ON THE ORIGIN OF PATRIARCHY AND CLASS RULE (AKA
CIVILIZATION)
By
Eugene E. Ruyle
Department of Anthropology
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, CA 90814
(213) 498-5171
Abstract
Recent research on the
origin of the state has shed useful light on the processes of state formation,
moving from the search for "prime movers" to the elaboration of
"systems" with "multivariate causality." In the process,
the insights of Marx and Engels on the class nature of the state have been
ignored. This paper proposes a thermodynamic model of class society which
attempts to incorporate both 19th century insight and 20th century data into a
unified theory of class and gender inequality. The proposed model sees
inequality as the consequence of the activities of ruling class men. With the
progressive development of the forces of social production and the growth of
population, predatory males devise ways of exploiting first women, and then
men. As the systems of exploitation grow, they support ruling classes that live
from the surplus extracted from the direct producers.
CONTENTS
The Transition from Primitive Communism to
Patriarchal Class Rule
AUTHORÕS NOTE, 2007: This
is the text of my article written in the early 1980s. Aside from correcting
some spelling errors and reformatting for the web no changes have been made.
The most significant change I would make if I were to re-write it would be to
change the term Òprimitive communismÓ to Òancestral communismÓ since I believe
the former term is pejorative and does not properly honor our ancestors.
ON THE
ORIGIN OF PATRIARCHY AND CLASS RULE (AKA CIVILIZATION)
The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity.
There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of
the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which
necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a
necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in
the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not
only ceased to be a necessity but becomes a positive hindrance to production.
They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls
with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and
equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it
will then belong - into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel
and the bronze ax (Engels 1972:232).
We no longer, however,
can be sure that there will be any museum of antiquities after the state
completes its career. Even leaving aside the possibility of the extinction of
our species in a "nuclear winter" (Sagan 1985), the growth of the
machinery of repression (Chomsky and Herman 1979) has reached a point that it
may seem foolhardy to look forward to future in which, once again, there will
be "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents,
prefects, or judges, no prisons, or lawsuits" (Engels 1972:159). Yet in
such a future lies the sole hope for humanity. For this reason, if no other, we
must examine, dispassionately and without prejudice, the origins of this
institution which threatens our very existence.[1]
Recent research on the
origins of the state has illuminated the ecological conditions, productive
processes, and settlement patterns within which the earliest states developed.
Modern anthropological thinking has moved from the search for "prime
movers" such as conquest, irrigation, trade, environmental
circumscription, and religion, to "systems analysis" and
"multivariate causality" (Flannery 1972, Service 1975, Wright 1977,
Cohen and Service 1978, Classen and Skalnik 1978). Current thinking on state
origins focus on changes in ecological, demographic, and subsistence patterns
within relatively narrow time-frames (around 3500 B.C. in southwest Asia,
2000-1500 B.C. in north China, and 500 B.C.- 500 A.D. in the New World),
centering on the emergence of new authority patterns associated with the growth
of redistributive networks. While this is more precise than Engels, it is less
satisfying. Modern theorists, for all their sophisticated data, give little
indication that they understand what they are looking for.[2]
Just as pre-Copernican
astronomy could predict eclipses and chart with great precision the movement of
the planets without understanding the actual structure and laws of motion of
the solar system, so bourgeois anthropology can tell us with considerable
precision when and under what conditions the earliest states developed without
having the slightest inkling of the inner structure and laws of motion of the civilizational
process.[3]
For this, we need a Copernicus.
Fortunately, the social
sciences have already had their Copernicus and Galileo, but have willfully
denied them as surely as the Catholic Church denied these revolutionary
thinkers. The founders of historical materialism saw the modern state as
"but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie" (Marx and Engels 1978:475).[4]
This conception of the state as an instrument of class rule was further
elaborated by Engels:
As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in
check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is
normally the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which by
its means becomes also the politically dominant class and so acquires new means
of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was,
above all, the state of the slave owners for holding down the slaves, just as
the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs
and the bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument for
exploiting wage labor by capital (1972:231).
The ensemble of
hierarchal and patriarchal relationships used by the ruling class to support
its domination plays a role in the origin and evolution of civilization
comparable to that played by the gravitational field of the sun in our solar
system. One can, however, no more expect bourgeois social scientists to
understand this fact that one could expect medieval priests to accept that the
earth revolved around the sun. But that is their problem, not ours. A
scientific, materialist understanding of the rise and evolution of civilization
must focus on the processes by which the ruling class establishes and maintains
its rule.
That such understanding
must begin with Engels does not mean that it must stop there.[5]
We must recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of Engels's formulations
and incorporate more recent archaeological and ethnological thinking into his
basic model of the relationship between the state and class rule.
Many of Engels's
shortcomings flow from his treatment of the rise of the Athenian state as
"a particularly typical example of the formation of a state" which
occurred "in a pure form without any interference through use of violent
force either from without or within" (Engels 1972:181). Since they had not
yet been discovered, Engels was of course unaware of the civilizations of Minos
and Mycenae which preceded Athens in the Aegean and of ancient Sumerian civilization
which preceded the classical world by as long a time span as the classical
world precedes our own (Fagan 1983:339-355, Renfew 1972). As Khavanov remarks,
it is now clear that the Mediterranean states of antiquity,
which were marked by slave ownership on a vast scale, were by no means the
truly pristine states of that region. They had been preceded by early states
based on different systems of dependence and exploitation (1978:83)
The processes leading to
the rise of the Athenian state, in short, were by no means typical when viewed
against the backdrop of the earliest pristine civilizations of the Near East,
China, and Native America.
Linked into this, Engels
regarded commodity production as lying at the beginning of class formation
(1972:233). While this may have been true in Greece, it was much less important
in the earliest civilizations of Sumer and Egypt, where redistributive networks
associated with temples appear to have played a central role (Adams 1966).
Trade in these early empires was more state enterprise than the activity of
individual commodity producers (Polanyi 1957b). The coinage of money does not
begin until the seventh century B.C., begun by the Greek state of Lydia in Asia
Minor (Friedman 1983:350, Kroeber 1948:729). Engels's discussion of cattle as
the earliest form of property and money loses much of its force in light of
more recent archaeological discoveries.
Engels also appears to
have regarded the emergence of classes, and a ruling class, as a
"necessity" at a particular "stage in the development of
production" (1972:232), when "human labor power obtains the capacity
of producing a considerably greater product than is required for the
maintenance of the producers" (1972:234). This, however, requires
reformulation in the light of recent studies of hunters and gatherers
indicating that they are capable of meeting their subsistence needs with a few
hours labor per day (see, e.g. Carneiro 1968, Lee 1968, Sahlins 1972, Cohen
1977, but also Altman 1984, Ember 1978). Of particular importance is Carneiro's
"test" of this "surplus" theory indicating that the
productivity of labor among classless horticulturalists in the Amazonian
lowlands is higher than that of maize and potato farmers supporting a class
society in the Andean highlands (1961). Clearly, as Carneiro suggests, it is
not productivity of labor as such that is decisive, but other material
features. I believe that Carneiro is correct in pointing to size, density, and
immobility of population as the crucial variables in the emergence of class
rule, and warfare as an important catalyst (1961, 1967, 1970). Carneiro errs,
however, in seeing warfare as simply growing out of competition for land and
ignoring the desire for plunder and slaves as vital motives for warfare in
horticultural societies.
