Prosocial (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

Conflict Resolution. By Douglas P. Fry. Edward Elgar. 2026. 121pp.

‘Nomadic foragers, as we all used to live, were socialist, prosocial, egalitarian societies’ (Douglas P. Fry).

In this distillation of long years of fieldwork and scholarship, the world-leading anthropologist Douglas Fry draws upon his knowledge and experience to propose means of resolving conflicts between individuals or groups as they might arise in contemporary contexts. Its analysis and recommendations are underpinned by the author’s accumulated understanding of how human beings have related to one another throughout the 300,000 years of our species’ existence. And it is precisely this that makes it of particular interest and relevance to socialists.

To be specific, a central plank of his arguments is how entirely fallacious are the oft-repeated claims that war, aggression and greed are rooted in the human psyche. All the evidence, he insists, is that such forms of behaviour, far from being somehow embedded in our nature, are, when they occur, an outcome of social conditioning and that our evolutionary history shows that we have just as much potential for, and indeed a much more natural bent, towards attachment, caring partnership and cooperation.

Drawing on decades of his own research and with evidence from various different fields of study, he demonstrates how over the approximately 290,000 years of prehistory (the Palaeolithic era), the overwhelming principle of existence among human groups was (and still is today among indigenous populations he has investigated across the world) non-violence, cooperation and egalitarianism, characterised by sharing food, caring for the vulnerable and maintaining social bonds. This the author sums up as ‘community solidarity and harmony’, reinforced by ‘socialization and social control mechanism geared toward promoting prosocial values and behaviors’. Not that violence, greed or attempts to monopolise necessities would never have occurred in Palaeolithic societies or never occur in modern indigenous cultures, but in such circumstances ways are usually found to resolve the conflicts caused via ‘restorative’ methods or by reconciliation, eschewing violence and seeking to practice ‘fairness’ in the eyes of the individuals most directly affected and of the collectivity. But in the rare cases where this is not possible, it may be necessary to apply sanctions to ‘wrongdoers’, probably via some form of social ostracism or banishment. As for large-scale organised killing, the author echoes the now widely accepted view that this has been largely a feature of the last approximately 10,000 years. Starting then, hunter-gatherer life (referred to in this book as ‘nomadic foraging’) gave way to settled agriculture with social hierarchies and control and domination of wealth by small groups of people developing and eventually becoming the norm. Later, of course, the industrial production of capitalism took over from agricultural society, but that society continued to manifest, as it still does, those same basic features: power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, leaders and led, and a willingness of the many, via social conditioning, to sacrifice themselves in the interests of the privileged few.

This book is one of many in the field of anthropology, archaeology and a gamut of other disciplines which have contributed to exploding the enduring myth that violence, competition and selfishness are somehow ‘locked into’ human interaction, that there exists inevitably some kind of ‘war of all against all’. Douglas Fry’s stark opposition to that idea is summed up in his statement that ‘on the basis of cross-cultural data … humans have a universal inclination to resolve conflicts and restore normal patterns of harmonious social interaction’ and that ‘the normal state of social affairs is to exchange good deeds, to feel gratitude, to be generous and appreciate the generosity of others. Overall, people strive to maintain positive interpersonal relations with others through mutually beneficial exchanges’.

All this is serious grist to the mill for socialists, providing as it does a powerful response to those who argue that the cooperative society of voluntary endeavour and free access to all goods and services which we call socialism is impossible because it is against what is usually referred to as ‘human nature’. We cannot but agree with the author’s plea that ‘the human potential for resolving conflicts without violence should be fully acknowledged, nurtured, and further elaborated by the people sharing one small planet in the vastness of space’. At the same time, however, though this plea is expressed, as all else in this book, in truly engaging fashion, it is difficult to see how its substance can be realised within the framework of the current social system of class division and production for profit. Rather, the environment for it to come to fruition has to be a society of economic equality and production for need.

Howard Moss

Indo-European (2026)

Book Review from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Proto. How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. William Collins. 2026. 342pp.

‘Migration has been a constant, “indigenous” is relative’ – Laura Spinney.

This is a book about the ancient language commonly known as Proto Indo-European which, starting around 5,000 years ago, began to spread beyond its home territory in the west Eurasian steppe (modern Ukraine, Moldova, southern Russia) in various different directions. As it did so, it gradually evolved into many different languages according to where the people speaking it went and settled.

Modern research has shown that today approximately half the world’s population speak a variant of that ancestral language in places as far apart as, for example, India and Britain, Iran and Iceland, Russia and the United States. What kind of research are we talking about? Archaeological, linguistic and, most recently, genetic. As the book’s author puts it, ‘the new tools of archaeology and genetics [largely via DNA] have opened our eyes to our past’. And she shows a breathtaking panoply of knowledge in these fields as well as a profound and detailed understanding of historical developments across the world since the earliest times. Furthermore, while producing a work of consummate scholarship, she manages to communicate her material with a reader-friendly lightness of touch and a style which, much of the time, is downright entertaining.

So, as the original Indo-Europeans moved east, west and south from their homeland, they came into contact with other peoples speaking other languages. Sometimes they ended up adopting the languages they came into contact with, but more often they carried on speaking a form of their original language modified by the different forms of speech of those they interacted with. To such an extent in fact that, over a period of time, many of the languages deriving from Indo-European became mutually incomprehensible – as is the case today between, say, Hindi and English or Russian and French or Welsh and Kurdish, all of which are of Indo-European origin.

The story of the spread of the common ancestor of many of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the world today is also part of the story of the wider inbuilt ability of the human species to adapt to changing circumstances of life – referred to by some writers as ‘plasticity’. We are talking here about human behaviour more generally and the truth that the way a human group organises itself in a given physical or social environment context has never been eternal but rather is subject to change according to conditions and circumstances and has been ever-shifting over history.

In its own way, therefore, the story so eloquently told in this book serves as an object lesson to opponents of the idea that there is no alternative to the kind of society we live in and that other different social arrangements, such as the free-access society advocated by socialists, are impossible or ‘utopian’. Those who maintain that we must continue to accept and live in a society divided by class and wealth would do well to heed the fact, made abundantly clear by Laura Spinney, that, in the less than 2 percent of the whole of human history she covers in her book (ie 5,000 years out of 300,000), we have undergone and adapted to multiple changes both linguistically and in a host of other domains. And there is certainly more of this to come. Just as, in Spinney’s words, ‘throughout humanity’s long existence, languages have never ceased to absorb and change each other’, we look forward to changed social arrangements in the future which will allow humans to move from the realm of oppression and necessity to that of cooperation and abundance.

