Well, it's my task to speak in 45 minutes on a very, very big subject. I could talk for a lot longer, so 45 minutes or so is a dangerous concept. But I will try my best, at least to give a taste of what Marxists have to say on this question. Now, this is about the origin of the family. I'm not going to just sit here and repeat what Engels said.
because Engels wrote a very interesting book which you can all read and study and I hope you either have done are doing or will do but the question is this has the family as we know it today always existed? Has it been like this from the very early days of human society? I.e. has it always been a patriarchal family with a dominant male figure as we have known it in recorded history?
Or is it a phenomenon which has changed and evolved over time? Was there a period in which there was a different kind of family? And in the future, could there be a different kind of family to the one that we have known? Now, in today's academic world, which is unfortunately dominated by idealist philosophical outlooks such as postmodernism, the evolutionist and materialist approach of Engels and Morgan that he based himself on is considered superseded. It's old.
It's no longer valid. valid. We have studies which prove that the family has always existed as the nuclear family.
Malinowski, a famous anthropologist of the first half of the 20th century, states quite bluntly, the nuclear family has always existed and will always exist. The question is this, is that true? Was there a phase which we would define as matrilineal?
Very often you hear people talking about matriarchy. Now, matriarchy means rule of women, as patriarchy means rule of men. We're not talking about matriarchy.
It would be a false debate to discuss that, because there wasn't such a thing as a matriarchal society. There was an egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies in which you had matrilineality, i.e. the tracing of descent and the organization of family groups around you. around the women.
And we argue, as Marxists and as Marx did, that there was an early phase of human society which he defined as primitive communism. By that we don't mean a primitive Joseph Stalin or a primitive Soviet Union. We mean a society where there was no private property, where there were no classes, where the means of production was so limited, undeveloped and humans lived from hunter gathering now i've read so many different anthropologists some of them not precise not exactly left wing who all agree that when you look at hunter-gatherer societies even today they are extremely egalitarian far more egalitarian than any other form of society.
Now, I've got an interesting quote which I put in my article, which is from Leslie White. Leslie White is an American anthropologist. He was head of the anthropology...
department at Michigan University in the post-war period, who I would say is very close to a Marxist approach, although sometimes a bit mechanical. But he wrote a book called The Evolution of Culture, The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. He refers to this question of primitive communism, and he says this, so menacing did the theory of primitive communism become. Apparently, that members of three anthropological schools have felt called upon to scotch it.
Lowy of the Boas school has attacked it repeatedly. Malinowski, a leader of the functionalist school, branded it perhaps the most leading fallacy there is in social anthropology. Lowy has been commended by Catholic scholars for his criticism of the theory of primitive communism. And through this, his opposition to socialism. socialist doctrines.
And then he adds, it would appear that an effort was being made to make the world safe for private property. You see, if you accept the idea that there was a phase of human development where there was no private property, then the logical conclusion would be that the phase of human society where there is private property may not be a permanent state of affairs. It may only be a temporary period of several thousands of years, of course, but a period which could lead to a new form of society without property again. That prospect terrifies the capitalist class. obviously, because all their wealth is based on the survival of capitalism.
Now, we need to understand where oppression originated, because the question is this. Is it in men's nature to be aggressive and violent and dominant? Because if it is, which some feminists do maintain that position, well, we're all on a loser, aren't we? If we are, by nature, if I, by nature, should be going to the toilet, going home and beating my wife.
I don't do that, actually. But, you know, if that's my nature and that is my instinct, well, it's pretty hopeless, isn't it, to struggle for the emancipation of women and for equality in society because it's inbuilt. Or is this aggression which we see in a certain period of human development a product of something more concrete, a product of class society, with the property that came with it?
Now, the answer to those two questions will determine actually whether we can actually fight for a better society or whether we are condemned forever and ever to a permanent conflict between men and women. Now, Engels wrote his famous book on the origin of the family in 1884, and he based it mainly on Morgan, Lewis Henry Morgan's book, Ancient Society, which was published in 1877. Now, when I... started looking at this, I thought, I want to see what Morgan had to say.
I read ancient society, and you see it, you can see where Engels gets his ideas. And one of the most important ideas that he comes up with, and by the way, Morgan refers to the idea that the peoples were living in, he called it communism in living. Now in 1877, nobody can accuse him of having any illusions in the Soviet Union.
Communism hadn't, didn't, there was no country like that. like that. What he was referring to was communism in the way people lived, i.e. an egalitarian working together socially, collaborating in a collective manner, consuming in a collective manner.