Engels is important on
this point. While in places he regards the emergence of classes as a necessity,
in other places he correctly points to greed and avarice as the motive force of
class rule:
The lowest interests - base greed, brutal appetites, sordid
avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth - inaugurate the new, civilized,
class society. It is by the vilest means - theft, violence, fraud, treason -
that the old classless gentile society is undermined and overthrown. And the
new society itself during all the 2,500 years of its existence has never been
anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the
great exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before
(Engels 1972:161).
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 (1972:235-236).
The origin and evolution
of class society is here correctly ascribed to simple greed and avarice, not
the requirements of production.[6]
As I have suggested elsewhere (Ruyle 1973a, 1973b, 1975, 1977), it is essential
to analytically separate the modes of exploitation which support ruling classes
from the modes of production which support entire human populations.[7]
The mode of exploitation may be viewed as the "mode of production" of
the ruling class, which requires certain forms of production and large,
sedentary populations for its emergence. While such material conditions may be
necessary preconditions for the emergence of ruling classes, and while the
existence of ruling classes necessarily has a real impact on the development of
productive systems, ruling classes are not now, nor have they ever been,
necessary for the rest of the species. They are better regarded as a social
disease that has persisted because its cure has only been recently discovered.
Continuing, Engels can be
interpreted as saying that class antagonism develop, and then the state appears
to reconcile these antagonism in the favor to the ruling class. Although Fried
makes a parallel point in his distinction between stratified and state
societies as evolutionary stages (1967), I believe this is erroneous. The
evidence suggests rather that the state develops simultaneously with the ruling
class as one of the primary mechanisms by which an emerging ruling class
consolidates its rule (for discussion, pro and con, see Service 1975:285;
Classen and Skalnik 1978:12,13,621,625,628; Fried 1978).
Finally, Engels's views
on the origin and evolution of the family need to be thoroughly re-examined in
the light of developments in the study of kinship since Morgan's time. This, of
course, is beyond the scope of the present essay, but some comments are in
order since, in Engels's view, the development of the family was intimately
interwoven with the rise of patriarchy.
It is to Engels's credit
that he saw the rise of class oppression as intimately associated with the
"world historical defeat of the female sex" and the oppression of
women, in a word, with the rise of patriarchy. Engels stressed the importance
of both production and reproduction in cultural causation:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor
in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of
immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the
production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the
tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human
beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization
under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular
country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the state of
development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other
(1972:71-72).
Engels found Morgan's
discovery of the non-patriarchal organization of the Iroquois highly
significant:
This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the
earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same
importance for anthropology as Darwin's theory of evolution has for biology and
Marx's theory of surplus value for political economy (Engels 1972:83).
Several observations are
in order here. First, due credit must be given to Morgan as the "Founding
Father" of the anthropological study of kinship which "stands at the
center of anthropological science" (Fortes 1969:4, also see White
1964:xvii), but it must also be stressed that there have been major advances in
the study of kinship since Morgan's time. Here, we may simply note the
discovery since Morgan's time of the importance of post-marital residence
rules, the avunculate, ambilineal descent, and componential analysis of kinship
terminologies ("kinship algebra"). At the same time, we must also
stress the powerful influence of viricentrism on kinship studies (Schrijvers
1979). Clearly, the theory of matriarchy challenges existing gender relations
no less than the theory of primitive communism challenges existing property
relations. "Obviously this gynaecocratic view, which placed woman in a new
relation to man, was unlikely to be permanently accepted" (Hartley
1914:27). The rejection of the theory of primitive matriarchy by male
chauvinist anthropology, then, is not to be explained on purely scientific
grounds.[8]
A good deal of the
problem flows from misunderstanding of the concept of matriarchy itself. Male
chauvinist anthropologists, reasoning that patriarchy refers to a society in
which men have power to dominate and oppress women, understand matriarchy as a
society in which women have power to dominate and oppress men. Such a sinister
society, the anthropological establishment assures us, has never existed (cf.
Schjrivers 1979). However, the concept of matriarchy involves not just a shift
in who has power, but in the nature of power itself (Webster 1975:142, Briffaut
1931:179-81).[9] Male
chauvinist social science has followed Max Weber in defining power in terms of
control over others (Weber 1966:21; Caplow 1971:26), and can conceive of no
other use of power than domination.[10]
But the power of women in matriarchy is power over their own productive and
reproductive capabilities. Unlike patriarchal power which is used to dominate
and oppress women (and other men) this matriarchal power is not used to dominate
and oppress men, although women in Iroquois society do appear to have exerted
some controls over male activities. In this sense, matriarchal societies have
clearly existed, although male chauvinists may regard them as equally sinister.[11]
It must be stressed,
however, that the matriarchal gens of the Iroquois was not primitive, in the
sense of reflecting the original condition of our species. Nor was it even a
universal stage in the development of gender relations. Rather, matrilineality
appears to be an adaptation to specific material conditions, conditions which
were not universal at any phase in humanity's existence (Aberle 1961:725,
Divale 1975, Fleur-Lobban 1979:347). Gentile society (or, in contemporary
usage, societies with corporate unilineal descent groups) appears only after
the neolithic revolution, when horticulture dramatically altered the material
conditions of production and reproduction for our species. Among hunters and
gatherers, who more nearly approximate the primitive condition for humanity,
the gens, as a corporate, landowning, unilineal descent group, does not appear,
and descent is typically cognatic (Aberle 1961, but see also Ember 1978). But
even among horticultural peoples, matrilineality is less common than
patrilineality (Aberle 1961), but as Gough notes, conditions leading to
matriarchy may have been more prevalent in the past (1977). The insights of
Morgan and Engels, although still relevant for understanding the history of
gender relations, have to be evaluated in light of these more recent findings.
Engels, then, in pointing
to the relationship between the state and class rule, and between class rule
and patriarchy, provided the essential insight for the scientific understanding
of the origin and evolution of civilization. This insight, however, must be
re-formulated in the light of scientific advances since Engels's time.
Social Thermodynamics
Human societies may
usefully be thought of in ecological and thermodynamic terms, as parts of
larger ecosystems composed of matter, energy, and information (Ruyle 1976,
1977, n.d.). The material entities include the human population, its
environment (including both resources and hazards), and the social product, the
ensemble of goods (or use-values) produced by human labor. The human population
interacts with its environment through a number of thermodynamic systems: the
bioenergy (or food energy) system, the ethnoenergy (or behavioral energy)
system, and the auxiliary energy system. The flow of energy through the
ecosystem is controlled by the information within that system. For human
populations, this includes both genetic information and culture.
