Seige 'Marxism' and the origins of social class

LIONEL SIMS

In my note to Sheila McGregor's article on rapei I argued that Sheila's use of anthropological evidence weakened the Marxist defence of Engel's claim of a primordial stage of primitive communism. My central argument was based upon three main propositions:

1) Quoting evidence of egalitarian relationships between the sexes from some pre-state societies cannot answer the criticism that in most of them women are oppressed in some form.

2) Attempts to explain the male oppression of women in the majority of such societies by the effects of colonialism, or resource stress, or warring between males are not consistent with the evidence of colonialism etc..

3) The variation in women's status in pre-State societies can only be understood by a thorough defence of Engels. Recent advances in archaeology and anthropology now allow a general, rather than

minimalist, defence of Engels to fully vindicate his view of the birth of humanity in a classless and free society - primitive communism. This new evidence allows us to precisely trace the rise of the family, private property and the state.

In her reply Sheilaii rejects all of these propositions in a point-by-point 'refutation', and accuses me of capitulating to feminism. Let's look at her arguments.

Sheila supports Chris Harman in claiming that where women's contribution to subsistence is high in pre-State societies, then their status is high, and vice-versa. Thus, according to this view, where gathered foods or horticultural food crops predominate over hunted meat, then men tend not to dominate women. "All the adult members of hunter-gatherer bands were involved in securing food for the band. The only division of labour possible was a sexual one with men and women undertaking different tasks to ensure survival...[E]galitarian relations between men and women are rooted in their autonomous economic role...[and this] sexual division of

labour...[is]...non-exploitative

and non-oppressive".iii

Comrades will not find this argument of women's status linked to their gathering role anywhere in the writings of Marx and Engels. On the contrary, Engels explicitly points out that "[t]he division of labour between the two sexes is determined by causes entirely different from those that determine

the status of women in society."iv For Engels it is women's solidarity that is the precondition for women's high status. "The communistic household, in which most of the women or even all of the women belong to one and the same gens (clan LS), while the men come from various other gentes, is the material foundation of that predominancy of women which generally obtained in primitive times." v A few seconds thought will demonstrate that the woman-the-gatherer model is not only not part of Marxism, but that it predicts the exact opposite to Engels for an initial situation for human culture. It is generally accepted within archaeology, on the basis of very strong evidence, that the first cultural humans were big game hunters. Since most of the subsistence in these societies would have been provided by hunting males, then women's contribution would be quite small. If that was the case, then the woman-the-gatherer model predicts the primordial oppression of women, exactly the opposite of Engels. Where does the woman-the-gatherer model come from? It began with Sally Linton in 1972 and was adopted by many other bourgeois feminist writers, including Ernistine Friedl, from whom Chris Harman presented a distorted version in this journal in 1984.vi But for Marx and Engels it is the mode of production which defines power relationships. There are gatherers and hunters in many societies, just as there are woodworkers or metal workers or traders in many societies, but what determines their social power is their relationship to the means of production, not their location in the division of labour.

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

tradition, since it was clans that Morgan, Engels and Marx identified as the unit of organisation in primitive communism. The concept of a 'band' was first developed by Julian Steward, a "bourgeois anthropologist", in 1955 to cautiously characterise the Great Basin and Western Shoshone.vii Later writers generalised the use of the term and dropped all Steward's earlier caution. For these writers a 'band'is a small loosely organised group characterised by a long list of absences: the absence of sharp political or territorial boundaries, the absence of groups larger than the village, the absence of men's institutions, the absence of age grades, and the absence of clans, moieties and lineages etc.. This concept of the 'band' has now been discredited within anthropology for three main reasons. First Thomasviii has shown that it is descriptively inaccurate of the Western Shoshone. Second, all the pre-State societies of the Northern Americas, including the Shoshone, are smashed cultures, and the findings of 'rescue' anthropology cannot be generalised to other traditional cultures that preserve much of their pre-contact institutions. It was not just hearts that were buried at Wounded Knee. Third, the assumption of organisational simplicity of the band equating with 'primitiveness' of historical stage commits the error of 'archaism', the assumption that traditional cultures stripped ragged by colonialism and imperialism are an accurate image of their initial situation. It cannot explain the Australian Aborigines which exhibit all of the characteristics whose very absence defines a band, yet are 'pre-Neolithic' hunters and gatherers with a very simple technology.ix It is for this reason that bourgeois anthropogists, and some of our leading

comrades, consider the Aborigines as 'anomalous'. Of course they are only anomalous if you have a model of primordial cultures which sees them negatively, as simple primitives, lacking in all the things like size, plentiful food, a rich cultural and ritual life, leisure etc. associated with 'non-primitive'. Anthropology pricks all such smugness, since

Aboriginal societies were far richer than western mass cultures in their complexity and leisure. When Aborigines hear of the violence of our societies, the genocidal wars, the lack of cooperation and incessant competitiveness, with exploitation dominating life, for them, we are the savages.