Howard Moss

Letter: Engels (2026)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Engels

Hello

There’s a certain irony in being accused (Pathfinders, February) of not having read Engels when my point (very much a side point) was that Engels’ arguments were based on no evidence of how people organised themselves in prehistory. My main point was that no, prehistory was not a feminist utopia, but there was a huge diversity of relations between men and women of which, until recently, we were completely ignorant. My reason for not including Engels in Further Reading was not that it was old hat, though perhaps even the author of this piece would agree that Engels’ ideas have been around a while, but that the rule for that particular section of The Guardian’s books pages is that it should be inspired by recent thinking and recent books – which are then cited in Further Reading. If this author were himself better read, he would know that I’ve written on this subject in greater depth, with a less restrictive word count, for New Scientist – written and he would, I hope, feel a little ashamed of his groundless (rather like Engels’) statements.

Best wishes,

Laura Spinney

Reply from the writer

As a New Scientist subscriber for twenty years I’ve appreciated many of your interesting articles, but I must have missed the one you wrote on Engels. You say there’s no evidence for his hypothesis on the subjection of women (actually derived from pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan), even calling it ‘groundless’. This seems a little harsh given that whole theoretical edifices are sometimes constructed based on one finger bone. The evidence of patriarchy is all around you and everywhere in history. Is the alternative origin story simply that ‘it’s complicated?’ To discuss Engels’ argument while omitting the crucial role of emerging property relations is a bit like discussing gravity without mentioning mass, or Newton, or relativity. That’s why your representation of Engels came across as woolly, hence the speculation that you might not have gone to the source. Angela Saini, as the article points out, instead takes the argument and runs with it in a way that sheds further light rather than confusion on the subject.

PJS

Self-Made Man and His Undoing (1993)

Book Review from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jonathan Kingdon: Self-Made Man and His Undoing. Simon At Schuster £20.

Human beings are related to other animals, and most closely to the other primates, especially chimpanzees and gorillas. The first hominid fossils (those belonging to the homo family) are found in Africa, and date back perhaps two-and-a-half million years. The origin of modern humans — as opposed to earlier hominid species such as erectus or Neanderthals is more controversial, but one theory again sees an African homeland, around 200,000 years ago. Since that lime, members of homo sapiens have expanded over most of the planet, changed the world we inhabit in numerous ways, and have themselves been changed in the process. It is this last point which is the focus of Kingdon's book, and, as the title suggest, his view is that humans have changed themselves, by dint of adapting to the world around them.

Our differences from our nearest animal relatives, the chimps, are enormous, even though we are genetically very close to them. For instance, we have a very different facial structure, with far smaller jaws and teeth. This may be explained as the result of humans' developing cooking, so that we no longer needed massive jaws to cope with raw meat and plants, which were eliminated through natural selection. Our hands became more efficient at manipulating tools, as an upright stance meant that they were not needed for support. In general, the invention of tools and technology led to quite drastic changes in our physical characteristics. As jaws became smaller, relative brain size increased and the capacity for speech — with all its implications for social organization evolved.

If the idea of an African origin for modern humans is correct, our ancestors must have spread out from there to the rest of the Earth. Probably the first expansion was to India, and thence to the rest of Asia and Australasia. Sea levels were lower than today, and 65.000 years ago Australia was linked to New Guinea, but travel from the Asian mainland still required boats, which can now be seen as one of the greatest human inventions. Perhaps 40,000 years ago, moderns expanded into Europe, replacing the Neanderthals (though others regard Neanderthals as one of the many ancestors of modern humans). The American continent was settled, from Asia, only around 15,000 years ago.

Human expansion over the Earth led to encounters with many different kinds of prey and different types of climate, and humans adapted to their local circumstances, thus leading to the evolution of different human appearances in terms of build, skin colour and hair type. For instance, people from tropics have on the whole far less body hair than other humans: this is presumably because body hair impairs the efficacy of sweating and so makes it harder for the body to remain cool. Comparably, people in areas where malaria occurs have developed defences against it, such as the sickle cell trait. Brown eyes, probably the original human colour, are a better protection in bright sunlight than blue. Blue eyes turn up in various parts of the world, including Africa and India, but are dominant only in northern Europe, where summer is short and selection working against non-brown eyes must have been weaker.

Kingdon deals dismissively with the concept of "race”: all humans are hybrids with mixed ancestries, and it is quite impossible to identify distinct races. As he says in a fine phrase:

“What it is to be a human will always be more complex, interesting and important than what it is to be any particular type of human."

The "undoing" of the title is dealt with in the last couple of chapters. Unfortunately this is a familiar and unoriginal discussion of environmental damage and the supposed dangers of over population. The usefulness of the book, however, lies elsewhere. It helps, to be honest, to have some prior knowledge of the topics he discusses, but Kingdon gives a clear and well-argued account of human evolution and adaptation, stressing all the while how solving the problems of surviving and reproducing has been the key to this aspect of human history.

Paul Bennett

Evolutionary pseudo-psychology (2001)

From the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is competition, leadership, aggression, possessiveness, and social and sexual inequality inevitable? Are they part of our biologically-determined human nature?

Socialists have seen it all before. First it was the Social Darwinists, then it was the Nazis, then in the 1960s books appeared with such titles as The Territorial Imperative, On Aggression and The Naked Ape, then there was sociobiology, now there’s “evolutionary psychology”. All put over the same basic message: competition, leadership, aggression, possessiveness, social and sexual inequality are inevitable; you can never have a society without them as they’re part of biologically-determined human nature.

In reply, socialists have pointed out that the people concerned were not writing as competent scientists but as ideologists serving privileged interests and/or pandering to popular prejudice. In fact the real scientific evidence proved the opposite: humans were of course the product of biological evolution but their particular evolutionary inheritance in the form of a complex brain allowed them to learn and live out a great variety of different behaviour patterns; one key feature of human biological nature was precisely this capacity for flexible behaviour, the capacity to adapt human behaviour to cope with the challenges presented by the natural and the social environments which humans had to live in. Humans can be competitive, aggressive, possessive, etc but we can also be—and are—co-operative, friendly and sharing. Groups of humans have lived in conditions of social equality in the past and so could do so again.