Evolutionary change
involves change in all of these features. While there has been no significant
genetic change in human evolution for the past 40,000 years or so, there have
been significant changes in cultural information, the human population has
grown steadily with increasing speed, increasingly powerful modes of production
have been developed, the social product has grown in size and complexity, and
there have been associated changes in our environment. Our food energy systems
have also grown, and in the process changed from foraging to horticulture and
agriculture. The auxiliary energy systems have also grown, incorporating the
energy of draft animals, wind and water power, and fossil fuels. For our
purposes, however, the most significant changes have been those in the system
of behavioral energy. To understand these changes we must look more closely at
the thermodynamic peculiarities of the human primate.
All animals expend
behavioral energy to satisfy their needs. Among humans, this energy expenditure
takes a distinctive form, labor. In contrast to the direct and individual
appropriation of naturally-occurring use values by other primates, humans
satisfy their needs through social production, using tools and cooperating to
produce a social product which is appropriated according to socially
established rules (see Figure 1.). All human beings, since australopithecine
times, have been dependent upon definite modes of production and it is this
dependence which has generated the distinctive characteristics of our species
(Ruyle 1976, Woolfson 1982).
Figure 1. Energy Flow in Non-human and Human Populations.
Now, although all human
beings are dependent upon social labor, it is by no means the case that all
human beings participate in social labor. Indeed, the distinctive feature of
civilization is the existence of classes which, although they enjoy
preferential access to the social product, do not themselves engage directly in
production. Such classes live by expending their energy into a mode of
exploitation, an ensemble of exploitative techniques (such as slavery, plunder,
rent, taxation, and wage-slavery) and associated institutions of violence and
thought-control (the State-Church). Human societies, then, may be classified
into two categories on the basis of their underlying thermodynamic structure
(see Figure 2.). On the one hand, there are classless societies in which all
members of society, for the greater part of their adult lives, participate
directly in production through the expenditure of their own labor power. The
primitive commune of foragers and the matriarchal clans of some
horticulturalists are examples of classless societies.
Figure 2. Energy Flow in Primitive Communism and Patriarchal Class Rule.
On the other hand, there
are class societies in which there are people who, from birth to death, enjoy
preferential access to the social product while not directly engaging in
production. All such societies are characterized by, first, a definite mode of
exploitation controlled by men who enjoy preferential access to the social
product, and second, patriarchy. It is men, not women, that control and are the
chief beneficiaries of the exploitative system. All historic and contemporary
civilizations fall into this category.
Before looking at these
two types of society, primitive communism and patriarchal class rule, in
greater detail, it may be useful to discuss the concepts of social
thermodynamics more fully. These concepts, it may be noted, are drawn from two
sources: ecological energetics and Marx's labor theory of value (see Ruyle
1977).
Just as all animal life
may be viewed as a struggle for the energy embodied in plant material and
animal flesh (White 1949:362-393), so all human life may be viewed as a
struggle for the labor energy embodied in the goods that satisfy human needs.
In capitalism, human needs are met predominately through the consumption of
commodities. The consumption of commodities is the consumption of the definite
amount of social labor embodied in those commodities, and it is the labor
energy embodied in commodities that ultimately determines, through the
mechanism of supply and demand, their exchange-value (Sweezy 1968; Marx 1969).
The exchange of commodities is, therefore, the exchange of the labor energy
embodied in those commodities. Access to the commodities that make up the
social product is acquired through money. The quest for money is, therefore, the
form that the struggle for labor energy takes in bourgeois society.
In precapitalist modes of
production this struggle for social energy takes different forms. Following
Polanyi's tripartite scheme of reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange
(1957a), we may characterize the modes of gaining access to the social product
as kinship (reciprocity), status (redistribution), and money (exchange). Each
of these modes had its own inner logic which shapes the form of struggle for
energy. In kinship systems, best exemplified by the foraging commune, efforts
at maximization are constrained by the small size and material interdependency
of the commune, as well as the ideology of kinship itself. In status systems,
best exemplified by the early empires such as the kingdom of Hammurabi in
Babylonia and the New Kingdom in Egypt, "distribution was graded,
involving sharply differentiated rations" according to status (Polanyi
1957a:51). As Claessen and Skalnik note,
Though the underlying principle of the early state is reciprocity,
the reciprocity does not appear to be
balanced: the flow of goods and labor is reciprocated mostly on the ideological
level, and, in reality, a form of redistributive exploitation prevails
(1978:638-39, see also p. 614).
Such systems are the product
of maximization efforts which tore asunder the primitive commune. Such
maximization reaches its apogee in the exchange systems of capitalism.[12]
Beneath the surface of
human social life, then, are underlying thermodynamic structures which exert
powerful influences on human behavior. It is these structures and their inner
laws of motion must be the focus of scientific analysis of the origin and
development of patriarchal system of class rule.
Before proceeding, it is
necessary to discuss two key concepts, exploitation and oppression. Although
these are intertwined, they are analytically distinct. While exploitation has
been fairly clearly defined in the scientific literature (contra Dalton 1974,
see Ruyle 1975), the term oppression does not appear either in standard
bourgeois sources (Sills 1968) or Marxist sources (Gould 1946). Nor, to the
best of my knowledge, is oppression defined within the literature of feminism
(but see Delphy 1984).
Standard dictionary
definitions of oppression include both objective ("the exercise of
authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner") and
subjective ("the feeling of being oppressed by something weighing down the
bodily powers or depressing the mind") aspects (Barnhart 1947:850). Clearly,
oppression is a broad concept which subsumes exploitation but includes other
social processes as well.
We may briefly define
oppression as the denial of equal access to the social product, which includes
both material goods and services as well as intellectual and spiritual
products, and denial of full development, use, and control of one's productive,
reproductive, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual powers. Such denial is
enforced by other people who, by virtue of their oppressive acts, gain
preferential access to the social product and control over the productive and
reproductive powers of the oppressed.
In addition to being a
social process, that is, some people are objectively oppressed by others,
oppression is also a subjective feeling within individuals. The objective
process and subjective feelings may, or may not, coincide. People may feel
oppressed even though, objectively, they are not, for example, members of
ruling classes after a revolution abolishes their former privileges, or someone
without musical ability wanting to be recognized as a great singer. Or people
may objectively be oppressed without necessarily feeling oppressed, for example
the mythical "happy slave" or "happy housewife."
While class and gender
oppression are intertwined, their analysis must take different forms. Class
oppression is everywhere associated with exploitation, the forcible extraction
of surplus from the direct producers by a class of non-producers. Exploitation
is a real process which can be measured in thermodynamic terms. Thus, the
average production worker in the U.S. is paid less than $20,000 per year, but
produces over $60,000 worth of value-added to the finished product (U.S. Bureau
of the Census 1984:746). The difference of $40,000, what we Marxists call
surplus value, is appropriated by the capitalist. In short, two-thirds of the
labor energy of the average worker in the United States is appropriated by the
bourgeoisie. By contrast, a capitalist with $10,000,000 to invest can, at a
modest 5% in tax free municipal bonds, receive $500,000 yearly with a minimum
expenditure of effort. The exploitation of peasants or slaves in precapitalist
systems is equally clear as this exploitation of wage-slaves in capitalism.
