The Origins of Slavery

[Hexen]

I wonder what was the origin of slavery and where did it first sprung up?

Well the main reason I'm asking is that I keep often hearing that the "Jews were the first recorded to be slaves" well honestly this is coming from a person I know who is Jewish although I'm kinda skeptical since the Bible/Torah shouldn't be taken as literal recorded history but rather mythology no different than Homer's Iliad and such.

[helot]

It would be difficult to find out the first slaves. The problem is that some of the earliest sources (such as the code of Hammurabi ca. 1700BC) already regarded it as an established institution. I'd expect it developed around Mesopotamia after the invention of agriculture as it would have been notoriously difficult for hunter gatherers to have slaves.

[Teacher]

As helot said, slavery was around before recorded history. However, the character of slave labor from one society to another has varied greatly over time.

[A Marxist Historian]

I wonder what was the origin of slavery and where did it first sprung up?

Well the main reason I'm asking is that I keep often hearing that the "Jews were the first recorded to be slaves" well honestly this is coming from a person I know who is Jewish although I'm kinda skeptical since the Bible/Torah shouldn't be taken as literal recorded history but rather mythology no different than Homer's Iliad and such.

As others have pointed out, Jews were definitely not the first recorded slaves, far from it.

Historians and anthropologists generally agree that slavery stems from that very oldest of human traditions, warfare. As agriculture developed and human productive powers advanced, it became economically practical to make war captives slaves, instead of killing and/or eating them, as was done in deepest prehistory.

Like helot said, a pre-agricultural hunting/gathering society has little use for slaves, as how could you trust them with spears and clubs? They'd just use them on you first opportunity.

-M.H.-

[Blake's Baby]

... slavery stems from that very oldest of human traditions, warfare...

What?

Earliest known stone tools = 2.6 million years ago

Earliest claimed mortuary ritual = 75,000 years ago

Earliest known art materials (for body painting?) = 60,000 years ago

Earlist known artworks (cave paintings) = 35,000 years ago

Earliest known domestic structures = 30,000 years ago

Earliest known body adornments (jewellry) = 25,000 years ago

Earliest known domesticated animals = 12,000 years ago

Earliest known pottery = 10,000 years ago

Earliest known mortuary monuments = 10,000 years ago

Earliest known urban centre = 8,000 years ago

Earliest known social hierarchy = 7,000 years ago

Earliest known astronomical monuments = 6,000 years ago

Earliest known glass-making techniques = 5,000 years ago

Earliest known anti-personnel weapons = 5,000 years ago

So before we have evidence for warfare, we have evidence for burial, monumentalisation of that burial, art and decoration on people and places, permanent living arrangements, domestication of cow, sheep, goat, pig, dog (and probably llama chicken oxen and horse too but they're outside my area of expertise), astronomy, pottery making and, arguably, glass.

There's no evidence that warfare existed before class society, and there's no evidence that class society existed before c. 5000BC. Even the earliest 'cities' (like Catal Huyuk, apologies to Turkish speakers but I have no idea how to do accents and the like on this forum, c.6000BC) were organised with no visible social hierarchy.

Slavery may have developed due to warfare, but if it did on the evidence we have that would suggest it developed in the last 5-7,000 years, long after a good many other technical and social 'traditions'.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I wonder what was the origin of slavery and where did it first sprung up?

Well the main reason I'm asking is that I keep often hearing that the "Jews were the first recorded to be slaves" well honestly this is coming from a person I know who is Jewish although I'm kinda skeptical since the Bible/Torah shouldn't be taken as literal recorded history but rather mythology no different than Homer's Iliad and such.

Well and I think an unspoken part of this question is if modern and classical slavery can really be equated. In my opinion they can not, especially in terms of the racist and ideological components.

In my experience, there are two ways that people take this kind of discussion of classical slavery. One, specific to the bible is that Jews have long-been the targets of repression - I don't know much about classical slavery in Egypt compared to Rome, but as far as anti-Judaism in under feudalism, there is certainty a long and harsh history there. To my limited knowledge of Egyptian slavery specifically, I've heard that there is no evidence other than the bible of systemic ethic-based slavery while there is evidence of slave-labor by prisoners and prisoners of war as well as people who sold themselves or children into slavery due to debts. I have also heard, but don't know for sure, that in Egypt slavery may have been much closer to serfdom than Roman slavery let alone modern slavery. At any rate, serf or slave, I'm sure there was plenty of reasons to want to rebel.

The other way people (usually conservatives, but sometimes you hear it from liberals too) use this kind of discussion is to downplay modern slavery's racial component. "Every group's been enslaved at some point" they say with the implication being "black people have nothing to complain about, and slavery in the US or other areas of the Americas was no different than anywhere else". This is retroactive apologetics for slavery IMO. Slavery in the Americas was much different than classical slavery - mostly because racial caste systems were developed along with it. So being a slave was who you were born to be, not just one of a variety of directly-exploitative labor castes that is seen as being circumstantial rather than based on who you are.

Slavery, in the Americas and the US particularly was a racial caste system which led directly to Jim Crow which leads directly to the kind of anti-black oppression that still exists.

[Manic Impressive]

Earliest known anti-personnel weapons = 5,000 years ago

What do you mean by anti-personnel weapons? I take it you mean metal axes and swords and stuff. That's closer to 6,000 years B.C. so 8,000 years ago. It was a new technology that doesn't mean people weren't killing each other with slings, spears and bow and arrow which are much much older. The same logic could be applied to say there was no war before the gun was invented or the tank or drones :sneaky:

[Manic Impressive]

Well and I think an unspoken part of this question is if modern and classical slavery can really be equated. In my opinion they can not, especially in terms of the racist and ideological components
The same logic was applied by Aristotle about keeping slaves seperate on the basis of culture/ethnic origin so that any rebellion would be easier to crush. Slavery isn't caused by racism, racism is just a good way to protect property.

[Zav]

I wonder what was the origin of slavery and where did it first sprung up?

Well the main reason I'm asking is that I keep often hearing that the "Jews were the first recorded to be slaves" well honestly this is coming from a person I know who is Jewish although I'm kinda skeptical since the Bible/Torah shouldn't be taken as literal recorded history but rather mythology no different than Homer's Iliad and such.
Slavery began when someone carrying a big stick or a rock decided he was more important than everyone else. Thus hierarchy was born.

[homegrown terror]

if you think broadly enough, slavery actually predates humanity, or even the hominid group as a whole. could the domination of lionesses by an alpha male be construed as "sexist" slavery in that the females of the species are forced to work for their patriarch, who lounges about until the females return with the kill, to which he gets first pick at?

[Jimmie Higgins]

The same logic was applied by Aristotle about keeping slaves seperate on the basis of culture/ethnic origin so that any rebellion would be easier to crush. Slavery isn't caused by racism, racism is just a good way to protect property.Well I never intended to imply that slavery comes from racism, I hold that the opposite is the case with modern slavery.

This is interesting about Aristotle. Do you know where he talked about this? My understanding of classical slavery was essentially that it was might makes right, not some kind of inherent biological superiority/inferiority as in modern slavery. So, for example, Athenians were considered citizens and had democracy amongst themselves, but then would take over neighboring farming areas or ports and the people of those locations would then be slaves or subjects of the Athenian democracy. The Athenians would consider themselves superior and more civilized but that was merely based on their victories and ability to enslave others, not some kind of biological and inherent superiority as a "race". Romans and Greeks and many other classical cultures considered themselves "superior" and other groups "inferior" but my understanding was that it was more along the lines of xenophobia or "us" vs "them" than a racial caste. They would talk of barbarians being inferior but it seems to have been a statement of way of life rather than inherent, so barbarians were "low" because of the way they produced and their level of organization and culture and so on but individual barbarians could become "Roman" and even emperor.

[Jimmie Higgins]

if you think broadly enough, slavery actually predates humanity, or even the hominid group as a whole. could the domination of lionesses by an alpha male be construed as "sexist" slavery in that the females of the species are forced to work for their patriarch, who lounges about until the females return with the kill, to which he gets first pick at?
While there may be some parallels, I think this is anthropomorphizing animal social behavior a bit. Lions are big predators and live in open areas and so I think they've evolved to be in prides due to these pressures as well as sexual pressures. The key being that they evolved these survival mechanisms and techniques to more effectively accomplish hunting and eating what they would still hunt and eat if they could do so as effectively on an individual basis. The female lions hunt while the male protects the children from being eaten by competing males and so while there is a division of labor, it's not based on classes, but on evolutionary conditions.

Humans however can reorganize their production and methods of production in a more conscious way, changing their circumstances (specifically they ways they produce), rather than changing themselves to adapt to the circumstances. It may have been possible and may have been the case that a strong person could force someone to work for them in a band society, but the gains wouldn't be that great since people could gather just about enough for themselves to eat. So a strong person could force maybe one other person to do something, but since you still need to feed a slave if you want them to continue laboring for you, then even if you work the slave really hard, you'd still probably end up with only 1/2 of what you could produce for yourself. And if you had them go off and gather for you while you gathered for yourself, then why wouldn't they just run-off or why wouldn't they try and ambush you, or why wouldn't they just eat the food they gathered themselves?

I think for slavery to exist as a system of production, there at least needs to be agriculture and the ability to have an army to take slaves and make sure they work... so you need a small production surplus and the emergence of rudimentary classes.

[Manic Impressive]

Well I never intended to imply that slavery comes from racism, I hold that the opposite is the case with modern slavery.ok cool I wasn't sure just checking


This is interesting about Aristotle. Do you know where he talked about this?
Yep it's in politics book 1


My understanding of classical slavery was essentially that it was might makes right, not some kind of inherent biological superiority/inferiority as in modern slavery. So, for example, Athenians were considered citizens and had democracy amongst themselves, but then would take over neighboring farming areas or ports and the people of those locations would then be slaves or subjects of the Athenian democracy. The Athenians would consider themselves superior and more civilized but that was merely based on their victories and ability to enslave others, not some kind of biological and inherent superiority as a "race". Romans and Greeks and many other classical cultures considered themselves "superior" and other groups "inferior" but my understanding was that it was more along the lines of xenophobia or "us" vs "them" than a racial caste. They would talk of barbarians being inferior but it seems to have been a statement of way of life rather than inherent, so barbarians were "low" because of the way they produced and their level of organization and culture and so on but individual barbarians could become "Roman" and even emperor.
Nah Aristotle believed that some people were born slaves e.g. barbarians. He says that societies without hierarchies are societies of natural slaves. To be ruled over by civilised peoples as men rule over women. Although you're right about the racial caste that came later as the barbarians in the classical period didn't look that different from the civilized. The logic used as a justification for slavery is the same though regardless of a persons skin colour.


Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. For he who can be, and therefore is, another's and he who participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle, is a slave by nature. Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend a principle; they obey their instincts. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life. Nature would like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves, making the one strong for servile labor, the other upright, and although useless for such services, useful for political life in the arts both of war and peace. But the opposite often happens--that some have the souls and others have the bodies of freemen. And doubtless if men differed from one another in the mere forms of their bodies as much as the statues of the Gods do from men, all would acknowledge that the inferior class should be slaves of the superior. And if this is true of the body, how much more just that a similar distinction should exist in the soul? but the beauty of the body is seen, whereas the beauty of the soul is not seen. It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.
This is pretty much the same argument used to justify the enslavement of Africans by Europeans in early capitalism. That they are undeveloped, uncivilized and closer to animals than civilized people's.

But why did they need to use such justification? It's because there were always those who said that slavery was unnatural and questioned the validity of owning another human being.


But that those who take the opposite view [that is, who hold the view that slavery is not natural] have in a certain way right on their side, may be easily seen. For the words slavery and slave are used in two senses. There is a slave or slavery by law as well as by nature. The law of which I speak is a sort of convention-- the law by which whatever is taken in war is supposed to belong to the victors. But this right many jurists impeach, as they would an orator who brought forward an unconstitutional measure: they detest the notion that, because one man has the power of doing violence and is superior in brute strength, another shall be his slave and subject.
So you're correct there were people who said that might is right but Aristotle rejects this view. As it does not take into consideration whether the cause for war was just or not. So a situation may arise where a civilized person is enslaved. This to Aristotle was not justified because it is unatural for a civilized man to be enslaved.

[Blake's Baby]

What do you mean by anti-personnel weapons? I take it you mean metal axes and swords and stuff...

Yes - weapons that appear better adapted to killing/maiming people than for hunting (eg, arrowheads that shred muscle tissue appear to be better suited to injuring enemies rather than securing meat from hunting game).


That's closer to 6,000 years B.C. so 8,000 years ago...

Really? Where was metal being used in 6000BC? My understanding was that metal use (first, gold) dates from c.5000BC and for some considerable period metal use is restricted to ornamentation, with copper and bronze weapons not appearing until c.3000BC. Around the same time the change from 'hunting' arrowheads to 'maiming' arrowheads occurs. There seems to be a 'militarisation' of (certainly European) societies.



... It was a new technology that doesn't mean people weren't killing each other with slings, spears and bow and arrow which are much much older...

Absolutely. They may have been. Now, people can kill each other with penknives and bricks, but strangely we don't see these as a sign of 'warfare'. Well, maybe you do.

People may have been flying before the invention of the hot air balloon, or sending instantaneous messages across vast distances before the invention of the telegraph, but we can only go on the evidence we have, which is that 'tools that appear to be weapons specifically for killing or maiming other people' appear around 3000BC. Roughly. As they don't exist before this period, we cannot really claim that there is any evidence for wafare before this date. Unless you know things I don't, of course.


... The same logic could be applied to say there was no war before the gun was invented or the tank or drones :sneaky:

Yeah, if you want to ignore the bit about 'logic' and substitute 'some pointless crap' instead.

The earliest known anti-personel weapons (that is, weapons that are little use for hunting), as opposed to the earliest known hunting weapons (that is weapons that are useful for hunting), are as good a date as we're going to get for the establishment of 'warfare' (I have problems with the notioon of inter-band violence as 'warfare' but never mind, let's assume that what we're talking about is unproblemnatically 'warfare' in the same way the America-Vietnam War or even the Thirty Years War was).

If however you assume that warfare is as old as people is, you can say - hey look, they could have beaten each other to death with sticks, 3 million years ago. Yes, they could, there just isn't any evidence that they did.

[Manic Impressive]

Really? Where was metal being used in 6000BC? My understanding was that metal use (first, gold) dates from c.5000BC and for some considerable period metal use is restricted to ornamentation, with copper and bronze weapons not appearing until c.3000BC. Around the same time the change from 'hunting' arrowheads to 'maiming' arrowheads occurs. There seems to be a 'militarisation' of (certainly European) societies.
The earliest one that we have is from 5500 BC from a site in Serbia.


Absolutely. They may have been. Now, people can kill each other with penknives and bricks, but strangely we don't see these as a sign of 'warfare'. Well, maybe you do.

People may have been flying before the invention of the hot air balloon, or sending instantaneous messages across vast distances before the invention of the telegraph, but we can only go on the evidence we have, which is that 'tools that appear to be weapons specifically for killing or maiming other people' appear around 3000BC. Roughly. As they don't exist before this period, we cannot really claim that there is any evidence for wafare before this date. Unless you know things I don't, of course.
I probably know many things that you don't comrade ;) but I'm not sure I appreciate your tone. The point you raise of the definition of warfare is a valid one and we can discuss that if you like. I don't have strong feelings either way and I feel that Marxist Historians comments which you originally took issue with were rather grandiose and factually inaccurate. For the sake of argument lets just call it organized violence from one group on to another.
There is plenty of evidence of different tribes fighting with each other over resources before they developed agriculture and settled down. Where's the evidence? There is a mountain of evidence from skeletal remains with wounds inflicted by weaponry, including Homo Sapiens on Neanderthals.
Here's a couple of examples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery_117
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talheim_Death_Pit


If however you assume that warfare is as old as people is, you can say - hey look, they could have beaten each other to death with sticks, 3 million years ago. Yes, they could, there just isn't any evidence that they did.
Well I've provided some there's plenty more if you want to go look for it. No one is arguing that warfare didn't escalate and evolve around 3000 BC. But to then say warfare doesn't exist because they didn't use the right weapons or there weren't enough casualties is just plain wrong.

Edit: I'd be interested to hear your definition of warfare but perhaps we're going off topic

[Blake's Baby]

I'm not arguing that organised violence against other human groups - which I think we can all accept as a working definition of 'warfare' - cannot have existed before the earliest anti-personnel (for want of a better term) weapons, because it is still possible to wage organised violence with inefficient weapons, ie those that are better suited for hunting.

