Role of the Advent of Agriculture in Creating Class Society

Discussion

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale:

"The transformation from equality to hierarchy, and from gender equality to marked gender inequality, is generally associated with farming, and this presents Graeber and Wengrow with considerable problems. Because of their interest in choice, they seem determined to avoid materialist arguments or consider the ways the environment conditions and limits the choices people have.

Agriculture was invented independently in many places in the world, beginning about 12,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers shared their food, and no one could own more than they could carry. But farmers settled and became invested in their fields and crops. This created a potential for some people to seize more than their share of the food.

Over time, groups of thugs and bullies could come together and become lords. They did this in many ways: theft and pillage, rent, sharecropping, hiring labour, tax, tribute and tithes. Whatever form this took, such class inequality was always dependent on organized violence. And this is what the class struggle has been about until very recently: who worked the land and who got the food.

Farmers were vulnerable as hunters were not. They were tied to their land, to the work they had put in to clear and irrigate the fields, and to the stores of crops. Hunter-gatherers could leave. Farmers could not.

However, Graeber and Wengrow set their faces against this narrative–that farmers were able to produce and store a surplus and that made possible class society, exploitation, the state and, as it happens, gendered inequality as well–and they do so again in the face of remarkable new archaeological and other material.

Flannery and Marcus

In 2012, the archaeologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus published a brilliant book on The Creation of Inequality. They trace the ways that agriculture has led to inequality in many different parts of the world.

But they insist the association was not automatic. Agriculture made class possible, but many farmers lived in egalitarian societies. In some places the gap between the invention of farming and the invention of class was measured in centuries and in some places in thousands of years.

Flannery and Marcus also show, through careful examples, that where local thugs or lords did seize power, like as not they were later overthrown. In many towns and cities, elites appear in the archaeological record, then disappear for decades, the appear again. In effect, the class struggle never stops.5

James C. Scott

Flannery and Marcus’s magnificent comparative study, was anticipated in the work of Edmund Leach in his 1954 book, Political Systems of Highland Burma which radically changed anthropology, and latterly, in the work of the anarchist political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott.6 In 2009, Scott published The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. It covered centuries across the whole region.

Scott is concerned with the multitudes of rice farmers in the kingdoms of the plains who did run away to the hills. There they reinvented themselves as new ethnic groups of ‘slash and burn’ shifting cultivators. Some of them created smaller class societies, and some lived without class. All of them had to resist continuous slaving and military raids from the kingdoms and states below.

Technology

In some ways Graeber and Wengrow build on the work of Leach, Scott, Flannery and Marcus. Wengrow, after all, has been part of the changes in archaeology which Flannery and Marcus are summarizing. And the influence of Scott is everywhere in The Dawn of Everything.

But Graeber and Wengrow do not like the links the other authors make between technology and environment, on the one hand, and economic and political change.

Flannery, Marcus and Scott are very careful to say that technology and environment do not determine change. They make change possible. Equally, the invention of grain agriculture did not automatically lead to class inequality or the state. But it made those changes possible.

Class Relations and the Class Struggle

The change in technology and environment set the stage for a class struggle. And the result of that class struggle determined whether equality and inequality triumphed. Graeber and Wengrow ignore this crucial point. Instead, they constantly take issue with the crude form of stages theory that makes such changes immediate and inevitable.

This allergy to ecological thinking is probably one of the things behind their refusal to deal with the new literature on human evolution.

All of that literature tries to understand how the animals who became humanity built a social adaptation to the environment they inhabited, the bodies they had, the competing predators, the technology they could invent, and the ways they made their livelihood. As it happens, they built egalitarian societies in order to cope with that ecology and those circumstances. That was not an inevitable result. But it was an adaptation.

Graeber and Wengrow, on the other hand, are not materialists. For them, thinking about ecology and technology threatens to make the choices and revolution they want impossible. This is why, for example, they are not happy with Scott’s book on ancient Mesopotamia, because it emphasizes the material reasons why grain agriculture in particular led to inequality.

This is not a trivial matter. The climate crisis we face now brings into sharp relief the question of how humanity might change society to adapt to a new technology and a new environment. Any politics of equality or human survival must now be profoundly materialist.

The Absence of Gender

We have seen that Graeber and Wengrow have little interest in the environment and the material bases of human existence.

In the same way, they observe an almost religious avoidance of the concept of class, discussions of class relations and class struggle. Graeber certainly, and presumably Wengrow, have an understanding of class relationships and class struggle. They know what class does, and, indeed, which class they are from, but cannot, or will not, treat class relations as a motor of social change.

Just as striking is Graeber and Wengrow’s lack of interest in the social construction of gender. In passing they reproduce a near-Bachofen of matriarchy in Minoan Crete, on the one hand, and on the other, they include a scattering of patriarchal stereotypes in which women are nurturing and men are bullies.

Because they hold that inequality has always been with us, Graeber and Wengrow have next to nothing to say about the origins of gendered inequality among humans.

There are basically three schools of thought about the evolution of gendered relations. First there are the evolutionary psychologists whose arguments are deeply conservative. Jared Diamond, Napoleon Chagnon and Steven Pinker argue that inequality, violence and competition are fundamental to human nature. They say this is because men are programmed by evolution to compete with other men so the strongest can dominate women and father more children. This is regrettable, Pinker says, and luckily Western Civilization has partly tamed such primitive feelings.

The great biologist, and trans activist, Joan Roughgarden, has rightly described these ideas as ‘thinly disguised rape narratives’. These arguments are indeed repellant, and surely were rejected by Graeber and Wengrow for this reason alone.

For a very long time, a second school of thought held sway among feminist anthropologists. This too essentialized differences between women and men, and accepted some form of inequality between women and men as a given in every society.

The third option is the one to which we subscribe. There is a striking feature of the historical, anthropological and archaeological record. In almost every case, where people lived in economically and politically equal societies, women and men too were equal. And wherever there have been class societies with economic inequality, there too men have dominated women.

The question that has obsessed us is: Why?

Graeber and Wengrow do not address this question. They have no explanation for sexism, nor are they interested in how or why gender relations change. But they are not sexists. They mention instances of the oppression of women many times, but in passing. It is just not central to their concerns. So what seems to us a striking congruence, is for them a mirage."

(https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/)