Free for all? (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people considering the SPGB’s case for the first time are staggered by the implication that when Socialist society is established there will no longer be private property or its manifestations. “Surely that’s absurd, everything free, no money, invoices, tax returns, banks. People would go mad taking things which they couldn’t afford—why would anyone work if not for wages? Everyone would rely on someone else to do things for them.” So goes the argument, and yet very often the same people who raise this objection also throw up the obstacle of “human nature” stopping the establishment of Socialism. We are all apparently too selfish, greedy, warlike and generally steeped in original sin to be capable of establishing Socialism (desirable though it sounds).

It comes as a shock, therefore, to people who react in this way to learn that for the most part in the development of human society the concept and consequences of private property did not exist. Capitalism itself (about 200 years old) conditions workers to regard it as permanent, unchanging and the only possible form of society, so that people are indeed jolted to hear about what anthropologists call “primitive communism”.

However, if we are to accept that nature, stars, planets, rocks, the atmosphere, life and man are all the products of evolution, then it is unreasonable to regard human society as being something immutable. L. H. Morgan was one anthropologist who discovered and described the workings of early society including the “communism in living” he observed among Iroquois Indians. One of the reasons for the violent academic backlash against Morgan’s theories was that they upset the notion of the permanence of private property. But Morgan was not the only one to note the lack of property relations among “primitive” peoples. A few illustrations are worth mentioning. G. Taplin talking of Australian tribes wrote: “In the clan there can be no personal property—all implements, weapons, etc., belong to members collectively, every individual regards them as possessions of his clan and to be employed for its welfare and defence as occasion may require. If he has a weapon, or a net, or canoe which is in some sense his own, he knows that his property in it is subject to the superior rights of the clan. Every man is interested in his neighbour’s property and cares for it because it is part of the wealth of the family collectively.”

Also writing of the Australian aborigines the Rev. W. Ridley said: “Real and personal property in individuals is rendered impossible by their systematic communism.” Darwin wrote of Fuegian tribes: “Even a piece of cloth given to one is torn in shreds and distributed, no one individual becomes richer than another.” Of the Eskimos H. W. Klutshak wrote: “In small things and in great, whatever is to be found in an Eskimo village in the way of provisions and tools is the common property of all. As long as there is a piece of meat in the camp it belongs to all.” L. A. de Bougainville wrote: “ . . . it seems that as regards the necessaries of life there is no private property, and everything belongs to everybody” (of Tahiti). Even Lowie, who was a vehement opponent of Morgan’s evolutionary view, had to grudgingly admit: “With respect to certain forms of property there is often what virtually comes to communism notably in connection with the procuring of food.”

The general Socialist argument about private property is that it gradually developed as man became more proficient at regularly producing surpluses which could then only be exchanged with other tribes for other produce. Concepts such as money, insurance, accounts, etc., could only arise from private property, which in turn depended on production surplus to the tribe’s needs. Property is a social phenomenon and not a biological one. It was Engels who pointed out that we must thank the ancient Greeks for that wonderful invention called the mortgage.

Those who object to Socialism on the grounds of “human nature” being incompatible with common ownership must explain why human nature changed. Or if it did not change then, what did change to give us the current situation?

Whilst human nature has not changed, man’s social organization and his behaviour have changed. These changes have occurred because man has continually improved his means of subsistence, i.e. of staying alive, and this has resulted in the development of property and wealth. The time is long due when man should use his means of production as a common instrument for all rather than for the benefit of a minority, the capitalist class.

Tony D'Arcy

Marxism, a Virile “Ghost” - Part 1 (1933)

From the August 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to an article in John O' London's Weekly, dated May 13th, 1933, "Marxism is Dead,” and though students of Marxian thought may feel ill disposed to mourn the loss of one departed spirit alone, we find the theories of Adam Smith coupled with those of Marx.

In passing, we should like to take the opportunity of mentioning that the number of times Marxism has been "appointed dead” during the last half century must surely surpass the number of times the world has been “coming to an end" since the going of Jesus Christ.

However, the death of Marxism having been “duly certified,” the writer of the article in question proceeds to the post mortem examination. But what does the analysis reveal? Lest Marxians should await the result of the analysis in fear and trembling, we hasten to disclose the findings of our journalistic analyst. Let us reproduce his own words. After suggesting that the two most important books ever written on political economy are “The Wealth of Nations,” by Adam Smith, and ”Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx, our critic says: — 

“The doctrines of Adam Smith and Karl Marx alike are, of course, discredited amongst modem students of economics for the simple reason that those doctrines left out the human factor."

It further appears that both Marx and Smith helped to bring their own works to disaster because of "their essentially materialistic outlook on the economic activities of mankind.”

What a revelation, indeed! We seem to remember hearing all this before, many a time. Anyhow, aside from the positively untrue and dogmatic assertion that Marx’s theories are discredited amongst students of economics (unless it is meant that they are discredited by those who oppose Marx’s theories, in which case we sympathetically agree). What, may we ask, is meant by the "human factor.” Presumably, since no details are given by our critic, we can but conclude that we have once again encountered that hoary objection to Marxism that it leaves no part to the influence of human behaviour in moulding the history of human society.

Now, were it not that this notion is so often stated in open or disguised form, even by pseudo-Socialists, we would feel impelled to act similarly to the Pharisee of old and ”pass by on the other side.” But, unlike the Pharisee, instead of thanking ”God” for not being "as other men,” we should confer the honour upon Marx himself. For even a casual study of Marx’s works is sufficient to dispel the illusion stated above. But perhaps a casual acquaintance with his writings is too much to expect from some of his critics.

Rather does it seem that the one indispensable condition for a criticism of Marxism is not to have read Marx at all. Or to have read him and ignore what he says. Significantly enough, in the same article from which we have quoted, the writer says quite bluntly: “It is safe to say that not more than a very small percentage of Marxian Communists have ever read ‘Das Kapital' or any of their master’s voluminous writings.” From which we gather at least one of the reasons for his criticism, for, if only a comparatively small number of Marx’s adherents are adequately acquainted with his writings, then it is fairly safe to make any kind of attack upon those writings. One may gain access to a “coward’s castle" at any time, where ignorance and credulity offer an easy passport.

However, what was the materialistic outlook of Marx? Did he fail to observe the operation of what is called the human factor?

These are questions which have often been replied to in the history of Socialist thought and will bear answering again in view of the continuously increasing interest in Marx’s theories.

At the moment we shall do well to let Marx speak for himself. When dealing with a series of events in French history during the nineteenth century Marx wrote as follows:—

“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth, he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such conditions as he finds close at hand.”

This is taken from a work in which, from first page to last, he proves how men acting upon the political and economic conditions of their time, exerted a considerable influence upon them. We refer to "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.’’ Again, when contrasting the materialistic views of some of his predecessors with his own, Marx declares in the most unmistakeable manner:—

“The materialistic doctrine that men are the products of conditions and education, different men therefore the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances may be altered by men and that the educator has himself to be educated.” (Engels, “ Feuerbach,” appendix, page 130.)

What could be more dear and comprehensive than these two statements. Those who really want to understand will find in them the foundation stones, so to speak, of the science of sociology, the science dealing with human society, and the history of its development.

But to return to the matter of Marx’s materialistic outlook upon mankind. The materialist attitude of mind, both in science and philosophy, Which took definite form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the result of a lengthy process of investigation made by thinkers over many centuries. Hence, apart from certain definite modifications introduced into materialist thought by Marx, materialism as a doctrine was no more the exclusive product of Marx’s brain than the general theory of organic evolution was that of Darwin’s. Historically considered, the foundations of materialism were laid by some of the greatest thinkers of Ancient Greece. Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aristotle and Hippocrates, were among the ancient minds who formulated the rough and ready groundwork of all modern materialist methods of thought, despite the fact that they lacked the solid backing at the disposal o£ modern scientific workers.