Class systems almost
invariably include groups of oppressed people who are not exploited in the
strict sense of the term. The unemployed in capitalism and the underclass of
agrarian empires are clearly oppressed as we have defined the term, but are not
sources of surplus for the ruling class, even though their existence
facilitates the extraction of surplus from the direct producers.
Class oppression, then,
takes the form of denial of equal access to the social product and associated
forms of threats, violence, and thought control to support this denial. It is
directly linked into a system of exploitation for the extraction of surplus
from the direct producers.
The oppression of women
is more complex.[13] It may, and
usually does, include exploitation. But it also includes other forms of
oppression, unique to gender oppression, such as the denial of the exercise of
productive, reproductive, intellectual, artistic, and sexual powers. The forms
of such oppression, as Engels correctly saw, varied with the class position of
the woman, or rather of the man to whom she is attached, since the class
position of a women is often determined by that of the men to whom she is
attached.
Women are significant
objects of class exploitation. Marx was no doubt correct when he saw that women
were the first exploited group (Meillassoux 1981:78), as female slavery appears
to antedate male slavery and remains more important than male slavery in early
Mesopotamia (Adams 1966:96-97, 102), and probably ethnographically as well.[14]
The exploitation of women workers has been important in every phase of
capitalist development, and women continue to function as a disadvantaged
minority group within the labor market. Such sexual discrimination within the
capitalist labor market, together with racial and ethnic discrimination, is an
essential feature of capitalism (Ruyle 1978). It is no accident, therefore,
that women form the bulk of the poor in contemporary capitalism.
In addition, however,
there are other forms of gender oppression. The women of the ruling classes are
typically not exploited in the Marxist sense, since no economic surplus is
extracted from them. But even with servants to attend them, upper class women
are oppressed if they are denied the exercise of their intellectual and
productive powers and control over their own reproduction. The roots of such
oppression lie in what Veblen termed "conspicuous consumption" of
ruling class men:
In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not
sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put
in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only does the
evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on others and to keep
their sense of importance alive and alert, but it is of scarcely less use in
building up and preserving one's self-complacency. . . . One portion of the
servant class, chiefly those persons whose occupation is vicarious leisure,
come to undertake a new, subsidiary range of duties - the vicarious consumption
of goods. . . . Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious
consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of food,
clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the domestic
establishment. . . . So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a
drudge, she is, in the average of cases, fairly content with her lot. She not
only has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she has also no time or
thought to spare for a rebellious assertion of such human propensity to
self-direction as she has inherited. And after the stage of universal female
drudgery is passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous application
becomes the accredited employment of the women of the well-to-do classes, the
prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary decency, which requires the
observance of ceremonial futility on their part, will long preserve high-minded
women from any sentimental leaning to self-direction and a "sphere of
usefulness" (Veblen 1953:42,60,232-33).
Ruling class women,
however, are not necessarily reduced to mere consumers of the surplus gained by
their predatory mates. Domhoff has analyzed the role of American ruling class
women in preserving the class system by not only establishing the canon of
invidious consumption, but also in maintaining the class lines through social
functions (debutante balls, parties, marriage arrangements, etc.) and in social
welfare work which increases the dependency of the poor on the well-wishes of
the rich (1971).
In the lower, but still
"respectable," classes, the dependence of women on men's claims to
the social product enforces "the open or concealed domestic slavery of the
wife":
In the great majority of
cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn
a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of
supremacy without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the
family, he is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat (Engels
1972:137).
Or, as Firestone
perceptively notes:
There is also much truth in the clichŽs that "behind every
man there is a woman," and that "women are the power behind [read:
voltage in] the throne." (Male) culture was built on the love of women,
and at their expense. Women provided the substance of those male masterpieces;
and for millennia they have done the work, and suffered the costs, of one-way
emotional relationships the benefits of which went to men and to the work of
men. So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the
male economy, the reverse too is true: (Male) culture was (and is) parasitical,
feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity. . . . Men were
thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into
those men (1971:127, 126).
Thus, although the
domestic slavery of women may be analyzed in thermodynamic terms (but somewhat
differently than wage slavery), and correctly seen as exploitation, this is not
the sole dimension of women's oppression. No economic surplus is obtained by
denying middle class women the exercise of their productive powers. What is
obtained, rather, is support for the man in his exploitative activities, by
providing a emotionally secure refuge. Perhaps we may borrow DeVos's (1967)
concept of "expressive exploitation" for the use of women as
consumers of leisure to enhance the invidious distinctions among men, and as
providers of support for the predatory activities of men.
Finally, we may note the
existence of sexual oppression, both in using women as sex objects and in
denying women's rights to sexual gratification. The use of women as sexual
objects is an ubiquitous form of oppression. Whether this occurs in the harems
of Oriental despots or in more mundane forms of prostitution, the object of
such sexual exploitation is not surplus value in the Marxist sense.
Neither class nor gender
oppression are universal in human societies (although, as we shall note, there
are differences of opinion on the universality of the gender oppression). They
do not appear in primitive communism, and only become universal with the rise
of civilization.
Primitive Communism
The theory of primitive
communism proposed by Morgan and Engels has not been well received by bourgeois
anthropology (see White 1959:55-56), no doubt due to a reluctance to admit that
our ancestors were communists. But there is general agreement on the
egalitarian and communal nature of foraging society, regardless of the term
used (see, e.g. Coon 1971, Fried 1967, Flannery 1972, Harris 1971, Service
1962, 1975, White 1959).
Contemporary foraging
peoples cannot, of course, be simply equated with the foragers of prehistory,
since 1. they occupy marginal areas rather than the most productive areas
occupied by prehistoric foragers, 2. they are usually in close contact with horticultural
and state-level peoples, and 3. there has been acculturation due to contact
with the West. Nevertheless, such peoples provide our best source of
information about the kinds of life-styles that existed prior to the neolithic
revolution. Archaeological evidence confirms the similarities in population
size, settlement patterns, and subsistence technologies between prehistoric and
contemporary foraging peoples. It is reasonable to assume, therefore,
considerable overlap between the ranges of variation of contemporary and
prehistoric foraging societies (Clark 1967:12, Woodburn 1980:113, but see also
Makarius 1979).
The basic features of the
foraging commune are well established. As Leacock and Lee note:
In our view there is a core of features common to band-living foraging societies around the world. Extraordinary
correspondences have emerged in details of culture between, for example, the
Cree and the San, or the Inuit and the Mbuti. These features, however, differ
from a number of cases such as California and the Northwest Coast of North
America where relations of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption
have more in common with many horticultural peoples than with other foragers.
