12.09.2013

Anthropology: Engels was right

In April Sheila McGregors Marxism and womens oppression today was published in the Socialist Workers Partys International Socialism. The journal declined to carry this response from radical anthropologist and SWP member Lionel Sims

Sheila McGregor’s defence of Engels’ The origin of the family, private property and the state can be strengthened.¹

In his and Marx’s claim that our ancestors were communist, Engels used five methods to reconstruct our human and cultural origins - the social anthropology of extant pre-state societies, the Darwinian limits to ape social systems, archaeology, Indo-European linguistics and mythology. Over the last 50 years there has been a revolution in all of these disciplines and the rise of entirely new sciences, in particular molecular biology and behavioural ecology. All of them have overturned the traditional bourgeois theory of prehistory and all of them lend support to Engels’ original claims.

These issues matter to us as revolutionary socialists for the same reason it mattered to Marx and Engels and matters to Sheila - the struggles we are in today are fought out through what we think happened in the past. Engels wrote The origin to answer the utopian socialist publication on the ‘woman question’ by August Bebel because it was politically important to do so.² So it is today for us. Now that a new wave of feminism is beginning, we need to be clear about how modern science can be drawn upon to defend the Marxist tradition. As long as we are aware of these scientific developments, the political left can be strengthened by the knowledge that the essential claims of Engels are confirmed by their latest findings.

Sheila notes the sociality and empathy of some apes, and argues that this must be a precondition for the evolution of our ancestors. Which leads on to the question of what our ancestor had to do to stop being an ape. The key issue is economics - no ape male provisions a female ape, whether she has his baby or not. Ape males are interested in estrus females and, once a female stops her estrus cycle, they lose all interest in her. These ape males then compete amongst themselves in attempts to monopolise estrus-cycling females, and from this emerges a ranked hierarchy. Competing males are a political superstructure, beneath which the females, depending on species and ecology, collectively or individually forage and reproduce.

Contrarily hunter-gatherer men gain a partner through bride service, mainly by the provisioning of hunted meat to her and her blood kin. Women in their clan relations with classificatory brothers and sisters collectively resist and negate any attempts at dominance by any individual. So in provisioning and egalitarianism human society is not just quantitatively more social or empathic than ape society, but a qualitative transformation. Animal sexual competition is overthrown in the service of the economic provisioning of females. Engels was correct in emphasising this point and is supported by all the evidence of modern primatology.³ “Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was, however, the first condition for the building of those large and enduring groups, in the midst of which alone the transition from ape to man could be achieved.”⁴ This is not to downplay the important provisioning role of women in hunter-gatherer societies, but in ape society females do all the provisioning for themselves and their offspring, while ape males do nothing for them. For our ancestors’ revolutionary break with animality a system of male provisioning had to be established in addition to female foraging.

Female coalitions

How could a hormonally driven bipedal ape like our ancestor, australopithecus afarensis, evolve into cognitively driven modern humans? In some way alpha-dominance systems of competition for females was overthrown for egalitarian bride service systems. Engels argued that female coalitions must have been crucial in this change. Science now agrees with that.⁵ Sheila calls attention to our loss of estrus. We can always say no to sex - an estrus ape cannot. Estrus is a public signal of the short period of ovulation, and is an involuntary ‘yes’ sexual signal to all males, and this mainly associates sex with reproduction. For the rest of their cycle most female apes cannot have sex.

While apes have estrus and very little menstruation, they also have a tendency for ovulatory synchrony. This allows ape females to change the organisation of the group according to whether they do or do not synchronise their estrus. If they synchronise the alpha male cannot monopolise all the females, and the females draw more males into the breeding system. If they are asynchronous then the alpha male can guard individual estrus females and successfully outcompete other males.

According to the social and ecological context, ape females therefore modulate the level of organisation of the group, and evolution has selected the sexual apparatus to achieve this. But human female sexual anatomy is not just different from that of the ape female - it is the opposite. We have lost estrus as a public signal of ovulation and can have sex at any time of our cycle, so it is not necessarily linked to reproduction or heterosexual sex. But as biology we have exaggerated menstruation as a public signal - the opposite to an ape sexual cycle. An ape has a short period of ‘yes’ and a long period of ‘no’; we have a long period of ‘yes’ and the wide currency of menstrual taboos culturally construct this as a period of ‘no’, even though there is no physical reason not to have sex. We also have a tendency, especially amongst collectivised and socially bonded females, for menstrual synchrony.⁶ Our evolution has selected it. When two systems are the opposite of each other, then in their difference they share the same structural properties, but have reversed their organisation. Therefore, while apes synchronise estrus, they draw in more males when it suits them, and when we synchronise menstruation we are building strong coalitions to enhance our bargaining power.

