V. Gordon Childe
John Molyneux Archive | ETOL Main Page
Dawn of Everything
From Irish Marxist Review, Vol. 11 No. 33, June 2022, pp. 73–75.
Copyright © Irish Marxist Review.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
This book makes large claims for itself. First there is its title, The Dawn of Everything, and then the statement that ‘In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity.’ [p. 24] [8] These claims are exaggerated. This book is not a history of humanity. It says nothing at all about the origins of humanity or of homo sapiens (a period of perhaps three million years overall and maybe 300,000 years for homo sapiens) or about the development of Chinese or Indian civilisations beyond their earliest phases, the Persian or Roman empires, the Mongol Empire, the Black Death, the conquest of the Americas, the rise of capitalism, the French or Russian or Chinese revolutions, the two world wars or indeed almost anything in modern history. [9] Nor is it a ‘science of history’, new or old.
What it is, in fact, is a series of polemics, illustrated by numerous stories and examples, against what the authors see as the dominant view of one segment of the early history of humankind (often called ‘pre-history’ because prior to written history), namely the transition from foraging to agriculture/urban societies. This character of the book gives rise to its major strength and one of its major weaknesses. The strength is that it contains a multitude of descriptions of the life and behaviour of indigenous peoples which are by turns intriguing and challenging. Its weakness is that it does this in a very unsystematic way, often with no clear time line indicated, so that the reader, unless they already possess massive anthropological and archaeological knowledge, is often left wondering whereabouts in human history we are supposed to be. Moreover, this element of confusion tends to facilitate the superficial plausibility of the case being made.
The main ostensible target of these polemics is what Graeber and Wengrow (GW) see as the ‘Rousseauian’ view of the nature of early human society which they often characterise as that societies before the advent of agriculture were ’confined to small, egalitarian bands’ [p. 4] but which they also repeatedly refer to, dismissively, as ‘a state of innocence’ or a ‘Garden of Eden’. [10] GW also reject what they see as the main alternative to the Rousseau view, that of Thomas Hobbes, that life in the state of nature was ‘a war of all against all’ and ‘nasty, brutish and short’ which they describe as even worse. But most of their energy goes into combating Rousseauism. This, in itself, is a problem because in their critique of the Rousseauian view they are implicitly attacking another theory of early human history, that of Marxism. and they do this without ever either properly setting out the Marxist theory or systematically confronting it.
The Marxist account of pre-history has its roots in Marx’s notes on the anthropological studies of the Iroquois Native Americans by Henry Morgan which were then developed by Engels into the famous The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This in turn was built on in the 1930s and 1940s by the eminent archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, and by subsequent Marxist anthropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock [11] and Richard B. Lee. [12] The most important features of this account were a) the role of labour in the process whereby humans differentiated themselves from animals and ‘mankind made itself’ [13]; b) that neither class divisions, nor the oppression of women, nor the existence of the state were eternal features of human society – and thus attributable to human nature – but arose historically after a prolonged period of classlessness or primitive communism as a result of the transition from foraging to agriculture and the generation of substantial surpluses over and above what was necessary for subsistence. [14] The evidence presented by GW in their extended polemic against Rousseau and his legacy, also constitutes a challenge to the Marxist account, in that they describe a number of pre-agricultural, foraging societies, particularly the Kwiakutl, the Yurok and the Chapusa, which were characterised by substantial inequality (including slavery) and were plainly not ‘primitive communist’.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, in their critical review of the book, maintain that GW’s examples are exceptions to the typical forager societies. The Kwakiutl, for example, were fishers in an area of such abundance that it generated huge surpluses which permitted class inequality to emerge. They say that ‘Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow fail to engage with the enormous body of new scholarship on human evolution’ which shows that ’for at least 200,000 years, [humans] lived in egalitarian societies where men and women were equal too.’ [15] To this I would add that it is a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the Marxist account to see it as envisaging a rapid or sudden transition from classless foraging to class divided agriculture. On the contrary as Martin Empson states ‘the process was a long drawn out one that took millennia’. [16] In such a transition there would be bound to be numerous hybrid cases, false starts and steps in one direction followed by steps in the opposite direction and the examples given by GW are all drawn from this transitional period. The already noted absence of a clear timeline or systematic presentation tends to mask this. They do not refute or disprove the argument that humans lived in rough equality for the vast bulk of their history.
|
V. Gordon Childe |
The Dawn of Everything is also an indirect attack on Marxism in a broader sense in that at every turn they reject materialist explanations of social development i.e. explanations that begin with the material conditions in which human beings produce their means of subsistence [17], always preferring explanations based on culture and ideas. For example that ‘Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live’ (p. 108); or ‘To farm or not to farm: it’s all in the head’ (p. 242); and ‘cities begin in the mind’ (p. 276). In philosophical terms GW exhibit a consistent preference for radical ‘idealism’ which has always been a strand in bourgeois thought. But it is also linked to the authors’ anarchism in that anarchists, beginning with Bakunin and continuing all the way through to the Occupy movement have always been irked by the ‘boring’ Marxist emphasis on objective conditions and seen the revolution as some combination of individual will power and mass spontaneity. Above all GW want to emphasise that ‘there is no single pattern’ (p. 115) or ‘no consistent pattern’ (p. 116); human freedom can just erupt in any place and at any time in history if people ‘choose’ it.
