by Chris Harman
Natural catastrophes, exhaustion of the land and wars could create conditions of acute crisis in a non-class agricultural society, making it difficult for the old order to continue. This would encourage dependence on new productive techniques. But these could only be widely adopted if some wealthy households or lineages broke completely with their old obligations. What had been wealth to be given away to others in return for prestige became wealth to consume while others suffered: ‘In advanced forms of chieftainship … what begins with the would-be headman putting his production to others’ benefit ends, to some degree, with others putting their production to the chief’s benefit’. 66
At the same time warfare allowed some individuals and lineages to gain great prestige as they concentrated loot and the tribute from other societies in their hands. Hierarchy became more pronounced, even if it remained hierarchy associated with the ability to give things to others. 67
There was nothing automatic about this process. In many parts of the world societies were able to prosper right through to modern times without resorting to labour-intensive methods such as the use of heavy ploughs or extensive hydraulic works. This explains the survival until relatively recent times of what are misleadingly called ‘primitive’ societies in Papua New Guinea, the Pacific islands and parts of Africa, the Americas and south east Asia. But in other conditions survival came to depend on adopting new techniques. Ruling classes arose out of the organisation of such activities and, with them, towns, states and what we usually call civilisation. From this point onwards the history of society certainly was the history of class struggle. Humanity increased its degree of control over nature, but at the price of most people becoming subject to control and exploitation by privileged minority groups.
Such groups could only keep the surplus in their own hands at times when the whole of society was suffering great hardship if they found ways of imposing their will on the rest of society by establishing coercive structures – states. Control over the surplus provided them with the means to do so, by hiring armed men and investing in expensive techniques such as metal working which could give them a monopoly of the most efficient means of killing.
Armed force is most effective when backed by legal codes and ideologies which sanctify ruling-class power by making it seem like the source of people’s livelihoods. In Mesopotamia, for example, ‘Early kings boast of their economic activities, of cutting canals, of building temples, of importing timber from Syria, and copper and granite from Oman. They are sometimes depicted on monuments in the garb of bricklayers or masons and of architects receiving the plan of the temple from the gods’. 68
Not only could rulers think of themselves as the embodiment of society’s highest values – so too, in certain circumstances, could those they exploited. By the very fact of absorbing society’s surplus, of having control of its means of reproducing itself, the rulers could come to symbolise society’s power for those below them – to be seen as gods, or at least as the necessary intermediaries between the mass of society and its gods. Hence the god-like attributes of the pharaohs of Egypt or the priestly attributes of the first ruling classes of Mesopotamia and Meso-America.
Religious notions of sorts had existed in pre-class societies. People had ascribed to magical beings control over the apparently mysterious processes which led some plants to flower and not others, to the years of bountiful hunting and years of hunger, to unexpected and sudden deaths. With the appearance of classes and states people also had to come to terms with the existence of social powers beyond their own control. It was at this stage that organised religious institutions arose. Worshipping the gods became a way of society worshipping its own power, of people giving an alienated recognition to their own achievements. This, in turn, enhanced the control of those who claimed to be responsible for these achievements – those who gave orders to the mass of producers, monopolised the surplus in their own hands and used armed force against anyone rejecting their claims.
Once such state structures and ideologies were in existence, they would perpetuate the control of the surplus by a certain group even when it no longer served the purpose of advancing production. A class that emerged as a spur to production would persist even when it was no longer such a spur.
The character of the first class societies
We usually think of class societies as based on private property. But private property is not a feature of all societies divided into classes. Karl Marx referred to an ‘Asiatic’ form of class society in which private property did not exist at all. Instead, he argued, the rulers were able, through their collective control of the state machine, to exploit entire peasant communities which farmed the land jointly without private ownership. He believed this picture applied to Indian society at the time of the British conquest in the eighteenth century. Much modern research suggests he was at least partially mistaken. 69 But the early history of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Meso-American and South American civilisations does seem to fit his model.
The social surplus was in the hands of the priests who ran the temples or of the king-led administrators of the palaces. They got hold of it through their direction of certain aspects of production – irrigation and flood control works, the labour of dependent peasants on the temple or palace lands, and control over trade. But neither the priests nor the palace administrators exercised private control or ownership. They benefited from class exploitation only in so far as they were part of a collective ruling group.