And Morgan, I think his most important contribution was, he developed the idea that it was the emergence of property which changed the relations between men and women. It was the emergence of property. the accumulation of wealth in the hands of men, which led to the emergence of the patriarchal family, i.e. no longer the egalitarianism of early days, but a society where men dominated in the family. And this was due to the desire to pass on one's accumulated wealth. I think that's an important contribution by Morgan.
Now, who was Morgan? Morgan is an important had the destiny to become the figure loved by communists and Marxists because he gave the basic outline of the evolution of society in the family. But he was no communist himself.
I mean, he was a well-to-do American. He was a lawyer. He invested in the railroads, in the mines.
And his ideal of the highest form of society was the United States because the United States... didn't have a king, didn't have an aristocracy, had a democracy. It was the highest form of society, and he actually says that on more than one occasion. So why is it that he became this figure so discussed and studied by communists? Why is it that the early Social Democratic Party of Germany or the early days of the Communist Party in Russia, all party activists knew about the family structure of early societies that Morgan referred to.
Well, because he provided the analysis, which was the basis for Engels'text. Now, in that period, there were several anthropologists. Morgan was one of them. There were Tyler, Lubbock, Spencer, Maine. There were others.
they all had an evolutionist approach to the history of society and the family etc. Now Morgan got to know the um the Iroquois the how denos sonay I think me I think you pronounce it um there was a chance occurrence he had an interest he got to know them he was actually adopted by the um by one by the Seneca they went through the actual ceremony of adoption um the reason being he took an interest because he was a lawyer these people were being defrauded of life and they were in conflict with private land companies that would do up to all kinds of tricks to basically steal their land legally. So he took an interest.
But by taking this interest, he got to know them. He spent time with them. What he...
What he struck upon was the kinship terminology of these people. Mother, father, and how they were used. Then he also struck upon the rules for mating and reproduction and who you could marry and who you couldn't marry.
He noticed, for instance, that they would call all the mothers of a certain generation, all the women of a certain generation, mother. All the fathers, father. he saw that there was a structure within a tribe in which you had gens or clans in which you could mate only outside of your clan.
You could not mate with the women of your clan because they were considered your sisters. It was a certain, in effect, it was a kind of incest taboo that had been established somehow in the long distant past. But he noticed there was such a different, and...
kinship relationship and terminology and he took an interest in it he described it he actually wrote a book the league of the required the league of the how they're not sunny in which he describes all this he then um he develops this interest and he's curious to understand where it could come from. Later in life, he did field work further west. He went to visit other indigenous peoples who spoke completely different languages to the Iroquois of the northeast.
And to his surprise, or not so much surprise, he discovered similar kinship relations. So he started to draw the conclusion, maybe these peoples, this goes back much, much further into the distant, distant past of humanity. and he drew the conclusion these people must have come from Asia. And did they bring it from Asia?
Maybe they did. So then he proceeded to try and study the kinship terminology of peoples around the world. used the smithsonian institute and the diplomatic network say the united states to send out a questionnaire to people all over the world and he waited for them to come back it took a few years but he started getting back questionnaires about the tamils in india the aborigines of australia and other peoples and that pops up the structure of the the tribe with the clans the prohibition of mating within the clan but you had to marry outside in another group and this started to confirm his idea that maybe it does go much much further back so he he looked into this now i think he made a major contribution to our understanding of the evolution of society now he didn't get everything right he actually literally believed that when people said mother to everybody they thought they were their mother he drew some conclusions from that going further back he said it was a remnant of a previous society of you group marriage, etc., which subsequent studies seem to show was a mistake on his part. He did make mistakes. How could not a man of that period not make mistakes?
Even Engels in 1891, in the preface to the 1891 edition of The Origin of the Family, says in the 14 years since the ancient society was published, subsequent studies have disproven some of what he said. Engels would not have been closed to further discoveries and studies. It's not a dogmatic question, you base yourself on the latest science.
In 1877 Morgan seemed to be the highest development in that field. But the conclusions Engels comes to is, yes, some of what he said has been disproven, but the core idea hasn't. Now, when I started looking at this, I thought, oh, I read so many. We just took it for granted.
Morgan and Engels were wrong. It's been superseded. No, it's false.
It's false. I thought, I'm going to read more and more and more. And I must say, I've come to the same conclusion that Engels came to in 1891. Yes, a lot of studies.
But the core idea that the family has evolved over time. time based on technique the development Technique is valid, it's valid because technique if we think about it the way we procure our food has changed. Hunter-gatherers at a very early stage They hunt and they gather. It's very simple. Now, before I go on to that, they have done studies, quite recent studies, on hunter-gatherer societies, hunter-gatherer groups in sub-Saharan Africa.