Democritus formulated his world-renowned theory of the atom and indicated the general truth upon which modem science rests, namely: “Nothing comes from nothing, and nothing is ever annihilated.” In this view-point he was followed by a number of thinkers who endeavoured to explain the whys and wherefores of existence, aiming all the time to find the cause or causes of things within nature’s own operations. Some idea may be gathered of the influence these men had on the world of thought and understanding immediately around them, from that powerful poem of classical antiquity, ”Of the Nature of Things,” by the Roman poet, Lucretius. He attempted to explain the many phases of existence, including man himself, biologically considered, and the rise of mankind from the savage to the civilised state, by means of purely natural causes. Amongst his most notable examples in this direction are his suggestions on the origin of speech and language. Says Lucretius: —

“ But Nature ’twas

Urged men to utter the various sounds of tongue. 

And need and use did mould the names of things. 

About in same wise as the lack-speech years,

Compel young children unto gesturings 

Making them point with finger here and there, at what’s before them.

For each creature feels by instinct to what use to put his powers.”

Of course, modern scientific thought would not put it in quite this way, but it cannot be logically disputed that here, at last, are the germs of a rational interpretation of natural phenomena.

In effect, the whole mode of reasoning here referred to marked a revolutionary departure from the primitive and age-long method of regarding all manifestations of existence as though some power or powers outside and above nature guided and controlled existence. Those of our readers who are desirous of obtaining detailed information concerning the methods of enquiry of the Greeks, and even thinkers of recent times, should consult ”The Biographical History of Philosophy,” by George Henry Lewes. This work is easily one of the best of the nineteenth century’s productions.

However, it is not without significance that these early attempts at a true understanding of nature’s workings were suppressed or kept in the background by the tyranny exercised by and through the power of “Holy Mother Church," but a discussion of this need not detain us at this juncture.

But when the revival of learning and the spirit of “free" enquiry arose after the “long winter sleep of the Christian Middle Ages," the formulas of some of the Greek thinkers were revived and re-employed in investigation, but this time with the more ripened experience and accumulated knowledge of a later social advancement. Perhaps it will appear strange to some to learn that, in the words of Engels: “The original home of all modern materialism, from the seventeenth century onwards, is England." A nasty knock this for those who attribute the origin of materialism to Germanic sources in the attempt to preserve the illusion of “English respectability."

Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Priestley and others form a band of thinkers who, by the scientific method of observation and experiment in their various fields of research, helped to furnish the truth of modern materialist thought. Further, the growth of the various natural sciences from the fifteenth century onwards until the explanation of the origin of species by Charles Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, mainly settled the question as to whether natural phenomena had a natural or supernatural origin.

Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Geology and Biology were the sciences which, each in their turn, presented the world with a picture of nature's workings without the aid of any external power. In strict logic the “Gods" were consigned to the limbo of the dark and ignorant past.

Pierre Laplace, the eminent French astronomer and mathematician, truly summed up the position in his reply to Napoleon. Asked by the Emperor why he had not even mentioned the supernatural in his work, “Mecanique Celeste," Laplace replied: “Sire, I have managed without that hypothesis."

Nevertheless, despite all that had been accomplished in the physical sciences, the last stronghold of supernaturalism was, as yet, to be conquered, namely, human society and its history, the science of sociology was yet to be placed upon a sound foundation.

It was inevitable that as something approaching exactitude had been established in the natural sciences, human history and its modes of being mid becoming could not for long be left outside the general trend of scientific thought and classification. Unquestionably, it was no mean task to survey the history of human society and reduce its movements to the operation of ascertainable natural laws, for the simple reason that history had mainly presented itself as a “ crude heap of irrationality and violence." The great task consisted in discovering some sort of order in the seeming disorder of historic events and their relationship and interconnection with one another. Further, was human society and its mode of being always the same as it presented itself to the general view of the nineteenth century, or had it also experienced an evolution, a process of development, such as had been ascertained in the purely physical world? In other words, could the principle of natural causation apply here as elsewhere? An affirmative answer to these questions was finally given by means of the materialistic method.

Thomas Henry Buckle, the author of the introduction to “The History of Civilisation in England," is outstanding among a few historians who made noteworthy attempts to formulate the laws of social development. Buckle saw clearly enough that such notions as chance action, the alleged free will of man theory, the doctrines of predestination and supernatural guidance could account for nothing of value to the problem of history. Moreover, he openly said so. Buckle went direct to the purely physical surroundings of mankind to find an explanation. Climate, Food, Soil and the General Aspect of Nature were the agents chosen by him to explain the rise and growth of society and its institutions. Rightly or wrongly this was a method of historical research which cannot be said to be other than materialistic throughout. It sought the material background of human existence as the propelling force behind the rise of society from its earliest beginnings.

But Buckle's theory of physical geography fell short in its application to the major question to be answered. Granted that it could account for the background, so to speak, of human endeavour in its earlier stages, but since the conditions of physical geography remain fairly stationary over immense periods of time, they could hardly be said to account for the many remarkable changes in human society that have taken place in historic times.

The real explanation to the problem was discovered and most comprehensively stated by Marx, with Engels and the American Ethnologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, making the same discovery independently of each other. This explanation is now known throughout the world as the materialist conception of history. Briefly, it is founded upon the recognition of the simple fact of organic existence, not, by the way, disputed within the domain of biology, that the primary need of mankind is the acquisition of the means of subsistence, and, therefore, the manner by which these are produced and distributed, forms the basis of all social organisation, no matter how varied the form such social organisation may take.

Further, this theory ascribes the final causes of all great social changes, namely, the changes from one form of society to another, to the changes which take place in the means and methods of producing and distributing the wherewithal to live, whatever form they may take, at particular stages of social development. We respectfully ask readers to note the phrase, “final causes of social change," and not the sole causes as is so often wrongly conceived or stated.

However, this is the essence of Marx’s crowning "crime," to use the phrase of our critic, his "materialistic outlook upon the economic activities of mankind."

From what we have so far stated, it should be perfectly plain that materialism as a system of thought amounts to our accounting for the operation of natural forces, through "laws" of nature herself. Observation and experimentation with the facts of existence, with verification through experience, is ^the kernel of the materialist doctrine. As far as human knowledge extends, the principle of causation is seen to be operative throughout nature, in all its manifestations, and whoever seeks to overthrow the materialist method must produce from nature something without a cause. We leave to other minds, however, this attempt at miracle working.

Robertus.

(To be continued.)

Book Review: An Economist on Marx. (1915)

Book Review from the August 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Historic Materialism and the Economics of Marx, by Benedetto Croce. Geo. Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 5s. nett.

One of the advantages of being a University Professor, or a Lecturer at a College, is that one may write arrant nonsense and pass it off for great wisdom on the uncritical reader.

The net result of the various essays forming the above volume is to leave the student with the conviction that the elder Weller’s statement can still be applied with force when he asked whether “it was worth while going through so much to learn so little.” Words, words, words, my masters, but little of real ideas or thoughts represented by these words and still less of any real criticism of Marx’s works.

The essays dealing with “Historical Materialism” are in the main an attempt to criticise Labriola’s writings on this subject. Labriola has replied to some of them in a new edition of his work, Socialism and Philosophy, so we need not cover the same ground here.

In their attempts to answer certain questions, Marx and Engels found that all the old theories and explanations taught at the Universities failed to give any satisfactory reply. Hence they were forced to re-examine the basis for themselves. And note the result. For this re-examination compelled them to abandon all their early training in philosophy, including their Hegelianism, as these furnished no answer.

It was in the facts of history they had to look for, and finally found, the answer to their questions. This was that the conditions of production and distribution of wealth formed the basis of, and gave the explanation to, the general form and structure of society. Now it should be evident that if there is a “structure of society” on a given basis, the factors of this structure will have a modifying effect upon the direct movement of the base. Perhaps an illustration may make this clear. Due to the fact of Gravity water will descend from a hill-top to a valley. The Gravity is the basic factor. The actual path will depend upon the kinds of soil, and obstacles met upon the way down. The stream seldom follows a straight course, but it still remains true that the only explanation of the water’s main movement is the force of Gravity.

In the case of social development the matter is of course not only more complex in itself, but we are far more ignorant of the factors and their properties than in the case of the soils in our illustration. The interest of the ruling class in hiding or falsifying certain of these factors is no mean stumbling-block in our way.

