Where Private Property Does Not Reign. (1922)

From the March 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism stands for a society of equals in which the distinctions between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, no longer exist. Opponents of this revolutionary conception assure us frequently that no such form of society has ever existed, or ever will ; that there always have been rich and poor, and always will be, and so on. The following is an attempt to show this statement to be false by depicting the social conditions obtaining amongst the native races of the interior of Africa prior to the European invasion. This invasion having taken place (so far as the countries known as Kenya and Uganda are concerned) during the past generation only, living evidence of previous conditions still exists. It takes the form of customs not yet entirely abandoned, of institutions not yet completely destroyed, and, above all, of the wonderful memories of the old men of the tribes, memories which, of necessity, are enhanced and sharpened by the absence of any literature of native origin.

The evidence above described has been the subject of much investigation on the part of Government officials, missionaries, and travellers in the course of their occupations, some of which has found expression in book form. To this the present writer is much indebted ; but the key to the understanding of native life was supplied to him by one (Lewis H. Morgan) who actually had very little knowledge of Africa; for the obvious reason that it had hardly been opened up at the time he wrote his master-work, "Ancient Society." This speaks volumes for the thoroughness with which Morgan dug to the foundations of barbaric society.

He discovered that among the American Indians the clan (or gens) was the central institution of society, the pivot on which turned the customs and beliefs of the people. He further showed that the same condition had obtained in ancient Greece and Rome before the development of political society, that is, society founded on economic classes ; and also among the barbaric races of Northern Europe and Western Asia who subsequently came under the sway of the above Empires. The case is the same in Africa!

The essential feature of the clan is kinship, i.e., its members are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor more or less remote. Being of the same blood, they may not intermarry. Each member of the clan must find his or her mate among the members of the other clans, the children ultimately becoming members of their fathers' clan. This occurs at the age of puberty, when the rite of circumcision is practised amid great ceremonial and rejoicing. Henceforth they are regarded as adults eligible for marriage. The young men at this age are trained as warriors. Their function is to protect the flocks and herds (which constitute the tangible wealth of the clans), and occasionally, when considered necessary, to undertake raiding expeditions on hostile tribes to augment this wealth.

At this age the young men and women enjoy a considerable amount of sexual freedom, which, as might be expected, gives bourgeois, who are establishing themselves there, a horrible shock and provides them with ample material for the propaganda of measures, such as forced labour, etc., which convert the men into wages-slaves and the women into whores. Infanticide appears to be practised before marriage, but this latter state is seldom long delayed, whereupon children become an important object in life. In fact, barbaric sentiment with regard to the younger generation, only equalled by its respect for the old, surpasses anything the present writer has seen expressed among the civilised races.

The first-born child marks yet another change in the status of its father, who thereupon commences to take an active part in the administration of tribal affairs. He serves at this stage an apprenticeship, as it were, in the art of judging cases such as are brought from time to time before the council of elders, the supreme judicial authority of the tribe. A man becomes an elder upon the circumcision of the firstborn. He thus enters upon the final stage of his career. Those dying before reaching this stage are exposed for the wild beasts to devour ; the elders, however, are accorded burial and their spirits become the guardians of the tribe. This brings us to another aspect of native life, i.e., its religious aspect. It is difficult, however, to say just where this aspect begins and ends. Unlike the abstract religions that have succeeded it, ancestor worship is an everyday religion. From birth to death the life of the individual is hedged around with superstitious observances to secure the favour of the guardian angels and, through them, of nature, the supreme element in a social order based upon primitive modes of living. As a result there exists a hierarchy of so-called medicine-men, elders who are supposed to have special intimacy with the spiritual forces surrounding the tribe and are expected to exercise their influence for its benefit.

Mr. A. C. Hollis, in his work, "The Nandi," gives a curious instance of a chief medicine-man who was put to death by his tribesmen for being the assumed cause of a serious military disaster. Misfortune, however, of various kinds continued to dog the path of the tribes, who then, with characteristic lack of consequence, attributed this to the murder of the medicine-man!

The medicine-men share with the people at large the selection of the chiefs from among the warriors to direct military affairs, and their advice also guides the people in the choice of times and seasons for stock movements in the case of pastoral tribes, and planting, etc., for those depending on horticulture. Thus the religious and conservative element dominates and holds together the destinies of the people, as is but natural in a State where economic conditions hardly vary from generation to-generation.