The basic position of the so-called evolutionary psychologists is put by one of their gurus, Steven Pinker, in his book, How The Mind Works:

“For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic herds. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilisations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience”

If this figure of 99 percent is meant to be taken literally, and assuming that human societies practising agriculture first came into being 10,000 years ago, the “people” Pinker is talking about would be those living about 1 million years ago. These were certainly members of the genus homo, but of the long-extinct species homo erectus rather than our own species homo sapiens. In fact modern humans are generally regarded as not having evolved until some 100,000 or perhaps 150,000 years ago.

The argument is not that the human brain is not a biological adaptation that better fitted humans for surviving, but whether this adaptation was just best for living as foragers on the African savannah or whether it was a more general capacity to adjust to whatever environment humans found themselves living in.

The fact that even homo erectus left Africa to settle and survive in different environments suggests the latter. This is strengthened by the fact that the evolutionary psychologists have failed to come up with any credible theory as to how complicated behaviour patterns such as they speak of could be governed by genes. For that’s what their argument amounts to—that the behaviour pattern appropriate to a foraging life on the African savannah somehow got imprinted on the brains of the species that immediately preceded us and which we modern humans have inherited through our (and their) genes. In fact, it amounts to a revival, with regard to mental characteristics, of the long-discredited theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited.

As a number of contributors to Alas, Poor Darwin. Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (ed. Hilary and Steven Rose, Jonathan Cape) show, this is not how the brain works. It has long been known that the 18th century materialist view such as that of Robert Owen of the mind as a blank sheet on which the environment can imprint anything is wrong; the brain plays a much more active role in the learning process. We also know, thanks to recent advances in genetics and neuroscience, that some capacities (such as the ability to distinguish faces or to tell distance and perspective) correspond to certain parts of the brain. It is this that the evolutionary psychologists—and others who believe that complex behaviour patterns are innate and that there is, for instance, a gene for aggression or for homosexuality—latch on to, but what they ignore is that the brain is not fully “wired up” (to use one of their favourite metaphors) at birth but that this “wiring up” is a process that takes place as we grow up and learn and in fact continues throughout our lives. We are not born with pre-programmed patterns of behaviour. We learn how to behave after we are born (indeed, this starts while we are still in the womb) and in so doing “programme” or “wire up”, or whatever metaphor you want to use, our brains. We are animals that are capable of adopting a great variety of behaviour patterns. The nature of our brain allows us, as participants in a particular system of society, to “programme” ourselves, in ways that neuroscience is beginning to understand in more detail, for living in that society.

This means that it is just as natural for us humans to live in a society with written language, formal social institutions and high technology as on the African savannah. If Pinker and his followers really believe that they are better adapted genetically to living on the African savannah than in contemporary capitalism or future socialist society then there is an easy way to test this: dump them naked in East Africa and see whether or not the “basic instincts” they suppose themselves to have allow them to survive better there than in Boston or Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, Alas, Poor Darwin cannot be recommended as a fully effective presentation of the case against evolutionary psychology. Some of the contributors do set out cogently enough the points made in the previous paragraphs but, unfortunately, some of the other “arguments against evolutionary psychology” are trivial or wrong. For instance, the first contributor merely criticises the form in which evolutionary psychologists present their arguments while the second (a raving postmodernist) criticises not just biological determinism but all determinisms including therefore social determinisms such as the materialist conception of history. Even Steven Rose himself questions the reasonable assumption—in fact the only reasonable assumption of evolutionary psychology—that humans won’t have changed genetically since we modern humans first evolved some 100,000 years ago. And a contribution from a physical anthropologist is a glaring omission.. Someone like Richard Leakey could have delivered a knock-out blow against the evolutionary psychologists in the first round.

Adam Buick

The nature of human nature (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu once said that what cultural anthropologists were really interested in was “the nature of human nature”. So what do they think it is?

Today, all humans are members of the same species, homo sapiens. We know what our main features are: upright position freeing our hands, stereoscopic vision allowing us to see things in three dimensions, a long period of growing up, the anatomical ability to utter a wide range of sounds, and, last but not least, a powerful brain as the centre of our nervous system. These are all genetic features, inherited via our genes, and are what distinguishes us, genetically, from other animals and living things.

Before us there were other species of homo (Man) but which are now extinct. The most well-known of these was Neanderthal Man which only became extinct about 30,000 or so years ago. Then there were the likely direct ancestors of our species: homo habilis (which Richard Dawkins translates as “handy Man”) and homo erectus or upright Man. The currently available evidence suggested that the first Man, as distinct from the last Ape-Man, emerged about two million years ago.

But this is partly a question of definition since biologists distinguish the first Man from the last Ape-Man by brain size – an inevitably arbitrary, genetic distinction. Anthropologists have introduced another but non-biological distinction: the generalised making and use of tools. While the ability to make tools depends on biology (free hands, good eyesight, more powerful brain)  the actual making of the tools – and what they were and how they were used – does not; it is learned not inherited and, as such, part of what anthropologists call “culture”.

It is now generally accepted that the evolution of homo habilis  (toolmaking Man, if you don’t like Dawkins’s translation) into modern humans was not just a question of biology but also of culture; that it was a biological-cultural co-evolution. That, as Man made and used tools, natural selection favoured those with a more powerful brain and so a greater ability to learn and, crucially, to think abstractly (i.e. of something not present to the senses). Since abstract thinking and language are probably indissolubly linked, this depended on the development of the vocal cords and other parts of our speech organs. The end-result was us, some 150,000 years ago, on the savannah, or open grasslands, of East Africa.

Since then the most noticeable biological change was the development of the different varieties of our species – sometimes mis-called “races” – as isolated groups of homo sapiens adapted biologically through natural selection, over many thousands of years, to the different physical environments in which they lived.

Otherwise human adaptation has been cultural rather than biological: humans making use of their biological capacities, to build-up a social tradition so as to better adapt to their environment, which is then passed on to a new generation through teaching and learning rather than through genes.