And they have done studies on that. And they've looked at the contribution to the diet of the overall family group of the women who tend to do the gathering, and not always, and the men who tend to do the hunting, although women also have been known to hunt. And they find that actually the women contribute more to the diet than the men. More is procured through gathering, through foraging, roots, nuts, fruits, plants, herbs. In fact, it eventually leads to the women being the ones who actually developed early horticulture, i.e. the idea of planting some of these seeds and not having to go on foraging for them.
Now, if you think about it, if the women are contributing at least 50% and more of the diet, there's a material basis for the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies. The men contribute, yes, but they're not the woman who has to look... You know, the typical idea would be...
it's like the Flintstones were like us they're stone age but they're like us they all have nuclear families or the rest of it primitive women of early societies had to look for a man to keep them just like they have to today don't they young women of today aren't you all looking for the ideal man that will keep you and feed you and clothe you as they should you laugh why because it's changed and yet for centuries that was the idea it wasn't so long ago long ago that an American man in the 60s still would have considered it his duty to earn enough money to keep his wife at home where she should be and he had to be the the bread earner it's changed I'll go back to that later on you see the family does change in spite of them saying that it's always been the same it's changed in our living memory but there was a material basis to the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies that's been proven beyond doubt even today the ones they look at there is a greater They've done studies on gender inequality between farmers and hunter-gatherers. And hey, what appears? There's a greater gender inequality amongst farmers than there is amongst hunter-gatherers. What are farmers?
Farmers are... Farming is what starts the process of the emergence of classes. Not immediately. Early farming did not immediately produce that.
The traditions... of egalitarianism continued in early farming society. In fact, if you look at the gens within a tribe, the land, even when it, first of all, in the early days, it would have been a territory in which you could hunt and others could not hunt in that territory. When it becomes horticulture and in agriculture, the land is still the property of the clan, the gens, and can only be inherited through the clan.
It can't be inherited outside. It doesn't become individual private property. Now on the question of matrilineality, again they try and portray it as, well there are matrilineal and there are patriarchal and there are bilateral and there's no real structure to it.
The thing is, you see, I've looked and I've found texts and the more I read, the earlier, the further back you go, the more matrilineal societies you meet. Now, in the early, early days, you see, there was no strict pairing, i.e., Mr. and Mrs. You know, as a young boy, I remember in England in the 60s, literally you had women who were called Mrs. John Smith. And I used to think, hasn't she got even a first name? No? At least Mrs. Smith.
No, Mrs. John. The complete property of the man is what that reflects, historically speaking. But in England...
In early societies, there was a degree of promiscuity. Now, I don't want to open up the whole discussion on promiscuity. I've got a whole load of reading on that, which would be very funny and interesting reading, but I'm not going to do it here. But human beings are not strictly monogamous animals, right?
There was a time when a young woman was expected to be a virgin, marry her man, and stay with him for the rest of her life, and know nobody else. Now, I'm not going to go around. one by one and ask everyone who's you whether you are monogamous or not I would bet you're not I wasn't and a lot of other people weren't either in the sense that nobody today finds the love of their life and stays with them for the rest of their lives and knows nobody else there's a much greater freedom in effect we could say that in the last hundred years we've been evolving back towards a much more natural way of being for human beings That doesn't mean that there aren't pairing couples and that there aren't people who fall in love and stay together, etc. But strict monogamy is not human nature. Good, okay.
Yeah, okay. A little bit louder, okay, sorry. In the very early days, and the societies that had been observed early enough, confirmed that. They confirmed that aspect. I could jump forward to, I will do that actually, to an individual called Paul Lejeune.
I don't know if any of you know him. He was a French Jesuit priest who... came to New France, the French colonies, to Christianize the indigenous people.
Now on this, the reason I'm raising this is that when they try to deny matrilineality, they say, oh, we've studied indigenous peoples, and there's patriarchy in some of them, right? The question is, when did they study them? Because if you study the indigenous peoples of America in the 1800s, it's They had been in contact with European culture for 200 years by then, influenced by contact with Europeans.
And I found interesting the reading of one text, which you might want to look up yourselves. It's called The Myths of Male Dominance by Eleanor Burke Leacock. She's an American anthropologist. It's interesting.
Americans have produced some really interesting anthropologists of a progressive nature. She went... and did fieldwork amongst what was called the Montagnier Nascapé, I think they're called the Innu now, of northeastern Canada.