The discovery of Marx and Engels was independently rediscovered by Lewis H. Morgan from the Ethnological side. But in neither case was it pretended that it gave an automatic answer to every petty little incident in history. At best  it only supplied the answer to the question of fundamental changes in society, and as Lafargue pointed out, it became a splendid instrument of research into history, not a ready answer to little puzzles. Marx himself applied the discovery twice with conspicuous success—first in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon III, and secondly in the pamphlet on the Commune of Paris, called The Civil War in France. But Marx was at a serious disadvantage compared with our ”professors.” He had to work for his living—often a poor one—in the midst of his other labours. Hence the incompleteness of many of his writings, particularly on this subject.

Yet how do his critics deal with those writings? At first they ignored them. Then it became the fashion to treat them as nonsense easily disposed of by a sneer. Unfortunately for these beautiful methods the working class is taking up the study of Socialism in steadily increasing numbers, and, despite the admitted difficulties of the form in which Marx wrote, are more and more reading his  books.   So the “latest and lovliest” method is to adopt the attitude of “revising” and “improving” Marx. It is now admitted that he was a giant intellect—hence the greater credit in “putting him right”—and that his works are important contributions to our knowledge—or rather they will be when properly “revised.”

Just here, however, the student finds himself laced with a pretty problem. No two of these “critics” are agreed upon what is wrong in Marx’s writings, if we leave out the question of value for a moment. Who is he to follow ? Many of these “critics” are Professors or Fellows of Colleges. They have written in some cases ponderous tomes, more difficult to understand than Marx and for a sufficiently obvious reason. In the volume under review the author claims that “Historical Materialism” is a “mass of new data, of new experiences, of which the historian becomes conscious.” (p. 12.)

Indeed! what are these “new experiences” and “data” thus supplied? Croce cannot tell us because they don’t exist.  On page 77, however, he tells us “Historical Materialism if it is to express something critically acceptable . . . must be simply a canon of historical interpretation.” This “canon” he describes as an aid in seeking results—an utterly nonsensical definition to English readers, as they understand the word  “canon” to mean a standard  for measuring or comparison.

By far the most audacious claim of this Italian critic is his discovery that Marx was really a metaphysician and idealist! True! this was charged against Marx when his Critique of Political Economy first appeared, so let us look at Croce’s grounds for this claim.

On page 50 he says: “the capitalist society studied by Marx is not this or that society, historically existing, in France or in England, nor the modern society of the most civilised nations, that of Western Europe and America. It is an ideal and formal society, deduced from certain hypotheses, which could indeed never have occurred as actual facts in the course of history.” If it were not for the fact that the phrase might seem discourteous we should feel inclined to call this statement an absurd fabrication; instead we merely remark that every line of Marx’s works flatly contradicts Croce’s claim.  Indeed, on page 79 he says “Marx was addicted, in short, to a kind of concrete logic”! ,

His general view may be stated as that Marx only examined one fact in history and this is so overlaid and interconnected with other facts that though it may be important it is not a dominant one.  It may be “rich in suggestion”; it may be the road “along which the solution must be sought of some of the greatest problems of history,” but it is only a metaphysical abstraction. From his high and pure position he can look down and smile at both the Marxians who regard the research into so-called “pure economics” as absurd, and at the various critics who have all failed to see in Marx what was left for Croce to discover.

If it were possible the essays dealing with’ .Marx’s economics are worse than those dealing with historical views. Once more the “abstract”  and “metaphysical” charges are made without the slightest evidence to support them. Croce agrees with the “utility theory” of value formulated in its modern form by Jevons and appropriated by the so-called “Austrian School” without, apparently, being aware of how completely the theory was crushed by Marxian criticism, in the land of its birth. In the only chapter in which Croce attempts to come to close quarters with Marx’s economics—the one on “The fall in the Rate of Profit,” he attempts to build up a case by maintaining that, according to Marx, when a number of labourers are displaced by improved methods of production, they are not discharged but kept on and production increased accordingly. Croce says that usually the production remains the same, the men are discharged and therefore profits rise with the alteration in the composition of capital. As the base of his criticism is false—for of course Marx has worked out the result of such a condition— his house of cards collapses.

According to the publisher’s note, a Mr. A. D. Lindsay has written an “illuminating introduction.” The thing most illuminated by this introduction is Mr. Lindsay’s ignorance of Marx’s writings. For he refers to “the laws of supply and demand which alone affect all things that have economic value” and says that the pure economist “finds little difficulty in refuting Marx’s theory,” in complete ignorance that Marx had shattered the so-called “Law of Supply and Demand” in Value, Price and Profit as well as in Capital. His reference to Socialism as an “automatic working out of economic laws” is too childish for farther consideration to-day.

However, as he admits at the end of his introduction that his knowledge of Marx and of economics is too small to allow him to judge Croce’s appraisement of Marx’s work, we may be thankful for small admissions.

Despite Croce’s attempt to forestall the criticism he feared would come when he states (p. 64) that he does not consider an explanation adequate and appropriate “which resolves itself into accusing a large number of students of allowing themselves blindly and foolishly to be overcome by passions alien to science; or, what is worse, of knowingly falsifying their thought,” it still remains the only explanation of these various falsifications of Marx under the cloak of “criticising” or “revising” his works. Unless, indeed, he would desire us to flatter their honesty at the expense of their intellects.    

Jack Fitzgerald

A Scientist on the Family. (1908)

From the February 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the fact is accepted that the family has passed through four successive forms, and is now in a fifth, the question at once arises whether this form can be permanent in the future. The only answer that can be given is, that it must advance as society advances, and change as society changes, even as it has done in the past. It is the creature of the social system, and will reflect its culture. As the monogamian family has improved since the commencement of civilization, and very sensibly in modern times, it is at least supposable that it is capable of still further improvement until the equality of the sexes is attained. Should the monogamian family in the distant future fail to answer the requirements of society, assuming the continuous progress of civilization, it is impossible to predict the nature of its successor.

Morgan. “Ancient Society.”

The Influence of Property in the Civilisation of Man. (1907)

From the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It is impossible to over-estimate the influence of property in the civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semetic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and Laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production ; and after the experience of several thousand years it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making machine. . . The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim ; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy is the next higher plane. It will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”

—Ancient Society MORGAN.

Gender myths (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many words have been written to explain, justify or rationalise women's social inferiority as against men. There are those like racists with their particular prejudice, who have claimed that this social inferiority is a direct reflection of women's biological inferiority. For example, it has been said that the average brain size in women tends to be smaller than that of men, the inference being that women are less intelligent. It is true that the brain of the female sex in homo sapiens tends to be smaller than in the male, but then the whole morphological structure tends to be smaller in the female than in the male — something known in scientific jargon as sexual dimorphism. The Neanderthal human, who preceded — and was for a time a contemporary of—homo sapiens, had an average brain size of 1,4550 cc. or 100 cc larger than the modern human. However there have been few, if any, attempts to claim that Neanderthal people therefore must have been more intelligent than homo sapiens.

There can be no doubt that the social position of women is closely bound up with the emergence of private property relations and class society. Lewis H. Morgan who, together with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, can be said to be the founders of social anthropology, was the first to discover this connection. His claim was that people living in those stages of human development which he called savagery and barbarism, had social organisation democratic in character. They practised communism in living and operated a matriarchal kinship structure, in contrast to institutionalaliscd private property and territorial government which. Morgan claimed, had evolved from primitive society. He was able to show that the patriarchal and monogamian type of families had not always existed — a complete break from the theory of original sin and the idea that primitive people were the result of degeneration from previous civilisation.

Morgan’s works greatly upset the academics of contemporary society. While Morgan put no special emphasis on the social position of women in primitive society, in the much more free society he described the implication was that women were not oppressed as in civilised periods. Much of what he claimed for primitive society is substantiated by modern anthropology.

However, it must be remembered that the peoples he studied were organised in tribal society and were not primitive in the prehistoric sense as understood by modern anthropologists in their studies of hunter gatherer bands. For example, Elman R. Service, who has made a close study of hunter gatherer peoples still existing in various parts of the world, and who are the closest approximation of early homo sapiens society of 40,000 years ago, says this in his book The Hunters:

Food gathering is the major enterprise of course, but more than that, it is a direct confrontation of man with nature. That is to say, there are no specialised groups who get their food by buying it from, the producer or exchanging services for it in some way. There is no full-time specialisation of labour other than the domestic age and sex divisions that are found in any family. Among hunting-gathering peoples this division of labour is simply that men do the hunting, at least the kind of hunting that takes them any distance from the camp. Women, probably because of the relative confinement of bearing and rearing children, are left to forage near the camp for vegetable foods and such small game as can be easily caught. But this does not mean that men's hunting is necessarily of greater economic importance than women's work.

