Ch 9. Class society, patriarchy and nature
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Terry Leahy 2024
So, in the last chapter I looked at the ways in which patriarchal masculinity is expressed in Indigenous societies. But does not lead to the consolidation of a class elite. I also looked at how these societies view the natural non-human world. How they live sustainably and blur distinctions between humans and the non-human world. I pointed out that these societies do not appear to notice what seems to us to be an obvious link. Between women as fertility and reproduction — and the non-human natural world on which we all depend. In this chapter I want to look at how all this plays out in class societies.
The birth of class
First, a brief account of the origins of class out of classless society. Class societies are an invention of the human species. They clearly were not around before, about 8,000 BC. My guess as to how that they were set up is the following thumbnail sketch. To begin with, cultural leaders in classless societies managed gifts for ceremonies. At sites like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey or Stonehenge in England. These were monumental sites but do not appear to be associated with an established class society. It appears that these sites hosted annual ritual festivals with participants from a vast hinterland. We can assume that such events also took place in other parts of the world where they left no monuments for archaeologists to look at. Like in Aboriginal Australia for the Bogong moth festivals.
It seems likely that influential shamans organized these events and sought contributions from the participants to make them work. For example, food, livestock, beer. In the first place and throughout the longest part of human history these contributions were gifts and did not imply elite command over society. But at a certain point, and along with the invention of cereal agriculture, the leadership started to pay a small army with these gifts and to ensure their loyalty through that. They used that leverage to make these gifts compulsory. They became ‘tribute’ or ‘taxation’ rather than donations. The extraction of a ‘surplus product’, to use the Marxist terminology.
At this point I am indebted to the theory of Michael Mann, a social historian. He notes that small aspiring states sprang up in many parts of the world after the ninth century BC. Their most typical fate was to fall apart as the peasant class deserted the state and de-camped to avoid control. The sites where class society got a more permanent foothold were all in areas where irrigation was used to produce basic subsistence. For example, in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, the two rivers of China, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Ancient Egypt. Even the Americas follow this pattern with the Aztec empire founded around a lake, the Incas installed in irrigation valleys surrounded by deserts, the Mayans using a system of irrigation based on cenotes, deep wells of water that are unique to that landscape. In these early irrigation societies, it was difficult for the subordinate class to escape, given that they were dependent on the irrigated homeland where the ruling class had become established.
So cereal agriculture made a store-able surplus possible. Allowing a ruling class to gain control of an army. Irrigation made it difficult for the subordinate class to leave. From these secure anchors, class society spread into surrounding territories. These neighbouring societies developed a professional army to defeat the nearby irrigation state. And ended up with a state. Or the irrigation state conquered them, using its stock of surplus food to supply a professional army — turning independent peasants from the hinterland into slaves of a great empire.
How patriarchy and class society connect
Given this brief account of the transition to class societies I am ready to ask how patriarchy informs them. I am arguing that patriarchy is a causal prerequisite for class society. Just as much as cereal agriculture and irrigation.
- The dominion of fathers in the patriarchal family becomes the psychic template for the relationship between ruling elites and the subordinate masses. The king and the accompanying elite class are regarded as the fathers of society. They are to be feared, respected and even loved. Obedience is a duty. They are terrifying in their power but also necessary to protect you. For example, they might organize ceremonies to ensure rainfall and a good crop. They command armies that defeat the enemies of the state. This is ideology, in so far as these wars put rival states in the good cop and bad cop camps where their respective peasant classes are concerned.
The benevolence of ruling classes is fictitious and is seen as a myth in moments of enlightenment. But this myth is also unavoidable in a state where the ruling class commands an army and extracts surplus to maintain their rule. The real power of fathers in families makes this scenario familiar and even to be expected. A psychological metaphor. At a deeper level this metaphor implies that the subordinate classes are being treated as though they were women. To be exploited and governed, just like women are exploited and governed.
- The second cultural pillar of class societies is the competitive masculinity that has been explained in an earlier chapter. At every point of the social hierarchy, the ruling layer has won the competition with the next layer and defeated them. The ruling class sends their subordinated army into battle on their behalf. On the friezes depicting these battles, they are glossed as conflicts between kings. The army shows no mercy to the enemies of the state. The army and the tax collectors subordinate the peasant classes. Without empathy. The peasants are constituted as women, to be despised. The Samurai knights of ancient Japan, beheading random peasants to test their weapons. The Spartan teenage boys becoming men by killing an enslaved helot for sport. The terrible massacres of Indigenous people in the colonial conquests. In the Congo, in Namibia, in Australia, in the Americas, in India. Before that in the Roman conquests of Europe and North Africa.
That defeated opponents are denigrated as women is so universal that it escapes comment. In Australian football, until very recently, a failing team was described as ‘playing like girls.’ The detachment from women that boys achieve as they ‘become men’ is reconfigured in class societies as detachment from a subordinated class and from the enemies of the ruling class.