But then, the lack of specifically-designed anti-personnel weapons must mitigate to some extent against the definition of warfare as 'organised violence against other human groups' - it's not organised enough, for instance, to require the development of a specific 'military' technology. So it's maybe no so organised - but could still be classified as 'warfare' depending on how far the stretching of 'organised' goes. Personally, I'm not sure that the palaeolithic equivalent of 'an angry mob with improvised weapons' can be regarded as 'an organised military force'. A riot, or even a pogrom, does not equal a war.

The topic of 'prehistoric genocide' is pretty contraversial in archaeology, though as I don't know anything about the Sudanese example you cite (from 1964?) I can't really comment on that. But the status of the Talheim Death Pit and Schletz-Asparn (and other sites of LBK violent death) is contested - it isn't as simple as the wiki claims, that these are '...the earliest known sites in the archaeological (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological) record that shows proof of genocide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide) in Early Neolithic Europe...'

Partly, because some of the conclusions made are contested - there are no defensive wounds so they must have been fleeing. Or they could have been captives (criminals or other 'deviants', religious sacrifices), and not fleeing, and not victims of 'warfare'.

Partly, because again the definition of 'warfare' or even 'genocide' gets very attenuated. These are seemingly LBK corpses, killed by LBK weapons, in LBK settlements. This isn't inter-group conflict as far as we can tell but some sort of internal process. It looks more like purges than war with external groups, and not 'genocide' either as the 'genus' (or at least 'ethnos') all these people came from seems to be the same.

So... if warfare can be understood as 'organised violence against other human groups', how well does 'evidence that seems to be not-so-well-organised violence against the same human group' stand up to that definition? Not brilliantly, on three criteria it comes out with one plus ('violence'), one minus ('not against other human groups') and for the third criterion it's a draw ('showing some organisation'). Overall, it's about 50% of the way there to being unequivocal evidence of warfare. In other words, it's pretty equivocal evidence.

Violence yes; there seems to be firm evidence that some people were killed with tools (adzes, arrows) going a long way back into prehistory, but what the context may have been is rarely easy to determine.

To be very honest, and critical of my discipline, interpretations by archaeologists vary a lot by cultural context.

From the 1500s to the 1800s, most 'archaeology' (in Europe at least) was doen by churchmen and treasure-hunters; there was strong emphasis on art-history and 'barbarian' goldwork.

From the 1800s and into the 20th century, most archaeology was done by military men and there was a strong emphasis on fortifications and 'massacre deposits' (even to the extent that I've been told independently by a number of eminent British archaeologists that Brigadier Sir Robert Mortimer Wheeler faked the evidence of a skeleton with a Roman ballista-bolt in its spine because he thought it would make things more dramatic).

Now, most archaeologists are hippies and talk about communal rituals and magic mushrooms.

While I can certainly be accused of being a bit of a hippy, we're trying in archaeology to bend the stick away from interpretations of the whole of prehistoric life as being 'nasty brutish and short'. Because it's only a particular culturally-specific interpretation.

[Positivist]

There was combat between tribes before there settled civilizations existed. But as someone else mentioned they didn't have much use for slaves in a hunter, gatherer economy.

[Luís Henrique]

There's no evidence that warfare existed before class society,

Eh? The Tupi-Guarani lived in classless societies, and they certainly warred each others.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

Did they live in a context entirely devoid of class society, or did they just not live in a class society themselves, Luis?

I have to admit my knowledge of the historical anthropology of the Americas is sketchy at best (hence, for example, not knowing when llamas were domesticated, as I mentioned above).



There was combat between tribes before there settled civilizations existed. But as someone else mentioned they didn't have much use for slaves in a hunter, gatherer economy.

What's your evidence for this?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Did they live in a context entirely devoid of class society, or did they just not live in a class society themselves, Luis?I think for some groups - even before coming into contact with class societies may have had battles or fought for various reasons. The didn't have developed classes, but they lived in conditions of scarcity (abundant scarcity for people in very productive or lush regions, more absolute scarcity for others) which may have resulted in fights over access to good hunting grounds or specific packs of game. I don't think you could classify it as being similar to post-class warfare in anything but the earliest or least stratified class societies though.

My feeling, I can't really back it up, is that this would generally be last resort sort of situations because populations seem to have been small enough that people could move on more easily than fighting. And raids of food probably weren't much of a factor (unless opportunistically or if people were literally about to starve) because there wouldn't have been much stored surplus to make it attractive - a war party is at least as hard as a hunting party (if not more) and you can hunt in a small group whereas you'd need as many people as possible to survive off of raiding other groups.

[Manic Impressive]

Agreed with most of that. I certainly concede that the findings are contested and I never used the word genocide. However, I'm not sure I accept that inter group conflict must be against groups that would be culturally or ethnically different. Two groups in the same area for a long period of time would be very similar, culturally, technologically and very closely related. Resources become scarce and if one group can't or won't move away, you've got conflict. Shit I know most of my extended family would like to kill each other :p


Now, most archaeologists are hippies and talk about communal rituals and magic mushrooms.

While I can certainly be accused of being a bit of a hippy, we're trying in archaeology to bend the stick away from interpretations of the whole of prehistoric life as being 'nasty brutish and short'. Because it's only a particular culturally-specific interpretation.
Here's the thing if someone was arguing that life before the formation of permanent settlements and states was full of violence and constant warfare (due to human nature:rolleyes:), I'd be singing a very different tune digging up evidence of trade and cooperation between groups as these were much more common. Violence tends to be the last resort if it can be avoided. Until permanent settlements were established and the option of moving away became less viable and the taking of slaves became economically favorable. While I agree it's important to shatter the myth that pre-historic times were ultra violent. I also think it's important not to omit evidence on the basis that it's not the image we wish to portray. I'm not saying you, but I have seen others do this on here before. Make it out to be something it's not an idolized version of history. That's my motivation for contending this argument.

[Hexen]

Now, most archaeologists are hippies and talk about communal rituals and magic mushrooms.

Now that explains alot about where the Ancient Astronaut theory came from....

[Positivist]

What's your evidence for this?

I don't have a concrete link but I read before that most anthropologists attribute conflict with homo sapiens to be a leading cause of the extinction of neandrethals. This includes indirect competition for resources (better strategies, tools etc.) as well as direct combat over resources.

Understandably, this conflict was between essentially two different species, but considering the similarity between the species, and the motivations of said conflict it is expectable that similar conflicts would erupt between members of the same species.

[RRRevolution]

You can trace the roots of certain types of slavery or slavery in certain countries, but yeah, as it's been said slavery has been around since before recorded history.

[homegrown terror]

What's your evidence for this?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/1135927827/

[Luís Henrique]

Did they live in a context entirely devoid of class society, or did they just not live in a class society themselves, Luis?

It would depend on what you call "entirely devoid of class".

If I correctly understand their wanderings, they were dislodged from the Andean region by the expansion of local empires (as such, class societies), moving Southeast to modern Paraguay and Southern Brazil, and then North along the Brazilian coast (where they were first found by Portuguese colonists from 1500 AD on) during a period of perhaps fifteen hundred years. In their way they displaced several other pre-Historic populations, most notably the Jês, who they expelled from the Brazilian coast to the hinterland. In their route they did not find any other class societies, so their acquaintance of class societies (previous to the Portuguese conquest) would be limited to the Andean civilisations that displaced them initially. Their expansion was violent and based on warfare against non-Tupi people; but they were also notable for the constant warfare among the various tribes they divided themselves into (European colonists would take advantage of that by allying themselves to some tribes against others - notably the Portuguese with the Tupiniquim and the French with the Tupinambá).

So if you consider that a past contact with a class society a millenium before makes their context not entirely devoid of classism, then it was not. Otherwise they certainly lived in a class-free context from their expulsion from the Andes to their contact with the Portuguese (and French), during more than 1,000 years. And warring against others and among themselves all that time for all we know.

Their warfare was highly ritualised, and closely associated with cannibalism.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Catal Huyuk, apologies to Turkish speakers but I have no idea how to do accents and the like on this forum

Google for Catal Huyuk, find a site where it is correctly spelled, highlight the name, copy, paste:


Çatal Hüyük

Luís Henrique

[Book O'Dead]

This may already have been pointed out in this thread by someone else, but here I go:

The first slave in the history of humanity was a woman.

Woman Is The Nigger Of The World:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lMxWWK218

[Blake's Baby]

I don't have a concrete link but I read before that most anthropologists attribute conflict with homo sapiens to be a leading cause of the extinction of neandrethals. This includes indirect competition for resources (better strategies, tools etc.) as well as direct combat over resources...

But that's the thing - competition doesn't have to involve direct conflict/combat at all, and that's what laking in my view - evidence of violence. The status of h. sapiens/h. neanderthalensis conflict is hotly debated. 'Conflict' is a loose word. 'Competition' is one thing, 'violence' is another thing.

Grey squirrels, introduced into Britain from North America in the 1800s, have mostly ousted red squirrels, not because they have attacked them with nuts and pointed twigs, but because they have successfully out-competed the red squirrels for food resources, and also because a disease that the greys carried proved very virulent in the red populations. No 'violence' necessary, but in 150 years or so red populations have been drastically reduced.


...Understandably, this conflict was between essentially two different species...

Except recent research (last 2 years) on human genetics has demonstrated that they aren't two species, all non-Africans have approximately 4% Neanderthal DNA from interbreeding between h. sapiens and h. neanderthalensis, c.70,000 years ago, in the Middle East.


... but considering the similarity between the species, and the motivations of said conflict it is expectable that similar conflicts would erupt between members of the same species.

But that's what we're trying to assertain - does the evidence for 'conflict' (ie inter-group violence) actually exist? Competition, yes, I think it's pretty well established that there are no more Neanderthals, but there's not a whole heap of evidence that they were wiped out in wars. H. sapiens and h. neanderthalensis both lived in Europe for approximately 15,000 years, and in SW Asia for maybe 20-25,000 years. There can't have been so much war going on, I don't think.

But even if there were, how can we know what 'motivations' were applied? Do you think the hypothetical Tribal Elders of Ug met one night to say 'those hairy grunting bastards in the caves over there are eating all our elk, let's get them with pointy sticks'?

Why then a 'racist' genocide to wipe out the Neanderthals? Why not 'those jumped-up people-like-us who wear beads in their hair instead of round their necks like all decent folk, from the caves over there, are eating all our elk, let's get them with pointy sticks?' Why didn't the neanderthals wipe out the h. sapiens competitors? Why didn't a pragmatic alliance of some h. neanderthalensis and some h. sapiens combine to wipe out an opposing h. sapiens/h. neanderthalensis alliance? If it's just about who's competing with who, h. sapiens must compete more directly with h. sapiens than h. neanderthalensis does.

The fact that Neanderthals, for all intents and purposes, were wiped out, suggests either:
1 - a deliberate policy of extermination;
2 - a substantial advantage for h. sapiens in competition.

I think a deliberate policy of extermination is ... ridiculous. Pretty much all extra-African humans would have to have to have been in on it and it still took maybe 20,000 years.

So the lack of evidence for wiping out Neanderthals can't then be applied to other h. sapiens groups or even similar h. sapiens cultural groups and used to justify the idea that warfare also existed between h. sapiens groups, 40,000 years (or whatever) later.



It would depend on what you call "entirely devoid of class".

So if you consider that a past contact with a class society a millenium before makes their context not entirely devoid of classism, then it was not. Otherwise they certainly lived in a class-free context from their expulsion from the Andes to their contact with the Portuguese (and French), during more than 1,000 years. And warring against others and among themselves all that time for all we know...

OK; I wouldn't have thought that contact with a class society 1,000 years or more before would have so totally marked their society...

But there are several intriguing aspects to this.

Their society was obviously one in which martial prowess was held to be important. Did the 'soldiers' also grow crops/hunt/provide work for the community beyond their 'military' aspects? Did they take slaves? Was there some kind of priestly... 'caste' ... overseeing this ritualised warfare? Because unless a) there's no noticeable sexual division of labour (female warriors for instance) and b) the warriors are also farmers/economic providers and c) there is no 'hierarchy' (literally, rule by priests), and d) there are no slaves, then it is a class society - as, for example, Sparta, which may have practiced a form of 'communism' along the soldier-citizen elite, but still had slaves and priests and even kings.

[Positivist]

Here's some theories on humans perpetrating a genocide against neandrethals.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/24-10-2007/99419-genocide-0/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/17/neanderthals-cannibalism-anthropological-sciences-journal

I personally believe that there was violent inter-group conflict prior to he development of settled civilizations, though I do feel that your arguments still apply to intra-group conflict. There is absolutely no evidence of mass violence within primitive societies, nor of forms of repression. This is where classlessness really comes I to play, because different tribes still had different interests making them similar to classes. (Though not classes because early societies had more or less the same relation to production.)

[A Marxist Historian]

What?

Earliest known stone tools = 2.6 million years ago

Earliest claimed mortuary ritual = 75,000 years ago

Earliest known art materials (for body painting?) = 60,000 years ago

Earlist known artworks (cave paintings) = 35,000 years ago

Earliest known domestic structures = 30,000 years ago

Earliest known body adornments (jewellry) = 25,000 years ago

Earliest known domesticated animals = 12,000 years ago

Earliest known pottery = 10,000 years ago

Earliest known mortuary monuments = 10,000 years ago

Earliest known urban centre = 8,000 years ago

Earliest known social hierarchy = 7,000 years ago

Earliest known astronomical monuments = 6,000 years ago

Earliest known glass-making techniques = 5,000 years ago

Earliest known anti-personnel weapons = 5,000 years ago

So before we have evidence for warfare, we have evidence for burial, monumentalisation of that burial, art and decoration on people and places, permanent living arrangements, domestication of cow, sheep, goat, pig, dog (and probably llama chicken oxen and horse too but they're outside my area of expertise), astronomy, pottery making and, arguably, glass.

There's no evidence that warfare existed before class society, and there's no evidence that class society existed before c. 5000BC. Even the earliest 'cities' (like Catal Huyuk, apologies to Turkish speakers but I have no idea how to do accents and the like on this forum, c.6000BC) were organised with no visible social hierarchy.

Slavery may have developed due to warfare, but if it did on the evidence we have that would suggest it developed in the last 5-7,000 years, long after a good many other technical and social 'traditions'.

There can be no conclusive physical proof of whether warfare existed 2.6 million years ago, unless somebody invents a time machine.

But warfare long predates class society, as can be seen from classless societies we do have records of, such as Native American tribal societies, who practiced warfare on each other with vim and vigor.

Although there is not and cannot be definitive physical proof, the entire science of anthropology indicates that warfare goes back to the very first human communities, in conflict with each other.

Chimpanzee groupings go to war with each other, why not humans?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Well I never intended to imply that slavery comes from racism, I hold that the opposite is the case with modern slavery.

This is interesting about Aristotle. Do you know where he talked about this? My understanding of classical slavery was essentially that it was might makes right, not some kind of inherent biological superiority/inferiority as in modern slavery. So, for example, Athenians were considered citizens and had democracy amongst themselves, but then would take over neighboring farming areas or ports and the people of those locations would then be slaves or subjects of the Athenian democracy. The Athenians would consider themselves superior and more civilized but that was merely based on their victories and ability to enslave others, not some kind of biological and inherent superiority as a "race". Romans and Greeks and many other classical cultures considered themselves "superior" and other groups "inferior" but my understanding was that it was more along the lines of xenophobia or "us" vs "them" than a racial caste. They would talk of barbarians being inferior but it seems to have been a statement of way of life rather than inherent, so barbarians were "low" because of the way they produced and their level of organization and culture and so on but individual barbarians could become "Roman" and even emperor.

Aristotle's idea, tremendously influential over later European thinkers, was that some people were natural slaves and some people natural masters, and that it was only right that natural slaves should be owned by natural masters, and that actual slave masters, such as himself, surely must be natural masters.

He thought that natural slaves were inferior in intellect and will to natural masters. But in any case he saw the institution of slavery as absolutely necessary, as otherwise you wouldn't have people with the leisure for science, culture, art and philosophy, if they had to worry about working for a living. So if sometimes the wrong people were slaves, well, such is life.

This was not a racial conception, but more of a class conception. Nor was it genetic, as he did not necessarily assume that the children of natural slaves were natural slaves, or of masters masters. But it's obviously a fine basis to develop a concept of racial slavery on, and plenty of medieval thinkers based themselves on Aristotle and went that route.

