The Development of Classes in Human Culture

How did classes arise in human history? This is the chief topic of the following essay by Eddy Laing, the second in a three-part series written for Kasama. Part 1 appears here.

Why historical materialism matters, 2

by Eddy Laing

The Core of Culture is the Mode of Production

Every human society, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, coheres around modes of activity that solve the prerequisites of food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical and ideological needs. Generally, modes of production are comprised of the activities through which the group provides for this subsistence and reproduction, including the rules, customs, techniques, beliefs, and other ideas that have arisen from and in turn enable those basic activities, such as how those activities are communicated across generations and geography.

Marx described the capitalist mode of production as distinguished by two characteristics. First, the social product takes the form of commodities (a useful product of human labor created for exchange), and second, the aim of production is the creation of surplus-value (the value created by labor beyond its cost as labor-power), which is appropriated as interest, ground rent and profit by capitalists.33 In this mode of production, the capitalists direct the kinds of social production and how the social surplus (the surplus-labor of the society as a whole) will be used as they compete to exchange commodities in various markets. Within this type of economy, human labor is one of the commodities produced and traded. The proletarian sells her labor-power for wages with which she feeds, clothes and shelters herself and her dependants, and thereby lives to work another day (and create more surplus-value for the capitalists).

This does not mean that only one mode of production is possible in any society.

Social practices are dynamic and human culture is constantly in process. For example, during the 12th and 13th centuries and continuing into the 18th, mercantile and small-scale productive capitalism co-existed with feudal agrarianism in much of Europe. Likewise, in some aboriginal North American societies observed during the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as among some Amazonian groups in the 20th, hunting/gathering co-exist with crop cultivation. In addition, from the 15th until the late 19th centuries, slave labor was essential to large-scale Euro-American capitalist farming and natural resource extraction in the Western Hemisphere. Nonetheless, within a given society at a specific period in time, one mode is dominant “whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.”34

The transformative quality of human culture both requires and enables the ensemble of ideological activities that explain, reproduce and challenge the underlying social practices of the society. We are not only capable of symbolizing; we require language, other sound and visual expression to enable our consciousness and our sociality. Our cultures are matrices of social practices. In order to operationalize a mode of life (hunting, cultivating, manufacturing, singing, painting, storytelling, writing) we cooperatively invent tools and techniques, which further transform our shared existence. All of this requires semiotic mediation – the expression and internalization of ideas – and that social interactivity in turn promotes new knowledge and expressions (words, meanings, etc.).

Early human advances in cognition were most likely confronted with many practical obstacles, not the least of which was recognizing cognition as the rationalization and internalization of social practice.35 Consequently, in the course of thinking about themselves and the world, people developed belief systems and ‘world views’, some of which were partially accurate or largely inaccurate. For example, long ago humans observed various manifestations of seasonality and learned to track the passing of time in order to predict their requirements for migratory hunting, agriculture, ceremonies, and other activity planning. Thus were created lunar and solar calendars. In various ancient societies, supernatural forces were assumed responsible for many of the phenomena being observed; the sun, the moon, major rivers, certain marine mammals, were ascribed with motive force. Coincidence was confused with causality, and successful predictions in one circumstance (seasonality as applied to cultivation) were sometimes generalized into ideological systems (the sun as an omnipotent god) in order to explain other phenomenon. We can recognize similar gaps between being and understanding in contemporary capitalist society, for example, ascribing the processes of economic exchange to supra-social ‘market forces,’ or the fetishism of commodities in which “a definite social relation between men assumes … the fantastic form of a relation between things.” 36

Our awareness is created through our interactions with the rest of the world, but it can never be fully aligned to it: first, because material reality is expansive and continually changing and second, because our thinking is a symbolic interpretation, an abstraction formed from that reality. A hallmark of human cognition is ‘predictive thinking’ and being able to form hypotheses that describe probable events or outcomes. We can’t actually ‘see into the future’; we anticipate based on prior experience.

Division of Labor and Social Stratification

As far as is known, within nearly every society to date, regardless of the mode, production has been engaged according to a division of labor. The regular production of a surplus enables such a division – more is collected or produced than is consumed by those collecting or producing it – and reciprocally, a division of labor may enable producing a surplus by concentrating specific skills on specific social functions. Alternately, if the band, ethno-unit or society is unable to maintain a productive surplus, it typically collapses (rather than contract to a less complex productive mode) and its members die out, migrate, or merge as bands with other groups.37 In just the last few decades, we have seen societies and state forms that have ‘failed,’ dissolved, been annexed or partitioned, and of course, throughout recorded history many states have been formed or dissolved because of social revolution or inter-state warfare.