Sheila seems unaware that she is supporting a position that has been taken wholesale from bourgeois anthropology. This position was developed largely by feminists in the seventies to combat male supremacist theories. They pointed to a few examples of societies with egalitarian relationships, such as the !Kung & Mbuti. Of course these examples (not their theories!) are crucial evidence against any universal claims of male domination, and to suggest that I do not support this minimalist defence of Engels is absurd and simply a deliberate distortion of my position. My point is the opposite of the feminist attack on Engels. How can we explain the majority (not all!) of cases of pre-State societies where in spite of women contributing the majority of gathered or domesticated foodstuffs they suffer male

domination? This is not an abstract or esoteric issue. Many people, including those mobilised by feminism, want to know how women's oppression

and class oppression began. At present, so long as we refuse to engage with this evidence, the left has not provided a rigorous answer to the question. Think how much stronger we will be if we can do this as Marxists. Then we would have enormously strengthened Engels and thus ourselves in the battle against right-wing ideas. If we can do that, then we would have opened the path for many more people to move towards Marxism. But we cannot begin to do this unless we have proper scientific respect for the evidence, and Sheila fails lamentably in this respect.

It is for this reason that I called attention to Sheila's misuse of Sanday's statistics. In her reply she compounds her first error with yet another distortion of Sanday, by claiming that 'mythical male dominance' excludes rape. This is just after quoting Sanday to the exact opposite! "When [male aggression] exists in the presence of [women's exercise of political and economic power], the term mythical male dominance will be employed to describe the relationship between the sexes." x . Out of a sample of 93 pre-state societies, 39 fit this label of 'mythical male dominance', but as comrades will see from Table 8.1 on pages 166-167 of Sandayxi, 20 of these 39 societies institutionalise rape as a means of disciplining women. If comrades are still unsure, and since Sheila seems incapable of stating the true position, I reproduce another of Sanday's table below for your own inspection.

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

such that after the initial null category, each indicator is included in the next one up the scale in a cumulative index. Thus if a society is found with interpersonal violence (scale value 4), then there will also be men's houses and/or machismo (scale values 2-3) in that society. Similarly if there is frequent or institutionalised rape (scale value 5), then there will also be interpersonal violence, men's houses and/or machismo, and so on. This means, for example, that rape (scale values 5 & 6) is used by men to discipline women in 47 (14+33) out of 93 (51%) of these societies. But Sanday defines equality between the sexes in a manner unacceptable to Marxists. She collapes the scale of male aggression into a simplified two-fold distinction between societies in which rape regularly occurs Table 1 Relationship between male aggression and women's economic and political power and authority.xii ________________________________________________________________ Females have no Females have Females have Row econ. or pol. econ. power econ. & pol. tot. power or auth. or auth. power or auth. a a (1-4) (5) (6-7)a % % % (N)c Male aggression ________________________________________________________________ No indicators(1)b Men's houses are present and/or machismo(2-3)b Interpersonal violence(4)b Frequent or institutionalised rape(5)b Wives taken from hostile groups(6)b Column totals 7 (2) 21 (6) 11 (3) 21 (6) 39(11) 99(28) 7 (1) 20 (3) 7 (1) 13 (2) 53 (8) 100(15) 24(12) 24(12) 12 (6) 12 (6) 28(14) 100(50) (15) (21) (10) (14) (33) (93)

________________________________________________________________ Note A. Sanday's scale values for women's economic and political power or authority. B. Sanday's scale values for male aggression. C. All other figures in brackets in the body of the table are actual case numbers. All other figures are in percentages.

and all the rest. Her definition of sexual equality is then all those societies in which women have economic and political power or authority and in which rape does not occur. But this includes those societies in which there are men's houses, machismo and interpersonal violence. If we wish to defend Engels view that primitive communism was a condition of complete equality between the sexes then this is an unacceptable simplificationxiii.

From the table we see that the contemporary evidence shows that in only 12 out of 93 societies is there no indicator of male aggression and in which women have economic and political power or authority. This means that in roughly 13% of contemporary pre-State societies there is no evidence of male aggression and women have economic power or authority. This is much smaller than the 32% that Sanday calls 'sexually equal'. But why is Sheila so keen to minimise the true extent of rape and general male aggression in these societies, so much so that she is prepared to either mistate the evidence or blindly follow Sanday? Because evidence such as this is 'anomalous' to the 'woman-the-gatherer' theory which she and Chris Harman have adopted from anthropology. Sheila is only prepared to admit that small part of anthropology congenial to her position, and turns a blind eye to

the enormous weight of contrary evidence. This is the politics of seige defence. In her original article Sheila claimed that "Hunter

gatherer...bands...are free from sexual oppression"xiv . Yet in her reply Sheila says "...I nowhere claimed that 'all "band"' societies are free from "sexual oppression"'xv. Exactly, we are just left with confusion as soon as her (feminist!) model is challenged with evidence. While it is the first job of Marxists to call attention to those 13% of societies which refute male supremacist or patriarchy theories, it is the responsibility of Marxists to move beyond this minimalist defence of Engels and to explain how and why women are not equal in the vast majority (87%) of them. It is here, on my second proposition, that Sheila's arguments are especially weak.