But in the 50s, obviously, you cannot hope to find the historical relations of these peoples. And it's not enough simply to say, oh, I did fieldwork, I observed them, this is how they are. That's where Paul Lejeune comes in.
Because he is a man of the 1600s. And he made a... a huge effort to Christianize these people and he spent the winter of 1633-34 with them to befriend them in the process of Christianizing them.
Now he found some problems. He started out with a typical European patriarchal approach. All I have to do is convince the men. Job done.
And he realized, no, it doesn't work like that. It's not enough to convince the men, because the men don't control the women. The men don't dominate the women.
They're egalitarian. And he said, he spent a lot of time trying to do this, and lots of European colonists have done this. They go to these peoples, thinking they're going to find a society where men dominate.
He sat down with one of these chiefs, and he tried to explain to this chief, the niceties of French civilization. And he was standing there with his son, and he said to him, this son of yours, for example, you say he's your son. How can you say, how do you know he's your son? You let your women have sex with other men. He might not be your son.
You know what the answer of the chief was? It's a famous quote. He said, you know what the problem with you French?
You love only your... children. We love all the children of the tribe. We bring up all the children together.
Basically, it does not matter to us. Now, here's a quote from Lejeune. He says this, the Montagnier, the Vinu, they prefer to take the children of their sisters as heirs rather than their own, or than those of their brothers, calling in question.
the fidelity of their wives and being unable to doubt that these nephews came from their blood. Now what he's describing is a matrilineal society. Why the children of their sisters?
Well, you see, a man can be absolutely sure that his sister's children are his nephews and nieces. Why? Because his sister is definitely his sister, because she was born of the same mother. But he says they don't trust... For instance, their brother's wives.
Now, in the logic of a French Jesuit, he thinks it's because they don't trust their fidelity. What he doesn't understand is that in actual fact, there was a freedom, a sexual freedom. freedom in these peoples and they were matrilineal.
Now the point Leacock is making here is this is a description actually by quite a reactionary, actually bastard if you think what he did, I'll describe what he did afterwards but he's describing these people before contact with Europeans and the kind of family relations which confirms what Morgan said about the matrilineal nature of these peoples. He tried to convince the young ones that he was trying to Christianize that you must stay with the same person for the rest of your life. Again, I quote Lejeune.
The young people do not think that they can persevere in the state of matrimony with a bad wife or a bad husband. They wish to be free. to be able to divorce the consort if they do not love each other. Now think about it, who is civilizing who?
The French Jesuit actually spent time trying to get them to understand the need to beat their wives. He would say, look, no French man is told what to do by their women, and you should be the same. And he realizes that It's not enough to convince the men, you've got to convince the women. But then he realizes, those that have been brought up in this culture, it's very difficult.
And he's thinking, if I baptize these young people, they may not behave like Christians. They may revert to their bad habits of not wanting to be with somebody they don't love. You know, terrible thing. So he draws the conclusion, you read it, we need to take their children.
And we need to take them away from them. Because, he actually says, says it in one of his texts if we have the schools for these children in the neighborhood of the tribe or the this group of people these indigenous people if they see the way we treat the children they will come and take them away because they didn't beat their children they didn't beat their wives and they didn't beat their children he describes um one scene where one young woman they can't convince her of the advantages of french civilization and culture and behavior that she has to accept uh fidelity to the man etc etc because they can't convince her they decide they're going to take her away to a dungeon that'll give her a that'll teach her a bit of time in a dungeon by then he had christianized some of the indigenous people and the first thing christianized were the most zealot of you know devout christians fanatical christians they were physically manhandling taking away this girl and the others who had not been born Christianites tried to intervene, the others threatened them, actually, we will do anything for God, I will kill you. So they backed off. But they were disgusted at the scene.
This is the civilizing effect of European culture on these people. But it goes, but you see, it wasn't just a product of a priest sitting down and trying to convince. What Leacock explains, and I think it's quite a convincing argument, is that... Contact with the Europeans changed the nature of the society in North America amongst the indigenous peoples.
For example, these people that she studied, who, as we can see, in the 1600s were still... still matrilineal and egalitarian and a degree of promiscuity amongst them when the whites arrive French and English they start trading furs the men of the of the Nazca pay you know start hunting beavers not for food that they need they didn't they didn't go extinct when they were hunting for what they needed now they started hunting on a large scale They describe how one man, maybe his son, would have 300 traps in a line in the forest. And they would spend the whole hunting season manning the traps, catching the beavers, killing them, skinning them.