Similarities among
foragers include: egalitarian patterns of sharing; strong
anti-authoritarianism; an emphasis on the importance of cooperation in
conjunction with great respect for individuality; marked flexibility in band
membership and in living arrangements generally; extremely permissive
child-rearing practices; and common techniques for handling problems of
conflict and reinforcing group cohesion, such as often-merciless teasing and
joking, endless talking, and the ritualization of potential antagonisms. Some
of these features are shared with horticultural peoples who are at the
egalitarian end of the spectrum, but what differentiates foragers from
egalitarian farmers is the greater informality of their arrangements
(1982:7-8).
The underlying
thermodynamic structure of the foraging commune is simple and clear: it is a
classless society with equality of access to the social product and equal
obligation to participate directly in productive labor. No one can expect to
live their lives on the labor of others, and no expects to be exploited
throughout their lives. There are no special instruments of violence and
thought control, but rather equality of access to violence and to the sacred
and supernatural worlds.
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 (Rosaldo 1974, Ortner 1974, Gough 1975,
Harris 1977, Firestone 1971, de Beauvoir 1952). 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).
To the best of my
knowledge, no one has suggested that patriarchal institutions comparable to
those of historic civilizations existed in foraging societies, although village
societies may provide some comparable examples (i.e. 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; 1981).[15]
There is, of course,
considerable variability in foraging societies. Friedl notes four patterns of
the sexual division of labor among foragers (1975:18-19). In the first,
represented by Hadza of Tanzania and the Paliyans of Southwest India, hunting
is of little importance and both men and women gather on a largely individual
basis, with little food sharing and little meat for distribution. In the
second, represented by the Washo of the Great Basin of North America and the
Mbuti pigmies of the Congo rain forests, both men and women participate in
collective hunting, although men do the actual killing, and also both sexes
participate in gathering activities, with food shared among the work team. In
the third, represented by the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in south Africa
and the Tiwi of north Australia, there is a clear division of labor in which
men hunt large game animals which provide 30 to 40 per cent of the food supply,
and women gather plant foods and small animals. In the fourth, represented by
the Eskimo, the game provided by men is virtually the only source of food, and
women are almost totally dependent on the men for all foodstuffs and raw
materials. The "Caribou-Eater" Chipewan of northern Canada, among
whom men's hunting activity provides over 90 per cent of the food supply, are
another example (Sharp 1981).
The differential control
over the distribution of meat has been suggested to be a crucial variable
determining the relative statuses of men and women (Friedl 1975). Where men's
hunting provides a substantial percentage of the food supply, men appear to
enjoy greater dominance, and the position of women appears most oppressive
among the Eskimo and Chipewan (Friedl 1975, Sharp 1981, but see also Sachs
1982, Fleur-Lobban 1979, Caufield 1981, Briffaut 1931)
In this connection, the
Agta pigmies of the Philippines are of crucial importance, for Agta women hunt
equally with men, using bows and arrows and other techniques to hunt wild pigs
and deer (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981). The Agta clearly demonstrate that
neither physical size and strength nor child bearing and child rearing prevent
women from hunting. The Griffins point out that Mbuti pigmy men kill elephant
and buffalo, and suggest that the robust Neanderthal women could certainly have
done the same (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981:146). They further suggest that
the Agta data deny the universality of the woman-the-gatherer
model, and go far to advance the concept of hunter-gatherers as incredibly
flexible in all their organizational characteristics. Subsistence activities as
well as social organization may be so malleable that whatever the environmental
pressures for and historical trajectory of culture change, hunters may shift
people into whatever food-getting pursuits will keep everybody fed (1981:143).
Pursuing this suggestion,
we may note also the plasticity of social behavior among the apes, from the
monogamous gibbons to the group living of chimps, and among baboons, from the
harems of Hamadryas baboons to the troops of the savannah (Jolly 1972). Among
lions, it is the females that "usually do the hunting in a pride,"
and hunting hyenas are "usually led by a female" (Schaller and
Lowther 1969:331, 318). We may further note that there is no task, with the
possible exception of metallurgy, from which women are completely excluded (Sacks
1979), certainly not hunting, not warfare (Harris 1978:119), and not, as the
example of Harriet Tubman shows, plow agriculture (Nies 1978:39). Clearly, a
high degree of diversity likely characterized all phases of human evolution.
Although it seems reasonable to suppose that a sexual division of labor between
man the hunter and woman the gatherer was a common pattern, it is equally
reasonable to deny that it was universal or even the norm.
Some see the egalitarian
character of foraging societies in negative terms, as simply due to the
undeveloped state of production - since H&G's are so poor in material
terms, and produce no surplus, they "naturally" have no economic
inequality (see, e.g. Lenski 1966). Such a view, however, ignores the key
structural differences between primitive communism and patriarchal class rule.
The umbilical cord of mutual interdependence binding foragers to the commune
enjoins each member to share and to refrain from aggressive and domineering
behavior, since such behavior would jeopardize the very social relations upon
which every individual depends. The liberty, equality, and solidarity of the
primitive commune, then, are positive features rooted in the material
conditions of the foraging mode of production.
There is a tendency to
view the foraging commune as a kind of "golden age" of humanity, vide
the "original affluent society" thesis of Sahlins (1972). There is
some justification for this, since diet and labor conditions compare favorably
with those of peasants in class society, class oppression was not yet
developed, and gender oppression was, at worst, sporadic. But primitive
communism should not be viewed as idyllic, for humanity was still subjected to
the forces of nature. Hunger, disease, high rates of infant mortality, forced
infanticide and abandonment of the aged were common. Nonetheless, primitive
communism was a viable and technologically progressive social order for the
greater period of humanity's existence. Foraging societies compare favorably
with horticultural societies and with peasants in civilized societies in terms
of their vital statistics, and it is not until the Industrial Revolution that
dramatic changes occur (Dumont 1975).
In summary, then, the
underlying thermodynamic structure of the foraging commune reflects the
"free and equal association of the producers," with a universal
obligation to participate in social labor and free and equal access to the
social product. Associated with this, there is equality of access to violence
(at least for men), to strategic resources, and to the sacred and supernatural.
Although gender roles vary from near androgyny to male dominance, the norm
appears to be closer to complementary and interdependence of men and women,
with both sexes enjoying considerable autonomy in their productive and
reproductive lives. Completely lacking are the features of patriarchal class
rule: male control over women's productive and reproductive powers, forcible
extraction of surplus through exploitative techniques, and specialized institutions
of violence and thought control. In their stead, the foraging commune was
characterized by, as Morgan and Engels correctly saw, liberty, equality, and
solidarity.
Patriarchal Class Rule
In contrast to the rough
equality of primitive communism, class societies are marked by gross
differentials in access to the social product. The last five thousand years of
human evolution have been dominated by men who, although they do not
participate directly in production, nevertheless are abundantly provided with the
good things in life. In all civilizations, those classes (slavemasters, nobles,
landlords, capitalists) that contribute the least amount of labor energy to
production receive the greatest rewards, while those classes (slaves, serfs,
peasants, workers) that contribute the most receive the least. Further, all
civilizations are patriarchal, in that men tend to enjoy preferential access to
the rewards of society and control over the productive and reproductive powers
of women, who bear the greater burdens of exploitation and oppression. Why is
this?