Ancient slavery in the Roman Empire was often household and therefore not horrific, but in some areas (Sicily in particular) did have many of the traits of plantation work you to death misery as modern capitalist agricultural plantations.

Plus there were literally no limits on what a master could do to a slave. One Roman master was famous for feeding his slaves to his pond filled with carnivorous fish. Perfectly legal.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I think for some groups - even before coming into contact with class societies may have had battles or fought for various reasons. The didn't have developed classes, but they lived in conditions of scarcity (abundant scarcity for people in very productive or lush regions, more absolute scarcity for others) which may have resulted in fights over access to good hunting grounds or specific packs of game. I don't think you could classify it as being similar to post-class warfare in anything but the earliest or least stratified class societies though.

My feeling, I can't really back it up, is that this would generally be last resort sort of situations because populations seem to have been small enough that people could move on more easily than fighting. And raids of food probably weren't much of a factor (unless opportunistically or if people were literally about to starve) because there wouldn't have been much stored surplus to make it attractive - a war party is at least as hard as a hunting party (if not more) and you can hunt in a small group whereas you'd need as many people as possible to survive off of raiding other groups.

Early forms of warfare between human groupings likely came about for contemporary reasons, economic and otherwise, such as when the chief of one clan insults the chief of another clan.

But raids for food were vital even at the very earliest stages, even before the invention of food storage, as humans themselves are quite edible. The very earliest human groupings likely made no distinction between killing humans vis a vis killing any other animals for food, if said humans were not part of the group.

-M.H.-

[Blake's Baby]

Here's some theories on humans perpetrating a genocide against neandrethals.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/24-10-2007/99419-genocide-0/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/17/neanderthals-cannibalism-anthropological-sciences-journal

I personally believe that there was violent inter-group conflict prior to he development of settled civilizations, though I do feel that your arguments still apply to intra-group conflict. There is absolutely no evidence of mass violence within primitive societies, nor of forms of repression...

Except, as discussed earlier, there is more evidence of intra-group conflict (eg LBK people in LBK settlements killed with LBK tools) than there is for for inter-group violence. Your 'personal belief' is not well-supported by evidence.


... This is where classlessness really comes I to play, because different tribes still had different interests making them similar to classes. (Though not classes because early societies had more or less the same relation to production.)

Were early h. sapiens communities competing with other h. sapiens communities? Yes, pretty directly. Were early h. sapiens communities competing with h. neanderthalensis communities? Not so directly. Where is conflict more likely?

Do LBK groups show evidence of LBK-on-LBK violence? Yes. Do LBK groups show evidence of LBK-on-Mesolithic hunter-gatherer violence? Not so much. Why is this? Could it be that LBK groups competed more directly with other LBK groups, or because pressures (eg rising populations, problems of social cohesion) inside LBK communities promoted these 'extermination events'?

In short: there's more evidence (at least in prehistoric Europe) of violence inside groups than there is between different groups.


There can be no conclusive physical proof of whether warfare existed 2.6 million years ago, unless somebody invents a time machine...

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, this is true. But by the same argument, helicopters cannot be proved not to exist 2.6 million years ago, nor Playboy magazine, nor the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.


But warfare long predates class society, as can be seen from classless societies we do have records of, such as Native American tribal societies, who practiced warfare on each other with vim and vigor...

You seem to have ignored my questions to Luis Henrique about what constitutes 'classless' here, and the contact these groups may have had with (unboubted) class societies.



Although there is not and cannot be definitive physical proof, the entire science of anthropology indicates that warfare goes back to the very first human communities, in conflict with each other...

'Anthropology', or more correctly 'historical anthropology', is a racist doctrine invented in the US academies to explain the 'primitive' condition of native American societies and by implication the superiority of Old-World (white) culture. Anthropology, for instance, would rather explain the Hopewell Mounds of Ohio as the result of 'travelling Mayans' or even Egyptians than admit that the native cultures of North America were creative enough to build them themselves.

Archaeology on the other hand is a guide to treasure-hunting which was turned into a (relatively) scientific pursuit about 120 years ago.

Anthropology may say 'Native Americans are primitive; Native Americans had wars; therefore all primitives had wars'. Archaeology says 'what is the evidence for wars in prehistory?'

So, you can believe that all primitive people fought wars if you like, just like you can believe that God was an astronaut, the Moon Landings were faked, and that dinosaurs are dragons from the Bible. There just isn't much, you know, evidence.


Chimpanzee groupings go to war with each other, why not humans?

-M.H.-

Bonobos fuck each other to relieve social tension, why not humans?

Gorillas shit in the forest, why not humans?

Chimpanzees masturbate in public, why not humans?

Gibbons swing from tree to tree, why not humans?

Most primates pick flees off each other in social bonding rituals, why not humans?

Humans wear clothes, why not chimpanzees?

It's a silly argument. Picking an aspect of behaviour and saying 'we're all primates, if one primate group does it then other primates can', while perfectly true in itself, does not demonstrate that other primates do.

I think I should stress that while I have no objection to the notion that either inter-group violence or intra-group violence occurred in 'deep' prehistory, I have a strong aversion to the notion that it must have occurred often - because the evidence isn't really there. To assert that it must have happened often, because chimpanzees chase each other out of territories and some Native American tribes waged war in a seemingly-classless society, is a matter of faith not science.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Early forms of warfare between human groupings likely came about for contemporary reasons, economic and otherwise, such as when the chief of one clan insults the chief of another clan.

But raids for food were vital even at the very earliest stages, even before the invention of food storage, as humans themselves are quite edible. The very earliest human groupings likely made no distinction between killing humans vis a vis killing any other animals for food, if said humans were not part of the group.

-M.H.-I have never read any convincing evidence of this sort of thing being wide-spread, but the information we have about pre-history is very spotty, so all of this could very well be true. However, I'm skeptical that any of this could have been systemic in the ages before surplus and classes developed. I find it much more likely that it would be the exception to the norm or only during periods of stress. Even new world tribal band societies where there have been recorded accounts of cannibalism or excessive warfare were either groups which had begun to have rudimentary class divisions because of either agriculture or trade or their society had been disrupted by displacement (forcing people to move to other areas where maybe they were now having to compete for resources) or disease or other factors.

[RedMaterialist]

Didn't Marx and Engels show that slavery began with the development of the family? As I understand it, pre-historic society was based on the clan system, originally with group marriage, later, pairing marriage and matriarchy. Then with agriculture and animal domestication, the patriarchal family developed. Women and children were the original slaves. Engels, Origin of the Family..Chap II-4.

Thus, as animals were domesticated, a male would become "owner" of the herd, probably because men did most of the hunting. The owner wanted to make sure that his "private property" would be inherited only by his own child. Also, his own children make perfect slaves as the children of any farmer can tell you. Women would be used to produce not only heirs but also children slaves. It would, it seems to me, to be a natural progression to taking captives, particularly women, in war to increase the slave population. Before the development of private property captives in war were either killed (the men) or taken into the tribe as wives.

[Blake's Baby]

...

Thus, as animals were domesticated, a male would become "owner" of the herd, probably because men did most of the hunting...

Yeah, there's no evidence for this either.

We're fond of projecting our own society on the past. The notion that men go out and provide while women stay home minding the kids/cave is one particularly suited to 1950s western suburbanites. It's Surbiton writ large, Gerry and Margo (insert culturally-specific reference here) in the palaeolithic.

Alternatively, men like DIY, women like shopping (culturally-relativistic statements that are now considered to have universal validity); does this not imply that it was women who went out providing while men stayed home looking after the cave?

No; because all statements of this nature are complete made up bullshit.

There is no evidence that men hunted more than women or vice versa.

[RedMaterialist]

There is no evidence that men hunted more than women or vice versa[/I].

There appears to be some evidence (just a brief walk through wikipedia) that a sexual division of labor in hunting and gathering began to appear a few thousand years before domestication of animals. This would fit with Marx's statement that sex was the original division of labor. Extant hunting and gathering societies seem to show that most hunting, not all, is done by men. Also, older societies hunted mostly small game or scavenged. There would have been no need for a sexual division of labor for that kind of hunting.

There doesn't seem to be any archaeological, genetic (if that would be possible), evidence for the pre-historic existence of slavery, but it is well known that slavery was well established at the time recorded writing began (Code of Hammurabi, etc.) Why no physical evidence of pre-historic slavery. For instance a 10,000 year old human might be discovered with evidence that he or she was a slave. Suppose the Iceman had been discovered with a companion who showed signs of being his slave?

All of this just rambling thoughts. nothing meant to be well thought out.

[A Marxist Historian]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, this is true. But by the same argument, helicopters cannot be proved not to exist 2.6 million years ago, nor Playboy magazine, nor the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

You've picked very bad examples to try to prove your point, as none of the above could have been produced without a high level of technology, which would have left evidence, so we can consider the nonexistence of all of your examples to be proven fact.

Warfare requires no technology whatsoever.




You seem to have ignored my questions to Luis Henrique about what constitutes 'classless' here, and the contact these groups may have had with (unboubted) class societies.

I thought Luis answered you quite well, with South American examples. Things are if anything clearer in North America, as north of the Aztecs class societies were few and far between. You did have the ancient Mound Builders, Cahokia and so forth, but they were centuries gone by the time Europeans arrived, and hardly could have had much influence over the ways of doing of an entire continent.

The great majority of North American Native American societies were genuinely classless, with tribal and not personal ownership of property, and equality of men and women for that matter. The social solidarity of North American Indian tribes was a major reason for their tremendous military effectiveness in warfare with English and French and Spanish colonists, despite technology disparities.

Most North American Indian tribes were highly warlike, long before the settlers arrived, warring with each other over natural resources. Captives were either incorporated into the tribe or tortured to death, sometimes with those holding up most bravely under torture being the ones incorporated instead of killed. Slavery was fairly unusual, except in the Southeast, probably in fact under the influence of the old Mound Builders, who had been an Aztec style hierarchical society.

Unlike in South America, cannibalism was an outgrown stage that had been abandoned. The nearest to an exception was, interestingly, the Iroquois, who did not practice cannibalism but still had tribal memories of when they had. They were in many ways the model and clearest example of all this, the most classless, the most communist, and the most warlike, dominating their neighbors mercilessly.

North American Indians were in fact the model for anthropologist Morgan's concept of "primitive communism," which Marx and Engels esteemed so highly. Their own conceptions of early man stem directly from Morgan, whom they admired. M and E did not have the same attitude to anthropology as you do.


'Anthropology', or more correctly 'historical anthropology', is a racist doctrine invented in the US academies to explain the 'primitive' condition of native American societies and by implication the superiority of Old-World (white) culture. Anthropology, for instance, would rather explain the Hopewell Mounds of Ohio as the result of 'travelling Mayans' or even Egyptians than admit that the native cultures of North America were creative enough to build them themselves.

Nonsense. Even in the 19th century, the height of Western racist pseudoscience, you had Morgan, probably the most famous anthropologist of his time. The white racist anthropology of the early 20th century is thoroughly rejected by modern anthropologists, who if anything tend to go in for Third Worldism these days.


Archaeology on the other hand is a guide to treasure-hunting which was turned into a (relatively) scientific pursuit about 120 years ago.

Anthropology may say 'Native Americans are primitive; Native Americans had wars; therefore all primitives had wars'. Archaeology says 'what is the evidence for wars in prehistory?'

Archeologists? That's the people who go around the world stealing cultural treasures from poor countries to put in Western museums?:)


So, you can believe that all primitive people fought wars if you like, just like you can believe that God was an astronaut, the Moon Landings were faked, and that dinosaurs are dragons from the Bible. There just isn't much, you know, evidence.

Bonobos fuck each other to relieve social tension, why not humans?

Gorillas shit in the forest, why not humans?

Chimpanzees masturbate in public, why not humans?

Gibbons swing from tree to tree, why not humans?

Most primates pick flees off each other in social bonding rituals, why not humans?

Because humans have developed social taboos against such behaviors. (And most of us have fewer fleas). Though the swinging from trees thing would be a lot tougher physically for humans than baboons.



Humans wear clothes, why not chimpanzees?

Because they don't have the technology to create them. And, as they have fur, they have less need for them.

In hot climates, as you may have heard, humans wear fewer clothes, sometimes none. Indeed in California, the greater interest in nudism than elsewhere in the USA is fundamentally due to the nice climate we have.



It's a silly argument. Picking an aspect of behaviour and saying 'we're all primates, if one primate group does it then other primates can', while perfectly true in itself, does not demonstrate that other primates do.

I think I should stress that while I have no objection to the notion that either inter-group violence or intra-group violence occurred in 'deep' prehistory, I have a strong aversion to the notion that it must have occurred often - because the evidence isn't really there. To assert that it must have happened often, because chimpanzees chase each other out of territories and some Native American tribes waged war in a seemingly-classless society, is a matter of faith not science.

What you fail to understand is that it is the absence of warfare in prehistory, not its presence, that would require proof. Though there can be no solid proof either way, there are more than enough indications to show that the prevalence of warfare among early humans is far, far more plausible than its absence.

There is, by the way, one area of North America where in fact there was, if not no warfare, relatively much less than elsewhere. That's California, where I happen to live. Much less warfare than elsewhere on the North American continent.

But the reason for that is well known. Due to the pleasant climate and abundance of natural resources, the living standards of California Indians were much higher than elsewhere in North America. California Indians had a better diet and were generally healthier than the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries that invaded them. Proven fact, as burial sites clearly indicate that on average they were several inches taller.

So there was less warfare, as why should they fight?

A fairly unique situation in prehistory I should think, as usually, for a decent living standard you need technology, something California Indians had little need to bother with, they didn't even practice agriculture.

-M.H.-

[Positivist]

Except, as discussed earlier, there is more evidence of intra-group conflict (eg LBK people in LBK settlements killed with LBK tools) than there is for for inter-group violence. Your 'personal belief' is not well-supported by evidence.

In short: there's more evidence (at least in prehistoric Europe) of violence inside groups than there is between different groups.

I think I should stress that while I have no objection to the notion that either inter-group violence or intra-group violence occurred in 'deep' prehistory, I have a strong aversion to the notion that it must have occurred often - because the evidence isn't really there. To assert that it must have happened often, because chimpanzees chase each other out of territories and some Native American tribes waged war in a seemingly-classless society, is a matter of faith not science.

But you were the first one to make any assertion about when violent conflict ensued. You set up that timeline which suggested there wasn't any violence prior to various social establishments. Furthermore if native Americans waged war, and there is evidence that they did, then primitive societies waged war before you asserted that they did, plain and simple.

As for your argument that there is more evidence for intra-group conflict, then doesn't that go further to discredit your position? Do you somehow believe that inter-group conflict is worse than intra-group conflict?

[lan153rez]

If there is one thing I developed during my lifetime, it is an acute awareness of the growing violence and conflict worldwide. Living in an era in which contributions aiming to the betterment of human life are becoming the most important ones. I feel that it is our duty to fascinate by the idea that the written word can alter individual lives, affect one's identity, and perhaps even shape national consciousness.

[Blake's Baby]

Right: there's so much crap in MH's last post that it'll take me hours to wade through it all, but I will say that the information about the California Indians is very interesting, and it may help to find a way out of this.

If it's accurate (I only have MH's word to go on here, as I've already said I'm fairly ignorant of pre-history in the Americas) then it implies that not all prehistoric societies engaged in warfare. Which rather disproves the 'all primitive societies engaged in warfare, we just know they did' argument. Why didn't they? According to MH, because they were in a state of productive equilibrium. They didn't need to wage war.

The same situation of productive equilibrium, incidently, has been posited for the European mesolithic (from which I was deriving my examples, as that's the period of pre-state prehistory I know most about). So perhaps the lack of evidence for warfare in the European mesolithic, as in the late prehistory of California, owes a lot to a society that has no need for warfare.

So that implies that the 'necessity' of war is economic, not innately biological or anything of the kind. There is no need for group conflict in a society of abundance.

If we do not have a society of abundance, we have, by necessity, a situation where different groups have different access to the means of production, one in which different groups vie to control the means of production. This then may be the cause of conflict - over access to (let's say) water sources, fertile areas for the gathering of plant foods, access to herds for hunting etc. The fact that the different groups may (or may not) organise themselves collectively, as a communal band, in no way alters the fact that they then interact with other groups on the basis of competition over scarce resources. In a different society this would be seen as 'class conflict'. In this society, it's not, because there's no formal overarching structure. But the conflict is the same. The social relationships are the same as if it were class conflict.