And then at the end of the season, they would come down to the river or the lake, wherever, with them, and waiting for the English or the French ships to arrive to trap them. trade the furs In exchange, they would get food, they would get clothing, they would get tools. The way they lived had changed. And this had a huge impact on the family.
Because now, instead of the egalitarian nature of society, the men were starting to become the earners. Some of the men sometimes would get occasional wage labor and get paid for their work. So the way they procured their means of existence, as Morgan pointed out, changed from a collective egalitarian hunter-gatherer society to trading with...
Basically, they'd become part of capitalism. They were hunting a product, a good which could be exchanged. And it radically changed the family relations. Then you get anthropologists of the 18th, 19th century, 20th century, and they said, oh, we've studied them.
They're patrilineal. They're patriarchal. And...
ignoring that there was an evolution already that had taken place under the impact of contact with capitalism. Now that's one important point which I found in the reading, which I find is a materialist explanation for the change in the family. But let's go back to the history of society and the family.
Homer Staples has been around for about 300,000 years. That's the latest description. discoveries, and agriculture came into being about 12,000 years ago, 10,000, 12,000 years ago, depends on different parts of the world. In the Middle East in particular is where this first emerged. Now, this is the Neolithic revolution.
From that known moment in history to the emergence of the first historically known societies, we have... The historically recorded societies, civilizations, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, Sumer, etc., they're all patriarchal by the time they emerge. But they are also all class societies.
You have slavery, you have private property, you have a privileged elite and a mass of people working. The passage had taken place sometime in that period. Not automatically, agriculture doesn't immediately produce that, but agriculture...
Agriculture and the development of technique, the development of tools, plowing, etc., eventually leads to a surplus accumulated in the hands of a few who want to pass on their property. Now, if you look at ancient Greece as known in history, it's an extremely patriarchal society. The ancient Greeks, great philosophers and great thinkers, how did they treat their women? Ancient Greece, the women could not be seen outside the house. They could not go out freely.
If a man came from outside, the woman had to be secluded at the back of the house. You recognize something here, don't you? You would, from where you come from, in certain parts of Pakistan or Afghanistan.
That is still the case today. The veil, just en passant, was not invented by Islam. It goes back millennia in the Middle East to a period where extreme control of women's sexuality was imposed.
Why? Because they had to impose monogamy, strict monogamy, but as Marx and Engels both say, for the women only. By the way, a parallel development to this is the first time that you have prostitution.
You know, they say that prostitution is the oldest trade. It's not. It's bollocks.
Hunter-gathering is the oldest trade in the world, not prostitution. Prostitution is a relatively recent phenomenon in the last 10,000 years or so. It comes into being with climate change. class society because you see once you have property and once you have the men controlling the property and the desire to pass your property onto your offspring how do you guarantee that your offspring are your offspring my dad used to joke whenever a friend would come around oh nice little boy you got there your son he said well yeah he's his mother's son he was joking i was his son too i actually looked like him so i think i was but he was joking with the idea was you never know right that was the joke But in that joke, there is a truth.
And how can you make sure? You have to control very strictly the sexuality of the women. And ancient Greece showed that.
Now, that came from somewhere. It wasn't always like that. There's another source we can take a look at, which is the evolution of the ancient religions.
I have here an article on Sumer. It's called State Formation. in Sumer and the subjugation of women, and a very interesting article which points out and actually outlines the evolution of the religion of Sumer, which shows that there were powerful goddesses in the early days, that women had a much more equal relationship relationship had a greater role in society but gradually the religion changes from goddesses sometimes very powerful goddesses it goes through stages the gods start to appear and then eventually the goddesses are demoted and you have an all-powerful male god.
There's a book by Diva called Did God Have a Wife? Very interesting. He's an archaeologist that has gone to Israel, Palestine, and has found all the archaeological evidence that proves that Yahweh had a wife.
She was called the Queen of the Heavens. That there was a period in which this was a powerful figure in the religion. The symbol of this goddess was the tree.
Now, why would it be the tree? Well, think about it. In a society where you don't really know exactly how we reproduce, you know, the actual science behind it, women are these fantastic beings that produce fruit.
They regularly produce new life. Like trees produce fruit that can be picked, women produce the next generation. And they were actually revered because of this in ancient societies.
And... that was part of the egalitarianism of the hunter-gatherer societies but you see you know when when god says we shall create them in our image again ask yourself why does he say our i don't know was god a transgender individual they didn't like to be called didn't be like regarded as a single individual the truth is is because that text probably belongs to a period when he had a wife and he was evident He didn't create us in his image. We created him in our image. We know that.
