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World history for the Left – What we are up against
Popular understandings of world history are typically ideological. They present class and gender hierarchy as inevitable consequences of human nature or as necessary for us to live civilized lives. The typical just-so story promoted on endless Discovery Channel documentaries, as well as much popular academic writing, goes like this. Agriculture was a great boon. With the invention of agriculture, it became possible for some people to live from the agricultural production of others. This specialization was actually beneficial, as it allowed the large populations permitted by agriculture to be organized efficiently and live together in harmony. The ruling elites functioned to organize society and used armed force to bring people into line for the good of society as a whole. This is the version presented recently in writings by Steven Pinker, admonishing the left for its utopianism and its failure to take human nature seriously. A darker version of this story is often presented at the same time. People are innately aggressive, competitive and greedy. With the invention of agriculture, it became possible to store a surplus of production. A ruling class took over to monopolize this surplus, exploiting the subordinate class. Given human nature, no other outcome is possible, as the failures of the communist revolutions have supposedly made apparent. In Collapse, Jared Diamond verges towards this pessimistic version, admitting that ruling elites can become kleptocracies, while also managing to treat class as a functional necessity for agricultural societies.
My discussion of these topics was in the first place prompted by a blog piece written by a friend who believes, like I do, that we need serious degrowth and a different economic system to deal with the environmental crisis. He wrote:
What does history tell us? It tells us that we humans are an extremely aggressive, selfish, greedy and stupid lot … at least we have been for about 10,000 years. It seems that before then when we lived in small tribal groups there was a high level of equality, cooperation, and sharing, and little organised warfare … Only after agriculture developed and it became possible to plunder settlements and take stored grain etc., did warfare take off … The history of the last many thousands of years has been primarily about the quest for wealth and power, by warlords, kings and nations. It has been about the struggle to get richer than others and to be able to dominate others … So collective human nature is primarily about greed, the constant craving for more no matter how much they’ve got and the refusal to be content with enough.
Here the explanation is in some ways similar to that presented on the Discovery Channel. What is different is the positive account of harmonious tribal societies. It was an unlucky moment when people allowed their societies to be taken over by greedy elites.
Belief in a harmonious golden age, predating imperialistic warlike societies has been a theme in some left critique of current capitalism. In Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Indigenous Australia is argued to have been a sustainable agricultural social order. Pascoe notes the absence of warfare and class distinction. A system of pan-continental government was enforced at the local level, with tribal sanctions implementing shared visions of the cosmos. Rock art shows the respect accorded to the female principle in this ancient civilisation. In Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s view, societies such as these, are gender egalitarian and peaceful – ‘matriarchal’, though not controlled by either sex. Nature is respected and the economy is governed by norms of reciprocity and sharing.
If this leftist view of an original egalitarian, harmonious and sustainable human society is accurate, then the task for the left is simple. Let us just abandon the science and technology of the last four hundred years. We do not need any of this to achieve the goals of the left. It is this technology that has been getting us into trouble. We should instead return to an original wisdom, forgotten since the rise of imperial civilisations.
Feeding into this discussion is the view that it is in fact impossible to maintain a highly technological society sustainably. I was at a talk given by David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture. Holmgren was explaining that energy descent inevitably implied the ending of the technologically sophisticated society that we now have in current capitalism. A child from the back of the audience asked whether this meant we would have to do without mobile phones. Yes, though this generation may find that difficult. In the future, you would just grow up without such devices being available. Holmgren’s view on this has been influenced by the writings of Howard Odum, an American environmental theorist. Fossil fuels are a deeply concentrated form of solar energy. They permit the technological knowledge we now have. Our technology is dependent on human capital, something which in turn depends on mass secondary education. This will not be possible in a society based on less energy dense renewables. The knowledge base for industrial society is in reality a storage of high-quality embodied fossil fuel energy. Without it we will inevitably return to many of the design structures of pre-industrial societies.
In a more trenchant critique of technological industrialism, deep green anarchists such as Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan recommend a return to the simple technologies of stateless societies of the past. Industrial technology represents an alienation from nature.
I have found some of these perspectives a worry. To understand why, I need to give a different account of world history to any of those mentioned above. While I do not entirely depart from every part of these conflicting accounts, I track a different path through world history to arrive at the conjunction we now face.