Sparta was a 'communist' state for the citizen-soldier elite. It had a lack of private property (communal meals and barracks etc) but it was still a militarised class society. The USSR had state ownership of industry, but it was still a militarised class society. 'Communal ownership' does not mean that a society is classless, especially when that 'ownership' may be disputed by other groups. In this case a state being defined as 'men armed in defence of property relations' the intergroup conflict over resources can be seen as both class conflict and state conflict.



But you were the first one to make any assertion about when violent conflict ensued...

No I wasn't. I was the one that offered a timeline for when evidence of military technology appeared. If you don't believe evidence is necessary, you can believe whatever you like.


... You set up that timeline which suggested there wasn't any violence prior to various social establishments...

No I didn't, I set up a timeline for the evidence of military technology, ie evidence of weapons (rather than tools). Not evidence of 'violence'. I've already said that I believe that 'violence' long predates anything we have evidence for, and that violence can be done with tools rather than weapons, that violence can be organised or unorganised, and it can be against another group or inside a group.

What this long, long aside from the original question of 'slavery' is about is evidence for warfare (ie, 'violence which is organised against another community'). Weapons are a good indicator of this; they aren't tools (they have no purpose beyond killing people) and they are as effective against non-community members as community members. It's possible that weapons were only used in the community against transgressors but I don't think it's likely. So, military technology can be seen as a likely indicator of 'warfare'.



... Furthermore if native Americans waged war, and there is evidence that they did, then primitive societies waged war before you asserted that they did, plain and simple...

And what exactly do you mean here by 'primitive'? MH has already asserted that the Californian Indians had a better adaption to their environment than the incoming Europeans. So do are you referring to the Europeans as 'primitive' here? Or, like the smug white self satisfied and lazy racists of American anthropology departments, are you assuming Native American societies are 'primitive'?

The 'anthropological paradigm' is that Native American societies are 'primitive', as a direct corrolary to the superiority of the European and Christian base of white American culture. They're not. They have had exactly the same development as any other society. From 'then' until 'now'.



...As for your argument that there is more evidence for intra-group conflict, then doesn't that go further to discredit your position? ...

My position that military technology can be used as a marker for warfare? Or my position that intra-group conflict isn't the same as inter-group conflict? My position that intra-group violence might have religious or juridicial motives? My position that the search for evidence is a good method, instead of just making shit up? I don't understand what position is supposed to be discredited.



...
Do you somehow believe that inter-group conflict is worse than intra-group conflict?

What does 'worse' have to do with it?

I don't think lynchings, judicial killings ('civil' or 'religious') etc are the same as 'war', because on the one hand they're less organised and on the other they intra-group not inter-group; warfare is 'organised violence against another social group', so 'disorganised violence' fails the test and so does 'violence in the same social group'. 'Worse' doesn't come into it.

[lan153rez]

Labor is one of the vital resources known to men. We need men to do different jobs to keep the economy from budding and these are what we consider the labor force. Nowadays, labor is not free but in some places remote and even anonymous to many, slavery is present. I want to talk about slavery in the Philippines today. This may seem isolated to this blog but somehow, I feel that it influenced Philippine culture.

:(

[A Marxist Historian]

Agreed with most of that. I certainly concede that the findings are contested and I never used the word genocide. However, I'm not sure I accept that inter group conflict must be against groups that would be culturally or ethnically different. Two groups in the same area for a long period of time would be very similar, culturally, technologically and very closely related. Resources become scarce and if one group can't or won't move away, you've got conflict. Shit I know most of my extended family would like to kill each other :p

Here's the thing if someone was arguing that life before the formation of permanent settlements and states was full of violence and constant warfare (due to human nature:rolleyes:), I'd be singing a very different tune digging up evidence of trade and cooperation between groups as these were much more common. Violence tends to be the last resort if it can be avoided. Until permanent settlements were established and the option of moving away became less viable and the taking of slaves became economically favorable. While I agree it's important to shatter the myth that pre-historic times were ultra violent. I also think it's important not to omit evidence on the basis that it's not the image we wish to portray. I'm not saying you, but I have seen others do this on here before. Make it out to be something it's not an idolized version of history. That's my motivation for contending this argument.

Ah, that's what people are missing in this discussion. "Human nature," a changeable and malleable thing that doesn't really exist, has nothing to do with the matter.

For peaceable interactions between human groupings, a certain minimal level of prosperity is necessary. If people are desperately poor, and certainly people were desperately poor in prehistory, there are only so many natural resources to go around, and those who seize them survive and those who don't, don't. Darwin's "survival of the fittest."

It is the development of technology that allows human progress. That is why communism is a possibility now, and wasn't really a possibility thousands of years ago. "Primitive communism" was exactly that, the communism of a tribe or clan, in a death struggle for natural resources with all other tribes or clans.

Nowadays violence is the last resort, then it was the first resort. A hundred thousand years ago, if somebody else has spent huge effort with nothing to help him other than flaked stone tools gathering food resources, it was certainly much easier and more efficient to kill him and take advantage of his labor than to do all that labor yourself. And, of course, he himself is a food resource.

Doesn't really need proof, as that is just elementary logic. People back then were after all just as smart as we are, by all evidence.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Yeah, there's no evidence for this either.

We're fond of projecting our own society on the past. The notion that men go out and provide while women stay home minding the kids/cave is one particularly suited to 1950s western suburbanites. It's Surbiton writ large, Gerry and Margo (insert culturally-specific reference here) in the palaeolithic.

Alternatively, men like DIY, women like shopping (culturally-relativistic statements that are now considered to have universal validity); does this not imply that it was women who went out providing while men stayed home looking after the cave?

No; because all statements of this nature are complete made up bullshit.

There is no evidence that men hunted more than women or vice versa.

All reasonably contemporary hunter/gatherer societies, similar to those of prehistory, have had the division of labor with the men doing the hunting and the women doing the gathering.

Why? Because firstly, the women give birth to the children, therefore are frequently pregnant (no birth control back then) and unable to hunt, and moreover automatically end up with the childraising responsibilities unless you have sophisticated social customs forcing the men to help out. And besides, men do have greater upper body strength, which is very important when throwing a javelin at a deer and not so important when digging up roots and picking berries.

No doubt there was plenty of variety in prehistory, and maybe even tribes where the women hunted and the men gathered. But those would not be the ones that survived. Darwin and all that.

And, by the way, hunting/gathering societies are usually pretty egalitarian genderwise. Gathering is just as important as hunting in feeding the tribe.

It's when agriculture was developed that you started having class divisions, and the first "class division," as Engels pointed out following Morgan, was men becoming superior to women, as enough of a social surplus was created by agriculture for something other than rough social equality to be even possible without the "lower class" starving to death.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Right: there's so much crap in MH's last post that it'll take me hours to wade through it all, but I will say that the information about the California Indians is very interesting, and it may help to find a way out of this.

If it's accurate (I only have MH's word to go on here, as I've already said I'm fairly ignorant of pre-history in the Americas) then it implies that not all prehistoric societies engaged in warfare. Which rather disproves the 'all primitive societies engaged in warfare, we just know they did' argument. Why didn't they? According to MH, because they were in a state of productive equilibrium. They didn't need to wage war.

The same situation of productive equilibrium, incidently, has been posited for the European mesolithic (from which I was deriving my examples, as that's the period of pre-state prehistory I know most about). So perhaps the lack of evidence for warfare in the European mesolithic, as in the late prehistory of California, owes a lot to a society that has no need for warfare.

So that implies that the 'necessity' of war is economic, not innately biological or anything of the kind. There is no need for group conflict in a society of abundance.

That's precisely the point. To avoid the social conflicts that lead to war, you need a society of abundance. Which is not the same thing as "productive equilibrium," if that is truly a meaningful description of the European mesolithic. "Productive equilibrium" just means people aren't starving to death or destroying their environments.

The situation of California was unique. The California Indians didn't have metals or the wheel or writing, but what they did have was highly sophisticated ecological landscaping techniques, population control methods (birth control, abortion and infanticide) built right into Indian religions, and an almost ideal natural environment, with salmon leaping out of the rivers and the acorn, a much more nutritious staple than wheat if processed properly, ubiquitous. A California Indian family could harvest enough acorns, in effectively infinite supply, for two years with two weeks work.

So why would they want to have wars? They did in fact have little wars, with average death tolls of three or four people, usually over one chief insulting another or salmon fishing rights or something, but in this situation of prosperity, trade made much more sense than warfare.

I think it is inconceivable that this could be other than a very rare and unusual situation in prehistory. Just as it was unusual in North America. Maybe on certain Polynesian islands I suppose...

Basic Marxism is that to get a society of abundance, you have to have the tremendous advances in the modes of production that class society, and foremost the most advanced form of class society, capitalism, made possible. Without ruling and subordinate classes, human life would forever have remained nasty, brutal and short.

Now capitalism has made communism possible. Without it, it never would have been.


If we do not have a society of abundance, we have, by necessity, a situation where different groups have different access to the means of production, one in which different groups vie to control the means of production. This then may be the cause of conflict - over access to (let's say) water sources, fertile areas for the gathering of plant foods, access to herds for hunting etc. The fact that the different groups may (or may not) organise themselves collectively, as a communal band, in no way alters the fact that they then interact with other groups on the basis of competition over scarce resources. In a different society this would be seen as 'class conflict'. In this society, it's not, because there's no formal overarching structure. But the conflict is the same. The social relationships are the same as if it were class conflict.

Except here you do not have different groups competing within a single society that you could see as the same sort of thing as class conflict. Instead you have different societies competing with each other.

The one thing we can definitively say about prehistory is that it was not, except with perhaps a few rare exceptions, a society of abundance. So if we accept the way you formulate it, "classes" and "class conflict" have been eternal, from the first time one band of cavemen in one cave attacked another band in the next cave over over the bear they killed yesterday. And there never have been any classless societies.



Sparta was a 'communist' state for the citizen-soldier elite. It had a lack of private property (communal meals and barracks etc) but it was still a militarised class society. The USSR had state ownership of industry, but it was still a militarised class society. 'Communal ownership' does not mean that a society is classless, especially when that 'ownership' may be disputed by other groups. In this case a state being defined as 'men armed in defence of property relations' the intergroup conflict over resources can be seen as both class conflict and state conflict.

Sparta was a society based on slavery. The citizen soldier elite didn't just own the barracks and food supplies in common, they owned the slaves in common. And there were more slaves than citizen soldiers. Now there's "collective ownership" by a ruling class for you!

A wee bit different from the USSR.




No I wasn't. I was the one that offered a timeline for when evidence of military technology appeared. If you don't believe evidence is necessary, you can believe whatever you like...

I'm three-dotting most of this segment out, as this is the problem right here. The argument, I should think, is about warfare. As "military technology" is utterly unnecessary for warfare, this is all irrelevant.

If armies were to go after each other with teeth, fingernails and fisticuffs, not even using sticks or rocks, there'd be fewer casualties and it'd take longer, but basically that wouldn't make an essential difference.

Now, the real problem would be supply, of course. You don't need "military technology" for warfare, but you do need enough technology to supply food and clothing (well, not clothing necessarily come to think of it) to the soldiers, and enough technological development in general so that you can detach the soldiers from production during warfare without everyone starving to death. Which is the real reason largescale warfare probably did not exist in prehistory, not insufficient death technology.



And what exactly do you mean here by 'primitive'? MH has already asserted that the Californian Indians had a better adaption to their environment than the incoming Europeans. So do are you referring to the Europeans as 'primitive' here? Or, like the smug white self satisfied and lazy racists of American anthropology departments, are you assuming Native American societies are 'primitive'?

The 'anthropological paradigm' is that Native American societies are 'primitive', as a direct corrolary to the superiority of the European and Christian base of white American culture. They're not. They have had exactly the same development as any other society. From 'then' until 'now'...


Your conception of the "anthropological paradigm" is just plain wrong, at least fifty years out of date. Search a recent anthropology textbook for the word "primitive" and you may have trouble finding it. Nowadays most anthropologists have if anything the reverse problem, sometimes going on dreamily about how much better the societies they like to study are than modern societies with all their dehumanizing technology and pollution and whatnot.

I mean, who do you think I get what I say about the California Indians from? The anthropologists of course.

-M.H.-

[Blake's Baby]

That's precisely the point. To avoid the social conflicts that lead to war, you need a society of abundance. Which is not the same thing as "productive equilibrium," if that is truly a meaningful description of the European mesolithic. "Productive equilibrium" just means people aren't starving to death or destroying their environments...

Productive quilibrium is not consuming more than is produced.

Abundance will do just fine if you don't like the term.

You're positing a society of abundance for California in the late prehistoric. A similarly abundant society has also been posited for the european mesolithic.


...
The situation of California was unique. The California Indians didn't have metals or the wheel or writing, but what they did have was highly sophisticated ecological landscaping techniques, population control methods (birth control, abortion and infanticide) built right into Indian religions, and an almost ideal natural environment, with salmon leaping out of the rivers and the acorn, a much more nutritious staple than wheat if processed properly, ubiquitous. A California Indian family could harvest enough acorns, in effectively infinite supply, for two years with two weeks work...

Maybe not so unique. The native America societies of the Pacific North-West are also believed to have lived in a society of abundance, and so were the societies of the European mesolithic. I don't know about the status of warfare in the Pacific North-West, but there's no evidence to support the idea of warfare from the European mesolithic.





...

Except here you do not have different groups competing within a single society that you could see as the same sort of thing as class conflict. Instead you have different societies competing with each other...

Well, I already said that there was no 'overarching structure', but I'm not sure you do have 'different societies competeing with each other'. France and Britain and Germany are all different countries, but if they have a war (like WWI or WWII) that's still a war inside the capitalist mode of production. Are they not in some senses 'the same' society' that is having a war inside itself? Even before capitalism was an international system, even before the real formation of 'England' and 'France', when the Angevins and the Capetins went to war with each other, was this not a war inside feudal society?

Two hunter-gather bands having a violent dispute over who gets to kill the antelope at the water-hole can be seen as a conflict between two different 'societies' (social groups) or inside one 'society'. I think you have to open your mind to the notion that 'tribe' or 'band' does not equal 'distinct and seperate society'. Given that we know that in prehistory objects (stone axes, obsidian tools, stingray spines, exotic feathers and shells, precious stones for example) were distributed over vast distances, these 'societies' were not ignorant of each other and if there's distribution of natural materials or worked objects, there is likely to also be some popultion movement, marriages, reciprocal productive arrangements ('trade' for want of a better word) and a process of cultural contact, assimilation and referencing.

"We, who wear red beads on strings round our necks, acknowledge that you, who wear blue beads in your hair, are also human beings like us, though not like us, so have some red beads, some obsidian tools and some deer meat. Got any young people who want to leave home?"

"We, who wear blue beads in our hair, acknowledge that you, who wear red beads on strings round your necks, are also human beings like us, though not like us, so have some blue beads, some polished axes and some fermented berries. Yeah, I'm sure a few of our youngsters will come to live with you. Got any you want rid of to us?"

Two different societies? Or one society, divided into different spatial groupings, articulated in particular ways around large communal ceremonies, probably at particular times of the year?


...
The one thing we can definitively say about prehistory is that it was not, except with perhaps a few rare exceptions, a society of abundance. So if we accept the way you formulate it, "classes" and "class conflict" have been eternal, from the first time one band of cavemen in one cave attacked another band in the next cave over over the bear they killed yesterday. And there never have been any classless societies...

I didn't say that 'classes' were eternal, that's your strawman.

I said that different social groups, competing for access to the means of production, approach each other in the same way that classes do in a class society.

If we see different groups in one overarching society doing this we call them classes. If we see prehistoric societies (not trying to prejudice the argument here, just can't think of another way to express it) as 'societies', and not individual bands as societies, then we already have a situation where there is an overarching structure and the bands/tribes are merely different 'communities' in that overall society. The band is not therefore a society in its own right, it is a community in a wider society.

If those different communities contest control of the means of production, how is this different to a class society?



...
Sparta was a society based on slavery. The citizen soldier elite didn't just own the barracks and food supplies in common, they owned the slaves in common. And there were more slaves than citizen soldiers. Now there's "collective ownership" by a ruling class for you!

Yeah, sure.

The Spartan citizen/warrior class was a class of slaveowners. But they also had communal property. They were militaristic slave-owning 'communists'. Collective ownership of the means of production (land and slaves) doesn't mean that everyone is equal. Those at the top were equal with each other, those at the bottom were equal with each other (more or less), but the top was not equal to the bottom.