Sheila has not answered the main point of my note. The issue is not just whether colonialism, resource stress or warring can explain the oppression of women amongst the Yanomamo, but whether these factors are sufficient to explain the widespread global ethnographic evidence for the oppression of women. In my note I set out a number of scientific tests using comparative evidence for these factors. For example a similar group of horticulturalists to the Yanomamo are the Baruya in Papua New Guinea. They were not subjected to the Spanish conquest (neither were the Yanomamo!), they are not resource stressed (although the Yanomamo are), they are engaged in regular warfare (as are the Yanomamo) and women's oppression is systematic. According to this comparative evidence, therefore, the absence of resource stress removes it from the equation as sufficient cause of women's oppression. A

better comparison is with the Australian Aborigines, whose cultures were not destroyed by colonialism before they were studied, who were not resource stressed, and were not engaged in warfare and again in which women are oppressed. Critical experiments like this are the method of scientific testing, and Sheila's attempt to dismiss the Yanomamo type evidence fail those tests. Sheila does not appear to understand this well known procedure. She claims that I am repeating the feminist attack on Marxism "whose main concern is to establish a norm of male behaviour across all time and regardless of historical change". Yet at the end of her reply she attacks me for holding a theory for the revolutionary origins of humanity in a lunar scheduled menstrual sex-strike. Whatever comrades will think of the theory of a sex-strike, and I have not had the opportunity to elaborate this theory in the Journal although Sheila feels free to attack me for it, I cannot be accused of both being a feminist (which I am not) and supporting a theory of the origins of primitive communism within matriarchal relations of production (which I do). I cannot simultaneously hold an ahistorical theory of universal male domination and a theory of initial women's rule through sex-striking! Sheila had better sort out what she is accusing me of before confusing comrades who read the Journal. In my note I was therefore pointing out to Sheila that a general defence of Engels requires much more robust arguments than previously used by herself or Chris Harman. How does Sheila respond?

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

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article. This is not the case. Chris dismissed such evidence in that article in very much the same terms as Sheila is doing now.

Secondly, Sheila insists that the Spanish conquest did have an effect on the Yanomamo, and refers to Leacock's discussion on the issue. I am surprised Sheila is impressed with Leacock's weak claims on this, and can only assume that Sheila wants to believe such arguments for her own purposes. An encounter with one Spanish raiding party in 1758 tells us nothing about the structure of Yanomamo society, which rests on the systematic and brutal oppression of women. Leacock's arguments were examined in a scholarly debate in anthropology in the mid- eighties and were decisively rejectedxvi. Another test is to look at the Kogi Indians of the north Colombian coast, the last survivors of the Tairona civilisation destroyed by the Spanish in the seventeenth centuryxvii. Almost wiped out, they retreated into the mountains at 'the heart of the world'. According to Sheila such a society should oppress its women, but instead there is no evidence for male aggression. So although the Khogi suffered terribly from the Spanish conquest, they do not abuse their women, while the Yanomamo were hardly touched by the Spanish conquest but do abuse their women. This is not to claim that colonialism has no effect on such societies, but that on its own it cannot explain the structure of women's oppression in these societies. Theory must move on to other types of explanation.

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

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insidious effects of all class societies, particularly capitalism, in undermining traditional societies. Because of this "...levels of violence and subordination of women may well be the result of external

violence..."xviii. Well they "may well be" as Sheila suggests, but I wasn't disputing that at all. My point was quite a different one that Sheila again fails to respond to, and that is to question whether the reactionary effects of class societies is the sole cause of women's oppression in pre-State societies. The argument can be simply tested because of the well known historical uneveness of this external penetration. If Sheila were correct, then we would expect that the more a pre-State society is in contact with outside class societies, then the more its traditional institutions would be undermined and that, in particular, women's status will be lower. Similarly, we would expect the reverse to hold, that the more and longer isolated the pre-State society, then the higher the status of women. Again Sheila's argument fails this simple test. The Mbuti have been in contact with agriculturalists since Pharonoic timesxix yet Mbuti women have high status. The !Kung are a similar case, and have suffered enormously at the hands of colonialism, yet again !Kung women have high status. But some societies have only very recently been in any contact with class societies, and anthropologists have been able to obtain accounts of pre-contact life in these societies. Andrew Strathern recorded the recollections of Ongka, a hill tribesman in Papua New Guinea, on the traditional practices of warring males long before any direct or indirect contact such as trading:

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"We burnt houses, slashed banana trees, tore the aprons off women and raped them, axed big pigs, broke down fences, we did everything...Men came to find [our women], chasing them down to the edges of streams till they seized hold of them...Twenty men might lay hold of the same woman, pulling her around for a day and a night, and then letting her go, saying "We've had intercourse with you, but you're not dead, so it doesn't matter, you can go home now"".xx

Sheila herself quotes from an earlier reference I made to a work of Godelier, even though she is much exercised by the thought that he is an Althusserian, which describe another Papua New Guinea hill tribe, the Baruya, who became drawn into the world market by trading salt for steel axes. This began in the decade before actual contact, and Sheila suggests that this accounts for the oppression of women amongst the Baruya, and presumably all the hill tribes of Papua New Guinea. Now of course, in time, the commodification of tribal production would transform the internal relations of that society, but in less than ten years it can hardly explain the extraordinarilly elaborate ritual oppression of women that exists in this society. Women's oppression is coded in the traditional architecture of the Baruya village, with the isolation and atomisation of the women contrasting with the central and large men's hut which pre-dates all contact, whether direct or indirect. The intricate ideological justification for male rule based upon the beneficial powers of semen and the poisonous effects of female sexual fluids and especially of menstrual blood can hardly be caused by a few years trading

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in salt bars! And anyway, has Sheila never heard of the lag between the relations of production and the forces of production? We would expect family forms to change much more slowly than economic arrangements. Is this not the ABC of Marxism?

A similar order of criticism can be applied to Sheila's fourth defence. Apparently I am "completely confused" about the role of "scarcity" amongst the Yanomamo. The Yanomamo are permanently on the edge of starvation, and this type of scarcity accounts for the extreme nature of gender oppression amongst them. This should not be confused, Sheila says, with Engels view of scarcity as an inability to create a surplus, and this second type of scarcity keeps all 'pre-class' societies at a primitive level of division of labour between the sexes. Again Sheila misses my point entirely as she seems unable to grasp the procedure of comparative method. Comrades can read my note in ISJ 49 to see that I did not deny that Yanomamo are resource stressed, but raised another point altogether - that there are other horticulturalists living in similar tropical habitats who are not resource stressed that also oppress their women, namely all the tribes of Papua New Guinea (whether or not studied by Althusserians!). As to Engels claim that the earliest human societies lived in scarcity because they were unable to produce a surplus, this is wrong on two main counts. Recent writers have shown that Middle and Upper Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers lived in conditions of mass plenty, and these were the material preconditions to matriarchal relations of production. It is not even true of some

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'contemporary' hunters and gatherers who use large-scale food storage, such as the Northwest Coast and California Indians in North America. xxi This evidence allows a position much more consistent with Marxist method, in which we can link early communism with mass plenty.xxii

There are not just good factual reasons why equating early communism with scarcity is wrong. We can see this by the way it leads Sheila into believing

that a mode of production does not exist in hunting and gathering societies. According to Sheila, humanity lives "off" nature, and all people have to ceaselessly forage without the ability to create a surplus, otherwise face the threat of starvation.xxiii If that were true primitive communism would be no different from animals' societies.xxiv But this goes entirely against the Marxist method.

We cease to be animals only when we have a mode of production. But what does 'labour' and 'production' mean for hunting and gatherering societies? Such societies, which account for all human society until the end of the last ice age, simply took wild food from their environment. They did not produce food in the sense that horticulturalists or farmers can be said to produce food. So what is the difference between a human hunter and an animal hunter such as a lion? Let's look at the negative case, when an isolated individual eats some food. "It is clear that in nutrition...which is but one form of consumption, man produces his own body...For an individual production and consumption appear as different aspects of one act...The individual

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produces a certain article and turns it again into himself by consuming it...Consumption thus appears as a factor in production."xxv But when Marx

speaks of 'labour' or 'production' as the basis of human life, he does not mean this. He takes society, not the individual, as his standpoint. An activity is therefore judged as 'productive' or 'unproductive' by its relationship to society. A person who, by eating or working to obtain food, merely produces or reproduces his or her own private existence is unproductive as far as society is concerned. In that sense, he or she cannot be said to be engaging in labour. Any animal, including pre-cultural hominids, in a sense 'produces', as Marx admits, but "it only produces what it needs immediately for itself or its offspring...it produces only under the pressure of immediate physical need, whereas man produces free from physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free..."xxvi In our

writings so far we have failed to specify the relationships which determine the consumption of food, the 'primitive' relations of production, and so our analysis remains focussed on what for Marx was an animal level of existence. The 'primitive' part of 'primitive communism' was never intended to stretch that far! "In society, however," writes Marx, "the relation of the producer to his product, as soon as it is completed, is an outward one, and the return of the product to the individual depends on his relations to other individuals. He does not take immediate possession of it. Nor does the direct appropriation of the product constitute his purpose, when he produces in society. Between the producer and his product distribution steps in, determining by social laws his share in the world of products; that is