Human nature
As the above discussion makes clear, the question of human nature is basic to understandings of world history. Does the history of warfare, slavery and class domination show us that humans are innately aggressive, selfish, greedy and stupid? Or do original harmonious societies show us the opposite? The following is a brief outline. For a longer account, see my book, Humanist Realism for Sociologists. The basic nature of humans as a species can be seen as a set of fundamental drives. It makes sense to postulate 6 main drives which together explain most human behaviour – when understood in relationship to the circumstances people are facing in particular times and places.
1. The drive to eat – hunger.
2. Sociability – the desire to be well regarded by other people, to have social contacts, the pleasure of caring.
3. Autonomy – the desire to get what you want at any particular time.
4. Sexual desire – basically polymorphous perverse as Freud thought.
5. The desire to be comfortable and for good health.
6. Creativity – the desire to express oneself by making things, imagination, aesthetics.
Within this framework it is assumed that aggression is not a basic drive. There is no basic desire to harm other people. On the other hand, the capacity to be aggressive is certainly an aspect of human nature. We can regard it as a tool which people use to enable them to satisfy the desires listed above, when to do so requires conflict with other people. Beyond this, particular kinds of socialisation make it likely that people will become competitive and aggressive as a normal part of their personality, behaving as though the desire to do harm is innate.
In the following discussion I will be arguing that the various stages of world history can be understood by using this basic understanding of human nature. Both patriarchy and class society are not caused by innate greed or an inborn competitive streak in human nature. They are social mechanisms which benefit one part of society at the expense of another. In that, they come about when the ruling group manages to gain an advantage that allows them to live well (in terms of the list of human drives given above) at the expense of the rest of society. This is just a beginning and the complexity of this situation will soon become apparent.
The great divide between stateless and class societies
The great divide in human societies is between stateless (and classless) societies and state-based class societies. This divide is an historical event which current archaeology dates at about 10,000 years ago. It is best regarded as an invention which spread and took hold, and which has proven very difficult to reverse. Class societies were invented independently in at least three regions of the world – the Middle East, China and middle America.
Stateless societies
Stateless societies took two basic forms. Some were hunting and gathering societies, and some were horticultural (agricultural) societies. In other words, the invention of agriculture (the intentional systematic cultivation of food plants) did not imply or directly cause class society. While this is a good broad division there are certainly societies that do not fit these classifications readily. For example, societies that were dense and settled in one place, like horticulturalists, but did not depend on agriculture. To take a case that is well known, North West American societies were settled but depended on hunting and gathering. What they gathered were copious supplies of wild salmon, harvested and smoked for storage. Or pastoralists, such as the Masai of Kenya, who depended on domesticated animals but moved with the seasons, like hunters and gatherers.
There was much that all stateless societies had in common. They were patriarchal and there was a definite gendered division of labour. Within these parameters they were egalitarian and cooperative. Decisions were made by face to face gatherings of all members of a residential group or by all men or all women. Even when there was a hereditary chief (as in some horticultural societies) their role was to mediate conflicts and assist people to come to a decision, not to impose their own authority. In terms of environmental relationships, such societies did not systematically destroy their environments and they also had religious beliefs which linked humans to the natural world, emphasizing kinship and cooperation with other species. There was no particular desire to acquire material goods in these societies. People with power and influence might gain temporary control of valued goods but prestige accrued to those who gave these goods away. For the most part, the kit of privately owned and consumed goods was pretty much the same for all members of the society, with many goods owned in common. When clans or divisions within a residential group had particular user rights (over a section of land for example) these rights were similar to those of another group – balancing rights between sections of a society.
In terms of competitive aggression. This cannot be understood except in relationship to patriarchy. As early second wave feminists such as Shulamith Firestone and Ti Grace-Atkinson argued, men have been able to gain dominance in the great bulk of quite different societies. The basic reason has been that men have not been disadvantaged in power struggles by the necessity to give birth and the special ties to young children which are typical of women as mothers. This has led to a particular process of recruitment into masculine identity, as the anthropologist Nancy Chodorow maintains. Men as fathers resist deep involvement with infants and the responsibility for early childcare. They maintain power and distance through this and achieve the freedom to act politically without hindrance. Boys as babies have a much closer and more intimate connection to their mothers and indeed to other adult women in their group. Boys as they grow older are urged to “become men” and take advantage of the social power that this role confers. Yet “becoming a man” is somewhat mysterious when proximate adult males are not intimately known. Boys are urged to solve this problem by rejecting “femininity”, cutting ties with women and with the values of nurturance that have been characteristic of their own experience as infants. This is often expressed in rituals of initiation that separate boys from the tribe and subject them to various kinds of torments at the hands of adult men, with a final passage to adult masculinity.