“Cultural anthropology is concerned with the study of man’s cultures. By ‘culture’ the anthropologist understands what may be called the man-made part of the environment; the pots and pans, the laws and institutions, the art, religion, philosophy. Whatever a particular group of people living together as a functioning population have learned to do as human beings, their way of life, in short, is to be regarded as culture” (Ashley Montagu, Man: His First Million Years, 1957).

Culture allows humans to adapt to a new or changing environment much, much more rapidly than biological adaptation through natural selection ever could. Cultural adaptation is measured in decades while biological adaptation is measured in tens of thousands of years. Other animals do have a culture in the sense of a tradition of behaviour that is passed on through learning, but none can vary and develop it as humans can. So, the capacity for adaptation through cultural change can be said to be a distinguishing feature of our species. It is of course a biologically-determined capacity, dependent upon in particular a powerful brain and the capacity to speak and on the extended period of childhood during which culture can be learned.

This is “human nature”: the set of biological capacities enabling humans to learn, teach and develop culture, which is a non-biological means of adapting to the environment in which they find themselves. Faced with a new environment, humans can and do adapt their behaviour not their biological make-up. Because culture is non-biological and not fixed, the cultural anthropologists emphasised that educability, behavioural adaptability and flexibility was the key feature of human nature, what made us human:

“The most notable thing about human behaviour is that it is learned. Everything a human being does as such he has to learn from other human beings. From any dominance of  biologically or inherited predetermined reactions that may prevail in the behaviour of other animals, man has moved into a zone of adaptation in which his behaviour is dominated by learned responses. It is within the dimension of culture, the learned, the man-made part of the environment that man grows, develops, and has his being as a behaving organism” (Ashley Montagu, Man and Aggression, 1968).

This biological capacity for culture, for learning behaviour and passing on to other humans and to other generations, was clearly an adaptive advantage and it is this that has allowed our species to spread and survive in all parts of the world, despite the widely differing environments. Much less of the behaviour of other animals is learned (and what is learned is essentially repetitive from generation to generation) and much more is governed by what used to be called “instincts”.

This is a word that has long fallen out of favour in scientific circles, but it would simply denote a fixed response to a given stimulus – like the literal knee-jerk reaction in humans. Or moths flying into lights. Another, more complicated response would be squirrels reacting to the shortening of periods of daylight by going into hibernation.

What the brain does is to allow a period between the stimulus and the response. The more developed the brain the wider the range of possible behavioural responses that the organism can make on the basis of its own past experience. We are the animals with the most developed brain and it is one that allows us the greatest choice of behavioural responses. So much so, the cultural anthropologists argued, that it can be said that we don’t really have any instincts. According to Montagu, any “instincts” that might have existed in the pre-human ape-men from which we evolved would have disappeared in the course of evolution:

“Instead of leading to fixed responses to the environment, man’s evolution has been such as to make him the least behaviourally fixed and most generally educable or plastic of all living creatures. It is this very plasticity of his mental traits that confers upon man the position he occupies. The acquisition of this capacity freed man from the constraint of the limited range of biologically predetermined responses that characterises all other animals” (Human Heredity, 1963 edition)

“ . . . man is man because he has no instincts because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of his environment, from other human beings” (Man and Aggression).

The scientific consensus that was established in the 1940s, 50s and 60s was that it was “human nature” to be able to have a wide range of  behavioural responses to the environment; that human behaviour was learned not innate; that it was culturally not biologically determined. This was confirmation that there is nothing in the biological nature of humans that would prevent us living in the co-operative, non-hierarchical, society of self-motivated individuals that socialism would be.

Since then the biological determinists have regrouped and counter-attacked, claiming that there still are “biologically predetermined responses” in humans. They have made some headway in that biological determinism is more intellectually acceptable than it was fifty years ago. People like Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker  – none of them anthropologists – have been able to achieve some popular success. But they have only done this by playing to the gallery, exploiting the fact that most people have a negative view of human nature – inherited from the Christian dogma of original sin and innate human depravity – and knowing that they could sell their books by pandering to this prejudice. Ardrey, Morris and Pinker also appealed to anti-intellectualism to ridicule and marginalise the scientific findings of the cultural anthropologists by painting them as an arrogant, liberal elite.

But they have failed to show how genes could determine human behaviour (as opposed to setting limits to it). Basically, genes are self-replicating codes for the production of the proteins in the cells of which we (and all other life-forms) are made. What they govern is the development and renewal of our physical, material bodies. They don’t govern behaviour – that depends, as the cultural anthropologists have established, on our social and cultural environment.

The biological determinists hoped that advances in genetics would back up their case, but it is proving to be their undoing. Molecular biologists are making huge advances in identifying and discovering the effect of individual human genes. And they are not discovering genes for any behaviour, only for how the human body develops and renews itself – and what happens when a gene is faulty or abnormal or unusual. In which case the person concerned will suffer some, usually crippling bodily defect, but which genetics holds out the hope of someday being able to correct.

The findings of the cultural anthropologists still stand. All human social behaviour has to be learned and so is culturally not biologically determined. A key distinguishing feature of our species is behavioural adaptability. Human nature is not a barrier to socialism.

Adam Buick

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

Human capacity (2001)

Book Review from the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Becoming Human. Evolution and Human Uniqueness by Ian Tattersall, OUP, 2001.

Like all the other life-forms on this planet, we humans are the product of a process of evolution from earlier life-forms. Our immediate ancestors will have been ape-like animals which had evolved to walk upright. The fossil record suggests that there will have been many species of such animals, from one line of which we are descended. All the other lines not only became extinct but left no descendants either. The last of these other types of Homo to go extinct were the Neanderthals, a mere (in evolutionary time) 27,000 years ago.

All this is described by Tattersall, who is the curator of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in this paperback edition of a book that was first published in 1998. According to him, although there was no predetermined course of evolution leading to us as the “highest form” of life, there is a feature that distinguishes us from all other life-forms—the capacity for symbolic thought, i.e. the ability to generate and manipulate complex abstract symbols (words naming parts of our environment and relationships between them). This allows us not just to react to the external world but to refashion it. This of course is tied up with language and it is what makes us unique. It has enabled us to develop technologies that have changed both the rest of nature and the societies in which we live.