Turning again to ethnography in search of historically analogous examples, at least some recent societies that have been primarily engaged in a combination of cultivation and hunting have done so through a division of labor between hunters and cultivators, reinforced with customs, rules, and other specialized behaviors that were developed and transmitted according to that division.38 In addition to expressly productive tasks, a division of labor also developed between manual activities and ideological tasks, such as conducted by shamans, priests or medicine societies. These specializations were required to ensure the life and growth of the group; to develop specific practices, such as birthing, dying, hunting, cultivating and symbolizing; to innovate new practices, such as plant or animal domestication; and to communicate specific practices as knowledge, especially across generations.

The first division of labor within human ethno-units was likely between women and men and may have arisen from one of the qualities of human biological dimorphism; within a given breeding population group of our species, males are typically larger than females. This hypothesis contradicts some well-known earlier assertions following L. H. Morgan39 who hypothesized that early human societies practiced a ‘primitive communalism’ in which labor was equally shared. Arguments contra Morgan have been proposed by various anthropologists who cite the behaviors of closely related hominids (as mentioned earlier). Others refer to analogous social relations as recorded by ethnographers over the past ┼ 200 years, such as J. H. Moore’s 1978 survey of Human Relations Area Files40 for evidence of exploitation of women by men in hunting and gathering societies. The only examples Moore found of ‘agalitarian’ societies – where there was no indication of such exploitation – were four groups who live or lived in marginal ecological zones that did not support a regular productive surplus (such as the Arctic coast and the North American Great Basin). However, those marginal zones were inhabited only after exploitative societies had fully occupied the more productive areas. Moore further argued that the subjugation of women provided a cultural model for the subjugation of men.41

Regardless of the moment and practice of origin, the differentiation of labor very early in human social history suggests the production of some amount of surplus. On that basis, societies cleaved according to provision and task. Those divisions would have promoted or reinforced in-group and cross-generational knowledge and technology transfer apropos to cultivation, hunting, healing, tool making, etc. As noted earlier, recorded oral histories of many hunter-gatherer societies describe divisions between hunters and cultivators and between mental and manual activities. Those ethnographies (as well as other data, such as archaeological evidence) also suggest that those two divisions are linked, and that within the resulting strata further hierarchy, primary leaders, and inter-strata conflicts emerged shortly thereafter. These earliest divisions provide the starting points for later and more complex stratification. Out of this process, sections of society come to be ‘fixed’ in their social relationships as classes that are comprised of specific relationship types, distinct from other classes. In many societies, these class definitions are transferred across generations, as heredity. Stratification also promotes – and increasingly requires in order to reproduce those relationships – the further development of an ideological and political superstructure, which soon comes to direct every aspect of the society’s activities.

“The division of labor implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labor, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the fragmentation between capital and labor, and the different forms of property itself.”42 It is in this division of labor (including the division between town and countryside) that private property and class distinctions are based. Marx and Engels considered this essential to understanding the dynamics of class society as well as to understanding how to create a new kind of society, free of class distinctions, exploitation and oppression.

Stratification Produces Class Struggle

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” With this statement in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels introduced their analysis that through all of human history “oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” 43

The division of societies into distinct classes is enabled by the economic exploitation of subaltern classes by the dominant class: slave by master, serf by landlord, proletarian by capitalist. These classes exist as social contradictions. There is dialectical unity between the opposing classes in such a society; one requires the other, but this is not a static relationship. The dominant class exists at the economic, political and ideological expense of the subaltern class. The economic disadvantage is generally evident in the respective life-ways of the opposed classes. The political disadvantage is evident in the nature of the laws and customs that promote those disadvantages. Ideologically, the ruling classes have free rein (by law as well as by economic control) to dominate the intellectual life of the society through philosophies, aesthetics, traditions and other sentiments that champion their position as elites and justify the subjugation of the other class. Beyond that fact, the ruling class also expropriates the symbolic innovations of the subaltern groups; the visual art, music, dance, poetry, prose and song created by the oppressed often become property of the dominant class in the intellectual market.44

This socio-political contention between strata and classes is grounded in the division of society according to labor that, as proposed earlier, emerged first between men and women and between mental and manual labor. Here, the reciprocity between different forms of social practice is critically important. The division of labor as it has evolved is not incidental much less inconsequential to the society; it is a requisite component of the social order and its continued existence.