Class societies — their material base
Now I want to look at the ways that class societies work with and view non-human nature. The first thing you can say is that cereal agriculture is the mainstay of class societies, because it allows a storable surplus that a ruling class can appropriate. Using it as they wish to control their armies and the population at large. Like maize in the Americas, rice in China and wheat in Europe. This agriculture is an intense modification of a pre-human environment. It implies ploughing the soil, planting a dominant crop and destroying the whole biodiverse environment of a previous era. Think of a rainforest which has been turned into a set of rice terraces. Well, where there was a rainforest, it’s not there any longer. The same thing with a field of wheat, or maize. Any remaining plants are divided into two types: a crop and its associated companion plants, and wild nature, as represented by unwanted weeds. Wild species become an enemy to be excluded with violence by clearing, ploughing or weeding. Then there are the various wild animals that are an enemy of a good harvest. Mice, rats, locusts, caterpillars, birds. It makes sense to see this agricultural context as at least part of the basis for the hostility to wild nature that is such a feature of class societies.
Going along with these material aspects of class, it has not been uncommon for class societies to destroy the natural basis of their own economies. For a start, these constructed ecologies are very vulnerable to natural disasters. Classless societies depend on a large estate with low population. They rely on a huge multitude of food sources in a biodiverse natural and constructed ecology. Class societies rely on a monoculture and can be undone by small climate fluctuations or plagues. Equally likely is that they depend on an agricultural ecology with self-destroying long-term outcomes. For example, irrigation agriculture that brings salts to the surface.
Related to this, it makes sense for a ruling elite to maximize the population density of their nation. Making every fluctuation in yield catastrophic for the vast majority. A famine. The ruling classes of pre-industrial societies had to ensure that they could supply an army travelling on foot. Increasing the likelihood that the central area under the state’s control, surrounding the capital, would become overpopulated, out running their agricultural resources.
Finally, there is the inflexibility of class societies as social machines. They are based on a set of unconscious assumptions about the way society should be organized. These ideas constitute an effective strategy for control at the time of their invention. The mode of production as a social invention, a kind of game. It is hard to shift strategies in the light of any natural crisis. Because each part of the society is locked into a relationship with every other part, constituting a social machine operated through the rules of the game. So even though the agricultural societies of the Mesopotamian basin could observe the decline in yields with increasing salinity, they had no chance of changing to allow a more sustainable mode of subsistence. For example, contour bunds, tree crops, depopulation and decentralisation.
Metaphors of gender and nature
Along with these material elements of class societies goes a set of dualisms that reflect the psychic structure of class. Women and the lower classes are seen as natural, unruly elements to be subordinated. These ways of thinking link the unruly wild with the subordinated parts of the human population. For example, as James Scott explains, the ancient states of Southeast Asia treated surrounding stateless populations as wild. The forest in which they lived was emblematic of their uncivilized danger. Nature is itself feminized. A force to be dominated as women are in patriarchy. There is a dissociation between ruling elites, their civilized states and their agriculture on the one hand — and the non-human natural world on the other hand. Psychologically this dissociation is modelled on the prior dissociation between men and women. As an effect, there is a patriarchal construction of nature in most class societies. Women are regarded as closer to nature. Masculinity is esteemed as control over nature.
Val Plumwood considers this as a set of parallel and related dualisms. Women and Men. Civilized versus wild. Reason versus emotion. Refined versus basic. Master versus slave. My view is that gender is the originating dualism of this set, a dualism that informs class society — and adds on these other dualisms pertinent to its functioning.
A common trope of class societies is the portrayal of the ruling class as beyond material concerns. Of course, this is a reality in so far as they dine on the surplus while the peasants starve in famines. But as well, the metaphor of gender is operating. Women do the earth-bound unpleasant chores, cleaning up the infant messes, tidying the house, cooking. The ruling class paints itself as pure, spiritual, even holy. The lowest classes get to do the work that is considered demeaning or disgusting. The ruling elites see themselves as rational and civilized compared to the irrational, uncivilized, merely animal.
Collapses and class society
Looking at looking at how this has worked out in history, quite a number of class societies have over-used their environments to the point of collapse. Capitalism is just the most recent example. Mesopotamia where irrigation agriculture brought a lot of salt to the surface of the soil and destroyed the cropping fields. The Indus valley, another early civilization with the same kind of problem. Rome, where the empire set up huge farms to grow wheat for export to feed Rome and its armies. Turning North Africa into a desert. The Cahokia in the Mississippi valley. A class society that built timber palisades around their settlements to stave off attacks from rival states. Ending up with deforestation and land degradation. A similar problem destroyed the Anasazi civilisation of New Mexico. The Mayan civilisation. To awe the peasants and advertise their power, the ruling class organized the construction of stone temples rising out of the rainforest. They were plastered to look a gleaming white. A striking show of power and control. The lime plaster was produced by burning limestone in kilns. The wood used for these fires was cut from surrounding forests in huge quantities. The deforestation that followed allowed rainfall to erode the hillsides, covering fertile bottom lands with a mass of infertile rocky soil. Starving their people. A drought finished things off. The irrigated city surrounding Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Lower rainfall gummed up the complex works required to feed a dense population.