This whole process is universal in all societies, including stateless cooperative societies. The effect is to produce adult men who do not have close intimacy with other men and are in competition to prove their masculine identity. Prestige is competitive for men.
In hunting and gathering societies, this competitive masculinity was expressed as competition for prestige in ritual, in hunting and the like. It also extended to feuds between men, which rarely became wars, but which were handled through processes of community justice between groups. As in the scene in “Ten Canoes” where rival clans stand apart and the offended clan throws spears at the offender from the other group.
In horticultural societies, low key warfare was very common. Raids on other villages or small-scale wars were a means by which men gained status as “warriors” in their own societies. These were group affairs, with men from one or more villages taking on men from other villages. Women were not involved in the fighting and were not members of war parties. Sometimes women and children were taken captive and recruited to the village of the victors.
These conflicts within stateless societies were never conceived by participants as economic – to take territory for hunting or gardening. This is partly because, as Marshall Sahlins demonstrates, these societies always underexploited their environmental resources, and their perception would have been that they had plenty of resources for any eventuality. On the other hand, these raids may have in fact functioned to keep environmental resources in synch with human use, especially in the case of horticultural societies. Marvin Harris argues that when a village in Melanesia was defeated, it moved further away from the border with the attacking village, allowing the forest to grow back over previous gardens. Likewise, this warfare killed off many young men, reducing population pressure. But this was just one of many measures that ensured stable population in stateless societies.
As is clear, I am sceptical about the idea of an original matriarchy and of some gender egalitarian societies continuing up to colonial times. Archaeological evidence for this viewpoint looks at depictions of female goddesses, sites without walled defences, and mythologies of an original matriarchy. Yet such indicators are not convincing given other evidence. For example, the site of Catal Huyuk in Turkey has often been argued to represent a matriarchal urban civilisation. This is on account of the goddess clay figurines discovered there. As Rosemary Ruether points out, there are other finds which challenge the matriarchal account of the site – ritual spaces with horned bulls’ head statues, male warrior graves with weapons and elite graves of women with jewellery. In relation to societies extant at the time of colonial expansion, none of the cited examples stand up if examined in detail and in relation to the understanding of patriarchy developed by second wave feminism. Men are dominant in political relations between groups, in ritual and religion, in daily interactions with women. For example, the Iroquois, the Minangkabau, the !Kung, the BaMbuti. Women and Men: An Anthropological View, by Ernestine Friedl is a good introduction to mainstream opinion in anthropology. Good accounts of a variety of different societies are Nisa, by Marjorie Shostak on the !Kung; Forest People, by Colin Turnbull on the BaMbuti; Women of the Forest, by Yolanda and Robert Murphy on the Munduruçu.
While I would not entirely rule out the possibility of some exceptions to patriarchy from past times, what we have to understand is why patriarchy is such a common pattern and to assess the role of a patriarchal substrate in different social machines throughout history.
Class societies
Class society is an invention of the human species. Psychologically, it totally depends on some of the social machinery of classless societies. In particular the patriarchal construction of gender and of the family provides a psychological model for the relationship between the ruling class and the subordinate class. As Wilhelm Reich and later Shulamith Firestone argued, the ruling class present themselves as “fathers”; authoritative and in control but also as the protectors of their families; with the subordinate classes regarded as “women” or “children”. The psychological experience of growing up in the patriarchal family prepares the child for an adult experience in hierarchical relationships. In stateless societies this psychology is contained and expresses itself as contests for prestige and influence between men. Who is the closest to the gods, who is the best hunter, who is the most fearless warrior? In class societies the ruling class becomes crystallized as the leaders of society taken as a whole and in perpetuity. A second related connection is that the competitive masculinity that comes about through men’s separation from the care of infant boys gets expressed in class societies through competition organized to serve the ruling class. The ruling class and the middle class express their competitive emotional distance from the subordinate class. The soldier class are urged to compete against the soldiers of rival ruling class factions or nations, and to maintain control over the peasantry.
