Agriculture/Farming Class

[tradeunionsupporter]

Is Agriculture/Farming a reason to why Humans went from classless societies to class based societies did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels say this ?

http://www-student.unl.edu/cis/hist1...sn11-tp10.html

http://www.marxism.org.uk/pack/history.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_history

[MaciejRozga]

Is Agriculture/Farming a reason to why Humans went from classless societies to class based societies did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels say this ?

No. According to Engels, not agriculture, but the invention of iron created a class society:

Iron was now at the service of man, the last and most important of all the raw materials which played a historically revolutionary role – until the potato. Iron brought the tillage of large areas, the clearing of wide tracts of virgin forest; iron gave to the handicraftsman tools so hard and sharp that no stone, no other known metal could resist them. All this came gradually (...) Wealth increased rapidly, but as the wealth of individuals. The products of weaving, metal-work and the other handicrafts, which were becoming more and more differentiated, displayed growing variety and skill. In addition to corn, leguminous plants and fruit, agriculture now provided wine and oil, the preparation of which had been learned. Such manifold activities were no longer within the scope of one and the same individual; the second great division of labor took place: handicraft separated from agriculture. The continuous increase of production and simultaneously of the productivity of labor heightened the value of human labor-power. Slavery, which during the preceding period was still in its beginnings and sporadic, now becomes an essential constituent part of the social system; slaves no longer merely help with production - they are driven by dozens to work in the fields and the workshops

(Frederick Engels, "Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State")

[tradeunionsupporter]

Yes but did Agriculture/Farming have anything to do with the change from Classless Society to Class Society ?

[Apoi_Viitor]

Yes but did Agriculture/Farming have anything to do with the change from Classless Society to Class Society ?

Yes there's a distinct difference in the class characteristics of a primitive hunter-gatherer society and any sort of non-subsistence based agricultural society.

[Ose]

I would imagine that the advent of agriculture had something to do with it, simply because it gave birth to society as we know it. Previously, people could only live in small groups, needing a relatively large hunting/gathering territory to support their needs. Agriculture allowed larger populations to be concentrated into one community, a necessary condition for the development of economic classes.

[tbasherizer]

It's not enough to quote Engels to hand-wave away the transformation to society that agriculture represented. Modern anthropologists have much more information at their disposal, and can therefore come to better conclusions about the chronology of pre-historic class struggle than Engels could in the nineteenth century.

The idea that we even started out classless may just be a memetic vestige of Rousseau's "Noble savage" farce.

To answer the OP, farming certainly did shape the class landscape. The surpluses of food and the stratification its allocation could induce defined class society. In our age, the proletarianization of rural farmers is also transforming the class landscape.