Sheila points to where our hunter-gatherer women ancestors would have conducted this bargaining. They are not isolated in nuclear families, as we are today, but lived in what Engels referred to, following Morgan, the “communistic household”: “The communistic household, in which most or all of the women belong to one and the same gens [clan], while the men come from various gentes [clans], is the material foundation of that supremacy of women which was general in primitive times ...”⁷ When all the sisters who could trace a common line of descent through their mothers lived together, along with their classificatory brothers, men from other matrilineal clans visited them as temporary ‘husbands’. Blood kinship, synchronised and living together with their brothers on call if necessary, therefore put women in a strong bargaining position in their pairing relationships. A large research team has shown that this is exactly how our ancestors were organised in sub-Saharan Africa. Destro-Bisol and colleagues⁸ have shown how the MitDNA, compared to the Y-chromosome evidence, supports the interpretation that our ancestors were matrilineal and matrilocal.

Sheila also emphasises that our ancestors included regular meat consumption in their diet. If we add to this the important acquisition of the control of fire early in our evolution, then cooking meat externalises a lot of the digestive process, reduces the need for a long gut and changes our energetic balances, allowing our metabolism to support a large brain.⁹ The grasslands of the world were full of big, herbivorous animals until about 10,000 years ago, and these were ideal naturally, given ‘objects of labour’ for modern hunter humans.¹⁰ Therefore as visiting husbands to women in a strong negotiating position, hunters’ gifts of meat would have been the ideal way to gain favour with women who have highly dependent, large-brained offspring.

Without assuming language, how might a women’s coalition have obtained this regular meat consumption? Recent research suggests that the simplest and most direct way would be by reversing the Darwinian signals of an animal mate recognition system. For successful reproduction all animals must check whether they are approaching the right species of the right sex at the right time. In mime and masquerade we can perform the ‘We are the wrong species, the wrong sex and this is the wrong time’ dance. If we ever saw a line of female chimpanzees in mime and masquerade synchronously performing that they are zebras, wearing a zebra’s penis and covered in red ochre, then we would have to admit them to citizenship of the human race.¹¹

Apes do not laugh together but we do.¹² When males were prepared to join the joke in a carnivalesque collective belly laugh, we find the act that established a mode of producing meat exchange rather than just assuming private meat consumption. Those who cannot see the joke are selected out of the clans, between which men oscillate from sister to ‘wife’ and back again. Laughter, acting as collective reverse dominance,¹³ becomes a productive force. This theory helps to explain otherwise paradoxical archaeological evidence.

Watts¹⁴ has shown that north and south African red ochre mining and use was general and sustained by 120,000 years ago and being used for the symbolism of menstrual blood, not for other utilitarian purposes. Prehistoric rock art displays large game animals and rows of dancing women synchronised through their vulvas.¹⁵ Marshak¹⁶ has shown that lunar ‘calendar’ sticks emphasise the period of dark moon, which suggests an ancient engagement with the moon.

All of these components are consistent with and predicted by sex strike theory, which sees the origins of culture in women’s dark-moon, synchronous, menstrual blood seclusion rituals, which signalled for eligible sexual partners to conduct a collective hunt for meat provisioning at full moon.¹⁷

Dead theory

It was generally accepted in the 60s that Gordon Childe’s theory of the rapid displacement of hunting by agriculture led to the first surplus product that would support civilisation and assure subsistence to a growing population.¹⁸ This theory is dead. Science now looks to the collapse in the big game hunting societies at the end of the Palaeolithic and the adaptations that had to be made in the Mesolithic and Neolithic that followed.¹⁹

In south east Europe, at Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia, before Neolithic agriculture, hunters built large stone monuments, which in later forms did not match the size or elaboration of the first hunters’ achievements.²⁰ According to Gordon Childe’s theory, this should not have been possible. We now know that in north-west Europe Mesolithic hunters were not displaced by agriculturalists, but it was they who selectively adopted cattle herding, continued hunting and chose not to switch to arable farming.²¹ The change to cattle pastoralism provides a direct explanation of women’s first oppression, in which bride-service hunted meat was displaced by bride-price cattle purchase. Where once women could always rely on her blood kin supporting her in her heterosexual relationships, now those same kin had an interest in downplaying those responsibilities and thereby keep hold of the cattle they had received for her purchase.