Class societies also depend on a social machinery organized around the human desires for physical well-being and food, as Marx recognized. They depend on an agriculture that can regularly produce a storable surplus; a surplus that can be appropriated and distributed by the ruling class. There is a basic three class model. The ruling class effectively controls the means of production of food. They take control of the surplus produced by the subordinate class. In this they are aided and abetted by the soldier class. The soldier class avoid the danger of hunger and starvation that bedevils the subordinate class.
This system was invented about 10,000 years ago and is still going strong. It developed across multiple sites where cereal agriculture had taken hold. It seems likely, as Pierre Clastres maintains, that in each location, class society started up as an effect of a newly invented cult, giving authority to religious leaders to expect tribute from the subordinate masses. It went on to establish itself as a successful social mechanism that was hard to break once it got going, for reasons that I will explain. We know that many early attempts to establish class did not leave a lasting legacy – for example in the Mississippi basin, in Europe at the time of Stonehenge. In such cases, a class society (signified by burials with luxury goods, fortifications, monumental buildings and the like) ended up collapsing and being replaced by a more egalitarian polity. It has been argued by the historian Michael Mann that class finally established itself permanently in irrigated river valleys. Here the subordinate population could not just escape into the hinterland when life got too difficult, they were trapped within the class machine. From these secure bases class spread out to other centres and was maintained by the pressure of competition between class-based states. The state became a necessary defence against other state-based armies. Agricultural class societies like this were able to defeat independent horticulturalists and hunting and gathering societies. The soldier class were full time soldiers, not part time gardeners. Class-based societies developed population density, as all parts of the class structure had an interest in having lots of children – the peasantry because they were insecure in their livelihoods, and the ruling class looking for subordinates to produce surplus and win wars. These dense populations supported armies that could not be easily defeated by independent stateless people, spread out to maximize their chances of living well in whatever environmental circumstances. A good general account of pre-industrial class societies is Gideon Sjoberg The Pre-Industrial City.
In relation to consumerism and greed. The ruling class depended on the extraction of a surplus and the private ownership and control of that surplus. To that extent greed was a necessity of this social machine. The constant fear of deprivation made greed a necessity for the broader population. Beyond this, ruling classes backed up their power through display. Their monuments, their rituals and their luxuries broadcast their power and implied that they could not be defeated.
To sum up, it is a mistake to think of the behaviour of ruling elites as driven by “greed” as my friend’s blog post argues. It is certainly true that the behaviour of ruling elites is acquisitive, and they certainly do amass more wealth than they could possibly need to live well. My view is that we have to account for this behaviour in relation to human nature. Greed is not an innate disposition of human beings, waiting to break loose and create havoc. In the first place, the original class societies were probably invented by people who were seeking social status rather than wealth. Their role as religious leaders allowed them to rise to prominence and call for tribute from the rest of the population. In turn, class society came about when they discovered that they could turn this situation to their advantage by paying a class of armed retainers, with the wealth derived from this tribute. Their motivation for this was founded on desires common to all people and also operating in stateless societies. Namely to ensure food supply, status, autonomy, sexual satisfaction and so on. By being in a particular position in what had become a social machine they could ensure all this. As argued above, this social machine also depended on and expressed the competitive masculinity that accompanies patriarchal socialisation, itself an outcome of men’s desires to live well. Once this system got going the acquisitive behaviour of the ruling class was partly an attempt to maximize status and well-being. But as we can see, it went well beyond these obvious motivations. My view is that this excessive acquisitiveness relates to the competitive political situation set up by class societies. Ruling classes amassed more wealth than they could possibly use because they needed to be able to recruit and expand an armed class to defend their supreme position – a position threatened by internal dissension and the armed force available to rival class societies. Their display of wealth, their excessive monumentalism, human sacrifices and the like were displays of power intended to intimidate any group that might be interested in challenging their rule. It was motivated by fear more than greed.