You agree that it was a class society that had communal ownership though, that's an important step forward I think. It demonstrates that 'communal ownership' is not the same as 'classless'.


...A wee bit different from the USSR...

Maybe not all that different.



...
I'm three-dotting most of this segment out, as this is the problem right here. The argument, I should think, is about warfare. As "military technology" is utterly unnecessary for warfare, this is all irrelevant...

Well, perhaps you could define what you think warfare is then, and what might be taken as indicators of its existence?

We're working on the definition that it is a) organised b) violence c) against external social groups.

Is military technology (ie evidence for weapons) necessarily a sign of warfare? No, weapons can be used against internal social groups, but it's a reasonable enough indicator.

Are there other reasonable archaeological indicators of warfare? Well, large numbers of bodies killed by tools that those people don't use might be considered a good indicator. But there's not so much evidence for that.


...
If armies were to go after each other with teeth, fingernails and fisticuffs, not even using sticks or rocks, there'd be fewer casualties and it'd take longer, but basically that wouldn't make an essential difference...

Well, it would, because an 'army' is an organised military force. If it's not organised (for example, if it has no military technology) it's not an army.

Armies have weapons, they're organised to fight. That's what makes them armies. 'Violence' is not equal to 'warfare'. There are many forms of violence that do not equal war, war is a particular subset of violence.


...Now, the real problem would be supply, of course. You don't need "military technology" for warfare, but you do need enough technology to supply food and clothing (well, not clothing necessarily come to think of it) to the soldiers, and enough technological development in general so that you can detach the soldiers from production during warfare without everyone starving to death. Which is the real reason largescale warfare probably did not exist in prehistory, not insufficient death technology...

Really? I thought your argument was that it was easier in prehistory to take over someone else's production than organise it yourself. If you're right, it's actually more difficult to kill your neighbours than it is to organise your society peacefully.



...
Your conception of the "anthropological paradigm" is just plain wrong, at least fifty years out of date. Search a recent anthropology textbook for the word "primitive" and you may have trouble finding it. Nowadays most anthropologists have if anything the reverse problem, sometimes going on dreamily about how much better the societies they like to study are than modern societies with all their dehumanizing technology and pollution and whatnot...

Well, quite, which is why I'm criticising your co-thinker Positivist for using it.

The point is, that 'oh, noble savage' is hardly an advance on 'oh, primitive'.

Historical anthropology was developed in (white) American academies on the basis that Native Americans provided a 'living laboratory' of 'primitive societies' that were seen as analogues of previous, historically-specific societies in Europe and Africa. True or false?


...I mean, who do you think I get what I say about the California Indians from? The anthropologists of course.

-M.H.-

See my point about 'noble savages' above.

Scientific method, looking at the evidence, is the only way to arrive at conclusions of past societies, not deciding that a whole bunch of differently-coloured people are conservative throwbacks to earlier epochs.

That's not to say that no good can come from anthropology of course. Binford's work among the Nunamiut for instance demonstrated that scatters of flakes found in archaeologiucal contexts could be paralleled by scatters of flakes found on modern Nunamiut sites; a reasonable assumption is that the same practices were happening.

What is not a reasonable assumption is 'Red Indians used stone tools, therefore all stone tool using societies are the same as Red Indians'.

[RedMaterialist]

What does all this have to do with the origins of slavery?

[Blake's Baby]

Good question.

MH asserted that slavery was a consequence of warfare, which predated all other human activity. I disagreed.

[RedMaterialist]

Good question.

MH asserted that slavery was a consequence of warfare, which predated all other human activity. I disagreed.

MH says war is the origin of slavery...what do you think is the origin?

[Blake's Baby]

I disagreed with the notion that warfare predated all other human activity.

[A Marxist Historian]

Productive quilibrium is not consuming more than is produced.

Abundance will do just fine if you don't like the term.

Productive equilibrium is then a society that is mangaging to survive and not disintegrate, that isn't in crisis or collapsing. That is a very different thing from abundance.



You're positing a society of abundance for California in the late prehistoric. A similarly abundant society has also been posited for the european mesolithic.

That sounds to me like something postulated by certain archeologists after too much marijuana.

What makes abundance possible is technology--including for the California Indians, who had developed remarkably sophisticated land management techniques that only now ecologists are rediscovering. It is inherently implausible that humans in the mesolithic had already managed to discover such techniques, and it is even less plausible that much of Europe then had the marvelous climate and unusual plethora of easily accessible food resources that California had, and even still has to some degree.

And also the relative isolation of California (and the very similar next door Pacific Northwest I should add) from the rest of North America by deserts on the south, the Pacific on the West, and the Sierra Nevada mountains on the east (and the Pacific Northwest on the north.)

But, hypothetically speaking, if mesolithic France and Germany were lands of milk and honey, then yes, probably little war.



Maybe not so unique. The native America societies of the Pacific North-West are also believed to have lived in a society of abundance, and so were the societies of the European mesolithic. I don't know about the status of warfare in the Pacific North-West, but there's no evidence to support the idea of warfare from the European mesolithic.

Ah yes, the passive voice. Believed by whom. Names please? References? (And yes, if you want references as to California I can give 'em to you.)

The Pacific Northwest is similar to California but not quite as ideal. A bit cooler, too much rain for many peoples' tastes. Even more rivers and even more salmon jumping out into the fisherman's fingers. I'm less expert on the PNW as I don't live there, and when I've visited there was definitely too damn much rain.

An old acquaintance of mine from Seattle once told me that in Seattle people don't get suntans, instead they just stand outside and get raintans.

But anyway, pretty similar to California so I'd guess not a lot of warfare their either. Definitely a culture of abundance among PNW Indians, I've heard of "potlatch," a custom that could not possibly exist without a high level of abundance.



Well, I already said that there was no 'overarching structure', but I'm not sure you do have 'different societies competeing with each other'. France and Britain and Germany are all different countries, but if they have a war (like WWI or WWII) that's still a war inside the capitalist mode of production. Are they not in some senses 'the same' society' that is having a war inside itself? Even before capitalism was an international system, even before the real formation of 'England' and 'France', when the Angevins and the Capetins went to war with each other, was this not a war inside feudal society?

Two hunter-gather bands having a violent dispute over who gets to kill the antelope at the water-hole can be seen as a conflict between two different 'societies' (social groups) or inside one 'society'. I think you have to open your mind to the notion that 'tribe' or 'band' does not equal 'distinct and seperate society'. Given that we know that in prehistory objects (stone axes, obsidian tools, stingray spines, exotic feathers and shells, precious stones for example) were distributed over vast distances, these 'societies' were not ignorant of each other and if there's distribution of natural materials or worked objects, there is likely to also be some popultion movement, marriages, reciprocal productive arrangements ('trade' for want of a better word) and a process of cultural contact, assimilation and referencing.

"We, who wear red beads on strings round our necks, acknowledge that you, who wear blue beads in your hair, are also human beings like us, though not like us, so have some red beads, some obsidian tools and some deer meat. Got any young people who want to leave home?"

"We, who wear blue beads in our hair, acknowledge that you, who wear red beads on strings round your necks, are also human beings like us, though not like us, so have some blue beads, some polished axes and some fermented berries. Yeah, I'm sure a few of our youngsters will come to live with you. Got any you want rid of to us?"

Two different societies? Or one society, divided into different spatial groupings, articulated in particular ways around large communal ceremonies, probably at particular times of the year?

Ah, so now we're bringing "globalization" back to the Mesolithic?

Nowadays, yes, Europe can be seen as a single society, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even several hundred years ago, the divisions between Western and Eastern Europe were sharp enough so that they could hardly be considered a single society (read Perry Anderson's "Lineages of the Absolute State."

Go back to the mesolithic, sure stone axe manufacture techniques and particular pretty feathers and whatnot gradually spread from one band to the next, but with no transportation or communication networks worth noticing, certainly none we have solid proof of, it seems rather unlikely that there were really that many comonalities among the tiny bands of humans and Neanderthals scattered across the European countryside.



I didn't say that 'classes' were eternal, that's your strawman.

I said that different social groups, competing for access to the means of production, approach each other in the same way that classes do in a class society.

If we see different groups in one overarching society doing this we call them classes. If we see prehistoric societies (not trying to prejudice the argument here, just can't think of another way to express it) as 'societies', and not individual bands as societies, then we already have a situation where there is an overarching structure and the bands/tribes are merely different 'communities' in that overall society. The band is not therefore a society in its own right, it is a community in a wider society.

If those different communities contest control of the means of production, how is this different to a class society?...


So then for all practical purposes you do see classes and class society as eternal, it seems. Unlike me.

Unlike you, I do not believe that classes and class conflict were eternal, quite the contrary. You see different social groups in conflict in a single society in eternal conflict with each other. If that's not precisely eternal class conflict, it's close enough for practical purposes, and certainly close enough for this thread, where we are supposed to be talking about just what caused slavery.



Well, perhaps you could define what you think warfare is then, and what might be taken as indicators of its existence?


Warfare is when one human grouping decides to kill members of another human grouping, in order to obtain something, material or psychological or cultural or whatever, from said other grouping.

What might be taken as indicators of its existence? A working time machine that would enable us to go back and interview people back then. Short of that, I don't think archeological findings are likely to prove much one way or another, as warfare does not require any particular technology traces of which could be found in diggings. Things useful for killing humans are equally useful for killing other animals.

If no killing tools were ever found, or no killing tools with traces of human DNA or whatever were ever found, that would be a very strong negative indication against the existence of warfare, but, as we can see from other postings to this thread, that is not the case.



We're working on the definition that it is a) organised b) violence c) against external social groups.

Is military technology (ie evidence for weapons) necessarily a sign of warfare? No, weapons can be used against internal social groups, but it's a reasonable enough indicator.

Are there other reasonable archaeological indicators of warfare? Well, large numbers of bodies killed by tools that those people don't use might be considered a good indicator. But there's not so much evidence for that.


I doubt society was well enough organized in the mesolithic to find large numbers of human bodies in one place period. Warfare back then was presumably between small bands with casualties in low numbers and bodies left on the ground where they died, not buried in mass graveyards.



Well, it would, because an 'army' is an organised military force. If it's not organised (for example, if it has no military technology) it's not an army.

Armies have weapons, they're organised to fight. That's what makes them armies. 'Violence' is not equal to 'warfare'. There are many forms of violence that do not equal war, war is a particular subset of violence.


Guess what, north American Indian tribes, and I suspect most hunting/gathering cultures historically, didn't have "armies" in the sense you mean. The "army" was simply all the healthy male braves of the tribe. Nor did they have generals, regiments, brigades, or any of that stuff. Nonetheless, not only did they have wars, but they usually beat European armies that went up against them in combat in the eighteenth century (in the sixteenth and 17th the Europeans had an unfair advantage due to the European diseases that were decimating the native population). The Comanches terrorized the Spanish and the Texans right up to the Civil War, almost always beating the Spanish and the Americans too in pitched combat up until then.

And military technology and organization are two different things. You can have warrior braves from a tribe on horseback with flintlocks, or hypothetically driving tanks for that matter, or you could have an army organized to the T armed with with rocks and sticks or even fists and teeth.



Really? I thought your argument was that it was easier in prehistory to take over someone else's production than organise it yourself. If you're right, it's actually more difficult to kill your neighbours than it is to organise your society peacefully.


Organizing permanent armies requires a certain minimal level of the productive forces. But permanent armies are not necessary for warfare.

Usually the way hunter gatherers conduct warfare is the obvious one. When the usual hunting season is over and the animals have gone south for the winter or what have you, and the acorns or what have you have fallen off the trees and are gathered.

Come to think of it, since hunting is usually somewhat possible and gathering only possible at certain times of the year, I'd speculate that you had female warriors quite often in early hunting gathering societies.



Well, quite, which is why I'm criticising your co-thinker Positivist for using it.

The point is, that 'oh, noble savage' is hardly an advance on 'oh, primitive'.

Historical anthropology was developed in (white) American academies on the basis that Native Americans provided a 'living laboratory' of 'primitive societies' that were seen as analogues of previous, historically-specific societies in Europe and Africa. True or false?


You mean like Lewis Morgan, the guy whom Marx and Engels swore by?

California Indians are not well described as "primitive," certainly not by contemporary anthropologists. But yes, I'd think that contemporary hunting/gathering cultures are better sources of information on the Mesolithic than are scanty archeological diggings. Granted, modern hunter/gathers are no doubt much more sophisticated than their Mesolithic equivalents, a hundred thousand years of human experience have got to count for something.

But still, if the basic mode of production is the same, you have to expect that the societies will be similar, if you are a Marxist.

-M.H.-



See my point about 'noble savages' above.

Scientific method, looking at the evidence, is the only way to arrive at conclusions of past societies, not deciding that a whole bunch of differently-coloured people are conservative throwbacks to earlier epochs.

That's not to say that no good can come from anthropology of course. Binford's work among the Nunamiut for instance demonstrated that scatters of flakes found in archaeologiucal contexts could be paralleled by scatters of flakes found on modern Nunamiut sites; a reasonable assumption is that the same practices were happening.

What is not a reasonable assumption is 'Red Indians used stone tools, therefore all stone tool using societies are the same as Red Indians'.

[Blake's Baby]

Productive equilibrium is then a society that is mangaging to survive and not disintegrate, that isn't in crisis or collapsing. That is a very different thing from abundance...

Depends what part of the equation you're looking at. From the society's point of view, if it isn't destroying its own environment, and it isn't actually being crushed to death by the natural bounty falling on its head, it's in a state of equilibrium.

But abundance then. Stick with abundance.




That sounds to me like something postulated by certain archeologists after too much marijuana...

Interesting isn't it, that anything you think backs up your argument is uncrtitically accepted, and anything that doesn't is obviously the ramblings of the deranged?


What makes abundance possible is technology--including for the California Indians, who had developed remarkably sophisticated land management techniques that only now ecologists are rediscovering. It is inherently implausible that humans in the mesolithic had already managed to discover such techniques, and it is even less plausible that much of Europe then had the marvelous climate and unusual plethora of easily accessible food resources that California had, and even still has to some degree...

'Implausible' because you don't want it to be true.

No, there were no sophisticated land management strategies as far as we know, beyond seasonal burning to encourage new growth and possibly game - see the second ahort article here for example - http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba33/ba33feat.html

What there seems to have been is a large, relatively-isolated continent (north of the Alps which are pretty hard to naviagte) only recently freed from the ice and not settled much by other humans, but enjoying a rapid warming phase.



...
And also the relative isolation of California (and the very similar next door Pacific Northwest I should add) from the rest of North America by deserts on the south, the Pacific on the West, and the Sierra Nevada mountains on the east (and the Pacific Northwest on the north.)

But, hypothetically speaking, if mesolithic France and Germany were lands of milk and honey, then yes, probably little war...





...
Ah yes, the passive voice. Believed by whom. Names please? References? (And yes, if you want references as to California I can give 'em to you.)

The Pacific Northwest is similar to California but not quite as ideal. A bit cooler, too much rain for many peoples' tastes. Even more rivers and even more salmon jumping out into the fisherman's fingers. I'm less expert on the PNW as I don't live there, and when I've visited there was definitely too damn much rain.

An old acquaintance of mine from Seattle once told me that in Seattle people don't get suntans, instead they just stand outside and get raintans.

But anyway, pretty similar to California so I'd guess not a lot of warfare their either. Definitely a culture of abundance among PNW Indians, I've heard of "potlatch," a custom that could not possibly exist without a high level of abundance...


There's loads of stuff on the net about mesolithic abundance. It's taking hours to wade through all of this, so I hope you'll forgive me if I say, go and look for it if you're interested.



...
Ah, so now we're bringing "globalization" back to the Mesolithic?

Nowadays, yes, Europe can be seen as a single society, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even several hundred years ago, the divisions between Western and Eastern Europe were sharp enough so that they could hardly be considered a single society (read Perry Anderson's "Lineages of the Absolute State."..

There's a hell of a difference between 'tribal' and 'global'. Do you not know that? The next step beyond your neighbourhood isn't 'everywhere on earth'.

Regional cultural groupings, with some diversity in them, are inherently more likely than self-sustaining isolated tribal groupings. There are regional European flint-tool styles which are too big and too long-lived to be the result of individuals and instead must be the result of cultural traditions that encompass groupings way beyond tribes or bands.