Service calculates that in aboriginal Australia, even on the northern coast where game and fish are abundant, vegetables make up 70/80 per cent of the people's diet—collected, of course, by women. Woman’s work is important: most hunting-gathering populations could not be maintained without it. On the other hand, they can, and do, go for long periods without meat hunted by men. Only the Eskimos live by hunting and fishing alone, and Eskimo women do most of the fishing.

The question now arises: why was it that the oppression of women by men took place at all? In spite of its shortcomings, the probable explanation for this is that contained in Engels' The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State based, as it is, on the concept of historical materialism and with much use of the researches carried out by Morgan. 

Needless to say, this explanation has been, and still is, rejected by most of the supporters of that epitome of all private property societies, capitalism — and by sonic of those who are interested in what is constantly referred to as “the liberation of women”. One such is Simone de Beauvoir who, in her work The Second Sex, says:

. . . On the same grounds it is impossible to deduce the oppression of woman from the institution of private property. Here again the inadequacy of Engels' point of view is obvious. He saw clearly that woman’s muscular weakness became the real point of inferiority only in its relation to the bronze and iron tool; but he did not see that the limitations of her capacity for labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only in a certain perspective . . . 

Instead, she implies as a metaphysical explanation:

Thus it is that man’s interest in his property becomes an intelligible relation. But we see that man's interest cannot be explained through the tool alone: we must grasp in its entirety the attitude of man wielding the tool, an attitude that implies an ontological substructure, a foundation in the nature of his being

It is not surprising that someone with these ideas can write the following passage in relation to the aspirations of women:

I have pointed out in the introduction how different women's situation is, particularly on account of the community of life and interests which entails here solidarity with man — and also because he finds in her an accomplice: no desire for revolution dwells within her, nor any thought of her own disappearance as a sex — all she asks is that aspects of sexual differentiation be abolished.

In other words, let capitalism remain providing women are not discriminated against. If the determining factor in women's inferior standing is an existentialist one and is not linked to the rise of private property relations and class society, why did women allow it to happen? If the special oppression of women is not a necessary corollary — as de Beauvoir suggests — why was it that the agitation for woman’s liberation had to wait for the 20th century?

During the 20th century there has been much anthropological field work and study of the cultural diversity — and similarity — of various peoples in different parts of the world, with the emphasis on the differences. Margaret Mead, in her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, describes her study of three tribes living in New Guinea; the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli;

We have now considered in detail the approved personalities of each sex among the primitive peoples. We found the Arapesh—both men and women displaying a personality that out of our historically limited preoccupations, we would call maternal in its parental aspects and feminine in its sexual aspects. We found men as well as women trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others. We found no idea that sex was a powerful driving force either for men or for women. In marked contrast to these attitudes, we found among the Mundugumor that both men and women developed as ruthless aggressive positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum. Both men and women approximated to a personality type that we in our culture would find only in an undisciplined and very violent male. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes. The Arapesh ideal is the mild responsive man married to the mild responsive woman: the Mundugumor ideal is the violent aggressive man married to the violent aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant impersonal managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine, such as passivity, responsiveness and a willingness to cherish children — can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes, in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions.

Whatever the other conclusions or speculations one can draw from this, one thing is certain. It show's that human society is capable of a variety of behavioural patterns, and that the so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of their societies. The question could be posed here, what are the crucial factors which determine the cultural conditioning? It would seem that these studies go some way to support the implication of Simone de Beauvoir of an ontological explanation, and to invalidate the universal approach of Morgan in his insistence that “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress.” However, what has to be taken into account is that all of these studies have been carried out with peoples living in tribal society where private property relations had already developed to a considerable extent, as indeed were Morgan’s, and should not be regarded as examples of the hunter-gatherer society of prehistoric people of some 40,000-50.000 years ago. As E. R. Service points out in his introduction to The Hunters “All the hunting gathering societies listed above have certain characteristics in common that serve to set them apart from tribal and other higher levels of society.”

As mentioned earlier, the hunter-gathering peoples studied by Service and others are the nearest approximation to the society of primitive humanity. There is no substantial evidence whatever to suggest that ownership aggression or the domination of one sex by the other has any part either with the hunter-gatherer peoples living, or in the society of primitive peoples of prehistoric times.

The agitation for women’s liberation is a phenomenon of modern capitalism. The oppression of women by men only arises in those societies where the form of marriage and the family is patriarchal or monogamian. and is associated with private property relations of an advanced kind. The problem is only recognised after the possibility of its solution has become apparent.

The social problems engendered by capitalist society, which dominates the whole world, cut across all speculation, all special pleading. The liberation of women is inextricably bound up with the liberation of the whole of humanity. Capitalism exploits its working class regardless of their sex. The question to-day is not just the emancipation of women, but the emancipation of the working class, regardless of sex.

Harry Walters

Lewis Henry Morgan. (1929)

From the November 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Morgan was undoubtedly the greatest sociologist of the past century, and in his monumental work (1871) laid a solid foundation for the study of the family and kinship systems; he formulated a scheme of the evolution of the family, based on a study of the classificatory system of relationships, of which he was the discoverer.” 

A. C. Haddon, “History of Anthropology.”

Socialism and Science. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Concerning the beginnings of the cosmic system, we are without knowledge. Science is concerned with the universe as we find it, and speculations as to beginning or finality would both be futile. The indestructibility of matter seems fairly established, and we therefore, only look for efficient causes to effect the changes that would bring about the forms we know to-day. There is evidence of a continuity of processes, the totality of which we term evolution. From astrology to astronomy, from alchemy to chemistry, supernatural creation to naturally selected species, such has been the unfolding in the branches of knowledge that has given us the concept of the universe as a totality of its relations : Before we can formulate a science upon any particular subject, we proceed by a certain method. That method is similar whether the subject matter be the Solar System or the Social System. First induction or the gathering of the facts by experiment and observation; second, the classification and generalisation of such facts into sequences or series, and finally the deduction from such sequences of a theory or scientific law which allows of no other interpretation of the facts than the one consistently derived. By such methods came the Atomic Theory in chemistry, the Law of Gravitation in Physics, the Germ Theory in Pathology, and the Labour Theory of Value in Economics. By such methods we are enabled to understand and explain the facts of experience, and also to supply the antidote to the numbing effects of Capitalist mal-education. Laplace, seeking material for his Nebulae Hypothesis found that he had no need for the God Idea. All science dispenses with such products of man’s ignorant fear. It assigns him his place in nature, and lays to rest for ever the belief in the supernatural. True, there are gaps that require filling in, but they are gaps in our knowledge, not in nature. Aided by abstract thought and the service rendered to one science by another, the gaps are filling. Worlds are not born except of pre-existing matter, and the astronomer has but to turn his powerful telescope toward the heavens, and, with the aid of the spectroscope, analyse, review and reconstruct the birth, growth and decay of solar systems like our own. Piecing together what was previously “explained” by childish theology (He made the stars) we learn that this earth was once a whirling gaseous mass thrown off the sun. Allowing for immense periods of time, cooling would take place, and condensation would bring with it a covering of water and ultimately the formation of oceans. From various sources, we know that primitive life must have begun in these oceans, and through the over-laid strata of the earth disturbed and altered though it has been, we piece together the history of plant and animal life from the geological order in which their fossils are embedded. We find the many extinct forms that were modified and evolved toward those that began life in a world like the one we know to-day.

It was upon this background that Darwin projected the results of his observations. It provided him with the eras of time in which to account for the differentiation of animals and plants from earlier times. It also enabled him to show that continual changing of the earth’s surface would beget conditions which, with the prolific nature in all species, would involve intense struggle for the limited available subsistence. Those species that acquired any advantage from one generation to another in the quest for food, and in the struggle against natural obstacles, would be the species that nature’s sifting process considered fittest to survive.