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to say, distribution steps in between production and consumption." xxvii Distribution steps in. For the first fully cultural humans, the big game hunters of the Palaeolithic, some social law of distribution had to be instituted to differentiate us from social systems still mainly governed by primate selfishness. Some rule of exchange had to be discovered for 'labour', for a mode of production, to begin. "Although isolated

labour....can also create use-values, it can create neither wealth nor culture."xxviii Man produces free from physical need within social laws of

distribution. Sheila's image of primitive communism is of a society of itinerant vagabonds, driven by need. And she is absolutely silent on the social laws of distribution which govern a hunting and gathering mode of production. It is both empirically and methodologically wrong.

The lack of surplus does not mean the inability to make a surplus, nor does it mean living in scarcity. Hunting and gathering relations of production do not normally require the accumulation of a surplus. Indeed it would be completely mad to do it. Every mode of production has its own laws of motion, and what looks like poverty to us is affluence to a hunter and gatherer. When game is plentiful and in 'large packets', then that is a rich hunting and gathering society which affords, to our standards, enormous leisure.xxix

The Yanomamo are resource-stressed compared to big game hunters in the Palaeolithic, but we cannot see that until we define primitive communism not as 'band' society living "off" nature, but as a mode of production of

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lunar scheduled big game hunting forces of production within matriarchal relations of production. Privatised hunting and gathering is a lower order of forces of production than that of collective hunting in the initial situation of mass plenty of big game animals. Fully egalitarian relations of production can not be supported with the withering away of big game hunting forces of production.

Sheila's fifth and final main response to my note is to dispute that she ever claimed that warring is a universal cause of the oppression of women, and that the rise of the State "in Sumer cannot be used to explain a horticultural and trading people like the Baruya today."xxx Exactly Sheila , that was my point! For warring also occurs in Papua New Guinea and they also oppress their women, yet they have no state. Sheila "fail[s] to understand how Sims could even imagine the one might have a bearing on the other"xxxi. The "bearing" is that the formation of state structures is not an adequate explanation for warring, and to isolate warring as a cause of women's oppression in Sumer can lead to the very dangerous and extreme right-wing position that " military male prowess"xxxii is the sole basis for women's oppression. This is the logical extension of warring as a sufficient cause for women's oppression if comparative data is used in testing the hypothesis. The woman-the-gatherer model, if it is extended globally, collapses into patriarchal notions of male power. This theory is a dangerous departure from Marxism, and one that needs an honest and open debate in our Party. In my view it should be rejected outright.

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Which brings me on to my final, third, proposition. In one sense Sheila's reply is a complete waste of Journal space, since instead of answering these tests in my first note she amalgamates me with the feminist claim that this evidence proves universal male domination. But as I have been making the very opposite claim for the past 25 years, her dishonest amalgam technique only succeeds in delaying a scientific and constructive approach to the problem. But why does Sheila make such intemperate, uncomradely charges? Why is Sheila creating an acrid atmosphere from such a seemingly esoteric issue? Comrades will notice that Sheila begins with the assumption that all pre-contact societies are 'pre-class' societies within which, by

definition, there is no oppression, particularly the oppression of women. Class societies "arose approximately 6,000 years ago as the result of the development of agriculture...involv[ing] land coming under permanent cultivation, settled populations, urban civilisation, trade and so on"xxxiii, according to Sheila. This new process disturbs all societies and begins to undermine 'pre-class' societies all over the globe. Therefore every contemporary 'pre-class' society is a complicated combination of original 'pre-class' elements and more recently introduced class elements such as the oppression of women.

This position is a tautology; it is impervious to scientific test. Any evidence of women's oppression in such 'pre-class' societies must be the result of outside disruption since by definition 'pre-class' societies do

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not oppress anybody! If this concept of 'pre-class' society is correct, then of course it is axiomatic that anyone, including "Sims", who then presents evidence of women's oppression that cannot be explained by factors external to these societies, must be coming from another intellectual tradition! Whenever I present such evidence I can only be heard as attacking 'Marxism', and since this evidence is of men oppressing women, then it follows I must be a feminist! But facts do not respect 'Party lines'. A party line can only hope to be in tune with reality, and this party line is completely out of touch with at least 87% of the reality of 'pre-class' societies.