...Go back to the mesolithic, sure stone axe manufacture techniques and particular pretty feathers and whatnot gradually spread from one band to the next, but with no transportation or communication networks worth noticing, certainly none we have solid proof of, it seems rather unlikely that there were really that many comonalities among the tiny bands of humans and Neanderthals scattered across the European countryside...

Two things, no there doesn't seem to be that kind of 'fashion' diffusion going on, in the mesolithic; it's not about people changing their styles to match their neighbours, it's about the humans who colonised NW Europe after the ice-retreat having the same toolkits. Either three very small groups of humans were increadibly busy and rampaged round the continent really quickly, travelling hundreds or thousands of miles as they left their bits and bobs all over the place, or larger groups, moving more slowly, and arranged in different cultural zones, colonized the European NW over a longer, more densley-peopled period. I know which I find more likely.

Secondly, technical point, which doesn't have much bearing on either of our arguments; by the mesolithic there were no more Neanderthals per se (though all non-Africans have some Neanderthal DNA), the last Neanderthal communities had died out at the middle-upper palaeolithic transition, about 17,000 years before the beginning of the mesolithic in NW Europe.



...
So then for all practical purposes you do see classes and class society as eternal, it seems. Unlike me...

OK, you didn't answer the question I asked you about different groupos and their relationship to the means of production, and you ignored the fact that I said that I didn't see class society as eternal (for one thing, I don't see war as being eternal so I have no reason, unlike you, to believe that different social groups stood in opposed relationships to each other).

So then for all practical purposes you do see classes and class society as eternal, it seems. Unlike me.


...
Unlike you, I do not believe that classes and class conflict were eternal, quite the contrary. You see different social groups in conflict in a single society in eternal conflict with each other. If that's not precisely eternal class conflict, it's close enough for practical purposes, and certainly close enough for this thread, where we are supposed to be talking about just what caused slavery...

Alternatively, you see different social groups in conflict not in a single society in eternal conflict with each other. If that's not precisely eternal class conflict, it's close enough for practical purposes, and certainly close enough for this thread, where we are supposed to be talking about just what caused slavery.

I don't see conflict as being eternal, so no, I completely reject what you claim I've said, because in fact you're claiming that what you've said is what I've said.


...
Warfare is when one human grouping decides to kill members of another human grouping, in order to obtain something, material or psychological or cultural or whatever, from said other grouping...

OK. So there has to be inter-group violence, but there also has to be a 'reward'. How can you possibly ascertain what the 'rewards' might be? Is there any reason to reject the definition of warfare that the rest of us have been working with, which is that it's a) organised (not spontaneous) b) violence c) against another social group?


...What might be taken as indicators of its existence? A working time machine that would enable us to go back and interview people back then. Short of that, I don't think archeological findings are likely to prove much one way or another, as warfare does not require any particular technology traces of which could be found in diggings. Things useful for killing humans are equally useful for killing other animals...

That's hardly true enough to be useful though, because it's axiomatic in the study of tools that not all tools are as useful as all other tools for any given purpose.

To take some modern examples, a cruise missile is more use for destroying a fortified compound than it is for hunting deer, and a machine gun is more useful for killing large numbers of closely packed people than it is for killing rabbits.

To take some ancient examples, a bronze sword is more use for killing humans than it is for killing wild boar, and bronze age 'maiming' arrows are more useful in disabling humans than they are in hunting game.

So, no, not all tools have equal utility for all purposes, though you can stab a man with garden shears, beat someone to death with a hammer, or put a hatchet in someone's head.


...If no killing tools were ever found, or no killing tools with traces of human DNA or whatever were ever found, that would be a very strong negative indication against the existence of warfare, but, as we can see from other postings to this thread, that is not the case...

'Killing tools' being tools that were used to kill, or tools that would kill if they were used to attack other humans? Not quite sure what it is you're getting at here.

As I've already said, pages and pages ago, even before stone tools, hominins may have been beating each other to death with tree branches.

As the definition of 'warfare' that any of these postings use is contested, what you're calling 'warfare' here I'll have to call 'violence' I'm afraid, and I'll agree with you, there is evidence of human-on-human violence in prehistory. As the definition of warfare that we're using includes a level of organisation that is lacking from the evidence, then I can't agree that it's warfare per se.




...
I doubt society was well enough organized in the mesolithic to find large numbers of human bodies in one place period. Warfare back then was presumably between small bands with casualties in low numbers and bodies left on the ground where they died, not buried in mass graveyards...

You're presupposing the existence if warfare there though.

True, if warfare existed it would likely be between small bands.

It's a bit rich however to say 'we theorise that there would be little evidence of this procvedure and therefore if we don't find any that means we must be right'. No, you could still be wrong, the evidence might not be there because the war never happened.



...
Guess what, north American Indian tribes, and I suspect most hunting/gathering cultures historically, didn't have "armies" in the sense you mean. The "army" was simply all the healthy male braves of the tribe. Nor did they have generals, regiments, brigades, or any of that stuff. Nonetheless, not only did they have wars, but they usually beat European armies that went up against them in combat in the eighteenth century (in the sixteenth and 17th the Europeans had an unfair advantage due to the European diseases that were decimating the native population). The Comanches terrorized the Spanish and the Texans right up to the Civil War, almost always beating the Spanish and the Americans too in pitched combat up until then...

Don't know what you're arguing against here, but it isn't my position.

I'm not aware of what the archaeology of brigades would look like but I'm not positing a professional soldiery here. I'm positing some idea similar to the Greek model of citizen soldiers, or the Viking armies. They had weapons for killing people (not just hunting/farming weapons) but they were also farmers, hunters, traders, craftspeople etc.

In early medieval England, for example, an 'army' ('here') was defined as any group of 30 or more armed men. Less than that and they were counted as bandits.


...

And military technology and organization are two different things. You can have warrior braves from a tribe on horseback with flintlocks, or hypothetically driving tanks for that matter, or you could have an army organized to the T armed with with rocks and sticks or even fists and teeth...

But why would one want to? Organization and technology aren't identical but they're not completely seperate either. The relationship between the two really is dialectical. There is no 'archaeology of brigades', as I said earlier; unless we find a technical manual we won't know for certain how any bunch of fighters was arranged in history, but we can make educated guesses from the archaeological evidence.

If we find weapons that make more sense for killing people than animals, we can guess that some of the time people fought other people, not rabbits or deer. If we find bodies that seem to have been killed with tools rather than weapons (eg the Neolithic bodies killed with adzes, which are woodworking tools), it is reasonable to assume that violence against other humans was a rare enough event not to require specialist tools.


...
Organizing permanent armies requires a certain minimal level of the productive forces. But permanent armies are not necessary for warfare...

Agreed. Already dealt with this above I think. No-one is talking about 'permanent armies'.


...Usually the way hunter gatherers conduct warfare is the obvious one. When the usual hunting season is over and the animals have gone south for the winter or what have you, and the acorns or what have you have fallen off the trees and are gathered.

Come to think of it, since hunting is usually somewhat possible and gathering only possible at certain times of the year, I'd speculate that you had female warriors quite often in early hunting gathering societies...

Why do you think 'gathering' is only possible at certain times of the year? Why do you think 'hunting' is possible all the time? Neither of these assertions has any real validity.

Many things can be 'gathered', at various times of the year. Different plants come into season at different times, shellfish can be collected etc, and therefore 'gathering' is a year-round phenomenon in may hunter-gatherer societies (which I have to stress may not be relaible analogues of any previous hunter-gatherer mode of existence).

Many (not all) animals are migratory, and can therefore only be hunted at certain times. A large suite of possible prey would allow hunting at different times of the year; but for many animals, hunting is only possible at very narrowly-circumscribed times of the year.



...
You mean like Lewis Morgan, the guy whom Marx and Engels swore by?...

They swore by Darwin too, does that mean you think women are inferior to men as Darwin did? Presumably, in citing Morgan, you believe like him that the Native Americans needed to be saved by assimilation and conversion to Christianity?

What, you mean you don't support Morgan in every single word that he said?

I mean, like American anthropology. It was a racist discipline founded on the notion that Native Americans were inherently uncreative and a living fossil of the past of the Old World. Do you accept this view of Native Americans? I don't care if you accept that view of anthropology, because whether you do or not, that's the basis of historical anthropology. It's whether you accept that view of Native Americans that's important here.




...
California Indians are not well described as "primitive," certainly not by contemporary anthropologists. But yes, I'd think that contemporary hunting/gathering cultures are better sources of information on the Mesolithic than are scanty archeological diggings. Granted, modern hunter/gathers are no doubt much more sophisticated than their Mesolithic equivalents, a hundred thousand years of human experience have got to count for something.

But still, if the basic mode of production is the same, you have to expect that the societies will be similar, if you are a Marxist.

-M.H.-

So you're prepared to say that societies thousands of miles apart and thousands - or tens, or hundreds, of thousands - of years apart, are 'similar' but not that neighbouring contemporary social groups are the same society? You accuse me of 'globalism' and yet you display the most abject ahistoricism and a homogenising tendency that shows a complete lack of finesse.

Aspects of two societies with a 'similar' (how similar?) mode of production are likely to be similar.

But how 'similar' are a settled hunter-gatherer society in NW Euope in the mesolithic, and a nomadic hunter-gather band in (for example) the Kalahari now?

Are Inuit seal-hunters really goin to be able to provide a model for Great Plains mammoth-hunters?

We assign the term 'hunter-gatherer' to then all but how similar are they really?

Binford demonstrated that ethnographic parallels work best when there is arcahaeological evidence. Flint and bone scatters on ancient sites matched by flint and bone scatters on modern sites are likely using the same techniques.

Not 'Native Americans used stone tools, put feathers in their hair, and lived in chieftain-societies, so mesolithic Europeans who used stone tools must also have worn flowers in their hair and lived in chieftainship societies.'




Now; can some mod split all this stuff about warfare in prehistory away from the main thread? The majority of posts here are no longer even vaguely related to the subject of slavery, which I think we all agree makes little sense outside of an agricultural economy, which only developed in the last 12,000 years or so.

[Luís Henrique]

Their society was obviously one in which martial prowess was held to be important. Did the 'soldiers' also grow crops/hunt/provide work for the community beyond their 'military' aspects?

Among the Tupi-Guarani all men of proper age would be warriors, except perhaps those devoted to magic practices (but then their rituals would be deemed a necessary part of warfare, so even this exception is an exception for us, who don't believe magic has any bearing on military activity, not for them). Tupi-Guarani males did not engage in agriculture, which they deemed a woman thing; they hunted, and made war.


Did they take slaves?No, they ate their prisoners if they deemed they had qualities they thought could benefit the eaters (they believed one could get braver by eating a brave warrior, etc.)


Was there some kind of priestly... 'caste' ... overseeing this ritualised warfare?They usually had a shaman (pagé in their language), but I doubt they constituted an actual hereditary caste.


Because unless a) there's no noticeable sexual division of labour (female warriors for instance) and b) the warriors are also farmers/economic providers and c) there is no 'hierarchy' (literally, rule by priests), and d) there are no slaves, then it is a class society - as, for example, Sparta, which may have practiced a form of 'communism' along the soldier-citizen elite, but still had slaves and priests and even kings.

There was a quite noticeable sexual division of labour, as hinted above; men hunted, fished, warred, built new houses, burnt the woods when necessary, and women practiced (a very limited ) agriculture, reared children, baked, and kept the houses. Their warriors were economic providers. There was no hierarchy; valiant, smart or strong warriors enjoyed respect from the colectivity (as did older men and good speakers), constituted a natural leadership and had privileged access to women, but that was not hereditary (the son of a highly respected warrior could be considered a coward or just a plain, non-notable warrior). There were no slaves, no serfs, no "labourers" that were not "citizens", there was no property of land, not even a collective property of a communal elite that excluded the "commoners". I don't think it is possible to consider their societies "class societies" in any reasonable way.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

I asked whether warriors hunted, practiced agriculture or worked for the community. You answered


... Tupi-Guarani males... hunted, and made war.

OK, so they were economic providers as well as warriors, so war wasn't the only form of economy, there was a form of resource acquisition out of war that warriors engaged in. They had multiple social roles and one was to procure food.


I asked if there was a sexual division of labour and you replied


...
There was a quite noticeable sexual division of labour... men hunted, fished, warred, built new houses, burnt the woods when necessary, and women practiced (a very limited ) agriculture, reared children, baked, and kept the houses...

Different social groups (one made up of warring hunting males and one made up of child-rearing agriculture-practicing females) inside the same society... different social groups, with different relationships to the means of production... reminds me of something, I can't put my finger on.


... ... I don't think it is possible to consider their societies "class societies" in any reasonable way.

I'm not sure we have the same understanding of what 'class relations' constitute then. Seem obvious to me that in fact these are societies where the notion of 'class' has to be taken seriously.

What exactly is the difference between a society where differences in relationship to the means of production are socially determined according to sex, and a society where differences in relationship to the means of production are socially determined according to how many pieces of green paper your parents own? Why is one a class relationship and one not?

[A Marxist Historian]

I asked whether warriors hunted, practiced agriculture or worked for the community. You answered



OK, so they were economic providers as well as warriors, so war wasn't the only form of economy, there was a form of resource acquisition out of war that warriors engaged in. They had multiple social roles and one was to procure food.


I asked if there was a sexual division of labour and you replied



Different social groups (one made up of warring hunting males and one made up of child-rearing agriculture-practicing females) inside the same society... different social groups, with different relationships to the means of production... reminds me of something, I can't put my finger on.



I'm not sure we have the same understanding of what 'class relations' constitute then. Seem obvious to me that in fact these are societies where the notion of 'class' has to be taken seriously.

What exactly is the difference between a society where differences in relationship to the means of production are socially determined according to sex, and a society where differences in relationship to the means of production are socially determined according to how many pieces of green paper your parents own? Why is one a class relationship and one not?

Until very recently at least, you've had strict sexual divisions of labor within the working class, with say women being more likely to work in sweatshops sewing clothing, and men more likely to work in steel mills or coal mines.

Does this mean that men and women workers were in separate social classes, with different relationships to the means of production?

The division between hunters and gatherers in most hunting-gathering societies is not a class difference, it is a gender division of labor difference. One made natural by anatomical differences between men and women, and not necessarily oppressive in any way, shape or form.

By the way, I'm not in the mood today for another ultralengthy response to your ultralengthy response, especially since we've gone way beyond the original question, but one point you made was valid there.

I was speculating imaginatively about female warriors, and your comments brought me to earth. Yes indeed, hunting is actually more likely to be seasonal than gathering, yet another reason why the warriors were likely to be the males not the females.

And of course in such a society men are ultimately more disposable as they are not the child bearers, the most critical function. Which is why pre-class societies were often believed (whether they were or not is I understand a huge subject among anthropologists to this day) to be matriarchal and not patriarchal.

And, oh yes, however you analyze the history of anthropology (and since most nineteenth sciences were racist, why not anthropology too? And archeology for that matter?), no, I for one don't think any contemporary society can be described accurately as "primitive," as all human societies have had tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to evolve.

Now, the Mesolithic, that might well be another matter, but lacking a time machine, I will not opine on that.

-M.H.-

[Luís Henrique]

I'm not sure we have the same understanding of what 'class relations' constitute then. Seem obvious to me that in fact these are societies where the notion of 'class' has to be taken seriously.

What exactly is the difference between a society where differences in relationship to the means of production are socially determined according to sex, and a society where differences in relationship to the means of production are socially determined according to how many pieces of green paper your parents own? Why is one a class relationship and one not?

It would seem that indeed we have very different conceptions of what a class is, and what the relations between classes are.

A class is a group of people that maintain a given relation to means of production, and is a hereditary group, ie, the children of members of a class are normally members of that same class. Accordingly, in a class society, intraclass "marriage" is the rule, and interclass "marriages" are exceptions.

If so, a "class" composed of only males, or only females, is not an actual class, since their relation to the means of production cannot be inherited. Every reproductive act would engage members of different "classes", so "interclass" "marriages" would not only be the rule, but indeed the only to produce offspring. Besides, the children would become members of those "classes" not according to their parents "class", but according to their natural sex. This is completely different from what we observe in actual class societies, be them capitalist, feudal, slave-based, etc.

Moreover, the difference between warring-hunting males and gathering-rearing females seems to me to be not a difference regarding their relation to means of production, but rather the kind of difference we find between people of different professions; we do not consider a teacher and a welder members of different classes, why would we consider a hunter and a gatherer members of different classes?