Those unable to adapt themselves as species would become extinct. Instead of plan and design, as talked of by the Christian, nature has been found to be one huge slaughterhouse of those for whom no place has been found. Darwin knew, of course, from his researches, that man must be included in his evolutionary process. He did not say, as so many falsely assert, that “man came from monkeys” : Man comes from his parents, they from ancestors, and they in turn from more primitive ancestors.

The evidence upon which Darwin relied to establish man’s development from lower forms was the close resemblance of primitive man in structure to the apes known as anthropoid. The resemblance is a much closer one than that between some living races of men. This structural likeness with many other similarities, is too close to be explained in any other way than by common ancestry at some earlier period. Man’s body, too, contains rudimentary parts which point with certainty to his lowly origin. Life begets life, and all biological forms evolve in a similar manner. From the simple cell stage to the most complex organism, plant, animal and man all develop alike, the cell is the unit. The human embryo commences with the union of the male and female cell, and the main history of the species is retold during its development, the last form it passes through before birth being that of the anthropoid ape. Man’s journey commences where he develops language and the ability to construct tools. With a mean power over nature’s materials, he was for thousands of years cradled in the crude communism of the tribe. With a subsistence so mean that it permitted of no idlers, it seems paradoxical that it was the very increase in productivity that made slavery possible. Slavery and class society arrive together. Says Karl Marx, the founder of the science of Socialism : “All history is the history of class struggles.” True to the scientific method, Marx assembled his facts, and answered his critics, with a patience and a thoroughness equalled only by his contemporary Darwin. He bequeathed to the workers an analysis of Capitalist society that has withstood the onslaughts of the paid Professors of the Universities for over half-a-century. In the monumental work Capital, the cause of working-class poverty, is made obvious and clear, and there is shown, that to understand the cause, is to understand the remedy. To remove poverty the workers must by class conscious activity take from the Master Class their means of life. They must commonly own these means which to-day are the Private Property of the Capitalist few. To enjoy the leisurely life, the modern powers of wealth-production make possible, Social revolution is necessary. In order to change the basis of society from a production for profit to a production for use one, the workers themselves must first have the revolutionary outlook. No amount of Capitalist evolution can bring the change to Socialism that is necessary to free the workers. Capitalism has the seeds of its own destruction, but the workers must be the seeds. Lewis H. Morgan, in his “Ancient Society,” after a life study of the development of human society, came to conclusions similar to Marx in quite an independent manner. He says (p. 562) :

“The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity, of the ancient gentes.”

Such conclusions the Socialist can endorse. From our own platform, and through our literature, can be obtained all the knowledge required by the workers for the establishment of that higher form of society. Time and truth will tell without empty slogans, or vote-catching reforms, but with the beacon-light of science we illuminate the road to Socialism.

W. E. MacHaffie

The Onward March of Capitalism. (1927)

From the June 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

To show the degrading effect of capitalist production on the modern wage-worker, Paul Lafargue uses this comparison.

“Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work, and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.” —The Right to be Lazy (p. 10).

To justify this statement, we need only compare the general conditions of the workers to-day with the following description that Lewis Morgan gives of the American Indian :—

“All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organised. A structure composed of such units would of necessity bear the impress of their character, for as the unit so the compound. It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character.” (Ancient Society, pp. 85-6.)

Such was the state of man in this form of society, before modern civilisation played its part. And the curse it has been to these people is evident from the following item of news that appeared in the “Daily News,” 7/3/1927 :—

“The Red Indians, confined to reservations in various parts of the United States, even as near the east coast as New York State itself, are dying by thousands, abused and neglected.

Mr. Robert E. Callahan, a writer on western life, has just spent a year surveying the 22 principal Indian reservations. He declared that on some reservations he found the Indians killing their pet dogs and their horses to keep themselves alive”

And further, we are told that :—

“Judges appointed by the agents have been known to throw Indians into gaol for resenting an agent’s treatment of them. An Indian named Kill Thunder was chained by one of these men, who was judge, gaoler, and prosecutor all in one, for visiting a friend without the agent’s permission.

There are estimated to be 340,000 Indians left in America. Mr. Callahan says 225,000 of them have been reduced to the most miserable conditions of existence, and that unless some drastic changes are made the Red Indians within a few years will be extinct.”

So we see that the capitalist method of wiping out, what is to them, an odious comparison, between the Barbarian and the wage-slave, is to reduce the former to a state of poverty and subjection, parallel to that suffered by the latter.

Exploitation by the capitalist class, together with the evils that flow from it, spreads like a plague, and to escape from its vile influence is out of the question.

In drawing up the manifesto of the Communist Party (1847) Marx and Engels dealt with this point :

On page 10, they say :—

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. ”

And further, on the same page, we read :

“It compels all nations on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeoisie mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

Events since this was written have demonstrated the truth of the assertions made. The most recent example, on the one hand, is China, whose development has been accelerated through its exploitation by the Western Powers. And an effort is now being made by the property-owning class in China, to rid itself of that influence, and secure the full benefits from the exploitation of the workers of that country.

On the other hand, there is the American Indians, who, not having reached the preceding stage in historical development to capitalist society, is unable to adopt that form of production, and consequently must suffer the penalty of extinction.

A nation or class can only establish that form of society which has been made possible by conditions which have developed within the prevailing system. And the chief factor which determines the character of a society; and the direction or form which the new system will take, is the way in which the wealth of that society is produced, and the form of ownership or distribution.

The introduction of capitalism, necessitated, not only that the production of goods for sale should be developed, together with the merchant and his capital, but also the presence of a body of producers that could be profitably utilised as wage-workers.

The backward nature of the vast populations of Russia and China, accounts to a great extent for the slow development of these countries. And the fact that they are, in spite of this handicap, following in the direction of the more advanced countries, speaks volumes for the penetrating powers of the capitalist method of production. But had the social system of these countries been in a more primitive state, their fate would have been that of America and the Colonies, which were developed by the modern emigrant wage-worker. And the original inhabitants, who were not slaughtered by the invading force, pushed in the background, and used later as chattel slaves or exterminated in compounds, provided by the “benevolent” Christian capitalists, because they could not profitably use them in the modern method of production.

As the establishment of capitalism was made possible by conditions that developer in feudalism, so in turn have the conditions been developed in the present system that makes the next social change both possible and necessary.

The growth of social production within the present system, supplies the foundation of the society that is to take its place, and makes the change to Socialism possible. The private ownership by a non-producing section of the socially produced wealth implies on the other hand a propertyless producing class, whose interest dictates the need for that change; a change that awaits the understanding by this class; that to secure the benefits their social productive powers justify, they must end the private ownership in the means of life, and establish a system of society in which the wealth that is socially produced, shall be socially owned.

And by taking advantage of the political conditions that have grown up with the system, they will secure control of the machinery of state, and with command of this force, accomplish the social change which their class interest dictates.

Ted Lake

About New Books (1952)

Book Reviews from the May 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

Professor V. Gordon Childe is probably the foremost pre-historian of the day. By pre-history we mean the study of the development of human society prior to the time when written records were made. Professor Childe’s newest book is entitled "Social Evolution," and is published by Watts & Co.

Professor Childe is an archaeologist, and, as he says:

  " . . . archaeologists to-day have realised that they are dealing with the concrete remains of societies, and that these societies, albeit illiterate, have left concrete embodiments not only of their material equipment but also of their social institutions, superstitions and behaviour, fragmentary and ambiguous though these undoubtedly be."

So he has taken the theories that Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan deduced from their comparative studies of the pre-historic societies that were still in existence during the nineteenth century, and he has examined them in the light of recent archaeological discoveries, or, as he puts it, ... “ in the light of the science which presents societies in a chronological sequence."

The book is not easy reading. In fact Childe himself refers to it as a “ . . . rather tedious examination of archaeological data." All the same, to the student of social evolution, it is a landmark in the study.

Lewis H. Morgan, in his book, “Ancient Society” (1877), divided human history into three main “ethnical periods’’--Savagery, Barbarism and Civilisation. He then made sub-divisions of the former two periods. Morgan made his divisions and sub-divisions on the basis of the technological development of society. The objects of archaeological study are, therefore, useful in an examination of Morgan’s theories, providing proof that Morgan was unable to obtain.

Prof. Childe warns us against a common error. We should not judge the rank of any technical device or process from a general principle. Each device and process must be considered in relation to the conditions in which it was used.