Bourgeois social science
would have us believe that "society" rewards some people, mostly men,
because they contribute something more important than labor to society -
brains, managerial skill, technical expertise, valor, or whatever - but this is
clearly nonsense[16] As Rousseau
remarked, this is
a question slaves who think they are being overheard by their
masters may find it useful to discuss, but that has no meaning for reasonable
and free men in search of the truth (as quoted by Dahrendorf 1969:20).
The real explanation is
quite different.
The emergence of wealthy,
leisured classes occurs simultaneously with the emergence of special
instruments of violence and thought control that are staffed and/or controlled
by those men who enjoy special privileges and wealth. It seems reasonable,
therefore, to conclude that the wealth and privileges of ruling classes result
from the activity of the members of the ruling class itself. This activity
takes the form of expenditures of energy into a mode of exploitation which
pumps surplus labor out of the direct producers and into the exploiting
classes. It is thus not "society" that rewards the wealthy and
powerful; they reward themselves. They accomplish this by manipulating a mode
of exploitation which may be thought of as 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 - see Ruyle 1977). First of all, there are the exploitative
techniques, the precise instrumentalities through which surplus is pumped out
of the direct producers and into the ruling class. These may be direct, such as
simple plunder, slavery, taxation, or corvee, or indirect, such as rent,
managerial exploitation (or differential withdrawal from a redistributive
network), or 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 exploited population. 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.
The State and the Church,
then, form twin agencies of oppression whose purpose is to support and
legitimate ruling class exploitation and the wealth and privileges resulting
from this exploitation. But in addition to their repressive role, these
agencies also carry out a variety of socially beneficial functions.
Marx once wrote of the
Asiatic state:
There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but
three departments of Government: that of Finance, or the plunder of the
interior, that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and finally, the
department of Public Works (1969:90).
Marx's statement here
calls our attention to the dual role of the State, as an agency of oppression
and of government. Generally speaking, the State carried on the following
functions in developed class societies: waging war, suppressing class conflict,
protecting private property, punishing theft, constructing and maintaining
irrigation works, running state monopolies of key economic resources,
regulation of markets, standardization of weights and measures, coinage of
money, maintaining roads, and controlling education (see White 1959:314-23).
The Church is often
viewed as a religious institution, but it is also an important agency of social
control. This is well understood by the theoreticians of the Catholic Church.
Pope Leo XIII, for example, declared that
God has divided the government of the human race between two
authorities, ecclesiastical and civil, establishing one over things divine, the
other over thing human (as quoted in White 1959:303).
The importance of the
Church in social control is made even more explicit in the following statement
of Pope Benedict XV:
Only too well does experience show that when religion is banished,
human authority totters to its fall . . . when the rulers of the people distain
the authority of God, the people in turn despise the authority of men. There
remains, it is true, the usual expedient of suppressing rebellion by force, but
to what effect? Force subdues the bodies of men, not their souls (as quoted by
White 1959:325).
The implication is clear.
Only the Church can subdue the souls of human beings and make them accept the
oppressiveness of class rule. Leslie White has provided abundant documentation
of the role of the Church in subduing the souls of human beings and supporting
the ruling class by 1) supporting the State in its functions of waging war,
suppressing class struggle, and protecting private property, and 2)
"keeping the subordinate class at home obedient and docile" (White
1959:303-328). The content of the religious ideology promulgated by the Church
helps fulfill this latter function by promising the subordinate class in the
afterlife the rewards they are denied in this world, and by threatening the
punishment of Hell for misbehavior in this world.
The Church also plays an
important role in legitimating the system by teaching that the social order is
an extension of the natural and sacred orders. This legitimation has a dual
aspect. First, there is the manipulative, thought control aspect in which the
content of religious ideology is consciously shaped in order to support the
existing system. Second, and also very important, is the legitimation of the
system to the rulers themselves. Max Weber discussed the latter aspect as
follows:
When a man who is happy compares his position with that of one
who is not happy, he is not content with the fact of his happiness, but desires
something more, namely the right to this happiness, the consciousness that he
has earned his good fortune, in contrast to the unfortunate one who must
equally have earned his misfortune. . . . What the privileged classes require
of religion, if anything at all, is this psychological reassurance of
legitimacy (1963:106-107).
It is important to
distinguish between religion and the Church. Religion is any body of ideas
about the sacred and supernatural. As such, it precedes class society and plays
important functions even in primitive communism. In class society, religion
becomes an arena of class struggle and religion becomes divided into the
religion of the oppressed and the religion of the oppressor. It is the latter
which is promulgated by the Church, a social organization, controlled by the
ruling class, which uses religion for purposes of thought control. In modern
systems, it may be noted, these thought control functions are largely taken
over by other institutions such as the mass media and educational system, so
that the role of the Church is somewhat reduced.[17]
This mode of
exploitation, including an ensemble of exploitative techniques, the State, and
the Church, 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 becomes 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. This predatory relationship between rulers and ruled, then,
generates the division of the population into classes, which are best defined
by their relationship to the underlying flow of labor energy through the
population.
The surface structure of
developed class societies may 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. The ruling class is composed of a group of intermarrying
patriarchal families who, in addition to controlling their own sources of
wealth in the form of landed estates typically worked by peasant labor, also
control the key positions in the State-Church bureaucracies. 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 but which nonetheless plays
an important role the overall system of exploitation.
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 and Engels correctly pointed out, is the
history of class struggle (1964). 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.[18]
The second is that
systems of class rule are invariably patriarchal.[19]
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 men struggle against class rule, so women struggle
against patriarchy. It is men who write history, however, and this gender
struggle has been poorly documented, and those sources which exist have been,
until quite recently, generally ignored (see, e.g., Carroll 1976).
Barrett has suggested
that the term patriarchy be restricted, since in its present usage it is
"transhistorical" (1980). A term that can be applied to so many
different societies, it may be argued, has lost all utility for social
analysis. Similar arguments, of course, could be made in favor of abandoning
the term "class rule." I believe such arguments are fundamentally
erroneous, for all systems of patriarchal class rule share underlying
structural features which set them off from both the primitive communism that
preceded them, and from the emerging socialist world that is replacing them.
The nature of these structural features, and how they generate the superficial
differences between historical systems of patriarchal class rule, are valid
topics for scientific analysis.
Neither patriarchy nor
class rule are "transhistorical," but are rather historically
limited, in that they develop after the neolithic revolution. They thus occupy
less than one percent of the period of humanity's existence.
This is a vital point,
for it underlines the fact that male dominance and women's oppression are
culturally, not biologically, determined. They are products of human activity
and can therefore be changed by human activity.
This does not deny that
male chauvinism may have existed in some foraging societies. But, as we noted
earlier, these are isolated, localized instances. It was not until what Engels
called "the world historical defeat of the female sex" that male
chauvinism became general in human societies.