In relation to the environment. Class societies of the past had a tendency to overuse and exploit their environments and this could lead to collapse, as Jared Diamond’s Collapse documents. For a start, before modern times, the concentration of political power in the hands of the ruling class meant a concentration of production around the city. The countryside had to be close enough to be reached by an army carrying its supplies on foot or horseback. As noted above, there was always a motive to increase population density. The combination could lead to overuse of land near a city. Everything a ruling class did to extract surplus was an act of fine tuning in relation to the potential for wars with other states, factionalism within the ruling class, army coups or peasant revolts. So, it was always very difficult to turn around an agricultural system that had been reliably delivering a surplus, even when results were not promising. For instance, it could be clear that irrigation was no longer effective, and that salt was damaging soil fertility, but it would be impossible to move production elsewhere or try something radically different. On the other hand, some civilisations of the past do seem to have worked all this out, mostly by not expanding beyond a certain frontier and maintaining a sustainable agricultural method without change over a very long period – for example China, Bali or Japan.
As ecofeminists, such as Ariel Salleh, Rosemary Ruether and Val Plumwood have noted, class societies are quite likely to have religions that denigrate the natural world as uncivilized. The ruling class presents itself as purified and spiritual, people who rise above merely “animal” motivations, even as gods. They picture the subordinate class as an unruly natural force that must be tamed by the rational elite. The psychological model is men’s domination over women. As a metaphor for the agricultural strategy of class societies, nature is tamed and forced to produce a surplus by technologies that destroy natural environments and plough up the land annually. This pattern of belief is not an unmitigated certainty of class societies. For example, traditional Balinese Hinduism stigmatized the wild and untamed “lower” side of human beings and the lower classes, while also respecting the natural world and deities related to it.
Capitalism as a class society
Capitalism is unique as a class society. Two mechanisms are central to this difference, as Marx recognized. One is that the means of production are owned by the ruling class as private property, commodities that can be bought and sold on the market. In all previous class societies, the means of production were owned by the ruling class as an inherited right or allocated by the king. Ownership was vulnerable to warfare between ruling elites, but it could not be lost through a bad business deal. The second is that in capitalism, wealth is created by producing goods for the market. A surplus is extracted through the labour contract. The worker is paid in money for their work. Their wage in money gives them a capacity to access the products of the work of other wage earners. However, the wage they receive is never the total monetary value of the work that they do – they cannot buy the quantity of hours of work that they put in through their own labour. The employer receives the surplus value that the workers are not paid and makes a profit by selling what their workers have produced. Yet of course this a very uncertain process, money can be advanced to start production (usually borrowed) but the market conditions can cause the capitalist to lose out and fail to make a profit. Their ownership of wealth is always achieved in competition with other capitalists and vulnerable to market uncertainties.
One effect of this ownership regime is constant technological change and growing technological power. To be sure of making a high profit and in order to maintain the value of their capital, the owner of the means of production attempts to produce more products at a cheaper cost. One way of doing this is to improve technologies so that less labour is used in production.
Capitalism up to 1970
As Immanuel Wallerstein and other left critics explain, capitalism is also unique in being a world system, depending on relationships between a core of more powerful regions of the world and exploited ‘peripheral’ regions of the world. According to Wallerstein, the core regions are capital intensive and the peripheral, labour intensive. Wallerstein’s analysis is intended as a critique of the naïve theory that certain regions of the world are ‘developing’, moving towards the affluence of the rich world. Instead, this relationship is complementary, with the affluence of the core regions depending on the exploitation of the peripheral regions. Within my analysis, it is important to see these phenomena as expressing relationships between classes in the world system. The ruling or capitalist class is essentially a global class. In addition, an affluent subordinate class is mainly located in the rich countries, while the poor of the world are mainly located in the peripheral countries. There is a relationship of mediated exploitation. The global capitalist class mediates the relationship whereby the affluent working class of the core countries benefit from the poverty of the peripheral countries. Seeing capitalism in its structural similarities to other class societies of the past, the affluent members of the subordinate class in the core countries are like the soldiers, traders and craft workers of previous class societies. Like the ruling class, they benefit from the exploitation of the subordinate class, but unlike the ruling class, they do not have independent power. In relation to the three-class model of class society explained above, the workers of affluent countries are the ones who are recruited to provide armed force to maintain exploitation in the peripheral societies – through imperial conquest and wars to put down leftist rebellions, as authors such as Noam Chomsky and David Horowitz have pointed out. Yet in capitalism, the affluent workers of the rich countries are not merely dependent parasites on the wealth produced by workers in the peripheral countries. They are also a productive and exploited part of the subordinate class. In other words, in comparison to class societies of the past, the intermediate classes of capitalism participate in production as well as in the policing of the subordinate class.