All the religions reflect the structure of society at a given moment. And as the structure of society changes from an egalitarian, matrilineal society to a patriarchal one, the goddesses are demoted and an all-powerful male god appears. First, as the father of all the gods, like Zeus, like Ogre. in all of these societies. But eventually we end up with the one God with no wife, no women whatsoever in the religion and it's an all-powerful and if you look at the Old Testament he's an all-powerful, very angry, very powerful, very violent God, very jealous God.
There's a lot of the evidence in the archaeology for this, because they found these statues of... The figure of Ashura is a woman with two lions by her, hands on the lion, and in the same clay... image there's the tree which is the symbol of Ashura she disappears but it's the same with ancient Greek religion ancient Roman religion in all of them if you go back far enough you find a preview stage where the female gods the goddesses were more important what leads to the demotion of woman in heaven is the demotion of woman on earth in in our society and we change the religion um in the in the skies let's say you know in line with the the society we live in when men become dominant the religion has to be one where the male figure is dominant the women are subservient and obedient, and women must know their place. And monogamy is imposed, but as I said, only for the women. If any of you have read the Old Testament and you see Abraham, how many wives did Abraham have?
How many women did he have? You know? Supposed to be, aren't we supposed to be husband and wife for life because the Bible teaches us? You read the Old Testament and you will find Jacob and all the, they have more than one wife.
A little detail that when I went to a Catholic school, when I was educated, the teaching was very different. teacher never pointed that little detail out because it would contradict the idea that it's the natural way and always has been no they were not they had more abraham actually the first son is not even with his wife it's with the concubine because um is um the the maid as a because his wife couldn't give them couldn't give him one then god is magnanimous and at the age of 90 he lets her have a baby um that's the story in the in the bible anyway but um the the religion's you change in reflecting the change in the structure of society so what I'm trying to say is that there You can go back to somebody like Lejeune to see what the indigenous people were like before contact. But you can go even much further back in history and study the original sources of religion and you see these changes which all... indicate a transition from matrilineal to patrilineal it's reflected in them in the religion now Morgan was an evolutionist and the anthropologists of the 19th century were mainly evolutionists.
Unfortunately, they were also, I'm not referring to Morgan, he was the one, one of the few who did field work, but some of them had an idea that yes, there is evolution, but they used it in a reactionary way. The white-skinned North European is the highest product of human evolution. That was the idea they had.
You had, you had theories like monogenesis, polygenesis, i.e. God created us all equal, yes. But some of us degenerated.
Some of us degenerated and became black and primitive and savages. And others remained the superior being that God had created. Others thought, no, he created us more primitive. But some of us evolved and became superior. The end story is always the same.
The whites were somehow superior. And there was scientific basis for that. That was the thinking. And that's extremely reactionary, but also very useful to the imperialists of the time. Because when you go and treat, especially the way they treated the black African people, enslaving them in horrendous conditions...
you've got to somehow justify that and how do you do it you declare them to be subhuman the president of the american anthropological society in 1901 actually says that they're subhuman and it's to justify the horrendous oppression of these people and then you have degrees of inferiority the the superior ones were the anglo-saxons they were the british the germans the scandinavians north europe southern europe italians and spanish they were already not not really white. The East Europeans, strangely enough, were very white, but not at the level of the North Europeans. It was all a nice story, which was backed up by so-called science, which dominated society. In comes I'm going to try and do this telegraphically, an individual called Franz Boas, who was a German of Jewish background, who came to America and became a professor of anthropology, I think, at Columbia University. Originally, he He accepted these ideas, but he was given the task, for instance, of measuring people's craniums to establish if there was a, you know, there must be a scientific basis to why black people are inferior to white people.
So measured their craniums, which he did. He measured thousands of them. And he came to the conclusion that this is bunkum because the size of a black person's brain can be bigger or smaller in the same way that that of a white person can be bigger or smaller.
Now, if I said if I had to. classify them i'd have to put a bunch of white people and black people and indigenous people in this category and a bunch of the in this other category because it just doesn't make sense there's no scientific basis to it and to his credit he combated the racism um and he had to fight against the stream in actual fact because the dominant views in american science at the time was that all this other stuff was scientifically based he combated it now i'm gonna have to be very telegraphic The unfortunate thing is this. He started out by saying, we must do a lot more concrete field work before we can develop laws of development and analysis, etc.