 “Any superiority possessed by an automobile over, say, a bullock-cart cannot be inferred from comparing their respective efficiencies on English roads, but only from the historical fact that automobiles do supersede bullock-carts wherever conditions for their employment can be created.” (P.9.)

Prof. Childe shows that human needs change just as much as the “efficiency" of the instruments for their satisfaction.

  "Did a reindeer hunter in 30,000 B.C., or an Ancient Egyptian in 3000, or an Ancient Briton in 30, really need or want to travel a couple of hundred miles at 60 m.p.h.? . . . . To a Magdalenian society in the last Ice Age a harpoon or antler was just as efficient as a steam trawler is to-day. With the former, tiny groups could get all the fish they needed; the load of a trawler would have been an embarrassing nuisance.” (P. 9.)

You cannot legitimately take some discovered object from one part of the world, give it a label, compare it with something similar from another part of the world, and so deduce its origin and the nature of the society to which it belonged. Professor Childe shows us how, in Ancient Egypt, when the habitable land was seldom as much as two miles away from the River Nile, which was a splendid highway, wheeled vehicles were less useful than they were in Syria which had no natural waterways. Wheeled vehicles were used in Syria fifteen hundred years before they were used in Egypt, but this does not prove that Egypt was more backward than Syria.

So, the professor marshals his evidence in the main part of his work, to show the successive steps through which different societies have actually passed on their way to civilisation in contrasted natural environments.

In his concluding chapter Prof. Childe examines the effects of intercourse between societies at different levels of development, even modern civilised societies, and he takes to task, very successfully, those who would claim an analogy between social evolution and organic evolution.

A very useful book.

Whilst we are dealing with Professor V. Gordon Childe we must mention another of his books that is well worth reading—"History” published by Cobbett Press, 1947. In this excellent little book the professor examines the various theories of history that have held the field at different times. One is astonished at the number of theories of “Historiography.”

Prof. Childe accepts the theory deduced by Karl Marx, the “materialist conception of history,” or, as Mr. Childe himself calls it, “Marxist historiography.” He uses this theory throughout this book. The professor has one misfortune. Like many others his eyes are turned towards Moscow and “the promised land” behind the iron curtain. But his vision does not appear to have become impaired—not yet.

B. Traven is claimed to be a mystery man. He lives somewhere in Mexico, operates through an agent in Mexico City and cannot be interviewed, photographed or “got at” in any way. He is one of the world’s best-selling story writers. His latest book is “The Rebellion of the Hanged,” translated by Charles Duff and published by Robert Hale, Ltd.

Capital must always have wage-labour and it has always been ruthless in the methods by which it has built up its armies of wage workers. B. Traven in this book shows the trickery, the callousness and the vile “legal” practices by which the Mexican Indians were dragged away from their small plots of land and poverty stricken farms in order to be made wage-slaves in the great lumber camps of Mexico.

The story of Candido Castro, Celso, Martin Trinadad and other Mexican Indians is set in the period just before the Mexican revolution which deposed President Porfirio Diaz in favour of Madero. It tells of the brutality and the abominable tortures inflicted upon these poor natives in order to make diem work ever harder and harder. The output of logs demanded from them is continuously stepped up by the lumber camp bosses and failure to satisfy the demand results in floggings, hanging naked by the feet in the tropical sun or being buried up to the nostrils in the sand with the uncovered head exposed to the sun and insects. The hanging is the favourite form of torture with the bosses and foremen and it is that which gives the book its title.

The Indians finally rebel and become more ruthless and cruel than their erstwhile employers. They torture, maim and kill, partly in revenge and partly because they know that they have no hope of clemency if their uprising is suppressed. Their adventures as they march through the tropical forests in the rainy season make stirring reading.

Mr. Traven has no illusions about rebellions. He sees their limitations and knows the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary. When Mexican peóns are killing the landowners their object is to claim the land for themselves, to share it out amongst them. Says Martin Trinadad towards the end of the story:

   ". . . the instinct of possession and property are more anchored than before in this ranch. Only the name of the owner has changed, and I can predict to you, comrade, that to-morrow or the day after the new proprietors will fight like devils amongst themselves with machetes until only one is left, if even one, to enjoy the property. The man who gets possession of the revolver will be the new master, the one who has the shotgun will be overseer. And those who by chance survive will become peóns again.”

And again:

  “Ease and speed are not worth anything to revolutionaries. These here have changed ownership of fields and pigs. What ought to have been changed are the ideas on which the whole system rests. Yesterday the master was called Don Churcho. He'll be called Florencio tomorrow, after now being called Eusebio. There will always be a master; that is to say, nothing will have changed.... A revolution which is explained and needs motivation is no revolution. It's merely a fight to get property and jobs. The true revolution, the one that is capable of changing systems, is deep in the character of all revolutionaries. The real revolutionary doesn't think in terms of the personal benefit he may get from the revolution. He tears down the social system in which he suffers and sees other men suffer. He sacrifices himself and dies in order that he may destroy and bring about other ideas.''

Now that I have read "The Rebellion of the Hanged,” whenever I see the name of B. Traven on the cover of a book I shall be searching through my pockets to find if 1 have enough ready cash to buy it.

W. Waters

Hero Worship: A Conversation With a Visitor from Mars. (Part 6) (1928)

From the May 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from April Issue).

 “Now it is on the economic basis of society, Marty, that the political, legal, religious and aesthetic superstructures are reared—’the mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life.’ [From Marx’s Critique of Political Economy] Some fine illustrations of this fact are provided in the great work, ‘Ancient Society,’ by Lewis Henry Morgan, the American ethnologist. The passage I will now read to you is in itself sufficiently convincing :—

  In its relation to the high career of mankind, the invention of the iron tool must be held the greatest event in human experience, preparatory to civilisation. When the barbarian, advancing step by step, had discovered the native metals …. and produced iron from the ore, nine-tenths of the battle for civilisation was gained. Furnished with iron tools, capable of holding both an edge and a point, mankind were certain of attainment to civilisation. The production of iron was the event of events in human experience . . . . Out of it came the metallic hammer and anvil, the axe and the chisel, the plough with an iron point, the iron sword; in fine, the basis of civilisation, which may be said to rest upon this metal. The want of iron tools arrested the progress of mankind in barbarism. There they would have remained to the present hour, had they failed to bridge the chasm.

“As I have already outlined to you, by the change from the Ancient World to Feudalism and from Feudalism to Capitalism, the industrial relations of men come into conflict with the ever-changing material productive forces, and thus, instead of helping, begin to hinder production. Then comes social revolution, a new economic foundation, and corresponding political, legal, artistic, and religious forms. Consequently, the history of mankind, Marty, in its broad outline, is a series of class struggles. At the present time, there remain but two classes in society — the workers, who produce wealth, and the Capitalists, who own the means of producing wealth and accordingly appropriate it when produced. The latter class, though small, is now dominant, but even as the members of this class eliminated the old feudal nobility, so the other class of society (the workers) will eliminate them. Accordingly, classes will cease to exist; the producers will then also be the possessors; in short, social ownership of the means of social production (or Socialism) is the next stage in society’s development.

“This theory of history, formulated by Marx and Engels, based on the economic structure of society, is called the ‘materialist conception of history,’ and completely shatters the view that society depends entirely upon court intrigues and the endeavours of ‘great’ individuals for its development.”

As I said these words, the Martian’s eyes roved around my bookcase, and at length he remarked, “How is it then, holding this view of history, you yet treasure such books as ‘Plutarch’s Lives,’ ‘Autobiography of Herbert Spencer,’ ‘Life of Danton,’ and ‘Marat’?—works dealing exclusively with particular persons.”

W. J.

(To be continued). 

The Romance of Ages (1964)

A classic reprint from the September 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard 

  From the treasury of past Socialist Standards we have selected the following four articles for reprinting in this Special Number. The choice was not easy to make from so much excellence.

Down from the tree-tops he came, primeval man, driven by hunger to wander through the forest with his kin searching for the nuts, roots and fruits on which he lived. He was the oldest specimen of his race and wandered over Europe when the climate was tropical and palms and tropical animals abounded. He required no clothes as the hair covering his body was sufficient protection in the mild climate then prevailing. His only weapons and tools were the branches torn from trees and the rough stones picked out of the beds of water-courses. He had learnt the art of communicating his primitive ideas by means of speech liberally helped out with gestures. His family arrangements were those of the brute from which he had just branched off, no rule had yet grown to guide him higher. He wandered widely over Europe before the coming of the ice drove him towards the Equator.