This doesn't mean, of course, that the relations between genders in a preclassist society were necessarily egalitarian, or even fair; I am pretty sure women were regularly oppressed within them. But not all oppression is class oppression, and gender oppression is particularly and remarkably different from class oppression, as it is routinely and quite often a form of intra-class oppression.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

Engels said that the first class relationship was the sexual division of labour. I don't see any real need to challenge that.

I do challenge the notion that we 'know' that men hunted and women gathered. Y'all are asserting it without any evidence beyond looking at some hunter-gatherer societies that exist now in different material and social conditions. Not good enough, in my opinion. Similar to saying, 'we know what communism will be like in the future, look at North Korea'. Invalid point of comparison.

MH - I too am somewhat weary of the massive to-and-fro, especially as we both acknowledge we're a long way from the point of the original posting. Perhaps we should consider a new thread on 'prehistory and the rise of class societies' or something.

[Luís Henrique]

Engels said that the first class relationship was the sexual division of labour.

Except he didn't. What he said was quite different:


The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.

To him class oppression and sex oppression appeared simultaneously (and he was wrong about it), but he does not say that they are reducible into each other.


I don't see any real need to challenge that.

There is pretty archaeological and anthropological evidence that sex oppression is much older than class oppression.


I do challenge the notion that we 'know' that men hunted and women gathered.

It seems to me a good assumption.


Y'all are asserting it without any evidence beyond looking at some hunter-gatherer societies that exist now in different material and social conditions.

Indeed the existing hunther-gatherer societies (and those that no longer exist, but lasted enough to be the object of the writing of other societies) are certainly quite different from mesolithic and paleolithic societies. Starting with the fact that they are already neolithic, having pottery and actual, if primitive, agriculture.

But we have absolutely no example of societies with different sexual divisions of labour. It would seem that if those existed in the past, they might still exist today, unless there is some reason that they were short-lived when compared to the classic male-hunter/female gatherer societies.


Not good enough, in my opinion. Similar to saying, 'we know what communism will be like in the future, look at North Korea'. Invalid point of comparison.

Well, no, because North Korea is by definition not communist at all, and the existing hunter-gathering societies are still hunter-gathering societies, not something else claiming (or, more precisely, mistakenly understood as claiming) they are hunter-gatherers for ideological reasons.

But, despite of the lack (or rather scarcity) of evidence, the male-hunter/female-gatherer arrangement seems much more logical than the reverse, or even than the absence of sexual division of labour. Hunting is necessarily associated with war, because both rely on the same instruments, and both imply ample mobility. Gathering on the other hand requires much less mobility, and is compatible with the lesser mobility of infants, which are necessarily associated with women at least during pregnancy and lactation. Added to that, a society with fewer women is a society with less reproductive capacity, which is not the case of a society with fewer men, so males are more expendable than females, which means that a society in which females were warriors would be in reproductive disavantage regarding a society in which males were warriors. And so the idea that the classic male-hunter/female-gatherer sexual division of labour must be, if not exclusive, at least strongly dominant among pre-historic humans seems quite sound.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

... Hunting is necessarily associated with war, because both rely on the same instruments, and both imply ample mobility...


No.

This is a ridicluous method.

You have demonstrated neither the existence of war, nor the division of labour; so the fact that there is no evidence for one in fact would be more likely to prove the non-existence of the other, if you're right.

Yes if you pretend that one exists then it's easier to believe in the other, but if you don't pretend then you don't have to believe in either. The Devil becomes much plausible if you believe in God, but using the one to 'prove' the other? No, thanks.

Man, this place is depressingly unscientific sometimes.

[Luís Henrique]

No.

This is a ridicluous method.

You have demonstrated neither the existence of war, nor the division of labour; so the fact that there is no evidence for one in fact would be more likely to prove the non-existence of the other, if you're right.

Yes if you pretend that one exists then it's easier to believe in the other, but if you don't pretend then you don't have to believe in either. The Devil becomes much plausible if you believe in God, but using the one to 'prove' the other? No, thanks.

Man, this place is depressingly unscientific sometimes.

Well. There is the existing evidence, and there is the evidence that we would need, but unhappily doesn't exist.

What we know is that many - most that we know, indeed - hunter-gatherer societies do have sexual division of labour, and do practice war (organised aggression against other societies). Of these, a huge majority does have the male-hunter/female-gatherer sexual division. Examples for North America were given by A Marxist Historian; an example from South America was given by myself.

We also know that these societies we know are not necessarily representative of all pre-classist societies, which existed for an enormous amount of time, and of which very little remains. Pretending that the archaeological register of those societies is enough to clarify whether they had a sexual division of labour or whether they engaged or not in war, is evidently ludicrous. So, as long as we are discussing paleolithic societies, the truth is, we do not know, and the only thing we can do is to speculate.

I don't think speculating that they would have warred and divided labour between male-hunters and female gatherers (like practically all more recent societies we know) is any more, or less, speculative or scientific than speculating that they wouldn't.

What is for sure, however, is that there were and are pre-classist societies which have engaged in war, so whatever happened among paleolithic societies, the emergence of war and the emergence of class division are different processes.

And no amount of misquoting Engels will change that.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

Meh, you're arguing with strawmen not me.

I've already said pages ago that violence between groups in the palaeolithic was possible, so I don't really know who you're arguing against. But it's not certain and no amount of pretending on your part that analogy is proof makes it so.

[Luís Henrique]

I've already said pages ago that violence between groups in the palaeolithic was possible, so I don't really know who you're arguing against.

Basically I am arguing against this:


Engels said that the first class relationship was the sexual division of labour.


I don't see any real need to challenge that.


I do challenge the notion that we 'know' that men hunted and women gathered.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

Basically I am arguing against this:

...
Luís Henrique

OK, you've already said you think Engels was wrong.

How about you explain why?

[RedMaterialist]

Can there really be any doubt that pre-historic (pre written history) humans engaged in war? Pre-columbian american natives were constantly at war, either for territory or vengeance; Tacitus and Caesar both described the Germans' delight in killing each other. The Iceman from the Alps died from an arrow in the back.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of slavery prior to about 3-5,000 years.

[Blake's Baby]

Can there really be any doubt that pre-historic (pre written history) humans engaged in war? Pre-columbian american natives were constantly at war, either for territory or vengeance; Tacitus and Caesar both described the Germans' delight in killing each other. The Iceman from the Alps died from an arrow in the back.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of slavery prior to about 3-5,000 years.

There's a big difference between 'prehistory' and 'pre-class society'. Even I date the arrival of class society (in Europe at least) to c.5000BC, about 3,500 years before there was writing in Europe, and more than 4,000 years before anything that could be considered 'history'. Tacitus's Germans were living in class societies, as you can tell from the references to kings, slaves and whatnot.

If you google 'Oetzi cause of death' you'll see that the idea that Oetzi (sorry no umlauts on this board) was killed by an arrow is not by any means universally accepted among archaeologists.

[Luís Henrique]

OK, you've already said you think Engels was wrong.

How about you explain why?

Of course I can try, though I am sure I am not going to convince you - basically because we adhere to very different definitions of "class" and "exploitation".

Here is Engels sentence:


The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.

First, of course, it is easy to misinterpret that as meaning that sex oppression is class oppression, and from that, as you seem to do, conclude that sexes can somehow be classes. But an attentive reading shows that this is not what the sentence means. What Engels says is that the opposition between classes coincides, historically, with the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage. Of course, it does not exclude the possibility that men and women could have been in antagonic relations within other forms of family organisation; for all we know such antagonism could have been present in clanic group marriage; it just wouldn't be historical contemporary to class oppression.

True, Engels then goes to say that the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. This still doesn't mean that sexual oppression is tantamount to class oppression, much less that the first social classes were the sexes, male and female. It only means that sexual oppression is absolutely necessary for the reproduction of class relations, through reasonably clear rules of inheritance. No monogamous marriage, no possible straightforward inheritance rules, consequently no solid base for property and no smooth reproduction of social inequality.

More or less as things are today: monogamous marriage is absolutely necessary for the reproduction of capitalism (and we see how unfathomable any other family arrangement is for the absolute majority of people in our society, to the point that people can even discuss the possibility of marriage between two people of the same biological sex, but can't figure out the idea of a marriage between three or more people), but there are bourgeois wives and bourgeois husbands as well as proletarian husbands and wives, and of course bachelors of all sexes and classes, with bourgeois husbands routinely oppressing their bourgeois wives and proletarian husbands doing the same to their respective wives.

The problem in Engels' sentence is that he seems to have an excessively restrict idea of what is sexual oppression. The subordination of women to men is much older than social classes; frankly I don't see any society at all that doesn't rely on some kind of oppression against women. And before you bring into discussion the enormous amount of societies about which we know close to nothing, including much of Mesolithic, most of Upper Paleolithic, and practically all Middle and Lower Paleolithic, we should be able to agree that Engels had no more clues about those than any of us.

To the extent of what we actually know about Pre-History, it was evidently plagued with oppression of women and preeminence of men (varying, evidently, from quasi-but-not-quite-egalitarian arrangements to almost demented misogyny), as well as by organised intersocial violence, ie, war; and wherever we find hunter-gatherer "economies" we find male hunters and female gatherers, with rare if any exceptions, and, as far as I am informed, absolutely no "reverse" arrangement of female hunters and male gatherers. As well, wherever we find hunter-gatherer societies, the functions of hunter and warrior are systematically associated, and the functions of gatherer and warrior coincide only in exceptional cases. Of course, again, the case may have been different in the Middle and Lower Paleolithic, but the evidence we have is too thin to decide one way of other.

Unless we are going to deny the existence of classless societies from the Upper Paleolithic (inclusive) on, either we have to admit the existence of sexual inequality in pre-classist societies, or conform our idea of sexual inequality to a standard that was perhaps acceptable in the late 19th century, but can no longer be sustained. And if we are going to deny the existence of classless societies from the Upper Paleolithic on, then we need agree that Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is an outdated book, because it abounds with discussion of Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and even Bronze Age supposedly classless societies.

So either Engels was wrong in seeing sexual equality where a modern eye will see very clear signs of male supremacy, or he was wrong in seeing absence of classes where classes actually existed.

So, basically, I disagree that Engels said that the first class relationship was the sexual division of labour; I think he said a different thing. I also disagree that there is real need to challenge either what was attributed to Engels in the previous point of contention or what I think he actually said. And finally, I must state a qualified disagreement with your challenge to the notion that we 'know' that men hunted and women gathered. Indeed, we don't know whether such was the case for an enormous period of time, but for all the periods of time that we know what the sexual division of labour was, it is the case that men hunted and women gathered. This, as far as I know, is also what Engels believed, as we can see when he discusses the sexual division of labour of pre-agricultural societies:


The “savage” warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman; the “gentler” shepherd, in the arrogance of his wealth, pushed himself forward into the first place and the woman down into the second. And she could not complain. The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house – that her activity was confined to domestic labor – this same cause now ensured the man's supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra.

(I think the idea that the “savage” warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman is a fantasy; evidently hunter-warriors could not own women like shepherds and farmers later could; but the situation was of evident inequality.)

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

This, as far as I know, is also what Engels believed, as we can see when he discusses the sexual division of labour of pre-agricultural societies:

Let me correct the above, which can be easily interpreted as meaning that Engels believed male-hunter/female-gatherer arrangements were the rule before the Upper Paleolithic. To make sure, that was what he (based on the evidence available to him) believed concerning Upper Paleolithic societies.

He however believed that Middle and Lower Paleolithic societies had no "division of labour" between hunting and gathering. But here he could not base his reasoning in existing evidence; he instead had to resort to some "ridiculous method", ie, to speculation. He believed that the "division of labour" between hunting and gathering was only made possible by the invention of the bow (which is the defining technology of the Upper Paleolithic), that made hunting a relatively reliable source of food, and that previous to that hunting as a specialisation was impossible.

It is a compelling argument, even though based on speculation. Whether it is true, that's a different issue.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

In your long post you say 'evidently' when what you claim is 'evident' is not 'evident' at all. You believe that in the Upper Pal, there were sexual division of labour, and warfare. That is all. No evidence has been provided, other than 'well there's sexual division of labour and warfare now.' That's all.

[Luís Henrique]

In your long post you say 'evidently' when what you claim is 'evident' is not 'evident' at all. You believe that in the Upper Pal, there were sexual division of labour, and warfare. That is all. No evidence has been provided, other than 'well there's sexual division of labour and warfare now.' That's all.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0047248487900698

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.10256/abstract;jsessionid=EBC7957AF1979416EDA3DE6E263105 0E.d03t04?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0047248480900500

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2743815?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21101112088411

http://courses.washington.edu/war101/readings/Thorpe_2005.pdf

Luís Henrique

[A Marxist Historian]

Of course I can try, though I am sure I am not going to convince you - basically because we adhere to very different definitions of "class" and "exploitation".

Here is Engels sentence:



First, of course, it is easy to misinterpret that as meaning that sex oppression is class oppression, and from that, as you seem to do, conclude that sexes can somehow be classes. But an attentive reading shows that this is not what the sentence means. What Engels says is that the opposition between classes coincides, historically, with the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage. Of course, it does not exclude the possibility that men and women could have been in antagonic relations within other forms of family organisation; for all we know such antagonism could have been present in clanic group marriage; it just wouldn't be historical contemporary to class oppression.

True, Engels then goes to say that the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. This still doesn't mean that sexual oppression is tantamount to class oppression, much less that the first social classes were the sexes, male and female. It only means that sexual oppression is absolutely necessary for the reproduction of class relations, through reasonably clear rules of inheritance. No monogamous marriage, no possible straightforward inheritance rules, consequently no solid base for property and no smooth reproduction of social inequality.

More or less as things are today: monogamous marriage is absolutely necessary for the reproduction of capitalism (and we see how unfathomable any other family arrangement is for the absolute majority of people in our society, to the point that people can even discuss the possibility of marriage between two people of the same biological sex, but can't figure out the idea of a marriage between three or more people), but there are bourgeois wives and bourgeois husbands as well as proletarian husbands and wives, and of course bachelors of all sexes and classes, with bourgeois husbands routinely oppressing their bourgeois wives and proletarian husbands doing the same to their respective wives.

The problem in Engels' sentence is that he seems to have an excessively restrict idea of what is sexual oppression. The subordination of women to men is much older than social classes; frankly I don't see any society at all that doesn't rely on some kind of oppression against women. And before you bring into discussion the enormous amount of societies about which we know close to nothing, including much of Mesolithic, most of Upper Paleolithic, and practically all Middle and Lower Paleolithic, we should be able to agree that Engels had no more clues about those than any of us.

To the extent of what we actually know about Pre-History, it was evidently plagued with oppression of women and preeminence of men (varying, evidently, from quasi-but-not-quite-egalitarian arrangements to almost demented misogyny), as well as by organised intersocial violence, ie, war; and wherever we find hunter-gatherer "economies" we find male hunters and female gatherers, with rare if any exceptions, and, as far as I am informed, absolutely no "reverse" arrangement of female hunters and male gatherers. As well, wherever we find hunter-gatherer societies, the functions of hunter and warrior are systematically associated, and the functions of gatherer and warrior coincide only in exceptional cases. Of course, again, the case may have been different in the Middle and Lower Paleolithic, but the evidence we have is too thin to decide one way of other.

Unless we are going to deny the existence of classless societies from the Upper Paleolithic (inclusive) on, either we have to admit the existence of sexual inequality in pre-classist societies, or conform our idea of sexual inequality to a standard that was perhaps acceptable in the late 19th century, but can no longer be sustained. And if we are going to deny the existence of classless societies from the Upper Paleolithic on, then we need agree that Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is an outdated book, because it abounds with discussion of Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and even Bronze Age supposedly classless societies.

So either Engels was wrong in seeing sexual equality where a modern eye will see very clear signs of male supremacy, or he was wrong in seeing absence of classes where classes actually existed.

So, basically, I disagree that Engels said that the first class relationship was the sexual division of labour; I think he said a different thing. I also disagree that there is real need to challenge either what was attributed to Engels in the previous point of contention or what I think he actually said. And finally, I must state a qualified disagreement with your challenge to the notion that we 'know' that men hunted and women gathered. Indeed, we don't know whether such was the case for an enormous period of time, but for all the periods of time that we know what the sexual division of labour was, it is the case that men hunted and women gathered. This, as far as I know, is also what Engels believed, as we can see when he discusses the sexual division of labour of pre-agricultural societies:

(I think the idea that the “savage” warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman is a fantasy; evidently hunter-warriors could not own women like shepherds and farmers later could; but the situation was of evident inequality.)