Until recently the experience of the subordinate class in the peripheral countries was not markedly different to that of peasants in feudal societies. The role of such workers was to produce basic resources and primary products for export to the rich countries. In many of the peripheral countries, members of the subordinate class were not employed as free wage labour but were slaves or feudalized dependents. In other countries, workers from the peripheral countries have been paid as wage labour. Yet governments have been authoritarian, not permitting labour movements to agitate for better wages and conditions. Incomes have been kept low. A large unemployed underclass has meant that competition for jobs has been severe.
In the core countries themselves, conflict between the ruling class and the subordinate class produced a stalemate. Starting from the middle of the nineteenth century, wages rose above a bare subsistence and some democratic control of society was achieved. Capitalists sold much of what was produced to their own workers and made profits by doing that, rather than only selling to the rich. By the fifties, workers in the core countries had even started to eat into the relative share of wealth owned by the rich through taxation, the expenses of the world wars and social welfare programmes, as Thomas Piketty shows.
It has been argued by Paul Cardan that a key factor explaining working class power in the core countries is the nature of capitalist production. Given the increasing technological complexity of industrial capitalist societies, it is impossible to control a labour force through simple instructions based in traditional and well-known production techniques (for example following a plough, making cheese etc). In this, capitalism is radically different from the class societies of the past. To a much larger extent it has to depend on the willing cooperation and participation of workers in production processes. Of course, the capitalist class always attempts to reduce skill levels and break workers’ power in production, defining tasks into simple steps that can be readily supervised. But these attempts can only go so far and new complexities constantly crop up and require participatory involvement.
In relation to the environment, there are a number of factors that make capitalism particularly destructive where the environment is concerned. As eco-Marxists such as Andrew McLaughlin and Joel Kovel have explained, competition to make profits between firms leads to externalisation of environmental costs. Firms (and countries) that spend money on environmental safeguards lose out in competition with firms that do not. In addition, the competitive pressure between firms works to create economic growth. Firms do well by producing more with less cost, and as these new technologies become broadly adopted, they allow the production of more material goods with fewer hours of labour – leading to growth and increasing environmental impact. A second factor, as explained by Paul Cardan, is that the stand-off between capitalists and the subordinate class in the rich countries is premised on wage increases – real increases in the buying power of the subordinate class over time. The freedom to express social and creative needs through leisure and consumption balances the coercion and boredom experienced in the working day. It becomes expected that consumer goods will increase constantly, and this is enabled by the technological advances that capitalism provides. A third factor is the real insecurity of life for the subordinate class. Unemployment is always a possibility. It seems sensible to spend up big when you are earning well and to buy expensive hedges against a downturn. Related to this is the work ethic, the cultural ideology associated with the work role of the subordinate class. You can prove to other people that you are worthy of respect by demonstrating your hard work, as documented in a classic ethnographic study of the working class of the United States – The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb. This can be achieved by buying goods that show that you have money and signal your worth to other people. Finally, as the anthropologist Annette Hamilton persuasively argues, there is the socialisation experience that has until recently been typical of childhood in the rich countries. Infants and young children have been tightly controlled – as though their desires have to be denied in order to prevent their wishes from becoming insatiable. They have been fed on a schedule, deprived of the breast at an early age, prevented from using dummies, shut away from the family to sleep, punished severely for disobedience and schooled to tolerate extreme boredom. The paradoxical effect is to instil in people a sense that their needs will not be met, that they cannot expect anything from other people. This also drives consumerism and anxious consumption.
Capitalism from the seventies
There are various reasons why the standoff between capitalists and the subordinate class in the core countries took a new turn in the seventies, generally identified with neoliberalism. The capitalist class were worried that their power was being eroded to the point of no return, with increasing spending by governments and increasing wage demands – backed up by strikes, industrial sabotage, left terrorism, street rebellions and riots, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello explain. In the meantime, the level of education of workers in many peripheral countries had increased. Containerisation allowed goods to be shipped around the world. Digital communications facilitated production across multiple sites. As Ankie Hoogvelt points out, all this allowed capitalists in the core countries to shift manufacturing production to authoritarian peripheral countries with low wages, leading to a long process in which the wages of the workers in the core countries stagnated and their industrial power dissipated.
