August 16, 2014
Primitive Accumulation, part 1
Primitive accumulation is a tern that refers to events that resulted in the establishment of a social relation between capital and labor which is specific to the capitalist mode of production, and has to be understood, historically, as a stage in the development of social relations between human beings. Humans haven't always lived, under God, in a world of "winners" and "losers." . I’ll start a long way back, but given limitations of space and of my personal knowledge, it will read like a hundred yard dash rather than a marathon.
Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is a good place to begin. Engels’ main influences are the early American Anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan (“Ancient Society”) and the 19th century Swiss archeologist/philologist J.J. Bachofen (Mother Right). In addition, Engels’ ideas about the social/economic structure of ancient societies owes much to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as to the radical criticism of the Bible and the state by 18th century and early 19th century Enlightenment writers like F.C. Bauer, Baron d’Holbach, and C. F. Volney. Socialist, humanist, and feminist writers of our own times like Marja Gimbutas, Martin Bernal, and Sylvia Federici, and many others have extended the investigation into the origins of civilization and of matrilineally organized communist societies.
To simplify Engels’ basic argument (one that in broad outline is generally accepted by most scholars interested in early human social organization), matrilineal, communistic social orders were universal among human beings at the earliest stages of settled social organization. Enduring mythical evidence, as well as studies of existing matrilineal groups by researchers such as Morgan at the time Engels was writing (1884) indicate a mutually reinforcing relationship between matrilineal and egalitarian social organization.
What I have to say here about matrilineal social order is culled mostly from Engels, Morgan, George Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena.
Matrilineal society was centered on the female, in the first place, because she created human life, and only through her could the structure of the tribal organization be stabilized, given the polyandric sexual practices of the time and the limits of human knowledge. Beyond that, there is strong archeological and mythical evidence that it was the specifically female qualities of human genius that were critical in creating the fundamental conditions for the establishment of settled communities and, eventually, civilized life. These female powers are dramatized in myths that circulated throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, and are best exemplified for us by the goddesses of the Greek Pantheon: to name a few, Persephone/Demeter (agriculture), Arachne (spinning and weaving of cloth), and Athena (the goddess of human thought and knowledge). These goddesses, still paternalistically honored within the pantheon of classical Greek civilization, are later, edited versions of much older goddesses from all over the Mediterranean and the Near East, belonging to a pre-patriarchal, older social order.
It’s been argued that the relative peacefulness and productivity of ancient matrilineally ordered, egalitarian society led to rapid population growth, which eventually created conditions of scarcity, which, given the limits of primitive human knowledge and technological development, could not be overcome. The result was conflict, war, warrior bands of males, hierarchical arrangements for control of scarce necessities, and, eventually, early tribal versions of private property in land (for powerful families), and various forms of exploitation of conquered peoples: as serfs or slaves, or “free” tenant labor.
Private property in the means of production is based on force and results in male-dominated hierarchies that are created specifically to protect the rights of the usurpers of natural and socially produced wealth, which (until quite recently in the advanced capitalist countries) have been passed from one generation to the other in the male line. The biological fact that females control the reproduction of human beings, male and female, must have immediately been seen as problematic to the leaders of what was to become hegemonic patriarchal society. To guard against things getting out of hand, females of the elite, as well as of the subject, exploited population, had to be strictly controlled relative to the needs of the possessing male elite. This control is expressed in the historically documented evolution of morals, property laws, the role of sovereign state, and the ideology of modern religions. Once the ideological hegemony of hierarchic patriarchal institutions was internalized by society at large, sexualized property rights could be relaxed, but over a very long period of time. Women have only very recently gotten the right to vote in “advanced”, bourgeois-democratic societies, and some women--if they have the “balls”--have even achieved positions of power to oppress men (and women) in subject nations.
At this point, I think it is important to distinguish between hierarchal matriarchy, which possibly never existed (except in the minds of feminists trapped in patriarchal society) and matrilineal societies that did exist and continued to exist into modern times. Nostalgia for matriarchy seems to assume that the same violent, political/economic phenomena typical of patriarchy--the usurpation of the common means of production by military gangs, legitimated and enforced by the controlled violence of religion, the law, and the state--would have been more humane if originated and controlled by females. Matriarchy is the inverse of patriarchy: rule not by men, but by women.
No doubt, organized bands of women fought back. There are ancient artifacts depicting battles between Amazons and Greek males. However, there is no evidence of a matriarchal, Amazon state. Men are better at brute force. Matrilineal society reflected the cultural superiority of women, and did succeed, probably for a very long time, because it was egalitarian. Women’s honored place in the community didn’t reflect their dominion over men, but their unique creative and imaginative gifts, which were freely given to society as a whole, men and women, and reciprocated. During the matrilineal period the basic creations of human civilization came into being: language, art, tools of all kinds, and a settled, ordered social life, capable of creating a surplus, but incapable of maintaining that surplus under the pressure of an expanding population. It is almost axiomatic in human history that civilizations become victims of the contradictions inherent in them, which were exacerbated by their own success. Marx called (written) history the history of class rule. We can learn from past, hierarchic civilizations without mourning their passing. However, the destruction of matrilineal society was a tragedy, one that hasn’t been forgotten.
Bachofen notes four stages in this early human development, each represented by a god or goddess: earth centered (Aphrodite), lunar (Demeter), transitional from matriarchy to patriarchy (Dionysian), patriarchy (Apollonian). There is plenty of Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek archeological and mythological evidence supporting such a thesis: myths of a lost golden age, of a war between an older order of gods centered on or beneath the Earth, of a decisive war between such gods and their progeny--for example, in Greek myth, the war between the Titans and the transitional Olympian gods and goddesses, whose progeny of demigods were claimed as ancestors by the ruling, slave owning families of ancient and classical Greece.
The Old Testament (which was codified by scribes for the Hebrew elite during the Babylonian Captivity (circa 6th century b.c.) is a testament to the much earlier establishment of full blown patriarchy and the absolute rejection of female right and communal property. The creation story, a re-treatment of early Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths, is noted for its patriarchal propaganda: Jehovah, pointedly male, has made (re-made) mother earth out of nothing and, having no other gods (or goddesses) before him, owns it. “God,” as He is called today in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has all the characteristics of a greedy landlord and demands a ridiculously high monopoly rent from Adam and Eve that must be repaid with endless adoration and infinite ignorance. He rules by fear, because his displeasures are expressed violently. Adam, made in God’s image (except lacking a will of his own), would have been a perfect debtor, but for Eve (a kind of demonized, alienated Aphrodite/Athena), who persuades Adam to think for himself and not pay up. Jehovah jumps up and down like an ape, and throws them out of his gated community, naked into the fallen world where the rent is labor, pain, death, and guilt. (Jehovah’s character translates neatly into Zionist Israel and Imperial USA.)
Read subversively, Eve is the heroine of the story, like Satan is in Paradise Lost. But the lesson for us is: never challenge overwhelming brute power directly.
Part 2 will move on to an examination of Western Civilization's patriarchal hierarchies that replaced matrilineal society.The focus will be on the main stages in the development of the exploitation of human labor by patriarchy's various elites, which led to the "primitive accumulation" of potential wage laborers and the establishment of the capitalist mode of production.