Between the different leagues of tribes, or peoples, the mode of life naturally varies. Thus, in the mountain fastnesses, clad in dense forest, dwell the Wandorobo, hunters of the big game (elephant, buffalo, and the like), whose bows and poison-tipped arrows are practically their sole means of production. Out on the open plains the Masai herd their cattle, wandering from place to place according to the rainfall and the growth of grass. Among the lower hills and the valleys formed by the streams, live people like the Kikuyu, cultivating with primitive knives and hoes small patches of ground for grains, legumes, tuberous roots, plantains, etc. But although normally hostile to one another, each people recognises amongst itself the principle of common access to the means of life, i.e., the land. With the hunters and the pastoral nomads this is obvious ; but even in the case of the horticultural tribes the same principle applies. The family (normally polygamous) holds from the clan sufficient land for its needs. It is entitled to that, and no more, and if by chance it dies out the land reverts to the clan.

Private property is confined to tools and domestic utensils, weapons and ornaments. These are all in such an immature state of development that it is impossible for them to form means for exploitation through monopoly. Agriculture strictly so-called (i.e., the cultivation of fields by drawn ploughs) not having arisen, the productivity of the individual is too small to make slavery a source of wealth. The slaves would produce little more than they would consume. Hence only the female sex are taken captive in battle, and they are adopted into the captor's family either as daughters or wives. Cattle occupy a peculiar importance in native economy. Their slaughter for food is practically confined to festivals and sacrifices. Their milk, of course, is used, but their principal function seems to be to serve as equivalents to human beings. Thus, when, by marriage, a man takes a woman from another clan, he has to compensate that clan, through the father, for the loss, with so many head of cattle. When, again, a man kills another, of a different clan, similar compensation must be made.

To kill a member of the same clan as himself is apparently a hopeless crime, for which no compensation can avail. The murderer becomes an outcast for the rest of his life.

After a raid the relatives of any warriors who have been slain receive, again, this same compensation. The herds are so numerous in excess of economic requirements and are distributed so liberally among the families from the heads of the clan downwards, and are, withal, regarded with such an intense sentiment, bordering on (if not actually amounting to) superstition, that they appear as a part of the tribe rather than a form of property.

Thus European civilisation has discovered in Africa a form of society somewhat similar to that examined by Morgan in America, a system in which economic classes do not exist, in which each individual becomes in turn warrior, worker, and counsellor, thus combining in his own person the social functions, the division of which, later in history, formed the basis for the origin of classes.

Some bourgeois critics, impatient for an end to this primitive form of communism, do not hesitate to describe it as the enslavement of the people by the chiefs.

Their assertions, however, are based on a very scanty acquaintance with the facts, and are effectively refuted by the painstaking literary efforts of prominent officials such as Sir Alfred Sharpe and Sir Harry Johnston, men whose life-work is the overthrow of this same communism in favour of British capitalist Imperialism, and consequently they are not prejudiced on its side.

The chiefs and elders express the unity of the clan. They have no power apart from it. They are its agents in dealing with other clans and with its individual members. Any privileges which may be incidental to their office are in the nature of special rewards for special services. They depend upon the voluntary tribute of the people and not upon any political or economic means of extortion. (Such means are a later innovation of the British Government, anxious to undermine native solidarity.) The chiefs are the creatures of the customs which they enforce ; any antagonism between them is fatal for the chief. As for the so-called subjection of the female sex, this is readily seen to be a form of division of labour dictated by the conditions of social existence. The women till the gardens, look after their houses, prepare the food, and nurse the young; but the bourgeois critic conveniently forgets that the tribes would soon expire if the male sex did not clear and break up the ground, fell the trees and build the houses, and devise and construct the tools and weapons (of iron) with which the ground is tilled and the herds protected from the wild beasts.

Still the defender of capitalism remains unsatisfied. "Even so," he will say, "admitting that society existed without economic classes for hundreds of thousands of years from the days of the ape-man to the dawn of history, granting that in that time it developed speech, discovered the art of making fire, domesticating animals, the use of grains and vegetables, and evolved from promiscuous herds to organised groups, even so, it did not produce the comfort and leisure without which art and science, in a word, civilisation, would not have come into being ! To do this the subordination of the ignorant many to the intelligent few was necessary."

This admits that civilisation is based on the servitude of the people; for it is not they who enjoy comfort and leisure, art and science, although they produce these desirable conditions by their labour. They do not even obtain the same security of life as the clansman ! But the same onward march of the productive forces which burst asunder the narrow communism of the past is preparing the economic basis of the world-communism of the future, i.e., enough wealth, comfort, leisure, art and science for all !