Slowly, very slowly, and painfully, man acquired more knowledge. A new type arose born during the breaks in the great ice ages. He discovered the wonderful properties of fire, and was able to add fish to his diet, a new weapon with which to fight hunger. Fire severed the cord that bound him to the forests and he wandered widely over the earth in the open, following the courses of the streams that provided him with fish. Out of the beds of streams he took rough stones and fashioned them into crude implements. His habitations were the beds of streams and holes in the hills. He peopled the hills, the woods, and the streams with living beings. The tree that fell on and crushed him, the rocks that impeded his passage, the mighty torrents, became to him objects endowed with life as he was—Religion was born. He wrought on the rough stone making for himself a stone-headed club and spear and became a hunter, strengthening himself in the fight against hunger by the addition of occasional supplies of meat to his food. The evil results of promiscuous marriage were modified by the growth of a rule prohibiting the marriage of parents to children.

Years passed away by the thousand and he learnt to make bows and arrows. Hunting became easier and meat became a more regular part of his food. On clay and stone, on the sides of his caves, using sharp-pointed wood or stone for pens, he sketched rude pictures of the animals he hunted, and the animals that hunted him. With the aid of fire he furnished himself with log boats to carry him over the water. He learnt to weave and make baskets and to make tools out of the bones of animals. He built himself huts and set them out in the form of village settlements—the town was born. He modified still further his marriage relations, and prohibited the marriage of brothers and sisters. He had by now gathered together some property and the seeds of the subsequent class struggles were planted. 

This property was held at first by women. He stepped higher in his religious ideas, and worshipped the elements; the earthquake, the cyclone, the cloudburst, inspired him with awe and he trembled before nature’s terrors and sought to find means to propitiate the mighty powers that so often involved him in wreck and ruin. He grew in numbers and lived in larger groups. These large groups were separated into gentes, phratries and tribes, or groups of close kinship, groups of near cousins, and groups of distant cousins. He improved his language and learnt the use of syllables. He polished up his stone implements and produced wonderful specimens of polished stone tools. The huge fierce animals that had harassed him of yore began to give way to a smaller and less ferocious kind, and the limbs, stature and gait of man lost much of their strength and uncouthness, becoming more beautiful as befitted one grasping at the conquest of nature.

With the discovery of pottery man continued his upward climb and found means to store his ever-growing varieties of food. He tanned the skin of the deer and took a pride in his personal adornment. He built himself villages surrounded by stockades, tamed the dog as a companion for hunting and learned how to make bread. His numbers had now grown so large that much of his attention was taken up with social organisation. The tribes had grown into numerous tribes living in a confederacy under a council of chiefs—the state was born. His religious ideas had moved upward to the conception of a great spirit that ruled his destiny, and the dreams that troubled his sleep became to him evidences of the wanderings of himself in other lands. His rude attempts at art grew into the making of pictures that conveyed ideas to those at a distance—the art of writing was born.

Some of the animals he hunted he learnt to domesticate and secured for himself a regular supply of milk and meat. But he did more. The work to be done in attending to flocks and herds was little. It was possible to supply the needs of many by the labour of few. Man at last was able to provide a surplus on which non-workers could live. Man learned the lesson well and in the wars on his kind he obtained captives who were put to work looking after the herds, thus giving leisure to the owners of the herds—in such wise was born the slavery that flourishes to-day.

Man cleared the forests and converted them into arable land and land on which to pasture his flocks. He cultivated gardens and raised root crops, pushing farther away his age-long enemy hunger. His wealth and responsibilities grew so much that he built for himself habitations of wood, mud and stone, and surrounded them with fortifications for the safe-keeping of his utensils and his cattle and to guard against the attacks of others of his kind. He added to his implements, his utensils, his weapons, and his ornaments by learning to manipulate metals—he had left the age of stone and entered the age of bronze. He built villages on the waters at the edges of lakes, safe from marauding animals and men. He made for himself personal gods, with idols and appointed officials to interpret the method of worship—priesthood had come into being. His council chiefs became organised into a close corporation, limiting election of officials to members of their families—aristocracy was born. He learnt how to picture ideas instead of objects, so developing his means of communication by writing.

His garden cultivation grew into field culture by the discovery of iron and the subsequent invention of the ploughshare. He now changed his habitation into towns surrounded with walls and battlements. His growing wealth and aristocratic privileges brought on the first great class struggle— the struggle between man and woman as to who should own and bequeath the store of wealth that had accumulated. Man won, and changed the law of inheritance from the female to the male. Individual ownership of property and to some extent the private ownership of land followed.

With the discovery of letter script and its use for writing records man entered into his own as a civilised being. The rest is a matter of history.

Reader, the above is a painfully brief and scrappy description of man’s development during prehistoric times. If you would enter fully into the romance consult the books on the subject that abound and you will have no cause for regret. Most of what is written above you will find in “Ancient Society,” a book written by Lewis H. Morgan. Look for it in the library.

Gilmac.

Reprinted from the "Socialist Standard," June, 1925.

Lewis Henry Morgan. An Account and Appreciation of his Life Work. (1919)

From the October 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

The Discovery of the Gens.
The second part of "Ancient Society" contains the fruits of those researches of Morgan's which it is generally recognised constitute his greatest contribution to sociology. Prior to its appearance there existed little or no exact knowledge of the tribal organisations of primitive peoples.

In his "League of the Iroquois" and even later works, Morgan himself had adhered to the commonly accepted view that the Mohawks, Senecas, etc., were each nations in many ways equivalent to modern national communities. The smaller groups within these "nations," each of which was called after a certain animal which was its totem, Morgan had designated "tribes." Subsequent investigation, however, convinced him that the larger groups, the Senecas, etc., were the true tribes, and that they were different from the nation which only came into existence after the coalescence of several such tribes, and fundamentally so from the modern territorial nation, in which kinship as a social tie is eliminated.

But the most important fact was that the basic and unitary organisation of the Indians was the smaller group, that which he had earlier called the "tribe." This "clan" or "totem group" he soon recognised, as his researches expanded, to be an all but universal institution among savage and barbarian peoples. Everywhere it consisted of a group of blood relatives descended, or claiming descent, from a common ancestor. Its members were strictly bound not to intermarry, but to mate outside the group ; they elected and deposed their own chiefs, and met together in common council.

Then Morgan made a remarkable discovery. Even the most learned and acute historians up to his time had been greatly puzzled over an institution which existed among the ancient Greeks and was known to the classical Latin writers by the name of "Gens." Being unable to understand its structure or function, Grote and other historians erroneously considered the gens to be an extension and outgrowth, of the monogamous family. Morgan, however, showed convincingly in his "Ancient Society'' that the Greek and Roman gens is identical in all essentials with the Indian "totem group," the only important difference between them being that among the Indians, except where European influence had crept in, the common ancestor of the group was a woman, female descent prevailed and children always remained in the same totem group as their mother, whereas among the early Greeks and Romans the recognised ancestor was a male, paternal descent was the rule, and children belonged to the gens of their father.

Morgan considered the former an archaic or primitive, and the latter the derived and modified, form of the same organisation, which he decided out of consistency to henceforth refer to by its Latin name of "gens." He believed that the change from the maternal to the paternal gens was an outcome of the growth of private property, possession of which instilled into the fathers a desire that this wealth should be enjoyed, after the death of themselves, by their own children.

Under the law of the gens the property of a member had to remain within the group, and as the maternal system placed a man's children in their mother's gens, never in his own, they were disinherited as regards their father's property. By introducing male descent and thus keeping children in their father’s gens they were enabled to inherit his property. Morgan clinched his argument by showing this change to have actually taken place in recent years with the growth of private property among several Indian tribes as a result of foreign influences.

Having thus placed ancient history upon a sound basis Morgan endeavours to show the stages by which, in Greece and in Rome, the social organisation of the gens and the tribe passed away and was supplanted by a form of society based upon possession of property and territorial residence. In a series of brilliant chapters he shows how increasing population, intermixture of tribes, growing division of social functions, and above all, the increase in private property and its concentration into the hands of a few, all results of the "enlargement of the sources of subsistence," gradually undermined the institutions founded on kinship and prepared the way for and made necessary the rise of the political State.