Luís Henrique

A good summary, but I am not as certain as you are, Luis, that Engels and Morgan were wrong and the modern anthropologists are right in asserting that women were always oppressed in all societies in all human history. I tend to think that this conclusion is not unaffected by bourgeois prejudice, rejecting the idea that human liberation is even possible. The logical conclusion would be that women would be oppressed in any socialist society of the future too.

The Native American societies of North America which Morgan saw as the model varied tremendously as to the status of women, but in most of them the status of women was definitely much higher than in European society.

Among the Iroquois by all accounts it was highly egalitarian until men came to the fore because they became more economically dependent on hunting for furs to sell to the colonists than agriculture, the female preserve. In the intricate Iroquois political structure, the male chiefs were originally picked by the women in the villages, not the men.

Extrapolating backwards, something BB hates but is still I think the best tool we really have for prehistory, given the scantiness and difficulty to interpret out of context of archeological remains, I think that the more classless a society was, the more equal was the situation of women. As a general rule, with no doubt zillions of exceptions.

Morgan's image of preclass societies as being matriarchies is probably overblown, but I think the truth is probably somewhere in between his vision and that of cynical bourgeois modern anthropologists.

-M.H.-

[RedMaterialist]

There's a big difference between 'prehistory' and 'pre-class society'. Even I date the arrival of class society (in Europe at least) to c.5000BC, about 3,500 years before there was writing in Europe, and more than 4,000 years before anything that could be considered 'history'. Tacitus's Germans were living in class societies, as you can tell from the references to kings, slaves and whatnot.

If you google 'Oetzi cause of death' you'll see that the idea that Oetzi (sorry no umlauts on this board) was killed by an arrow is not by any means universally accepted among archaeologists.

So, your point is that prior to class society there was no war? There is, I think, plenty of archaeological evidence of mass (maybe 20-30 at a time) violent death before then.

Engels and Morgan believed that in the "savage" (probably at least 10,000BCE) stage of development, there was no class society; but no war before then? That seems pretty unlikely.

As far as Oetzi, a body found with a flint tipped arrow embedded in his back is evidence enough for me that he was murdered or killed in war. Personally, I think he was murdered by someone, probably a son, from his own clan; leading to the Oedipus situation.

[Blake's Baby]

...
Extrapolating backwards, something BB hates but is still I think the best tool we really have for prehistory...

No, I don't hate extrapolation MH, I've already given examples where I think ethnographic parallels work. Binford among the Nunamiut is a classic case but other ethnographic parallels are as good.

What I 'hate' is people pretending that their analogies are some kind of revealed truth. They're not, you don't know, get over it.



So, your point is that prior to class society there was no war? There is, I think, plenty of archaeological evidence of mass (maybe 20-30 at a time) violent death before then...

No. Someone else who doesn't get the point. There may have been war, there may not have been war, what is in short supply is evidence. Some of the examples of violence, as has already been discussed ad nauseum, relate not to organised violence against another social group, but violence inside a group. That's not 'war', that's... peace-keeping? Justice? Religion? We really don't know.


...
Engels and Morgan believed that in the "savage" (probably at least 10,000BCE) stage of development, there was no class society; but no war before then? That seems pretty unlikely...

To you and MH and LH, but not to everyone.


...As far as Oetzi, a body found with a flint tipped arrow embedded in his back is evidence enough for me that he was murdered or killed in war. Personally, I think he was murdered by someone, probably a son, from his own clan; leading to the Oedipus situation.

Oh good, now we're moving from evidence, to prejudice, and on to myth. Fucking brilliant. I applaud your scientific method.

[Blake's Baby]

Damn, DP, sorry.

[RedMaterialist]

OK....accidental death...hey man! i am SO sorry I shot you in the back with a bow and arrow.

[Blake's Baby]

OK....accidental death...hey man! i am SO sorry I shot you in the back with a bow and arrow.

Yeah; because the only explanation, other than 'Oedipus did it', was 'Dick Chaney was hunting deer'.

You're right that they quite literally the only two explanations for any event that may or may not turn up in an Alpine galcier, or probably anywhere else. No sane person could ever think of any explanation that might be outside your amazing complex and forensic 'Was it Oedipus? Yes/No - it was Dick Chaney' matrix of possibilities.

[Luís Henrique]

A good summary, but I am not as certain as you are, Luis, that Engels and Morgan were wrong and the modern anthropologists are right in asserting that women were always oppressed in all societies in all human history.

Like I said, we know little about Middle and Lower Paleolithic. If Engels is right in his argument that at that time hunting could not provide enough "income" to make it a dependable source of food, then actually a sexual division of labour might have had been impossible. And, without a sexual division of labour, it is difficult to see how male supremacy could be prevalent. Especially if, as it is quite possible, the relation between sexual acts and pregnancy was unknown.

But Engels' conclusion here was based on speculation, or, as you put it, on backward extrapolation.


I tend to think that this conclusion is not unaffected by bourgeois prejudice, rejecting the idea that human liberation is even possible. The logical conclusion would be that women would be oppressed in any socialist society of the future too.

It may be a conclusion, but it seems to me far from logical. Even if bourgeois anthropology/archeology/pre-history could prove beyond doubt that there always has been sexual - and even class - oppression throughout human existence, it does not follow that those cannot be abolished in the future.

This debate seems to me plagued by the idea that one of the opposed suppositions of Hobbes and Rousseau must be true: either Hobbes was right, and "human nature" makes human life necessarily rife with war and violence unless some greater power - the State - imposes peace through its own monopoly of violence, or Rousseau was right, and "human nature" makes men naturally peaceful and cooperative unless some mysterious deus ex machina corrupts us.

But this is a fallacy of excluded middle; both opinions are idealistic and false. Human history isn't determined by any metaphysical "human nature", but what we call "human nature" is determined by human history. If the material conditions of our existence require fight, we can fight; if they require cooperation, we cooperate.

Luís Henrique

[Hexen]

A good summary, but I am not as certain as you are, Luis, that Engels and Morgan were wrong and the modern anthropologists are right in asserting that women were always oppressed in all societies in all human history. I tend to think that this conclusion is not unaffected by bourgeois prejudice, rejecting the idea that human liberation is even possible. Morgan's image of preclass societies as being matriarchies is probably overblown, but I think the truth is probably somewhere in between his vision and that of cynical bourgeois modern anthropologists.

That's exactly what Modern anthropologists are as bolded above. They're simply products of their own society to justify and uphold the current capitalist system by asserting that human liberation is impossible which sounds good on bourgeois ears and prevents any further class struggles.

[RedMaterialist]

The gentile, matrimonial kinship system of the clan must have been matriarchal. How else can you explain that a person's identity with the clan is inherited through the mother?

[Luís Henrique]

The gentile, matrimonial kinship system of the clan must have been matriarchal. How else can you explain that a person's identity with the clan is inherited through the mother?

That's matrilineal, not matriarchal.

Jewishness is inherited through the mother; a Jew is a person whose mother is a Jew (and a person whose father is Jew but whose mother is a Gentile is not a Jew). But the social organisation of Jews is strongly patriarchal. So these are very different issues.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

The gentile, matrimonial kinship system of the clan must have been matriarchal. How else can you explain that a person's identity with the clan is inherited through the mother?

In the end we don't know that identity was inherited through the mother, again that's speculation. Speculation that makes sense, I think, but as I've been spending pages criticising acceptance of other speculation, I have to criticise the acceptance of this speculation too.

It's all just speculation, what one considers to be most probable.

[A Marxist Historian]

That's matrilineal, not matriarchal.

Jewishness is inherited through the mother; a Jew is a person whose mother is a Jew (and a person whose father is Jew but whose mother is a Gentile is not a Jew). But the social organisation of Jews is strongly patriarchal. So these are very different issues.

Luís Henrique

Yes. Side note I have always found interesting, but which nobody in the USA wants to think about, whether white, black, Jewish, goyish or other.

By those rules, which most certainly are those of the Jewish community to this day, including in the USA, Obama is Jewish. And under Israeli law, has the Right of Return.

-M.H.-

[RedMaterialist]

In the end we don't know that identity was inherited through the mother, again that's speculation. Speculation that makes sense, I think, but as I've been spending pages criticising acceptance of other speculation, I have to criticise the acceptance of this speculation too.

It's all just speculation, what one considers to be most probable.

There is plenty of evidence from native american history that the matriarchal clan was the social structure of society. The rule of marriage (of having kids) was that you could not marry anyone from your own clan. Thus a husband and wife never can be from the same clan. All a woman's children and the children of her sisters and brothers are part of the same clan.

The males had no control over this system primarily because they did not know for sure who their own children were. Once private property and ownership of the property by males developed they became extremely interested in making sure their property passed by inheritance to their own children. According to Engels and Morgan, private property destroyed matriarchy and mother right associated with it.

[Luís Henrique]

The males had no control over this system primarily because they did not know for sure who their own children were.

Yes. They did not have control over the reproduction of their society.

It doesn't mean that they did not keep all interesting activities (hunting, war) to themselves, while confining women to the boring ones (child rearing, cooking, cleaning), nor that they did not exclude women from the important decisions (when to move and where to, who to wage war against and who to befriend, etc.)

The confusion between matrilinearity and matriarchy tends to establish a very low standard for what should pass for equal rights for women and men. And of this Engels is partially guilty (though he does try to distinguish one from another).

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

TTacitus's Germans were living in class societies, as you can tell from the references to kings, slaves and whatnot.

One thing we cannot know for sure is whether Tacitus was being objective in analysing German societies, or reading Roman institutions into them.

The Portuguese (and the French) saw kings among the Tupi-Guarani, but there weren't any; they misinterpreted a very different society along the categories of their own. Tacitus might have done the same.

Luís Henrique

[Blake's Baby]

Which is rather my point about going to anthropological texts to ascertain what the structure of any society is.

Portuguese and French ethnographers; wrong about the Tupi-Guarani, you claim. So who was right about the Tupi-Guarani?

Tacitus; wrong about the Germans, you suggest. So who, do you suggest, was right about the Germans? Who gives us evidence of how Germanic societies were organised?

If you're right, and the French and Portuguese ethnographers were wrong, and your speculation about Tacitus is right and the Roman ethnographers were wrong, it rather destroys the notion that ethnogrpahy (ie, comparative anthropology) is a useful tool. What if the other ethnographers are wrong, the ones you agree with?

Couple of years ago while investigating gender in archaeology I read a really interesting paper from an anthropologist who was researching the traditional societies of southern Mexico. Anyway, she recounts a story about discussing with an old man, sitting on the verandah outside his house. 'I've lived in this house for 41 years...' ('43 years!' comes a voice from inside the house) '...43 years, and have eight children and 11 grandchildren...' ('12 grandchildren!' comes the voice from inside) '12 grandchildren, my wife and I have been married for 40 years...' ('41 years!' comes the voice again) '...41 years...'

Every time the old man made a mistake, his wife would correct him from inside the house, but she was never visible, and never directly acknowleged by either the old man or the anthropologist. Pondering this afterwards, the anthropologist decided that this was a culture where women are prevented from meeting outsiders, confined to the house, and their contributions are not acknowleged, while men assume public roles relating to guests and visitors. Pretty obviously signs of a male-dominated culture.

Pondering some more she wondered how she would have interpreted the situation had she been talking to the old woman on the verandah, and the old man had been inside the house correcting her. In that case, she thought probably, she'd have reasoned that the man's unseen corrections would have indicated that even though he was not physically present, he still excercised control over his wife's interactions with outsiders. Pretty obviously the sign of a male-dominated culture.

The point of this is to demonstrate exactly the opposite evidence could produce exactly the same result in the mind of an anthropologist determined (or conditioned) to see a male dominated culture. In this case, how would an anthropologist detect a female-dominated culture? How could they detect a culture with neither male- nor female-domination?

Likewise; Tacitus could have mapped Roman institutions onto the Germans, the French could have mapped feudal social institutions onto the Tupi-Guarani, bourgeois anthropologists could have mapped bourgois divisions of labour onto almost anyone...

Anthropology is not a reliable guide even to the behaviour we observe now; still less to behaviour in the past.

[robbo203]

Talking about war and slavery etc etc, I think it is important not to fall for the crap put around by the likes of Stephen Pinker & co that hunter-gatherer societies were comparatively violent. The opposite is true - at least if we are talking about simple HG societies or band-based societies - what we humans lived in for 95% of our time here on this planet - as opposed to complex HG societies which are tribe-based. Pinker did not seem to appreciate the difference - he is no anthroplogist - and has shot himself in the foot repeatedly with claims about HG violence when the examples he produced were not even Hunter-gatherer societies at all but settled agricultural groups!

See for example this link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-ryan/pinkers-dirty-war-on-preh_b_1187329.html



Pinker based much of his evidence on the findings of archeologists like Lawrence Keeley but even Keeley does not support the claim that HG societies were violent as such. In fact the very way of life militated against violence. There is nothing much to fight over when you can simply move on as nomadic bands tend to do. It is with sedentarisation and the emergence of territories that you begin to have something to fight over . Not only that, internal agrression in HG bands is usually resolved by a process of fission - some band members peeling off to start up another band (sorry if this sounds like the rock music scene :D.)

There is an enormous amount of anthropological evidence to suggest that relationships between bands even in inhospitable environments such as central Australia and the Kalahari desert were basically cooperative rather than conflictual and involved extended networks of gift exchanges that could cover vast areas, hundreds of kilometres in length

There is a great article by Brian Ferguson who is reputedly the worlds leading expert on early warfare which dispels so much of the mythology surrounding hunter-gatherer societies. Check it out here


http://iweb.tntech.edu/kosburn/history-444/birth_of_war.htm

[A Marxist Historian]

Yes. They did not have control over the reproduction of their society.

It doesn't mean that they did not keep all interesting activities (hunting, war) to themselves, while confining women to the boring ones (child rearing, cooking, cleaning), nor that they did not exclude women from the important decisions (when to move and where to, who to wage war against and who to befriend, etc.)

The confusion between matrilinearity and matriarchy tends to establish a very low standard for what should pass for equal rights for women and men. And of this Engels is partially guilty (though he does try to distinguish one from another).

Luís Henrique

Oh, I dunno, I think childrearing, even though the lil' buggers get annoying, is a pleasanter occupation than war, and probably than hunting too. And cooking can get interesting too. As for cleaning, I don't think there was a lot of that back then.

Women not men bear the children, and the fact is that mothers have an instinctual bond with children which is definitely genetic and stronger than the general and also probably genetic fondness of all humans for small animals, human or otherwise. The father-child bond is essentially cultural not instinctive, IMHO.

Plus, men have greater upper body strength, which means they are just plain better at war and hunting at early technological levels.

Not any more. There was a saying in the Old American West, "God created man and woman, but Colonel Colt made them equal."

So in short, the classic male-female division of labor in hunting-gathering societies was not necessarily oppressive, and in fact probably a good idea.

-M.H.-

[Luís Henrique]

So in short, the classic male-female division of labor in hunting-gathering societies was not necessarily oppressive, and in fact probably a good idea.

It was quite certainly a good idea. And we have to put things into their historic context; in the context of hunter-gathering society it is not like there was any less oppressive option at hand. What was that bearded guy said? "Mankind only puts the problems that it can solve", or something like that.

But clearly, in an industrial society, the sexual labour division between male providers and female caretakers - that is the paleolithic heritage among us - is oppressive, and needs to go.

Or, in other words, we cannot liberate the past (there was a poster here who once accused me of being a "sicko" because I made a rough description of what the relations between the biological sexes were in a hunter-gatherer society; apparently I was being oppressive towards paleolithic females...)

Luís Henrique

[Bakunin Knight]

Slavery came about in different ways:
1) Kidnapping. In fact the Biblical commandment not to steal actually refers to kidnapping rather than petty theft.
2) Debt slavery. Farmers would take on debt either to give them enough capital to prepare for the next season or simply to survive. Using their own selves as collateral, they would become slaves on failure to pay back the debt. This practice is attested both at early Athens and at early Rome.
3) Selling of offspring. Since children were controlled by their parents (which as Engels argued can itself be considered slavery), they could be sold off as slaves to other individuals. This happened in early Rome.
4) War. Those defeated in war were considered subjects of the victors, since it was the latter who had sway over whether they lived or died.
5) Crime. Criminals were often enslaved and forced to work the most dangerous jobs, e.g. mining.

If you extend the definition of slavery beyond chattel slavery and to whole communities, the rise of proto-states of clan bandits could also be considered another origin of slavery.