Eric Boden

How Did Social Inequality Arise? (2013)

From the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at one theory of the origins of hierarchy and social inequality

In The Creation of Inequality: how our prehistoric ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus begin with the notion that the fields of Anthropology and Archaeology should inform one another. Anthropology learns from humans within living memory what they think and feel; while archaeology provides silent clues to the past: buildings, tools or bones.

They build a detailed account of how over the last five thousand or so years, humans have built unequal societies. They examine the underlying cultural logic of different social formations to show how inequality, and subsequent formations, can arise. They deny any straight line model of social development, that one stage leads to another, but rather that each stage can allow the next development. They also note that it isn’t a given level of technology or natural abundance that gives rise to different social formations (they note how the Andes, where the wheel was never even invented, can be seen as the graveyard of such theories). They suggest that over millennia, societies have oscillated between relatively equal or unequal forms, following ‘social logic’.

Hunters-gatherers

They begin with the most equal form of society: the nomadic extended kin group (such as has been encountered in the Arctic within historic memory). They observe that these groups of hunter/gatherers are relatively egalitarian, without formal leaders or classes. They also note that this distinguishes humans from our near primate relatives, who in similar bands operate either with alpha males or an alpha male/beta male coalition. They propose, though, that such dominance hierarchies and behavioural traits do remain in human communities; but that, rather, the function of the alpha male has been replaced by ‘God' with beta coalitions replaced by interceding ancestors and spirits.

That is, people treat the deity and ancestors as if they were above them in a dominance hierarchy (such as, by adopting submission positions), and thinking of themselves as subordinates to these entities. All living humans thus become gammas, in effect equal in subordination. Religion, they suggest, is accompanied by collective ritual, and by inducement of euphoric states to reinforce its effects.

As an aside, this is a fascinating concept, firstly because it does provide for the notion that there was a positive evolutionary reason for the development of the idea of god (which rebuts the arguments of some pro-theists who suggest the disutility of the idea as evidence for some real basis for religion). Secondly, it suggests a useful interpretation of contemporary political psychology. When dictators and their boot boys elevate themselves to godlike status or servants of god, they free themselves from the constraints imposed by such submission. As we shall see, below, the development of inequality was in part about the appropriation of divine sanction.

The hunter gatherer bands may have engaged in gift relations with other nearby bands. As the authors note, the emphasis would have been on seeking and maintaining social relations and retaining the possibility of help and assistance when things may have gone bad. They suggest that, rather than developing language to assist in practical tasks, language and symbolic thinking emerged as a means of coalition building and enabling links between extended kin groups. A development of this, for example, was the nomination of special friends for young males. They give the example of an Eskimo tribe, whose boys had friends allocated parts of a slaughtered seal, indicating their sharing of the goods. They also note the ‘magic of names’ where a bond is assumed between people sharing a name, even beyond a kinship relation.

They conjecture that it was such behaviour that gave rise to the extended clan-based society. A key feature of such a society is the notion of social substitutability. If a person commits a murder, say, it becomes acceptable to kill one of their clan as a substitute for retaliating directly against them individually.

Clan-based societies

Clan-based societies can be very complex. Often, they are divided into two moieties, and the members of one clan from one moiety cannot marry with the members of clans from that same moiety. This can be further complicated by lineages within clans, and much more specific clan-marriage-based arrangements (such as members of clan A always marry into clan D but not clan C).

Flannery and Marcus identify two important features of the cultural logic of such societies. The first is the principle of ‘We were here first’. This has repercussions as certain clans begin to claim pre-ordinance based on clans that are putatively descendants of later arrivers. The second is that individuals may have or acquire virtue. At first, this may be simply the difference between initiated men and un-initiated boys, later there may be stages to initiation, so that even some full grown men may lack virtue. They also note, by reference to Australian aboriginal tribes, that some clans can lay claim to a certain copyright of prestigious rites and rituals.

This sets the scene for the development of the next stage, the achievement-based societies. In hunter-gatherer and tribal societies, anyone getting too big for their boots and bossing others around would be quietly taken into a field and murdered. They also note that mockery, too, was a powerful tool for curbing ambition. In achievement based-societies, an individual could achieve the rank of chief, through a number of routes: success in warfare, or religious/ritual means being among them. The achievement at this stage is individual, and the chief is required to maintain their position through feasts and gift giving. Rank does not pass automatically to off-spring, but chiefs can take steps to try and confer honour on their children and put them in a strong position to achieve rank themselves.