For Sheila there cannot be "class societies which are stateles", either because this is "a departure from Marxism" or "it is precisely the kind of fudged terminology which allows others to depart from a clear understanding of Marx and Engels"xxxiv. According to this view there are just two conditions, 'pre-class band society' and 'class' society. First there was a 'simple' division of labour, and then with agriculture there was a 'complex' division of labour releasing some members of society from involvement in food production.xxxv If this were true, how does Sheila explain the rise of the oppression of women? First we are told that the division of labour between male hunting and female gathering is the condition for complete equality between the sexes, then we are told that "[c]lass society arose

approximately 6,000 years ago as the result of the development of agriculture".

xxxvi

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

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

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society is a lengthy one. In the process transitional forms combining elements of egalitarian relationships with new forms resulting from the development of oppression and exploitation will have occurred. More of this later".xxxvii Another two pages after that Sheila favourably quotes Rohrlich's account of the rise of the Sumer state, in which male military prowess (!LS) overthrows "kinship structures"xxxviii. Remarkably Sheila says nothing else in her entire article about the origins of women's oppression, despite that being the sole point of my note.

Sheila's position is contradictory. If it were the case that there were "transitional forms" from "egalitarian" to "fully fledged class society" during a period of "lengthy transition", then that must mean that there can be types of class society with or without types of state structures which precede "fully fledged class society". In which case the term "pre-class"

society is a fudge which amalgamates fully egalitarian primitive communism with these "transitional forms". The conceptual naivety of a simple distinction between 'pre-class band societies' and fully fledged class societies, already complete with the oppression of women and the state, disallows investigating the precise intermediate forms by which we can locate the exact mechanisms of women's oppression and the origins of social classes. Sheila fails to understand that the establishment of the state is the final moment in that transition which is a historical recognition of the irreconcilability of the social classes which already exist.xxxix

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"The inner organisation of this primitive Communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primaeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes"
xl

The first counter-revolution in history was a process, just as the next revolution will be a process. To view the next revolution as an instantaneous leap from capitalism to communism is, of course, infantile. But with concepts that view "egalitarianism" being replaced with societies with "the family, social classes and the state" all fully formed and simultaneously in place we are led to make the same type of error.

The key problem in this debate is not just evidence, but concepts. We have failed to come to grips with a key insight of Engels - that the rise of the family, social classes and the State was a process, not a single simultaneous event. The rise of the family and the oppression of women is how class oppression began, but this process was not completed until the rise of agriculture and the state.

Before looking at the ethnography, let's look at an analogy where the evidence is more familiar - the collapse of the Russian Revolution and the rise of bureaucratic state capitalism in that country. The Stalinist bureacracy did not finally rule, as a class-for-itself, until 1928 with the

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first Five Year Plan. But the working class had ceased to rule in Russia as a class by the winter of 1919, by which time they were dispersed and decimated and the soviets were no longer the organisations of the Russian working class. Between 1919 and 1928 the new bureaucratic ruling class was in the process of becoming. Other classes, such as the peasantry, were also vying for power. But this osmotic process of filtering out those social forces that would coalesce as new class formations was all predicated on the condition that working class solidarity was already gone. It is impossible to understand Stalinism without understanding how it is qualitatively different to the worker's power that preceeded it, and whose collapse was Stalinism's own precondition. All of this is the common understanding of members of the SWP. xli The collapse of working class solidarity in Russia is not immediately replaced with a new ruling class. There is nothing contentious in saying that the emergence of an oppressive ruling class is a historical process extending over a decade or so, during which time separate classes are coalescing and practising their various forms of oppression.

This analogy is useful, like all analogies, as long as we understand its limits. Firstly, Russia in 1917 carried the accumulated crap of thousands of years of class rule, while human culture in its initial situation was completely free and equal. In particular monogamy and the oppression of women did not exist in primitive communism, while it did in Russia. Secondly, Russia in 1917-1919 was a worker's state isolated and under attack, it was

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not a communistic world order as was primitive communism for much of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic (M&UP). Thirdly, twentieth century capitalism is based on the industrial manufacture of products made artificially scarce, whereas the naturally-given mass plenty of big game animals for the M&UP battue hunters lasted, along a moving frontier rippling out from a central area probably in the Levant, until roughly 10,000 years before the present (BP). This mega-fauna extinction was a very long drawn out process, with optimal hunting conditions around 70,000 years BP and then a gradual deterioration continuing up until the collapse of the big game herds by a combination of over-hunting and climatic change some 10,000 years ago. And the fourth main difference is that as the first cultural humans followed the large herds of game they populated a globe uninhabited except for the Neanderthals in Europe. They therefore did not face any competition for resources, with the very important exception of Europe, until roughly the end of the Palaeolithic around 10,000 years BP, by which time virtually the whole planet had been populated by hunting societies.xlii At this point, so long as hunting and gathering was clung to, resource stress became population pressure. Since matriarchal communism based upon big game collective hunting was on a much higher base than the Russian worker's state, since the pressures to adapt to depleted big-game resources were much less than those of invading counter-revolutionary armies during 'war communism', and since inter-tribal competition for scarce resources varied according to the local ecological circumstances unlike the mass famine in Russia, the process of collapse of matriarchal communism and the separation out of new

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class formations could be strung out over, in many areas, not a decade as in Russia but over thousands of years.