At the bottom of society peasant production does not seem to have been based on private ownership of land, either. The communal forms of organisation of economic life which characterise pre-class agricultural societies still seem to have survived, although in a distorted form now that the majority had lost control of the surplus. People still carried out their labours on the basis of a system of reciprocal obligations to each other, organised through the remnants of the old kin lineages. So in Mesopotamia patriarchal clans (lineage groups run by the allegedly senior male) controlled the land not in the hands of the temples, while the mass of peasant producers in Mexico as late as the Aztec period (the fifteenth century) were organised through calpulli – lineage groups which were ‘highly stratified internally’, 70 with those at the top imposing the demands of the ruling class on the rest – and among the Incas through similar aylulli . 71 Archaeologists and anthropologists have often used the term ‘conical clans’ to describe such groups. They retained the formal appearance of the lineages of pre-class society, linking groups of nuclear families to a mythical common ancestor, 72 but now organised the labour of the exploited class in the interests of the exploiting class, acting as both units of production and social control.
In much of Eurasia and Africa private property was to develop among both the ruling class and the peasantry, but only over many centuries, with deep splits within ruling classes, bloody wars and sharp conflicts between exploited and exploiting classes.
Chapter 4
Women’s oppression
Women everywhere lost out with the polarisation of society into classes and the rise of the state. There was a shift in their status, described by Frederick Engels more than a century ago as ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’. From being co-decision-makers with men, they were thrust into a position of dependence and subordination. The exact nature of the subordination varied enormously from one class society to another, and from class to class in each society. But it existed everywhere that class existed. So universal did it become that even today it is usually treated as an invariant product of human nature.
The change was rooted in the new relations that grew up between people with the production of a surplus. The new intensive production techniques tended to prioritise men’s labour over women’s for the first time. Gathering, the main source of nutrition for hunter-gatherer societies, had been fully compatible with childbearing and breastfeeding. So had early forms of agriculture based on the hoe. But heavy ploughing and herding of ca
ttle and horses were not. Societies in which women did these things would have low birthrates and stagnating populations, and lose out to societies which excluded most women from these roles. Gordon Childe pointed out long ago that among ‘barbarians’, purely agricultural peoples, ‘whereas women normally hoe plots it is men who plough. And even in the oldest Sumerian and Egyptian documents the ploughmen really are males’. 73 He suggested, ‘The plough … relieved women of the most exacting drudgery, but deprived them of the monopoly over the cereal crops and the social status which it conferred’. 74 Key decisions about the future of the household or lineage became male decisions, since it was males who would implement them. Other changes which accompanied the growth of the surplus had a similar impact. Women could engage in local trade, and there were cases of women playing a part in warfare. But long-distance trade and serious soldiering became male monopolies. Warriors and merchants were overwhelmingly male – and, as they increasingly exercised control over the surplus, ownership and power tended to become male prerogatives. The break-up of the old clan lineages accentuated the trend. The individual adult woman was no longer part of a wider network of relationships which gave her some say over the use of productive means and some protection against arbitrary treatment. Instead, she became simply a ‘wife’, a subordinate in a strange household. 75 Ruling-class women were increasingly treated as one more possession of a male controller of the surplus, valued as an ornament, a source of sexual pleasure or a breeder of heirs. They would be protected from hardship and external dangers, but also cocooned from any interaction with the wider social world. Life was very different for women in agricultural or artisan households. They still had a productive role and were engaged in endless toil. Nevertheless, it was their husbands who controlled relations between the household and the rest of society, imposing on the women and children the measures needed to ensure the household’s survival (including successive pregnancies for the wife). 76 Among the exploiting and the exploited classes alike there was literally ‘patriarchy’ – rule of the father over the other members of the household. Its imprint was soon to be found in all ideologies and all religions. Female gods and priestesses increasingly played a secondary role, surviving as mother figures or symbols of beauty rather than as active participants in the creation and organisation of the world.
Women’s roles were not changeless or uniform across all classes and societies. Women’s oppression among the peasantry took a very different form to that among the aristocracies – and a different form again among slaves who, whether male or female, were not allowed to live in households of their own. Widows were common everywhere, because of relatively high death rates among young male adults, and they often ended up running a peasant or artisan household, or even a kingdom, very much as a man would. In some societies women were denied all rights – in others they were allowed to own and inherit property, and to initiate divorce proceedings. The fact that women were everywhere oppressed did not mean that their oppression was everywhere the same, as the ‘patriarchy’ theories so common among feminist academics in the 1980s implied. It did, however, mean that their position was inferior to what it had been under primitive communism.
The growth of the first exploiting classes further influenced the whole development of society. The methods used by the exploiters to buttress their rule began to eat up a major portion of society’s resources. Expenditures on servants, on professional police or military forces, on building huge temples, palaces or tombs to celebrate their powers, necessitated further exploitation and oppression of the masses – and further justified exploitation and oppression as the only way to keep society going. There was also an added incentive for external warfare as a means of grabbing the resources of other societies. Yet endemic war caused further suffering for the mass of people. It also encouraged the emergence of ruling classes and states among neighbouring peoples, as they came to accept that only the centralisation of the surplus into a few hands could provide them with the means of defence. 77 Overall, however ‘functional’ for society as a whole the rise of a ruling group may once have been, beyond a certain point it became a drag on society. This was shown dramatically by events in the Middle East, the Indus Valley and the eastern Mediterranean between 1,000 and 1,500 years after the rise of the first civilisations.