Tattersall speaks of “human capacity” (as opposed to “human nature”) and clashes with those, such as the sociobiologists and the evolutionary psychologists, who have a very narrow view of this capacity, seeing it as being severely limited by our genes. But, Tattersall points out, while our genes can’t be ignored “they only intervene in our behaviours in an indirect way, by programming the development of our brains”. Therefore, “if we are to understand the complexities of our behaviour, it is to our brains, not directly to our genes, that we have to look”.

When we do this then, we can add, we find that our brains allow us, as a species, to adopt – and, as prehistory and history bear out, we have in fact adopted – a great variety of different behaviours depending on the natural, economic and social environments we have found ourselves in. So, contrary to the biological determinists of various hues, “human nature” is not a barrier to socialism. On the contrary, our biologically evolved and inherited “human capacity” will allow us to live in a socialist society.

Tattersall has his own particular theory of how our brains developed, which is not accepted by all anthropologists and palaeontologists. He suggests that the ability to think abstractly, and to express such thoughts vocally, arose for other reasons than directly to be able to do these, for instance perhaps as a result of the mental images involved in fashioning tools, in one line of Homo which only later exploited this capacity. Hence his view that the Neanderthals did not use symbolic language.

This is a neat refutation of the views of those who claim that our brains only evolved for life on the open grasslands of East Africa and that therefore we have “stone age minds” which make it difficult for us to live under capitalism let alone in a socialist society. In any event, Tattersall points out, the idea that the brains of us modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved out of living in a single environment has been overstated. During the time that the various different species of Homo evolved, and all except the line that led to us became extinct, the natural environment was unstable. The Earth cooled and warmed and cooled again, shifting patterns of vegetation even in East Africa. “It is out of this ecologically and geographically unstable world that our ancestors ultimately arose,” concludes Tattersall. “The widely cited notion of a monolithic ‘ancestral environment’ that, through our genetic heritage, still conditions our behavior today is simply untenable”.

Adam Buick

Voice From The Back: The Inequalities Of Capitalism (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Inequalities Of Capitalism

A good example of the class division in modern society can be seen when we look at the wealth of the top 0.1 percent of the population in the USA. “An analysis by David Cay Johnston in the New York Times found that the average annual inflation-adjusted income of this group increased by 2.5 times, to $3 million (£1.6 million), from 1980 to 2002. The average net worth of those on the Forbes 400 list has mushroomed in the past 20 years, rising from $390 million (£206 million) to $2.8 billion (£1.48 billion)” (Times, 17 August).  As for you and your family, “inflation adjusted” how are you doing? A little less than $3 million this year I would imagine.

Pardon Our French

Nothing sums up capitalism better than the article that appeared in the Observer Magazine (27 August) when dealing with the former member of the Workers Revolutionary Party John Bird, who it describes as an entrepreneur. We think this might mean con man but we never went to French classes. This enterprising person may be more familiar to you as the owner of the magazine The Big Issue – yes the one you bought because you felt sorry for the lady outside the bus station.

Here is the owner of that magazine on the homeless and how he feels about it. “Fifty years ago a homeless person wasn’t allowed to sleep rough or beg. They’d get a menial job but they were part of society. Nowadays they pay nothing. They are infantilised. And it costs us £60,000 to keep each one of them in that state.” We must go to French classes. Perhaps entrepreneur really means “arrogant owning class bastard.”

Exploitation

It is a basic premise of socialists that all wealth that is produced inside modern capitalism is the product of the working class and that the capitalist class live off the surplus value that the working class produce. Now we have such pillars of capitalist society as the Observer and Reuters agreeing with us. “The 20 largest quoted companies in the UK make an average of over £96,000 pre-tax profit per employee, according to research carried out by the Observer. … BG, formerly British Gas, made by far the most – approximately £445,000 ..” (Observer, 27 August). Are you understanding these figures? On average your employer cons you out of more than £1,800 a week and in the case of BG over £8,000 a week. Why aren’t you a socialist? Are you a shareholder in BG?

The American Dream

There is a popular misconception about that as the USA is the world’s most developed capitalist country and the most productive the American workers must be well off. A recent report from the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute shows that this is not true.

“Adjusted for inflation, average wages in the US are now lower than they were in 2000 – so the benefits of the rapid increases in productivity . . .  are not being passed to the workers. In fact, as the New York Times reported last week, official figures show that wages and salaries now make up the smallest part of GDP since records began in 1947 . . .  In 1965, CEOs earned 24 times more than the average worker; by 2005 it was 262 times. . . . The top 20 per cent of asset-holders now control 85 per cent of all America’s wealth.” (Observer, 3 September)

Bones of Contention

The National Museum of Kenya is to reopen next year after extensive renovations. It will feature a special exhibit The Origins Of Man which will display the key fossil finds of Africa’s Great Rift Valley – considered by many to be the cradle of humanity. All round celebrations locally, you may imagine. Not a bit of it. “It’s creating a big weapon against Christians that’s killing our faith,” said Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who is leading the hide-the-bones-campaign.” (Observer, 10 September). This individual is chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which claims to represent churches of 35 denominations with 9 million members. No surprise there, he is carrying on the long tradition of Christian suppression of scientific enquiry.

 

Big Brother Is Watching You

George Orwell’s 1984 was a dystopia where every move of the worker was monitored, but Orwell’s nightmare has arrived. “Learn that truth, and learn it well; what you do at work is the boss’s business. Xora and SurfControl are just some of the new technologies that have sprung up in the past two years peddling products and services – software, GPS video and phone surveillance, even investigators – that let managers get to know you really well. The worst mole sits right on your desk. Your computer can be rigged to lock down work files, restrict Web searches and flag e-mailed jokes about the CEO’s wife. ‘Virtually nothing you do at work on your computer can’t be monitored’, says Jeremy Gruber, legal director of the US National Workrights Institute, which advocates work place privacy” (Time, 11 September). The article goes on to quantify how widespread this snooping is. 76 percent of employers watch your use of the Web, 36 percent track the content and time spent on the keyboard. 38 percent hire staff to sift through your e-mail and 38 percent have fired workers over the last 12 months for misuse of the email.