Which he did. He proceeded to accumulate. Him and all his students who became quite famous anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Lowy, a lot of the Boasians, basically. But he drew the conclusion by looking at the different...
such a variety of different societies. He actually says, I'll quote it, it's from his Anthropology in Modern Life. He says, what is it, I'm trying to find it.
Laws of development, except in most generalized forms, cannot be established and a detailed course of growth cannot be predicted. Basically, all we can do, he says, is study the phenomenons in front of us, i.e. look at each individual case, but you can't generalize. Now, what happened was, in the 20th century, there was a reaction against Morgan and Engels and the materialist and evolutionist approach to this question. But it fits the needs of the capitalist class, because the capitalist class cannot accept an idea which says, the families evolved through different phases, and the great thing about Morgan, he actually says, he calls it the monogamy. Gamian, the monogamous family has served us well so far, but if society should continue to evolve, it could further change.
So he leaves it open to a further change in society. Engels takes that much further, and he actually says the future generations will decide. how they should relate to each other.
It's not our task to dictate to the future generations what kind of sexual relations they're going to have. Now, these ideas were a threat to bourgeois society. Now, in particular... After 1917, the Bolsheviks come to power.
And they try to act on the ideas of Engels, which he had elaborated, basing themselves on the analysis of Morgan. What did the Bolsheviks do? Well, remember what they did. They introduced abortion for all women, available for all women. They decriminalized homosexuality.
They made divorce a very simple procedure. They abolished the concept of illegitimacy. illegitimate children, a swathe of very radical advanced reforms, because they were basing themselves on Engels. Now unfortunately, and I can't go into it here, obviously the Soviet Union, because it was so backward, economically speaking, 85% of the population were peasants, most of them illiterate, and because of the isolation of the revolution in one country, in a backward country, they didn't have the material resources to act fully on those reforms. and to maintain them fully.
In fact, in the 30s, they abolish abortion, they make divorce more difficult, and they recriminalize homosexuality. This is the reaction of the bureaucracy. But for a period, the Bolsheviks gave the world a view of what genuine communists could achieve in terms of family relations. That became something they had to combat.
They had to combat it. I've got it here. Marvin Harris, another American anthropologist, in a text called The Rise of Anthropological Theory, published in 1968. So it's worth reading.
He says, he explains the modern anthropology entered the 20th century with the mandate to quote, to expose Morgan's scheme and destroy the method on which it was based, i.e. the method of social evolution based on the evolution of technique, basically of the means of production. Ever since then, in reality, in anthropology, we've had a battle against uh materialist evolutionist approach to the family and reaction your ideas dominate um there were anthropologists like leslie white which i quoted before i've really got to quote this one he says this is this shows you how you know the post-modernists um it's all about ideas it's all about words you change the word and you change the essence not necessarily so and he says um because you know, you can have what's called an abstraction. And they say, he quotes them, he says, how can science have a subject matter which cannot be perceived?
There is no science that has an invisible, imperceptible, intangible subject matter. There is not and cannot be one. Then because the abstractionists, he says, have jockeyed themselves into the position that culture is imperceptible. You can't see culture, you can't touch it.
So does it exist? Yes. Does it exist? I can't actually draw on this a map of culture. I can't draw you a picture of culture.
I can't describe what colour it is or how big it is. But it exists. Who can deny it? But he says because of that, they say, the next logical question to be raised is, and he quotes, is culture real? Indeed, does it exist?
And then he quotes, this is a question that Ralph Linton asked. And then he quotes Radcliffe Brown. And he says, Culture is a word that designates no concrete reality, but only an abstraction, and a vague abstraction at that.
And then he goes on to say, quote Spiro, another anthropologist, who says that culture has no ontological reality. And Leslie White says, by this, he evidently means that culture is not real. Thus they have defined culture out of existence, thinking something out of existence. Lewis White says, if one can get oneself into a situation, like this by thinking, maybe one can get oneself out of it by thinking, though by a different kind of thinking. And I would say it would be an evolutionist, materialist, dialectical materialist way of thinking you can solve this problem.
As I said earlier on, Hunter-gatherer societies have been shown to be extremely egalitarian. The passage to farming eventually produces the surplus that produces the early forms of class society. When you have property in goods, you can have property also in human beings.
Slavery appears. Women become property, which they weren't before. In the ancient Romans, the pater familias, the head of the family, he was literally the owner of everything.
everything in the family wife children slaves animals and he had all power over them if you read the old testament what do you do to an adulterous wife you stone her to death you have to introduce extreme forms of punishment to force women to accept the monogamy imposed on them Now, the 20th century anthropology tries to remove a historical view, an evolutionist, materialist view of this, and deny that this is valid. Now, I've got... other things here I'd like to list but I can't. But just to conclude on one thing.