The archaeological evidence at this stage consists of the examination of grave goods. The general absence of children with expensive funeral goods indicates that people did not have exalted status from birth, for example. A common feature of early human societies is the men’s hut, a place where men go and perform rituals (possibly a development from the men staying together while hunting). In achievement societies this becomes the chief’s hut, and the gradations within the men become apparent based on their sleeping position (the lowest ranked sleeping next to the door, thus being most at risk of being killed in a sneak attack).

Entire groups of people become known as ‘Nothing men’ with no status and no property to live off. The chief controls the land and natural resources: sumptuary goods come into existence, in the form of jade, gold or certain shells.

As the authors note, a feature of early human religion was that it could be frequently rewritten, based on new experiences and circumstances. In achievement societies, the leading members of society try to cast themselves as nearer to god (or descended from god) and, often, as different from the rest of humanity. A part of this attempted appropriation, they suggest, is the gradual transformation of the men’s hut into the public temple, and so that building becomes a key archaeological indicator of the development of hierarchy within a society.

Hereditary rulers

At its most fully developed, chiefly rank becomes hereditary. The chief becomes taboo, and no one may look at or touch him (often meaning foreigners have to be employed to assassinate him). Even his waste becomes charged with dangerous levels of virtue, and has to be safely disposed of. Instead of commanding great skill himself, he controls craftsmen who produce status goods, which he can distribute.

At this point, it should be noted, the authors present evidence of societies oscillating between equality and hierarchy, and elite groups lose their grasp on power (through incompetence, or in-fighting, or both). It should also be noted that these developments are not dependent on the state of agriculture or prevailing techniques of production, and seem to stem as much from the capacity of individuals at the right time taking chances and staking a claim to pre-eminence.

This is certainly the case for their model of the emergence of kingship: a distinct caste apart with an hereditary leader. Their basic model is that kingdom’s emergence comes from a usurper taking control of a tribe and annexing nearby groups, in short, through a sort of revolution. They produce examples from African and Polynesian anthropology and history. They note that as hereditary rule emerges within one society, neighbouring societies begin to adopt more and more of its attributes, as a defensive mechanism. As with the move from achievement society to hereditary society, they suggest that multiple attempts to assert sovereignty may have been tried and failed before any given monarch ascended to the purple.

Empires continue the process of creating inequality, by denuding local elites of their power/virtue and creating a hierarchy of civic centres, with each successive layer subordinated to the centre and the king. Multiple strategies can be employed to achieve this (as can be said of each of the previous stages). Often, empires were born out of the ruins of preceding empires (as in the Andes), with successive waves of domination refining the process of conquering and absorbing neighbours.

If there is a flaw with the book, it lies in one of its great strengths. There is a wealth of detail about a great many societies, but the continued listing of the dimensions of huts does get slightly in the way of progressing the book’s points (and may inhibit its utility as a popular book).

Throughout there is a running side argument, around the nature of marriage. They note that historically it was a primarily economic arrangement, and they list at least seven different permutations of marriage (one man two women; one man one woman, two men, one woman, etc.) Their argument is very much with the so-called traditionalists whose model of marriage, they note, goes all the way back to the particular bureaucratic conditions of ancient Sumeria. Marriage, though, is often a route towards hierarchy, with control of marriage between people of high status being a means to create and sustain inequality.

They also touch on ancient warfare. They note how in clan societies, it has been known for the victors in a war to compensate the defeated for their dead, as a means of retaining social bonds and preventing conflict continuation. They show, through anthropological data from Polynesia, that tribal warfare was particularly brutal, with the sneak attack and massacre being favoured (the other evidence they have for this is the increasing incidence of defences around settlements as they develop). They point to Mesoamerican carvings to show how captives were taken and tortured in public display in kingdoms there.

The book does not conclude with any political programme. They do note that the attempt to impose hierarchy has been resisted at every stage. The nearest they come to a suggestion is an anecdote about an archaeologist whose proposal was to ‘put hunter gatherers in charge’.

Overall, this is a worthwhile and important book in the description and articulation of how we came to be where we are. At the very least, it is an eye-opening description of the amazing and varied forms of human society. If nothing else, you can finally discover exactly what a Big Kahuna was.

Pik Smeet