Without devising solutions to shared necessities – such as how to hunt most effectively, what plants to cultivate and when or how to attend to the sick and dying – the band cannot survive and thrive. Over time, these shared practices are explained and encoded as ideology. Knowledge is not acquired in the abstract or equally by all members of the group concurrently; as a process, it proceeds unevenly among individuals and is intentionally withheld or shared. Those discrepancies, transferred across generations, eventually come to comprise distinct ideological systems shared within specific sub-groups, strata or classes.

Given the burden of knowledge acquisition and transfer, especially for the many tens of thousands of years before the advent of writing, specialization of activity was both vitally important and subject to tremendous pressures. Nature (climate, weather, geology, biology) appeared as mysterious and dominating forces. Predation by other animals was always present. An unsuccessful collection or hunt could produce internal strife over causes and results, under the constant specter of starvation. The spontaneous emergence of division morphed into codifications deemed necessary for survival and which came to be perceived as complementary to the conditions of life, as ‘natural’ as nature itself. From this process emerge concepts of medicine, taboo, morality, ethics, etc.

These ideological practices are tethered to how the society is structured and functions. The anthropologist Leslie White pithily noted that “religion is, at bottom, an affair of the emotions,”45 but emotions – affective responses – are an interpretation of the real world. Marriage traditions and incest taboos promote exogamy46 which can foster productivity by the group (by expanding its size) and reinforce peaceful coexistence with neighboring groups in their mutual use of resources (for hunting, cultivation, etc.). Origin stories explain in-group distinctions and traditions and thus promote social cohesion.

These interactions work in reverse as well. Shocks to the lifeways of the society call into question the ideologies that support and promote those lifeways. The 19th century encroachment of the US Army and European settlers onto the North American Plains undermined the status and role of the traditional Cheyenne clan system of Council Chiefs, prompting its replacement by the Soldier Chiefs.47 The economic dislocations and prolonged slaughter of the First World War, combined with subaltern demands for peace and bread and land, prompted the overthrow of the 300 year-old Romanov dynasty and its replacement by a revolutionary socialist government.48 In both cases, long-standing ideological support for the traditional order was overturned in favor of new worldviews.

The struggle within societies between strata and classes, and which appears to erupt more or less ‘spontaneously,’ takes as its starting point any of a wide variety of practices in politics, ideologies and/or economics. In times of acute social crisis, any aspect of how society operates is liable to be interrogated, and at such times, “(new) beginnings are to be seen literally on all sides.”49

Notes

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[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> 33 Marx, K. 1967. Capital. Vol. 3. New York. p. 879-880.

34 Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. New York. p. 107-108.

<!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> 35 A related illustration might be the schizophrenic perceiving their own thoughts to be external voices. c.f. Fernyhough, C. 2004. Alien voices and inner dialogue: towards a developmental account of auditory verbal hallucinations. New Ideas in Psychology 22(1): 49-68.

36 Capital, Vol. 1. p. 77.

37 c.f. Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York. Viking.

38 Ethnography is rich on this topic, but an illustrative sample would be: Sharrock, S. R. 1974. Crees, Cree-Assiniboines, and Assiniboines: Interethnic Social Organization on the Far Northern Plains. Ethnohistory 21(2): 95-122. Moore, J. H. 1974. Cheyenne Political History, 1820-1894. Ethnohistory 21(4): 329-359. Southall, A. 1976. Nuer and Dinka Are People: Ecology, Ethnicity and Logical Possibility. Man 11(4): 463-491. Moore, J. H. 1994. Putting Anthropology Back Together Again. American Anthropolgist 96(4): 925-948. Masco, J. 1995. “It is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance”: Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death, and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch, 1849 to 1922. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 41-75.

39 Morgan’s survey Ancient Society (1877) is cited by Engels throughout The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

40 HRAF is a collaborative archive at Yale University that catalogues worldwide ethnographic data.

41 Moore. ‘Exploitation of Women’.

42 The German Ideology. p. 86.

43 Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1969/1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 109.

44 This is obviously the case in many fields of intellectual activity, where patents, copyright and other contracts assign ‘intellectual property’ rights to the employer, not the intellectual employee.

45 White, L. A. 1926. An Anthropological Approach to the Emotional Factors in Religion. The Journal of Philosophy 23(20): 546-554.

46 White, L. A. 1948. The Definition and Prohibition of Incest. American Anthropologist 50(3): 416-435.

47 Moore. ‘Cheyenne Political History’.

48 c.f. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1917. Lessons of the Revolution. LCW Vol. 25. Moscow.

49 Lenin, V.I. 1964/1920. ‘Left-wing’ Communism – An infantile disorder. LCW Vol. 31. Moscow. p. 101.

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