To continue to assert, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that all pre-contact 'pre-class' societies are free of all gender oppression, is no different from the dogma of those 'Marxists' who continue to assert that Russia remained a worker's state just because there had once been a revolution. To understand what happened in Russia we look first at the revolution, not at Stalinism. So also with the counter-revolution which oppressed women. We can only understand it by first looking at the revolution by women that made us culturally human.

Engels does not commit the error of simultaneity for the rise of the family, private property and the state. They are a process of becoming, beginning with the rise of monogamy and the oppression of all women, and that's how social classes begin. "The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monomogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy...is...the cellular form of civilised society, in which we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and contradictions which develop fully in the latter."xliii

As long as the term 'pre-class' society is used, then we commit the error of amalgamating matriarchal communist society with the pre-State societies

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within which separate social classes are being formed. The material pre-condition to matriarchal communism was lunar scheduled big-game hunting. Once the big game herds disappeared so did the material conditions for the collective solidarity of clan brothers and sisters. Matriarchal communism has ceased to exist all over the globe, and the recent and contemporary record of pre-State societies is of proto-class societies. Women's collectivity collapsed when privatised hunting became necessary under the new resource-stressed conditions. We cannot begin to talk of the oppression of women and the rise of social class unless we accept that women's solidarity had already collapsed as, in another way, worker's solidarity began to collapse in Russia around 1919 as new class forces started to take over. To amalgamate classless matriarchal communism with proto-class societies and call them all 'pre-class' society therefore confuses primitive communism with these first forms of class oppression. It is for this reason that I use the term pre-State society, which does allow that class formation begins before the rise of the state.

The contemporary and historically recent record of pre-State societies is an immensely varied picture of women's status strung out between all of the possible levels between matriarchy and patriarchy, with the point of origin, matriarchal communism, having gone. To the extent that women retain collectivity in some of these societies, although they do not rule, then their status is high. (Women's "rule", of course, can only be on the basis of equality.) The more resource stress, competition for resources and

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colonialism has acted upon these societies, then the less women's collectivity and the lower their status. This is the acid which acts upon a society which has already lost women's clan solidarity. How was social solidarity retained when the first leaders of society, women, lost theirs? By men's solidarity appropriating women's power. Men's huts, men's secret societies, male monopolisation of ritual power, these are the means by which men rule women and alienate their labour in Papua New Guinea and Australian Aboriginal societies. If we do not accept that this is a condition of counter-revolution against women's rule in primitive communism, then men's collectivity is taken for granted, as part of the natural order of things. The Aborigines know differently. As one of Berndt's informants amongst the Kunapipi of north - western Australia put it:

"Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wawilak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can't see what men are doing, although it really is their business. But really we have been stealing what belongs to the women, for it is mostly all women's business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them...all the Dreaming business came out of women-everything. In the beginning we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from the women."xliv

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

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of rape as one means of men's control of women, and this is the first form of class oppression. Monogamy at this stage does not mean the modern nuclear family, but the isolation and atomisation of women. This can still take place within wider kinship structures, but which are now not normally matrilineal and matrilocal, but any of the many possible combinations between that egalitarian extreme to the other of patrilineal and patrilocal. The collective of men is the proto-class from which will arise a private propertied class of landowners and/or a state in the agricultural revolution. The monogamous isolation of women and the solidarity of men is the "cellular form" of social class and the state.

Sheila cannot admit this with her present revisionist concepts. It is a double dialectical irony that while the feminists are no longer interested in their own woman-the-gatherer model, this ghost of feminism lives on within the SWP propounded by the most ardent opponents of feminism who are accusing me of their 'crime'! Caught within a model that leads in entirely different directions to those that Sheila intends, she fights its logical implications with bluster and bad manners.

We have to be at the forefront of ideas. We have to work hard at keeping in touch with new research findings that continually invigorate Marxism with the new life of discovering our past and thus our future. And we have everything to play for. A leading member of our Party recently stated our present position on these matters in stark terms:

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"I do not accept that we have a party line on any of these things. It has never been debated and certainly never voted on. Nor should we. It is a scientific/historical question. I, certainly, will not be bound by a general view."xlv

Exactly! Let the real debate begin.