We as Marxists would argue that what I've just listed here is a very brief explanation. You can read the article and maybe even read... some of the books which I've quoted, it's worth doing. There has been an evolution. Class society is where women were demoted from the egalitarian position into property of the men.
And that took place thousands of years ago. But what has happened in the last 80 to 100 years? At the beginning I asked you is it your aim to find the man of your life? Or should it be my aim to find the man? man or the woman of my life or whatever.
No, that doesn't mean that people don't pair, the people don't fall in love, we're not arguing that, but it has changed. Think about this, in the United States of America, 50% of marriages end in divorce. That's very different to what it would have been a hundred years ago. 40% of babies in the United States are born to women who are not married.
That's one hell of a change that's taken place. In the last 70 or 80 years, the family has changed more than in the previous 5,000, 10,000 years. That's a fact. And it's a fact we can touch with our hands.
What is the material basis for this? Women have come into the labour market more and more and more. Capitalism has actually created that.
Capitalism in the last 50 years has created a family where the husband and wife must go to work both of them if they're to pay the rent the mortgage and keep the family it's a material question they've also I've got the facts and figures they've actually reduced the real wages of individuals there was a time when a man's wages did include the wife's needs because they could feed clothes and give money to the wife etc no longer can a man do that because the real wages relative to the the overall economy has been reduced. Now, to maintain the same standard of living as 50 years ago, you need two wages coming into the house. But this has a very progressive side to it.
Women are no longer tied to the half, to the kitchen, etc. They are in the labour movement. They're in the workplace. Young women go to college. They get degrees.
They get jobs. And with that comes a wage. And with that comes a degree of independence.
Now I'm not saying that we live in an idyllic world. We all know that it's not perfect. And there's still lots of inequalities.
There's still a gender inequality in wages. Nonetheless, it's capitalism which has actually created the material conditions for the final true emancipation of women, but which can only come about through the abolition of the capitalist system itself. I think I've said enough and I've gone on. gone on long enough um i haven't said everything i want to say even in these short notes which are an abbreviation of a shortened version of what i've read um but i hope i've given you a taste of what marxists think about this and what we have to say and i do believe we have a lot to say it's not true what they say about morgan and angles are superseded and the materialist historical materialist approach evolutionist approach is superseded and all the rest of it I think we have a lot to say and we have to say it loudly Because from all this, what's the conclusion?
The final conclusion? Men are not naturally aggressive towards women. It just isn't true.
There are violent men. Of course there are. There's femicide and it's a terrible problem.
But it's a product of the distortions of human society by class relations. and by property. You remove the private property, you build a genuine socialist society where you don't have private property in the sense of private property the means of production.
Or, for instance, a society where if... if a man and woman with children have to separate they don't have to fight each other with lawyers over who gets the house and the money but there's plenty of social housing where the husband or the wife or whoever can move out and there can be a much more peaceful breakup i'd have some experience because i've been married more than once and i know what it means when you have to decide what happens with the children the way it's structured we have a breed of individuals called lawyers you who make couples fight each other to the death over the money, the alimony, the house. Because who makes from that?
It's the lawyer. The lawyer always wins. Every letter he writes, it's $30, $50, $100. And I had it.
I actually told my lawyer, I don't need you anymore. I proceeded by myself. Because I had a deal with one of my ex-wives. We had a deal. I thought, why bother with lawyers?
But this shit. society is structured in such a way as to force people to fight each other. Enough social housing, the children are cared for, there's no fighting between individuals, you have much more natural relations between humans. Much healthier, I think, relations between humans in a socialist society.
And it's something worth fighting for. And it can be fought for, and it would change the relations between men and women. So I think we actually have a far more powerful argument than some of the extreme forms of feminism which say it's all men's fault because of the nature of men.
We say no, it's not the nature of men, it's the nature of people who live in a class society. Remove the class society, remove the material conditions, and you will remove the basic, it won't disappear overnight. But as Engels says in his book, once a generation of men. of men who have never had to buy a woman appear and once a generation of women who have never had to sell themselves appear then the relations between the sexes will change that's what will happen our task is to fight to build a society where those material conditions exist it's not my task to tell the future generations what kind of sex to have and who with and how often that will be their business and furthermore even if I did try to dictate I'd be dead by then and I wouldn't have many powers to impose my will and I have no desire to impose a will I want to create the conditions as a Marxist that would allow genuine freedom of human beings in the future that's what we're about as Marxists and that's what we're fighting for applause