Clearly the dualism of humans and nature is not the only cause of these collapses. But it is surely part of the mixture, as ruling classes distanced themselves from the everyday material world. Not all class societies succumbed to that kind of collapse. The Asian states based in irrigated rice terraces have done better in the long run. In China, Japan, Indonesia, parts of India, and Southeast Asia. A social machine that linked into persistent ecological conditions to remain sustainable. Despite these differences, a common thread in class societies is the psychology of patriarchy, the culture of class domination and the separation from nature.
Examples — gender and the natural world
I will give a few examples of these constructions in diverse class societies. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest pieces of poetry ever discovered. A saga from Mesopotamia. The reign of Gilgamesh was about 2,700 BC with versions of the epic created by the Sumerians and Akkadians in about 2,000 BC and inscribed on clay tablets found at Nineveh and other sites. The epic is a mythical account of the founding of the city of Uruk and the exploits of its first king. The following ecofeminist interpretation of the myth owes much to ‘Rape of the Wild’ by Andrée Collard and Joyce Contrucci.
Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk. He is renowned for his aggressive, nasty competitiveness and his huge sexual appetite. As punishment for his cruelty, the God Anu creates the wild man, Enkidu, to restrain him.
Much about the following events suggests the way non-human nature and the feminine are linked. Enkidu has long hair. He eats grass and lives in the wild with gazelles. Gilgamesh turns the tables on Anu by befriending Enkidu. He persuades Enkidu to rape a priestess. Now friends, the two men eat animal flesh and drink alcohol. They travel to a cedar forest, sacred to the Goddess Ishtar. They kill the guardian of the forest and cut down the sacred trees. The goddess Ishtar responds by sending the Bull of Heaven to attack them. But they kill the bull and offer its heart to Ishtar’s brother, the Sun God. Ishtar is in mourning and calls on the courtesans, prostitutes and harlots to join her lamentations. Meanwhile Gilgamesh holds a celebration.
The myth features Gilgamesh as a powerful and cruel king. He dominates nature and destroys the sacred trees, temples and allies of a goddess. He suborns Enkidu, the wild man sent to restrain him. Enkidu joins him in his desecration of nature and female power. Doing all this Gilgamesh founds a powerful city. Masculine power is control over women, the rejection of nature and the subordination of the lower classes. Along with imperial conquest.
Let us now jump to 2,000 years later and to Aristotle, the third of the linked Ancient Greek philosophers. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. At the time when he was writing his influential books, he was a tutor to Alexander the Great. A famous passage in his ‘Politics’ is a very clear articulation of these dualisms.
And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient, whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind. Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.
He separates emotions, which are material and gross from the rational. The rational should always control the emotional. Based on this logic, humans should control animals. The ruling classes should control the slaves. Men should control women. This is the natural order, and in each case represents the rule of reason over the irrational. Anything else is hurtful, a corruption. Not just for the ruling category but also for those who are ruled.
While these are just two examples, we can find similar analogies informing the myths and religions of other class societies. In Indian caste system we have the higher castes who are the purest and the untouchables who do menial and disgusting tasks related to the body. The world is divided between ‘prakriti’ and ‘purusha’. Prakriti represents material reality, the original form of things. It is associated with women. While ‘purusha’ represents the abstract, the soul. The disembodied intellect that watches things. In Balinese tradition, we have the evil witch goddess Rangda. She eats children and leads a coterie of fellow witches against the good god, Barong. She is depicted as a grotesque older female figure, mostly naked, with pendulous breasts and claws. Her statues are placed at the base of huge banyan fig trees, a symbol of femininity and danger. In ancient Balinese, Rangda is also the name for a widow. In English mythology, we have St. George killing the dragon. The knight on horseback, in armour kills the evil monster. St Patrick drives the snakes out of Ireland.
In other words, these linked dualisms tend to be a theme of class societies in a variety of times and places. Some ecofeminist writing traces the origin of this socially constructed link between women and nature to capitalism and the scientific revolution. For example, Carolyn Merchant explains the patriarchal metaphors used by Bacon to explain the scientific method. Nature is a woman to be investigated, to discover the truth through science. An oft quoted passage in a letter to his King, goes like this:
For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again … those holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.
What I am suggesting instead is that these linked dualisms well predate capitalism and the scientific enlightenment. They are in fact a common theme in a variety of class societies. In the next chapter I will look at the way current capitalism conceives class, gender and nature. How dualisms that are manifest in a variety of class societies are also reflected in popular media today.