Walking with Beasts (2002)

Book Review from the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Walking with Beasts’ by Tim Haines. BBC Worldwide, 2001

The Walking with Beasts television series was one of the BBC’s success stories towards the end of last year. The accompanying book is equally as visually impressive. In particular the section on Pliocene Africa (relating to Australopithecines) provides a useful and easily digestible summary of the current knowledge of very early human ancestors. Such knowledge is particularly important when we consider “human nature” and its being an alleged barrier to achieving socialism. The section on chimpanzees is rather useful in this respect. Socialists are familiar with the old chimp argument: chimpanzees having an aggressive, male-dominated society, therefore such behaviour must be innate in humans too, the “evolved chimpanzees”. As Haines rightly points out, the bonobo (so-called “pygmy” chimp”) is equally closely related, yet has a completely different social structure – a matriarchy based on promiscuous sex. There are several other useful little snippets of a similar nature. It also makes a good bit of light-hearted entertainment.

Kaz.

Prehistoric capitalism? (2004)

Book Review from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the practice of exchange one which occurs in all societies, or is it rather something which emerges in particular historical circumstances? One writer who has recently discussed such questions is Steven Mithen. Mithen has written previously (in The Prehistory of the Mind, 1996) on the genetic development of a brain and mind capable of our modern complex set of activities. His latest book (After The Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5,000BC, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) deals with the formation of a productive culture within the effectively fixed constraints of our previous biological evolution.

The contents of After the Ice are an excellent, extremely readable account of early human life as reconstructed from known artefacts and other archaeological evidence. One vital component, added as an aid to presentation but essential to a work of this nature, it would seem, is the introduction of an observer, John Lubbock, through whose eyes we explore this prehistoric world. This observer, who bears the same name as an actual 19th century scientist but is not him, combines characteristics of Victorian and modern scientist, and thus when we read what he sees we are alerted to the fact that these are interpretations based on scarce data, and filtered not just through the eye but also the mind of the observer.

This becomes especially important when Mithen comes to discussing prehistoric economics. He takes care to attribute at least the wilder claims to the appropriate sources, these sources being those for whom Lubbock is a warning – those attempting to apply modern economics to scraps of ancient data. For example, we are told that a prehistoric inland tribe buried sea shells with their dead; therefore, given the mind of a modern or Victorian economist, they must have traded food for these shells; the shells must have been a symbol of status and power; and by burying these shells with their dead the high status clans could preserve the link between their ownership of shells and status, wealth and power.

Let us consider instead that ancient humans knew nothing of modern capitalist economics, and that, until we have evidence to the contrary, the human mind does not have a specific module devoted to capitalistic thinking. Instead, we will assume that ideas are the product of development, including ideas about human relationships. We then find that what seems the simplest of ideas, trading shells for an equal value of food, is actually a curious modern concept.

Firstly, the relationship between food and other products must be established: they must be exchanged, and to be valued they must be exchangeable for one product in common, a reproducible product of labour. Historically this is often cattle; for example, our words “fee” and ”pecuniary” are based on words for cattle in the Germanic languages and Latin respectively. Cattle can, however, only be subdivided when they are eaten; therefore in the course of millennia of trading the precious metals come to the fore as products of labour which can easily be used as a means of exchange and a measure of exchange value. Once such a universal representative of value has been developed, and only then, may tokens may be substituted for it, whether paper, copper and nickel, as today, or shells and beads. However, it was only in the 20th century that token money developed to the point of ending the gold standard and allowing the tokens a semblance of freedom in exchange (and only a semblance). How are our primitive forebears meant to have achieved this trick, except in the mind of a 20th century archaeologist with an understanding of such an advanced trading system so ingrained that they see it as natural to humans from the first generation?

Rather than such an understanding being genetically programmed into the hyman mind and brain, it is the product of thousands of years of social evolution, which had not finished even as the first modern archaeologists began to conjure such systems for their ancient forebears.

These criticisms aside – and they are criticisms which we would be forced to level against all academic endeavour which assumes modern conditions to be universal conditions – this is an excellent book which can be recommended to all socialists as an accessible source of information on ancient human societies.

We would, with our different interpretation, however, certainly come to more positive conclusions than Mithen. He writes, “Our politicians might devise both the will and the means to curb pollution, to distribute resources fairly throughout the world, to provide new homes for displaced populations, and to preserve the natural world. They might do all these things. But they probably won’t.” This is consistent with thinking that human social evolution is fundamentally constrained within the inherited mental structure of our organism. Socialists, on the other hand, see people as the product of history, just as earlier we have explained that one part of our lives, exchange between humans, is a product of history rather than a fact of nature to be merely endured. And so we would point to our ability to change, to transcend the limitations of our organism, to manufacture our social conditions rather than to be the product of original conditions; a potential yet to be fully realised, and which will be fully realised by transcending the conditions of our history that have led us so far from the ape to capitalist society. In other words, the answer is not to find solace in our fixed animal behaviours but in our mutability, and our ability to overcome these behaviours and conditions.

SJW

Selfish by nature? (2022)

From the November 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

About 30 years ago, I was feeling a bit pleased with myself. My tiny donor booklet told me that I was on my tenth visit to a mobile blood donation unit. I can’t remember if I was still on the bed or having my brew and biscuit but I’ll never forget the spontaneous acclaim from everyone in that hall when a nurse announced that a donor had turned up to give blood for the fiftieth time. The contribution of most of us there must have paled into insignificance against that of the newcomer. So what? We were all there doing a Good Thing. And it felt good too.

I think we can safely assume that the 10,000 who responded to October’s blood supply alert were acting out of a sense of solidarity, public duty, call it what you will. They did a Good Thing, and will rightly feel good about it too.

Such behaviour sits very badly with the tale that we’re all hard-wired for selfishness and competition rather than for cooperation, that capitalism is our natural state.

Solidarity is no new thing either – a recent report in Nature reveals that, 31,000 years ago, one of our kind, probably in childhood, had part of a lower leg surgically removed. Apart from the wow! factor of the approximate date (previous evidence for surgery dated to ‘only’ 7,000 years ago), what’s significant is that the amputee survived for at least 6 years in mountainous terrain which, the archaeologists infer, could only have been possible with ‘a high degree of community care’.

Our close relatives were at it too some 50,000 years ago. A 2017 study of a Neanderthal‘s skeletal remains shows that he survived into late adulthood despite a missing forearm, profound deafness – unhelpful when there are loads of predators around – and other severe physical problems. Again, the only inference that the researchers could draw was that his survival would only have been possible with continuous social support. In other words, Neanderthals could care for each other too.

