard,A.(1975), 'Australian models in the south west African highlands',African Studies, 34(1)1975:9-18. Also see Yan in Bloch,M. RethinkingAnthropology(ASA monograph).

xxxvi. Ibid, p130.

xxxvii. Ibid, p132.

xxxviii. Ibid, p134.

xxxix. "[The state] is a product of society at a certain stage ofdevelopment; it is the admission that this society has become entangledin an insoluble contradiction with itself, that is has split intoirreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel." Engels,ibid. p166. "The state is a product and a manifestation of theirreconcilabilityof class antagonisms." V.I. Lenin, The State andRevolution in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: a one volume selection(London, 1969), p267.

xl.Note by Engels, p35ff, (my emphasis in underlining) in K Marx andF Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Partyin K Marx and F Engels,Selected Works (London, 1968).

xli. C Harman, 'How the Revolution was Lost', International Socialism(old series), Autumn 1967, 30, pp8-15.

xlii. Although some competition may have been experienced long beforethis for those hunters that stayed behind the moving frontier.

xliii. Engels, ibid, p66.

xliv. R.M.Berndt (1951), Kunapipi (Melbourne:Cheshire), p55.


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xlv. Duncan Hallas, personal communication, undated, circa March 1990(quoted with permission).

seige 'marxism' and the origins of social class

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