Notes i. L Sims, 'Rape and pre-state societies: a note on Sheila McGregor's anthropology' International Socialism, Winter 1990, 49, pp123-128. ii. S McGregor, 'A reply to Lionel Sims', ibid., pp129-136. iii. Ibid, p133 and footnote 13 on p136.. iv. F Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (Moscow, 1968), p50. v. Ibid, p49. vi. See L.Sims, 'Engels Revisited: a new look at the matriarchy thesis' (unpublished,1989). vii . R.L.Bettinger, 'Aboriginal Socio-Political Organisation in Owen's Valley: beyond the family-band' in E.Tooker (ed.)(1983) Political Organisation in Native North America (Proceedings of American Ethnological Society). viii . Thomas (1983) 'On Steward's Models of Shoshonian Socio-Political Organisation: a great bias in the basin' in Tooker, ibid, p63. ix. And if it is claimed that western influence has so modified the

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Australian Aborigines that they are exceptional, how would such interference have introduced men's institutions, age grades, clans, moieties and lineages? x. McGregor, ibid, p134. xi. Sanday, P.R. (1981), Female Power and Male Dominance: on the origins of sexual inequality (London: Cambridge University Press) xii. Sanday, ibid, pp166-167. xiii. Or are there some comrades who believe that wife-beating, male chauvinism and men's houses are part of primitive communism? xiv. S McGregor, 'Rape, pornography and capitalism', International Socialism, Winter 1989, 45, p7. xv. McGregor (1990), ibid, p134. xvi. B. Hayden, M. Deal, A. Cannon & J. Casey, (1986), 'Ecological Determinants of Women's Status Among Hunter/Gatherers', Human Evolution Vol1 - N. 5 (449-474) - 1986. xvii. Alan Ereira (1990), The Heart of the World (London: Cape). xviii. McGregor (1990), ibid, 132. xix. E.M. Zeusse, Ritual Cosmos: the sanctification of life in African religions (Ohio University Press, 1979). xx. Strathern,A.(Trans.) 1979. Ongka: a self-account of a New Guinea big-man. London, Duckworth. xxi . A. Testart, 'The Significance of Food Storage among Hunter-Gatherers: Residence Patterns, Population Densities, and Social Inequalities', Current Anthropology Vol 23, No. 5, October 1982, pp 523-537. xxii. Sheila failed to make any response to my reference to one of many authorities who have discussed this - M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London,1974), who, by the way, was a 'Leacock-type' Marxist when he wrote this work.

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xxiii. McGregor,1990, ibid, p133. xxiv. Or it means that there has never been such a thing as primitive communism. xxv. D.McLellan (1971), Marx's Grundrisse (London:Macmillan), p24 and p27. xxvi. D.McLellan (ed.)(1971), Karl Marx Early Texts (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), p140. xxvii. D.McLellan (ed)(1971), op cit, pp27-28. xxviii. Marx, K.(1875)(1951), Critique of the Gotha Programme, in K.Marx and F.Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House) Vol. 2, p18. xxix. See Sahlins, ibid. xxx. McGregor (1990), ibid, p134. xxxi. ibid, p134. xxxii. ibid, p134. I am amazed that a Marxist can isolate warring as a cause of women's oppression without substantial qualification. But then as Sheila says of herself "I may have been wrong to quote her"! xxxiii . Ibid, p130. The term is Rohrlich's, quoted favourably by Sheila. xxxiv. ibid, pp129-130. xxxv. Ibid, p130. This theory that the replacement of a 'simple' division of labour by a 'complex' divisions of labour causes an increase in social differentiation, such as a leisure class, comes, by the way, from the bourgeois sociologist Emile Durkheim. (E Durkheim, The Division of Labour (Free Press, 1964)). It has nothing to do with Marxism, or the evidence. The most complex, or differentiated, extant kinship systems in the world are the section systems amongst the Australian Aborigines, yet they have the 'simplest' division of labour. Further, the !Kung's contemporary 'band' organisation is a recent development. Alan Barnard has shown that they, along with most

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of the pre-state societies of the South West African highlands, had a patrilineal localised clan moiety system combined with a cross-descent name group. What commentators used to characterise as a 'loose informal band' system, is now considered to be a product of colonial contact and contact with more 'advanced' herders from the north. Their earlier social organisation hinged on a lineage system more complicated than that of the Australian Aborigines. It follows from this that the contemporary !Kung are 'falsely archaic'. Barnard, A.(1975), 'Australian models in the south west African highlands', African Studies, 34(1)1975:9-18. Also see Yan in Bloch,M. Rethinking Anthropology (ASA monograph). xxxvi. Ibid, p130. xxxvii. Ibid, p132. xxxviii. Ibid, p134. xxxix. "[The state] is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that is has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel." Engels, ibid. p166. "The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms." V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: a one volume selection (London, 1969), p267. xl.Note by Engels, p35ff, (my emphasis in underlining) in K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works (London, 1968). xli. C Harman, 'How the Revolution was Lost', International Socialism (old series), Autumn 1967, 30, pp8-15. xlii. Although some competition may have been experienced long before this for those hunters that stayed behind the moving frontier. xliii. Engels, ibid, p66. xliv. R.M.Berndt (1951), Kunapipi (Melbourne:Cheshire), p55.

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

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