Co-operation and sociability appear to have even deeper roots in the history of our species, as Penny Spikins, an archaeology professor at York University, argues in her newly published book Hidden Depths: The origins of human connection. We shall be reviewing this book in future no doubt but here is a taster from her conclusions:

‘We are innately wired to care for living and non-living things, to seek emotional comfort and to reach out to form connections. When the going gets tough, we tend to help each other.’

So it’s not just ‘human nature’ that capitalism’s supporters have got wrong – they misunderstand (or distort) what it means to be part of the genus Homo. Increasingly, scientific research shows that ‘the way we are’ is no barrier to socialism.

S. F.

Aspects of the “Woman Question.” (Part 2) (1929)

From the August 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

(Based on Notes of a Series of Lectures on “The Sexes in Evolution.”)

The status of woman in primitive society is examined. There are divergent opinions among the anthropologists themselves re­garding this feature of social development. Some assert that a matriarchal stage last­ing a long time was passed through by most primitive civilisations—a stage in which women were dominant. Others be­lieve that if such a state did exist it was probably of short duration. They claim that though evidence unearthed in Egypt, Mesopotamia and elsewhere indicates that a high degree of civilisation existed as far back as 20,000 years ago, there is very little to show that women occupied a truly dominant position.

The only way to arrive at an answer to these questions is to study the lower cul­tures that can be observed to-day, or have been observed and recorded within “histori­cal” times. Where there is history there is, of course, continuity from prehistory, and it is the task of the anthropologist to trace this continuity as far back as possible.

Briffault, in his monumental work, “The Mothers,” concludes that women occupied a relatively high position. In his opinion, the primal human group is not the family (in the modern sense), but a larger group which he calls “motherhood.” The assertion, he says, that “the family is the foundation of society” is belied by all the facts, anthropological and biological. He bases his claim for a belief in the relatively high position of woman on the fact that they could not have forced themselves up from an original subjection to the position they are assumed to have occupied. To some extent he appears to have followed Bachofen, though Bachofen could hardly have been conversant with the theory of the development of the human species from pre-existing orders. Support is lent to Briffault’s contention of the existence of a matriarchal group by researches which have revealed that early economic relations were based on productiveness, and not on property, and that women were the chief producers. Out of woman’s early activities, based on the maternal instinct which conserves the highest interests of her offspring, was established the principle which afterwards governed human groups—the principle of cohesion and sympathy—a factor which made organisation possible and progress attainable.

At one period she was elevated to the ideal of the mother goddess. As a divinity she was set apart what time the male was busy reacting to the herd instinct, and incidentally diverting the line of social development. At another period she is degraded to the position of a chattel, actually below that of cattle as regards her value. In early Greece women sank so low that they were treated as mere agencies of reproduction. In Biblical times both Moses and St. Paul were hostile to women, and the same hatred was displayed by both Tertullian and Origen, early Fathers of the Christian Church.

We then pass on to a consideration of her position within historical times, where the evidence is more reliable and easier to interpret. Under Feudalism the position of women improved somewhat, and in the Renaissance we find their lot still better, comparatively. But with the growth of wealth in the later Middle Ages their position changed from that of the cult of the saint to that of a mere colourless female character compelled to servitude. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution changed conditions forced them from this servitude to that of another kind—production in the home, with child labour as one of its deadly features, until, with the rise of modern capitalism, we arrive at conditions as we find them to-day.

Tom Sala

(To be continued.)

The Modern Tyranny. (1907)

From the June 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man’s Dominion over Things.

Whether it could ever have been truly said that man was “Lord of Creation,” using the last word in its mundane sense, is a point the profit of discussing which may be doubted. But if we agree that there was some modicum of truth in the Scriptural statement that man had dominion over all “created” things, then indeed has he had such a fall from his position of universal ascendency as even the historic experience of Humpty Dumpty does not parallel.

The rude savage, launching his arrow at the light-footed denizen of the plains; or contriving traps and pitfalls and poisoned welcome for the lumbering giants of the forest, might still, perhaps, be looked down upon with an air of condescension by the modern “Lord of Creation,” whose bow has evolved into a rifle, and whose chemistry has advanced from poison to explosives.

But, low as we adjudge him in the scale of humanity, the savage’s dominion over things had one distinguishing characteristic of vital importance, which made him a true dominator, and the absense of which has reduced civilised man, with all his vaunted triumphs over the forces of nature, to a condition of slavery more abject, more subtle, and more general than any form of subjection which has previously cumbered the earth.

This characteristic lay in man’s relation to the simple tools and weapons which constituted his means of procuring the necessaries of life. Early man was master of his instruments of production. He took up his bow when he was hungry or in danger, and laid it aside when it had served the logical purpose of its existence. He plied his axe, spun and wove on rude frames, and produced wealth by toilsome processes, to the end that he might have shelter and clothing and the comforts of his age, and these obtained, his axe might lie idle, and his loom be still.

Was given him by his tools.

And if, in these material things, the instruments of wealth production were the servants of those who made and owned them, still more effectively did they serve them in other ways. They lifted man up above the beasts of the field and gave him dominion over them. They brought him self-consciousness,—the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They built him up moral codes and ethical standards who had known no law of conduct. They prescribed his methods of life, determined his sexual relationships, fashioned alike the canons of his art and of his religion. They made unto him images to bow down to and worship—images of his idealised self, decked out in the barbaric splendour of savage virtues—”good’uns according to his lights.”

The savage sustaining himself by the weapons of the chase and war esteems certain qualities as virtues which people whose means of production have evolved to a higher stage condemn as vices. Thus the bow and spear demand for courage and cunning and ferocity, recognition as the highest of virtues, and decree the merciful unworthy and contemptible, while the plough and the windmill elevate the peaceful and the compassionate. Ferocity is a social necessity in savage life, as peace is to husbandry.

As also were his Gods.