Morgan's analysis still holds good, but it may be usefully supplemented by Engels' "Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State," which shows that class-oppression is the function of the State-power. Morgan did not deal with the feudal form of political society which developed from gentile society in a somewhat different fashion, but Engels outlined its beginning among the Germans and it has been adequately if briefly treated in a generalised manner by Edward Jenks in his "Short History of Politics."

One of the most instructive and important chapters in "Ancient Society" treats of the native culture of Mexico prior to the Spanish Conquest. Investigation had convinced Morgan that the records of the Spaniards, together with the historic works which, like Prescott's, were built upon them, were very unreliable wherever they dealt with the social institutions of either the Aztecs or the Incas of Peru. The Spaniards, accustomed only to the social relations of a feudal monarchy, completely misunderstood what little they did observe of Mexican and Peruvian society. They interpreted the league of tribes as an empire and the war-chief of the Aztec federation as an Emperor.

Morgan did valuable pioneer work in unravelling the mystery of "Aztec civilisation," and had already criticised the prevailing misconceptions in some of the articles we have referred to. Moreover, in this field he had the assistance of his friend, Adolph H. Bandelier (1840-1914) a Swiss who had gone to America, and the leading authority at that time on the archeology of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico

In "Ancient Society" Morgan's conclusions were fully stated and the evidence massed which showed that the Aztecs were, at the time of their discovery by Europeans, in the Middle Status of Barbarism, intermediate between the Iroquois and the Greeks of the Homeric period, and that they lived in village communities based upon the gens.

By revealing the inner structure of tribal society Morgan performed a signal service to sociology. Incidentally he showed and was one of the first to appreciate the fact, now generally recognised, that the barbarian is not a bloodthirsty monster of ferocity, and that his society, far from being a despotism ruled over by a brutal, tyrannical chieftain, is usually a well-organised, democratic body.

  "All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other's freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachems and chiefs claiming no superiority ; and they were a brotherhood bound together by ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens." ("Ancient Society", p. 85.)

The Family and Property.
In the third part of "Ancient Society," which describes the evolution of the family, Morgan not only re-stated his theory (which we have already outlined) in a revised, more complete, and widely generalised form, but he devoted a special section to a refutation of the criticisms of McLennan, the author of "Primitive Marriage." He was now in a position to show that McLennan's position was, in the light of the fresh discoveries, completely untenable, his theory of tribal Endogamy and Exogamy being due to the common confusion of the gens with the tribe.

Morgan's theory of the family is generally accepted to-day in its main outlines. His most important error lay in considering the patriarchal family to be an exceptional form instead of, as has been since shown by the Russian student, Maxim Kovalevsky, and others, to be a widespread institution characteristic of the Middle and Upper stages of Barbarism, and as the intermediary almost everywhere manifest between the matriarchal family and monogamy.

In his concluding part Morgan outlines his view of the development of property. He shows how, feebly developed and largely communal during Savagery, it achieves more definite recognition and power during the pastoral stage in the period of Barbarism and reaches almost complete dominance in social life with the greatly increased productivity of the epoch of Civilisation.

He defines three successive systems of property inheritance, the first two of which correspond with the two stages of female and male descent in the gens among the members of which the property of a deceased member was divided ; the third system harmonising with the monogamous family in which the father's property is inherited exclusively by his own family.

Morgan's observations on the social significance of private property are very acute and approximate very closely to the Marxian position. He says:

  "It is impossible to overestimate the influence of property in the civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and laws are institute with primary reference to its creation, protection, and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production ; and after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making machine." (Pp. 511-512.)

"The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over  property . . . The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilisation began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence ; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim ; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction." (P. 561.)

Final Work.
With the publication of his principal literary work, the real culmination of his long enquiry into the evolution of human culture, Morgan did not by any means rest from his scientific labours. A true scientist, he continued to investigate and to generalise from the facts so observed, ever searching for fresh truths, ever seeking further to contribute to the totality of human knowledge.

In 1876 he visited the ancient and the modern pueblos, or native villages of Colorado and New Mexico. An early result was his essay on "Communal Living Among the Village Indians."

He devoted his attentions especially to the architecture and domestic life of the Indians, and his final conclusions on this phase of their life were embodied in his last great book, "Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines," which appeared in 1881. This work contains abundant information on the property relations of the Indians and shows in great detail the communistic habits and modes of thought which pervaded their life. Commenting upon the brotherhood and hospitality of the Redskins Morgan, says in a striking passage :

  "If a man entered an Indian house in any of their villages, whether a villager or a stranger, it was the duty of the women therein to set food before him. . . . This characteristic of barbarous society, wherein food was the principal concern of life, is a remarkable fact. The law of hospitality, as administered by the American aborigines, tended to the final equalisation of subsistence. Hunger and destitution could not exist at one end of an Indian village or in one section of an encampment while plenty prevailed elsewhere in the same village or encampment. "

We have now completed our survey of Morgan's scientific and literary achievements. His important and original work earned for him the name of "the father of American Anthropology." In 1873 he had received the degree of Doctor of Laws from Union College, and in 1880 he was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

At first sight it appears strange that although his vital discoveries were appropriated for their own use by the English anthropologists, to their great discredit they did their utmost to belittle Morgan, and as far as possible ignored, and were silent regarding, his meritorious achievements. No doubt this, in part, was due to the severe blow which Morgan had dealt to the prestige of the English School by causing the collapse of their pet theory—that of McLennan. But, worse still, Morgan had criticised the social power of property, and such criticism could not be tolerated by the intellectuals of the hothouse of industrial capitalism, the birth-place of Laisser-Faire "political economy." (*)

Morgan's home was a rendezvous for the leading American scholars and scientists of the day. In his own library Morgan would often gather with a number of young students for the systematic study of ethnology and also of the works of Herbert Spencer, whom he greatly admired.

Morgan took a practical interest in political activity and in 1861 was elected to the N.Y. Assembly, later, in 1868, becoming a Senator. He used all his influence in the endeavour to improve the conditions of life and the treatment meted out to his life-long friends, the Red-men—dying remnants of a splendid race, broken and bespoiled by the fateful finger that writes the story of economic evolution.

Morgan reached through his studies the very verge of the Socialist conception of society. Had his investigations carried him further into the epoch of civilisation he would probably have realised more completely than he did the vast importance of the struggle of classes arising from those property developments the early stages of which he himself so ably described.

But if his sphere was too narrow to permit of this, it was even less fitted to give Morgan an understanding of the present capitalistic stage of society. It required a man of equal intellect working, observing, analysing, generalising at the very hub-centre of the capitalist world market —London, and this role was played by Marx, in whom Capitalism as well as Socialism found its Morgan.

The works of Marx and Morgan are in a very real sense interrelated and complementary. Together they laid secure foundations for a genuine natural science of social life. This Marx clearly recognised and intended to show in a work upon the evolution of society based upon his own researches and those of Morgan. Unfortunately this, which might possibly have been Marx's master work, was never accomplished—ill health and death intervened. But Marx's great co-worker, Frederick Engels, seeing the urgent necessity of such a work, himself undertook the task and produced that classic of Marxian sociology, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," which first appeared in Germany in 1884.

This little book of Engels' was the first real appreciation, outside of America, of the pioneer work done by Morgan. Passing through several editions and translated into numerous languages, it has been the means of spreading a knowledge of Morgan's work amongst members of the working class the world over. To this day, in fact, "Ancient Society" is read and discussed wherever class conscious working-men gather together, while, on the other hand, the average bourgeois student is ignorant, often enough, of Morgan's very name and position in science, let alone being conversant with his writings.

In the estimation of the proletarian student Lewis H. Morgan, by the originality and vast importance of his scientific achievements, occupies a place in that imperishable trinity of nineteenth century science —Marx, Darwin, Morgan.

R. W. Housley.

(*) Of late years there has been a change of attitude, and in addition to the praise of Edward Jenks, we have Dr. Haddon in his "History of Anthropology'' referring to Morgan as the greatest sociologist of the nineteenth century.

(Concluded.)