The great weakness of this approach is that while people’s culture, ideas and choices must always be part of any historical explanation, if they are the starting point and the finishing point then they are just left hanging with no answer to why that was a certain people’s culture or ideas. To give a more recent example than those given by GW, how do we explain why, in the American Civil War, the South was pro-slavery and the North was anti-slavery? Can we just say it was their different ‘cultures’ or their different morality or their different interpretations of the bible? Or did those differences, as Marxists argue, have their roots in the different economic conditions in the North and the South – industrial capitalism requiring (‘free’) wage labour versus plantation production resting on slavery?
There are other things I don’t much like about this book. I don’t like the way they dismiss the questions about the origin of inequality and of the state. In the case of inequality, I think it’s because they really believe that inequality and private property have always been there and maybe always will be. [18] In the case of the State they simply divert the question of origin by saying that there is no consensus definition of the State [19], but this is just casuistry. If states now exist, which they clearly do, they either have always existed or they have an origin. I think that in many of their descriptions of indigenous and prehistoric societies they build speculation on speculation in a way that exceeds the evidence they present or reference. Often the account begins with ‘it seems that’
or ‘it might have been the case that’ but a couple of paragraphs later those qualifications have been forgotten. And occasionally they present good stories, precisely because they are good stories, but which are not in fact true. For example they claim May Day was chosen as international workers day because ‘so many British Peasant revolts had historically begun on that day’ (p. 117). But they didn’t. the three main peasant revolts in English history were in 1381 (the Peasant Revolt), 1450 (Jack Cade) and 1549 (Kett’s Rebellion). None of them started on 1 May. [20]
But leave these objections aside. The main point is that this book is a challenge to the Marxist theory of history but not in the end a convincing one.
8. The final phrase in this sentence is important – and typical in that repeatedly our authors suggest that their account of history is not only truer than virtually all accounts that have gone before but also morally and politically superior (less racist, less condescending etc.) and at the same time more ‘fun’.
9. Here the obvious contrast is with Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World, London 1999, which manages to cover all of the above.
10. This is disingenuous ‘straw manning’ as what the advocates of forager equality believe existed was not ‘a state of innocence’ or a ‘Garden of Eden’ but simply societies without classes or gender oppression.
11. See Eleanor Burke Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance, Chicago 2008. GW discuss the encounter between the indigenous Montagnais-Naskapi and the colonising Jesuits but fail to reference Leacock’s path-breaking study of this. They mention Leacock in passing elsewhere but refer to her as a ‘feminist’ anthropologist and don’t mention that she was a Marxist.
12. Richard B. Lee, The !Kung San, Cambridge 1979.
13. The most famous text in this regard is Frederick Engels, 1876 essay The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm. But the fundamental idea is present in Marx and Engels from the beginning – i.e. before they or anyone else knew much about human pre-history. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx wrote, the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour,’ www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm. In The German Ideology they wrote. ‘Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.’ www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2. This idea was also the inspiration for the path-breaking archaeology of V. Gordon Childe in Man Makes Himself, London (1936).
14. The principal classic text for this is Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm. The best more recent summary, in the light of modern archaeological and anthropological findings, is Chris Harman, Engels and the Origins of Human Society, International Socialism Journal 65, www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1994/xx/engels.htm.
15. Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, All Things Being Equal, https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/.
16. Martin Empson, Land and Labour, London 2014, p. 30.
17. I stress ‘begin with’ because it is no part of genuine Marxism to deny the role of culture, ideas, politics etc. in history but is a very familiar bourgeois trope to denounce materialist explanations as crude economic determinism.
18. This is not argued in a sustained way but there are many hints in this direction as in ‘If private property has an ‘origin’ it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself’. (p. 163) Or, in relation to Bali, ‘In principle there are no equals [because we are all different – JM] and most Balinese would argue that in the greater cosmic scheme of things, this must always be true’. (p. 320) . I suspect GW agree the view they attribute to ‘most Balinese’.
19. Again there is only the barest mention of the Marxist theory of the state (despite the vast literature on the subject). And why would anyone, let alone avowed anarchists like GW expect there to be consensus on this hot topic.
20. As Lindisfarne and Neale note in passing ‘The reader should be warned that their use of evidence is often not reliable.’
John Molyneux Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 2 January 2023