So, the needs of Society as fashioned by the means of producing wealth, determine what shall be virtue and what vice, and the gods of the people being the embodiment of the people’s ideal, we find those of the savage and nomad races to be mighty gods of war, merciless and pitiless—the god of the barbarous Jews of the Old Testament, who smote the Amalakites and the Egyptians, and bade his victorious people take their male captives and “put them under axes of iron and under harrows of iron, and pass them through brick-kilns,” while for the virgins he devised a fate quite in accord with the jolly nature of one who said of Solomon (who numbered his wives by the hundred) “He is a man after my own heart.” And we find the ever developing means of production mould the people’s gods like plastic clay as they mould the people,—as they moulded the god of the Hebrews of the Old Testament into the loving and merciful father (an impossible conception to the savage) of the New.

In this way the tools—the means of producing wealth—served man in the past; served him with an irresistible hand if you like, and very much as a benevolent despot might serve his people, but served him nevertheless, since they developed in the individual, and set up in public esteem those qualities which were necessary to the public welfare.

But the tool has become master.

But when we examine the relative position of man and his means of production we stand appalled at the changed condition. The servant has become the master. That which man conceived and created in order that he might use it to assist him in the production of wealth, now uses man, not in the production of wealth, but of profit. The savage bent his bow to procure him meat and clothing and shelter, but human productive activities have long ceased to be purposive of the feeding, clothing, sheltering and comforting of humanity. If bread was produced to feed the hungry we should not find plaster in part substituted for flour. If cloth was produced to clothe the naked we should not weight it with useless and harmful mineral substances. Our universal custom of adulteration should show those whom no other argument can convince, that our modern means of wealth production are only incidentally means of producing those things which are necessary to the life and well-being of the people, while they are purposely conceived and designed and created with the primary object of producing—profit.

And Man its mere Lackey.

Think of it, ye exultant admirers of the march of civilisation, this wonderful development of the productive powers of man, has subjugated the lightning and exploited the tides, which has conquered the obdurate barrenness of the desert and set at defiance the terrors of capricious and untoward seasons, which has taken the very earth in its grip and forced it to yield up its treasures willy-nilly, what of human advantage has it brought, with all its evolution and its revolution ? What is it to us that it has made two blades of grass grow where one grew before, if we may never lie down upon it be we never so weary ? What is it to us that the drought can no longer bring us famine or the storm destroy our crops, if from abundance we reap only stint and from very surfeit starvation ? What is it to us that the cataract has been harnessed to our wheels and the electric element put to our revolving wonders, if we find no respite from toil save in utter exhaustion, and no relief from the cares of penury and insecurity but in the oblivion of the grave ?

It Starves Man amidst Plenty.

Yet this is what the development of our means of production has brought us to. It has made the fields to bring forth with astonishing prodigality, but it has created private ownership in those fields, and driven us from them, and brands us trespassers when we set foot upon their green sward. It has made us independent of the seasons and secure from famine, but instead it has given us the terrors of plethora—the casting of producers into the streets to starve because they have produced too much. It has placed the mighty forces of water-power and steam and electricity at the disposal of man, to enable him to produce with economical expenditure of effort, yet, instead of lightening his toil, it has augmented it until it is limited only by his endurance, and instead of saving him from the insecurity and vicissitudes of life, it has extended them until he finds surcease only in his death.

And has reduced him to a Commodity.

What dignity may ever have attached to the human state has been crushed out under the fearful tyranny of modern machinery. Not only has man’s productive energies been subverted so he labours for profit instead of for use-values, but he himself is reduced to the status of a commodity, is driven to market with a price upon his head like the most vulgar of the inanimate objects which he produces for sale, there to struggle for recognition as a common use-value, to find a purchaser or to perish. And in the struggle he is undone by the child of his own bosom. His position is undermined and he is rendered increasingly superfluous by the very machinery which he has created and raised up in opposition to him.

Nor is it only the producer who lies trammelled beneath the modern tyrant. Just as much is the possessor under the lash, at least as regards the development of those finer qualities and feelings which the evolutionary processes have rendered socially expedient and therefore moral. Our means of production have set the individual in opposition to the community. No longer are those qualities which are good for Society those fostered by our economic relations. The purchaser of labour-power who allows himself to be actuated by humane feelings, who pays above the market price for the human flesh and blood which he incorporates in the commodities he produces, or (which is the same thing) neglects to drain the last drop of sweat out of his workers, to just that extent weakens his position in the race for accumulated capital. To that extent he proves himself the unworthy steward of Capital, and Capital has a process of selection wonderfully effective in eliminating her unworthy stewards. She has no place for them in her economy—there is no room in production for profit for any humane feelings, but only for mean, sordid avarice and the qualities which support it. The capitalist even, dare not stand up and be a man ; dare not if he would give free rein to the feelings which (perchance) surge up within his breast. He also is a servitor of the modern tyrant, compelled by irresistible economic forces to play his part in the grim tragedy, in which each must be either oppressed or oppressor.

So human nature itself writhes under the heel of the tyrant. The ferocity of the savage, fostered by his method of production, was good both for the individual and his tribe, but who can pretend that that avarice nourished by capitalist production, at the promptings of which, when a man asks for beer we give him arsenic, and when our soldiers at the “front” ask for food we somehow get the powder mixed up with the beef, and the can explodes as Tommy opens it—who can pretend, I ask, that the mean and sordid qualities which our capitalist system of production tends to develope are good for the race, whatever they may be for the individual ? The savage, so far from being ashamed of the ferocity and cunning which are nurtured by his method of obtaining subsistence, idealises them, and makes them the inherent qualities of his gods ; but dare we so elevate and deify those personal attributes which tend to success in our mad system of blood-sucking competition ? No, they are anti-social, and instinctively we contemn them, as the savage contemns as undoing weakness the feeling that would spare an enemy. They are base, and we hate, loathe and despise them, as we must all baseness, and try to cover them up with the veil of hypocrisy, and put them out of sight behind vain pretences.

The machinery then, which we have perfected with so much patient application, has not only increased our toil and decreased our security, driven us from the fields to the city slum, set us so in opposition one against another that the son must struggle with the father, and the mother snatch the bread from the mouth of her babe, but it has so taken hold of us and our lives that the very possession of the social qualities which alone are moral, are damnation to their possessors. It has dethroned us, not only from any position of “lordship” we may have had over “creation,” but from that of being dictators of our own better feelings and guardians of those social instincts which play so important a part in our collective advancement.

A. E. Jacomb