In giving cattle men could now take a woman to his household and keep her children as his. Before cattle herding her children had belonged to all her brothers and sisters in her matrilineal/matrilocal clan. Now with patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence women and children became the chattels of men’s cattle exchanges²². The connection between women’s status and cattle is clear. Wherever there are cattle in Africa, there are patrilineages, and in the tsetse fly belt, where cattle cannot survive, there are matrilineal societies.²³ “… property: the nucleus, the first form of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband.”²⁴ And out of the differential ownership and competition for cattle amongst ranked men emerged the first social classes.

We can reconstruct the story of these first class struggles that oppressed women, as men divided. Indo-European poetics reveals the struggles between matrilineal and patrilineal kin in cultures as widely apart as Iceland and Sri Lanka. In Marxism content determines form. So to find the same mythical forms transcending ancient productive modes, from cattle pastoralism to hydraulic agriculture, cannot be explained as ideological superstructures. These origin myths must therefore be the forms of an earlier content - a universal form that must be the echo of an earlier mode of production in prehistory. Linguists are now reconstructing the origin myths of our ancestors that point towards our common origin as a higher form of living. All the world’s origin myths are gender-inflected Eden myths.²⁵

We need to engage with the latest research and explore and test its political implications. Advances that sum to a revolution in knowledge across five disciplines support the claims of Marx and Engels for an ‘ur-communism’²⁶ in our origins. We need to stretch out our arms further to grasp the new science and so be forearmed for the opportunities ahead.

Notes

1. S McGregor, ‘Marxism and women’s oppression today’ International Socialism April 2013.

2. L Vogel Marxism and the oppression of women London 1983, p75.

3. See R Dunbar Primate social systems London 1988.

4. F Engels (1884) The origin of the family, private property and the state Moscow 1968, pp35-36.

5. S Schultz, C Opie and QD Atkinson, ‘Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates’ Nature Vol 479, No 219, November 10 2011.

6. A Gosline, ‘Do women who live together menstruate together?’ Scientific American December 7 2007.

7. F Engels (1884) The origin of the family, private property and the state London 1986, p79.

8. G Destro-Bisol, F Donati, V Coia, I Boschi, F Verginelli, A Caglia, S Tofanelli, G Spedini and C Capelli, ‘Variation of female and male lineages in sub-Saharan populations: the importance of sociocultural factors Molecular Biology and Evolution No21, 2004, pp1673-82.

9. C Power, L Aiello, ‘Female proto-symbolic strategies, in LD Hager (ed) Women in human evolution London 1997.

10. PS Martin Twilight of the mammoths California 2005.

11. C Power, I Watts, ‘The woman with the zebra’s penis: gender, mutability and performance’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 3, No3, 1997.

12. J Huizinga Homo ludens London 1971.

13. C Boehm Hierarchy in the forest: the evolution of egalitarian behaviour Harvard 2001.

14. I Watts, ‘Red ochre, body painting and language: interpreting the Blombos ochre’ in R Botha and C Knight (eds) The cradle of language Oxford 2009.

15. A Marshack The roots of civilisation: the cognitive beginnings of man’s first art, symbol and notation London 1972.

16. Ibid.

17. C Knight Blood relations: menstruation and the origins of culture Yale 1991.

18. GV Childe What happened in history? London 1942.

19. CJ Stevens and DQ Fuller, ‘Did Neolithic farming fail? The case for a Bronze Age agricultural revolution in the British Isles’ Antiquity No86, 2012, pp707-22; PS Martin Twilight of the mammoths California 2005; M Alinei, ‘Towards a generalised continuity model for Uralic and Indo-European languages’ in K Julku (ed) The roots of peoples and languages of Northern Eurasia IV, 2002: www.continuitas.org/texts/alinei_generalised.pdf.

20. CC Mann, ‘Dawn of civilisation’ National Geographic June 2011, pp39-59.

21. CJ Stevens and DQ Fuller, ‘Did Neolithic farming fail? The case for a Bronze Age agricultural revolution in the British Isles’ Antiquity No86, 2012, pp707-22.

2012.

22. R Mace and C Holden, ‘Evolutionary ecology and cross-cultural comparison: the case of matrilineal descent in sub-Saharan Africa’ in PC Lee (ed) Comparative primate socioecology Cambridge 1999, pp387-405.

23. GP Murdock Africa: its peoples and their culture history New York 1959.

24. K Marx and F Engels in D McClellan (ed) Karl Marx: selected writings Oxford 1977, p169.

25. See M Pagel, QD Atkinson, AS Calude and A Meade, ‘Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia’ (2013): www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/01/1218726110.full.pdf+html; JP Mallory and DQ Adams The Oxford introduction to proto-Indo-European and the proto-Indo-European world Oxford 2006; C Watkins How to kill a dragon: aspects of Indo-European poetics Oxford 1995.