As far as all this goes, the current tendency is hard to determine. It may be that demands for democratic control in the peripheral countries will escalate and will be hard to resist given the dependence of production on participatory involvement. It may be that all these jobs will be outsourced to robots. It may be that the ruling class will effectively cut itself off from demands for political power and wage affluence, reinstating a production system geared to luxury goods for the rich – a trajectory that Thomas Piketty and Wolfgang Streeck see as quite likely. The capitalist class would aim to maintain the great bulk of the global population on meagre handouts. Meanwhile firms would consolidate, fortunes would become predictable and the capitalist class would start to look like a feudal nobility.
Hanging over all this is the environmental crisis. The political deal in which promises of increased consumer spending balance the experience of coercion at work is no longer an option. It is taking a long time for this penny to drop but there is no doubt that it will. The same applies to the developing world which has to a large extent been kept passive through promises of growing affluence and consumer well-being. None of this is possible given the necessity to re-jig energy systems and transport, the extreme unlikelihood of managing to produce an amount of energy equal to what we now use in the rich countries, the basic fact that you cannot have endless growth on a finite planet. All of these impossibilities have been extensively documented in the writings of Ted Trainer and the oil peak movement writers like Richard Heinberg.
What we are up against
It is easy for the left to imagine that we could just go back to a much simpler lifestyle and make do with much less – following the almost inevitable collapse of current industrial capitalism. Indeed, we could live well without most of our industrial machinery: using permaculture to grow food; making iron tools and roofing tiles (using kilns fired with wood from sustainable forests); keeping population under control using the rhythm method! There would be no need for war or exploitation. Life might be a bit sparse compared to current affluence in the rich countries, but at least one’s own labour would not be appropriated. You could be creative and plan what to produce cooperatively. There would be mountains of leisure time for art, drama, music, sport and the like.
My problem with this optimistic vision is that I cannot see any reason why such a technological basis would not be accompanied by one or all three of the social machines which have already been tried and certainly work.
1. Stateless hunting and gathering
2. Horticultural stateless societies
3. Feudal and imperial class societies
All of these past modes of production can be sustainable. All three work with a set of simple technologies of the kind proposed for a simpler lifestyle utopia. Indeed, the technological vision of the simpler lifestyle utopia just collects together the best of what was already available in mediaeval times. In those times, technologies not too different to these were accompanied by peasant starvation, religious pogroms, killing epidemics and feudal warfare.
It is all very well to hope that humans have now learned their lesson and will avoid re-establishing these unsatisfactory social machines, through some collective act of cultural change that will imprint itself on the future. Yet these unsatisfactory options from our past appeared over a very long period and were established in a great variety of contexts across space and history – because they work. They are social machines which fit with patriarchal power and the typical desires of human beings to have more of their basic human needs met. They are all nasty to some degree and certainly not what the left has in mind as a goal. For the reasons given above, feudal and imperial societies would end up winning out over the two (slightly preferable) stateless society options.
To prevent all these options, we need to be aware of the social mechanisms that allow such developments and have the capacity to avoid them.
I have explained how patriarchy has played a central part in all three of these social machines. I have also maintained that patriarchy is premised on the reproductive role of women, as argued by early feminist theorists of the second wave such as Shulamith Firestone and Ti Grace-Atkinson. Responsibility for childbirth and the consequent emotional links between children and adult women has given men an advantage in conflicts with women; allowing men to take control at the expense of women. This has not been without some very unpleasant consequences for men. Despite these, patriarchy has been maintained and constantly reinvented in a great variety of social contexts. It is only since the late nineteenth century that women have gained some leverage in challenging patriarchy. This has been due to developments premised on medical technologies.
1. Reliable and safe contraception that can be controlled by women.
2. The falling infant mortality rate, the end of death in childbirth, the longevity enabled by medical technologies.
3. The consequent drop in family size – the demographic transition.
For the left to replace the three options offered by human history with something new, we must be able to maintain and strengthen the challenge to patriarchy enabled by these medical technologies. A technologically simple utopia is just impossible. Beyond the first phase of enthusiastic cultural transition, patriarchy would re-establish itself and ultimately the state and class society would follow.