Even after the rise of
patriarchy, however, women were able to maintain some equality with men in some
groups within larger systems of patriarchal class rule. But again, these are
localized instances which do not characterize the systems as wholes. The
attempt to define precisely the conditions under which male chauvinism
flourishes among hunters and gatherers and sometimes wanes within civilized
societies is a useful and important task, but it should not detract from
recognition of the general tendencies of these two forms of society, tendencies
which are quite clear when we compare the two forms of society in their
totality.
The motive force of
patriarchal class rule is the greed and avarice of the male rulers. This is not
simply the desire for a decent life, but a passion to live better than the rest
of society. Women, of course, are by no means immune from such ambition
(although, as a group, they are probably less susceptible to it than men), but
women, on the one hand, have fewer opportunities to satisfy such ambitions,
and, on the other, they typically satisfy such ambitions through men. For these
reasons, it is the greed and avarice of men that is dominant in the origin and
maintenance of class rule.
This underlying motive
force, of course, is manifest in different ways depending on historically
conditioned material circumstances. Just as patriarchal class rule is based on
a variety of different modes of production (from the irrigated wheat and barley
cultivation of ancient Sumeria and Egypt, through the chinampas of the Aztecs,
the potato farming of the Incas, the rice paddies of east and south Asia, to
the industrial agriculture of modern Euro-American capitalism), so different
modes of exploitation are developed by different ruling classes: the
bureaucratic mode of the Chinese gentry, the feudal mode of the Japanese
samurai, the slave mode of ancient Athens, and the modern bourgeois mode of
exploitation.
Similarly, the forms of
oppression of women vary from patriarchy to patriarchy. The oppression of
middle class women in the capitalist patriarchies of Europe and the United
States have, of course, been most intensively analyzed by feminists. These
exhibit clear differences from capitalist patriarchy in Japan and from the
patriarchal oppression of southern womanhood before (and after) the Civil War,
the foot-binding of the daughters of the Chinese gentry, the suttee inflicted
on Hindu women, and the purdah imposed on Arabic women.
Also, the forms of
oppression vary along class lines within patriarchal systems. Engels analyzed
the different forms of the oppression of women in the bourgeois and proletarian
families of his time, and we may not also the differences between gentry and
peasant families in Chinese patriarchy and between samurai and peasant families
in feudal Japan. We may note here also the existence of matrifocal families
among the most oppressed groups within capitalist patriarchy.
All of this is not to
suggest that women are universally mere pawns in the game of male power.
Clearly, they have sources of strength within the system (Collier 1974,
Schlegal 1972, Webster 1975:152). Nor, for that matter, are women pure
innocents, as Domhoff's study of the role of ruling class women in the United
States in maintaining capitalism indicates (1971). Women play a key role in the
training of young patriarchs, and, as the example of the Chinese mother-in-law
indicates, use their own power to oppress other women. The games women must
play, however, are typically different from those of men. In some cases,
however, women may even become adept at playing the male power game, as
numerous examples from history indicate.
None of this, however,
negates the underlying structure of patriarchy which is manifest in the
universal facts that men have greater access to power, prestige, and wealth in
patriarchy and women suffer disproportionately from oppression in patriarchy.
Although patriarchal
systems of class rule take a variety of forms, they also exhibit remarkable
similarities. The central feature is everywhere a predatory ruling class that
uses a definite mode of exploitation to extract surplus from the direct
producers, thereby supporting their own wealth and privilege. The ruling class
is composed of a group of intermarrying patriarchal families whose male members
staff the key positions in the political and religious structures supporting
class rule and whose female members are largely restricted to the domestic sphere.
There is variation, however, in the degree of discrimination against female
participation in the politico-religious system. In Japanese history, at least
since the Heian period, the Emperor and the Shogun were invariably men, while
in England women could, and as in the cases of Queen Elizabeth and Queen
Victoria, assume the leading political role (which, however, did not improve
the general position of women any more than did the election of Margaret
Thatcher as Prime Minister).
The ruling class almost
invariably lives in the cities, for good reasons. In addition to providing
protection from invaders and marauders that may plague the countryside, the
cities also provide ruling class families with the best access to the
State-Church organizations, usually based in the cities, and to the luxuries of
urban life (Sjoberg 1960).
Marriage within ruling
class families is rarely left up to the bride and groom, for marriage is a
crucial way of forming and cementing alliances within the ruling class. The
marriage networks of ruling class families extend across ethnic boundaries, as
in medieval European civilization, and even across civilizations. Cleopatra of
Egypt and Asoka of India, for example, were linked together by affinal ties in
what Darlington calls an "intercontinental ruling caste"
(1969:224-27).
The mode of exploitation
and the organization of the ruling class also varies. Typically, the
exploitation of the peasants is primary; the importance of slave-labor in
ancient Greece is unusual, although slaves are ubiquitous in precaptialist
civilizations. The State-Church organization is also variable, sometimes being
headed by a single person, as in Japan, or sometimes being separate.
Beneath the ruling class
are, typically in precapitalist systems, a retainer class which does much of
the actual work of ruling by staffing the lower levels of the
politico-religious systems, an urban artisan class, usually with a guild
organization, a peasantry, usually with internal class divisions between rich
and poor peasants, and an underclass, made up of outcastes and outcasts. The
divisions between these classes may be rigid, as in Tokugawa Japan, or fluid,
as in bureaucratic China, so that there are differing degrees of, social
mobility both between and within different class systems.
In capitalist patriarchy,
of course, the class structure is quite different.
The essence of
civilization, then, lies in exploitation. It is exploitation that generates the
distinction between ruler and ruled, and the struggle between them. The unique
accomplishments of civilizations in writing, in arts and sciences, in
architecture, and so forth, are based upon exploitation. Once this is
understood, the question of the origin of the state and civilization becomes
transformed into a question about how exploitation began.
The Transition From Primitive Communism
To Patriarchal Class Rule.
Since bourgeois
anthropology generally ignores or denies the central role of exploitation in
civilization, it has been unable to provide any convincing explanation for the
origin of civilization. Once the oppressive nature of civilization is
understood, however, we may begin to ask the right questions, and examine with
greater precision how the liberty, equality, and solidarity of primitive
communism became transformed into the oppression, inequality, and male
chauvinism of civilization.
The answers lie in the
changed material conditions of social life after the Neolithic Revolution. With
the development of a sedentary way of life based on village farming, certain
men began to develop techniques for exploiting first women, and then other men.
This led to what Engels called "the world historical defeat of the female
sex" (1972:120). We may add that this was also a defeat for the greater
part of the male sex as well.
This defeat was not
accomplished all at once, nor everywhere in the same manner. Its motive,
however, was everywhere the same: the predatory impulses of men. Curwen
(1953:3-5) notes that, "Apart from theft or plunder, there are three ways
in which you may obtain your supply of food": food collecting (hunting and
gathering), food production (with domesticated plants and animals), and
industry. Curwen should not have given such short shift to theft and plunder,
however, for they are the basis of all civilization. At least since Aristotle,
social theorists have seen property as the basis of civil society, and, as
Proudhon reminds us, "What is property? Theft!" (Mandel 1968:88).