Chapter 5
The first ‘Dark Ages’
No one who has seen the pyramids, temples, palaces or enormous statues of the first civilisations can fail to be impressed. Not only were there these monumental buildings. Just as impressive were stone houses that kept out the wind and rain – even, in some cases, with water supplies and sewerage systems. What is more, the people who built these did so without the knowledge of hardened metals, using tools elaborated out of stone or wood and sometimes copper or bronze.
The impact on the people who lived in and around these cities must have been even greater. The pyramids of Giza or Teotihuacan, the ziggurats of Ur or Uruk, dominating the skyline even more than the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower, would have been ever-present symbols of the power, the permanence and the stability of the state. They allowed the ruling class to believe its power was as eternal and unquestionable as the movement of the sun and the stars, while reinforcing feelings of powerlessness and insignificance among the mass of people.
Yet if the pyramids, the statues and sometimes the buildings endured, the societies which produced them sooner or later entered deep crisis. The city states of Mesopotamia were involved in incessant warfare with each other before succumbing in around 2300 BC to a conqueror from the north, Sargon, who welded the whole Fertile Crescent into a great empire which fell prey to other conquerors after his death. The ‘Old Kingdom’ Egypt of the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara 78 fell apart in a century and a half of civil war and massive social disruption (the so-called ‘first intermediate period’ of 2181 to 2040 BC). The Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjodero were abandoned after more than a millennium in around 1500 BC. About 100 years later it was the turn of the civilisation of Crete, exemplified by the magnificent palace at Knossos, to fall apart – to be followed soon after by the Mycenaean civilisation which dominated mainland Greece. And just as the rise of civilisation was replicated in Meso-America, so was the record of sudden collapse. People abandoned, in turn, Teotihuacan, Monte Alban and the southern Maya centres, leaving whole cities as empty monuments to bewilder, in turn, the Aztecs, the Spanish Conquistadores and ourselves.
There has been much historical speculation as to what caused each of these crises of early civilisation. But underlying the different attempts at explanation, certain factors stand out.
First, there is the record of ever-greater expenditure of resources by the ruling class on itself and its monuments. The temples, the palaces and the tombs grew ever more extensive over the centuries, the opulence of upper-class lifestyles ever greater, the effort that went into extracting the surplus from the cultivators ever more intense, the trade networks bringing rare products over enormous distances ever longer.
In Egypt the surviving texts show the state administration to have been ‘mainly concerned with facilitating the transfer of produce’ to the various centres which made up the ‘court’, and with supervising construction work rather than with maintaining the agricultural system’, so putting ‘serious pressures on the agricultural surplus’. 79 The picture in Mesopotamia seems to have been very similar, with the added pressure of war between the different city states as well as with pastoral peoples around the fringes of their civilisation.
The growth in the power and wealth of the ruling class drove the living standards of the mass of people down to the minimum necessary for survival – and sometimes even lower. So although the craftspeople working for the temples or palaces developed new techniques, particularly in the use of copper and bronze,
the peasant masses from whom … the surplus … was gathered could hardly afford the new equipment. In practice, the cultivators and quarrymen of Egypt had to be cont
ent with neolithic tools. Wool in Sumer was still plucked, not shorn. Even in the Indus cities chert [stone] knives are common enough to suggest a shortage of metal tools. 80
The ever greater absorption of resources by the ruling class was accompanied by a massive slowdown in the growth of humanity’s ability to control and understand the natural world. Gordon Childe contrasted the massive advances made by comparatively poor and illiterate communities in the early period leading up to the ‘urban revolution’ with what followed the establishment of the great states:
The two millennia immediately preceding 3000 BC had witnessed discoveries in applied science that directly or indirectly affected the prosperity of millions and demonstrably furthered the biological welfare of our species … artificial irrigation using canals and ditches; the plough; the harnessing of animal motive-power; the sailing boat; wheeled vehicles; orchard-husbandry; fermentation; the production and use of copper; bricks; the arch; glazing; the seal; and – in the early stage of the revolution – a solar calendar, writing, numeral notation, and bronze … The 2,000 years after the revolution produced few contributions of anything like comparable importance to human progress. 81
The advances which did occur (‘iron, water wheels, alphabetic writing, pure mathematics’) were not made inside the ‘great civilisations’, but among ‘barbarian peoples’ on their periphery. 82