The “othering” of groups of humans has been an integral feature of all three of these previous social machines. I have shown how this is related to patriarchal socialisation. Beyond this it has certainly been facilitated by the fact that people in other villages, tribes, countries and cultures are not intimately known. Digital technologies of media such as film, television, popular music and the textual communication of information are necessary if we are to prevent localized ethnocentrism. This is particularly important if the basic economic format is small largely self-sufficient village economies – which seems necessary to maintain sustainability. These opportunities for empathy and cooperation across the global population are impossible in a technologically simple society.
None of this is impossible, and we do not need a state to organize this technological production. Village economies would specialize in particular aspects of a highly technological process and liaise with partners in other villages. Digital communication would facilitate organization across the production chain. Train services run on renewable energy would be used for any necessary transport of machine parts. Face to face conventions and organizing meetings would link different parts of a production process. While all this would be absolutely necessary to maintain an egalitarian diverse civilisation, it would be but a small part of any particular village economy. For more discussion of this ‘gift economy’ vision see Life Without Money, edited by Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman.
If I have any reason to be optimistic it is this. We have learned an awful lot of science in the last ten thousand years, as well as a much better understanding of ourselves as psychic beings. There is every reasons to think that a new environmentalist mode of production would develop new technologies and new ways of understanding the world through science. At the same time, we could hope that the capacities necessary to maintain gender egalitarian and tolerant, open societies would be feasible within the parameters of a sustainable economy. I have spelled out what I think are some of the requirements.
A Postscript on Odum
It seems paradoxical to argue as Odum does, that our complex technological knowledge is a side effect of fossil fuel bounty, and that it cannot be maintained in a future where this bounty is not available. While it would be a mistake to deny the energy requirements of digital communication and information storage, they seem small beer compared to energy uses which we could clearly do without and which have no obvious or necessary connection to information technology. For example, travel by plane, suburbs which depend on car travel, houses heated and cooled using fossil fuels, an agricultural system that depends on machinery powered by fossil fuels as well as transport, packaging and cold storage using fossil fuels. These are just a beginning of the energy guzzling technologies which we could do without, while retaining information technology. It is certainly not true, as Holmgren suggests, that we will be run off our feet producing food and housing in a society without cheap energy supplies – with no time left over to attend secondary school and learn how to use complex technology. Marshall Sahlins estimates that members of horticultural societies studied by anthropologists were working at most a three-hour day.
Having read Odum’s writings fairly carefully, my understanding of his logic and its basic fallacy is as follows. Let us take something like a book. In the usual everyday account, the energy requirement of the book includes things like the lighting used while the author writes their text, the energy used in printing and distribution, the energy spent by readers as they are reading. That is it, really. Even the latter is not a separate cost of the book, as the reader would be alive and using energy whether they were reading or not.
However, for Odum, this common sense approach is a mistake. The author of the book is making use of mental processes which, for their existence, depend on a vast raft of earlier energy uses. For example, the food supply that went to feed the originator of the alphabet, the endless hours of energy used by those who spread the ideas on which our current author relies to develop their own ideas. The current situation is enabled by a vast pyramid of energy uses extending into the past. Odum calculates all this in relation to the hours of sunlight required to create the precursors of current energy uses. For example, the sunlight falling on leaves that eventually became coal or oil. Given our present context, many of these energy precursors of current mental processes have been made possible through the use of the sunlight energy concentrated in fossil fuels. For example, the meals consumed by those who were the literate purveyors of the ideas which have formed the basis for the book that an author is now writing were all transported in trucks using diesel. And so on. Case closed. Our current high-tech information rich society stands on centuries of use of fossil fuels. It is inconceivable that a society of the future without this kind of energy base could maintain such technological capacity.
My own view is that Odum commits an error not unlike that of those people who trace their ancestral tree, only to find that they are descended from kings and queens in the thirteenth century. Clearly what they are leaving out is all their other ancestors. I look at Odum’s argument like this. Suppose I am not sitting at my desk writing but instead walk down to the beach and dabble my toes in the water. In future this toe dabbling will not be possible because the energy resources that have made my toe dabbling happen (through a variety of causal chains in the past) have depended on the use of fossil fuels. Such extravagances will not be possible in the future with a society constrained to use only renewables. This is patently absurd, so there must be some flaw in Odum’s argument.
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