No less than modern
bourgeois civilization is founded on wealth stolen from the workers, early
civilizations from Ur to Teotihuacan were founded on wealth stolen from the
peasants. Just as Marx revealed the precise instrumentality and analyzed in
detail the consequences of this theft in modern society, so we must analyze the
instrumentality and consequences of the early systems for extracting surplus
from the peasant producers. For, as Marx stressed,
The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labor is
pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relation between rulers and
ruled, as it grows immediately out of production itself and, in turn reacts
upon it as a determining agent. . . . It is always the direct relation of the
owners of the means of production to the direct producers which reveals the
innermost secret, the hidden foundation of the entire social structure
(1966:791, as quoted by Baran 1957:44).
So too will it shed light
on the problem of the origin of civilization. For civilization began when some
men began to devise ways for exploiting first women, and then other men.
We cannot be sure exactly
how this was accomplished, but let me discuss some aspects of the process with
reference to the fishing societies of the Indians of the Northwest Coast (see
Ruyle 1973b).
Wealth may be gained
through labor or through exploitation. A man may, for example, stand on a rock
and spear salmon for 5 hours and obtain 50 salmon, or 10 per hour. By extending
his hours of labor, he can increase his return, but only in proportion to his
increase in labor expenditure. If, however, he declares himself the owner of
his rock and guards "his" rock with a war club and permits five other
men to spear fish from "his" rock only on condition that they give
him one half of their catch, his return will then be one half of the ten fish
speared by each of the five men, or 12 x 10 x 5, or 25 fish per hour. In five
hours, then, he can obtain 125 fish, more than he could obtain in twelve hours
of his own labor. Clearly, one can obtain wealth much more rapidly through
exploitation than through labor.
Certain points need to be
made. First, the efforts at guarding the rock, although they provide a high
rate of return for the owner, are not productive labor since they do not
contribute directly to production.
On the other hand,
exploitation does lead to an intensification of production, since each of the
direct producers must now work ten hours in order to obtain 50 fish each, and
the total number of fish produced will be 500 - 250 going to the direct
producers ad 250 to the "owner". In an egalitarian setting, with six
people fishing five hours each, only 300 fish would have been produced.
Such exploitation is
possible only under certain circumstances. First of all, in the example given,
the "owner" must be able to control access to strategic resources. If
there were other fishing rocks downstream, the producers would have fished
there instead of working twice as hard on the "owner's" rock. Or if,
instead, there were five hunters hunting kangaroo in the Australian desert, it
would be much more difficult to control their activities.
Second, it must be
possible to store and accumulate wealth. What can anybody do with 250 fish? It
must be possible to store them or transform them into other forms of wealth.
Clearly, exploitation is not practical among nomadic foragers. A sedentary way
of life is a prerequisite to the development of any substantial exploitative
system.
Third, a large population
is necessary, since exploitation is a disruptive force. The five men who must
work ten hours to get their fifty fish are aware of what is going on, and will
be hostile toward their exploiter. The "owner" of the rock,
therefore, must have his own network of friends, kinsmen, and supporters to
protect him against the resentment and anger of the exploited. Class exploitation,
therefore, cannot develop fully without a large population, numbering well into
the thousands, so that significantly large numbers of people who live by
exploitation can set themselves off from the remainder of the population,
intermarry, and form a ruling class.
Finally, the mode of
exploitation must be capable of being intensified. If catching 500 salmon so
depletes the fish population that it can't reproduce, there will be no salmon,
no production, and no exploitation next year. It is not accidental, therefore,
that developed systems of exploitation and class rule occur with modes of
production that involve intensive agriculture.
Thus, it takes not only a
certain development of the forces of social production but also certain kinds
of productive systems and certain sorts of demographic and ecological
conditions for the emergence of a mode of exploitation large and powerful
enough to support a ruling class.
As population growth
leads to large, dense, and sedentary populations, a new ecological niche opens,
a niche which involves living not off one's own productive labor, but instead
off other people's labor. In order to occupy this predatory niche, a system of
instrumental techniques has to be developed. This system is what I have termed
the mode of exploitation. Men had the advantage in developing these techniques
of exploitation since exploitation, as a system of social predation, tends to
be more similar to the predatory activity of males in hunting than to the
productive and reproductive specialties of women in foraging and horticultural
societies.
People move into this new
niche because the benefits of doing so are considerable, in terms of improved
standard of living, health and wealth, and prestige. But although the emerging
ruling class benefits, the conditions of the rest of the human population
deteriorate, in terms of diet, health, and labor conditions. As Cohen and
Armelagos note, after discussing several paleopathological studies indicating
that the emergence of social stratification and political centralization was to
the benefit of the elite but detriment of the bulk of the population,
These data provide one
approach for testing theories that view early centralized political systems
alternately as supportive homeostatic mechanisms (Service 1975) or as systems
essentially exploitative of subject populations (Fried 1967) (1984:599).
Basically, then, the
larger the population, the greater the opportunities for exploitation. In
nomadic groups with less than 100 people, the possibilities are nil, and very
real barriers to exploitation exist. In settled populations with ten thousand
or more people, the exploiter-niche is invariably occupied by ruling classes.
In the middle range of a few hundred to a few thousand people, incipient ruling
classes are striving to create and consolidate their rule.
The relationship between
increasing size of population and increasing complexity of society has, of
course, been well documented (Dumond 1965; Carneiro 1967, 1978; Spooner 1972;
Polgar 1975). What is crucial to understand, however, is that this increasing
complexity is based upon the emergence of a system of exploitation that
extracts the surplus that supports the complex class relationships. This system
of exploitation is fundamentally different from the system of production which
supports the bulk of the population (Earle 1977; Gall and Saxe 1977).
It is also crucial to
understand that the conditions which favored exploitation will not endure in
the future. If the Neolithic Revolution created the conditions which permitted
the opening of the exploiter-niche, and the Urban Revolution represented the
consolidation of the system of exploitation, the Industrial Revolution has
created the conditions where exploitation can no longer endure, and the present
Socialist Revolution is a process of dismantling the systems of exploitation
which have been so painstakingly constructed for the past five thousand years.
To accomplish this task, it is essential to understand how these systems of
exploitation were constructed in the first place.
During the phase of
nomadic foraging, exploitation was impossible because: 1) mobility prevented
the accumulation of wealth, 2) mobility also permitted people to move away from
undesirable situations, 3) exploitation would have jeopardized the cooperative
network of productive relations upon which all members of the population
depended, and hence, 4) the costs of exploitation far exceeded any possible
benefits. It was not simply, as Engels any many others have suggested, that
"at this stage human labor power does not produce any considerable surplus
over and above its maintenance costs" (1972:118). As recent ethnographies
have shown, foragers are able to satisfy their basic subsistence needs with a
few hours of labor per day. They do not produce a surplus because there is no
reason to do so.
Everyone p