THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO CAPITAL

Part 1

THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO CAPITAL
By James Miller
Part 1

This essay argues that the social sciences taught in nearly all capitalist educational institutions—sociology, economics, political science, history, cultural anthropology, and philosophy—have been systematically distorted by the dominant social class to justify their rule. The journalists and propagandists who act in support of the capitalist ruling families seek to legitimize and inculcate myths and illusions that justify the domination of the master class. The social sciences have thus become “apologetic,” meaning that they now exist to garner support for the existing social regime. But the earlier scientific approaches to human society had their origins in ancient times as genuine attempts to systematize and spread verifiable scientific knowledge.

More recently, since the 17^th century, the social sciences have branched out into separate disciplines and for many decades have updated and sharpened their methods of investigation. When initially emerging in the European enlightenment period, these social sciences took the form of philosophical and historical inquiries to advance the understanding of humanity’s origins, progress, and potential. But throughout the expansion of the territory under the control of the colonial settlers in the 18^th and 19th centuries, the propertied merchant and landowning classes came to be seen as those who were in the strongest position to determine the destiny of the new nation in formation.

The wealthy property owners who developed their political power in North America throughout the colonial period increasingly recognized that the masses of workers and farmers could threaten their power, if and when these toilers became aware of their exploited condition and potential to resist. It would be helpful if the leading propertied families could make the masses of workers and farmers believe that the rule of the economically dominant class was beneficial for all. For this, it became necessary to develop ideas that stressed the harmonious coexistence of wealthy families with the relatively impoverished. The rich, they reasoned, had gained social prominence through their ingenuity and energy, and were naturally destined to play a more prominent social and political role. In addition, by offering gainful employment to the poor, the big property owners provided the masses with opportunities to improve their lives. What’s more, many of the rich, due to their family heritage, had been educated in colleges and universities and possessed advanced knowledge. Naturally, education, whether obtained from institutions or self-study, enabled them to play a leadership role in creating a new nation. The main purpose of this essay is to trace the evolution of the main features of the ruling class's philosophical and cultural beliefs and policies in the U.S.

Of course, propaganda alone had no social authority unless it were backed up by military and police power. Violent repression of mass resistance was not just a “final expedient,” but an ever-present threat. Engels explained in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:

“But we have seen that a police force became also necessary to maintain order among the citizens. This public power of coercion exists in every state. It is not composed of armed men alone but has also such objects as prisons and correction houses attached to it, that were unknown to gentilism [pre-civilized clan-based social organization]. It may be very small, almost infinitesimal, in societies with feebly developed class antagonisms and in out-of-the-way places, as was once the case in certain regions of the United States. But it increases in the same ratio in which the class antagonisms become more pronounced, and in which neighboring states become larger and more populous.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/

Universities in the colonial period were generally founded by churches to train ministers, or to educate the offspring of the wealthiest families among the colonists in manners, morals, philosophy, literature, and history. Many of them modeled their curricula on the existing English church-sponsored institutions at Cambridge and Oxford. The well-to-do families hired tutors for their young ones, to prepare them to get the most out of university education. In this way, the knowledge of Europe was transmitted to the rising generations in the new world. This higher education helped to form the predominant moral and political outlook of the propertied leaders of the North American colonies.

In the period leading up to the Revolutionary War and the approach to the adoption of a constitution for the new nation, many of the political leaders were drawn into debates and controversies over legal, economic, and moral questions. For the most part, the proposals advocated in these debates were derived from principles inherited from Europe, but they had a practical purpose in a new continent: how to direct the efforts of the colonial population on a course that would lead to a strong and prosperous nation. This led to the long-lasting debate over what would serve the best interests of the population: free labor or slavery. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the signal for this issue to be resolved in battle. And the war resulted in the abolition of slavery through the passage of the 13^th Amendment.

The well-heeled manufacturers, merchants, landowners, and bankers, together with their elected representatives in federal, state, and local governments, had to come to grips with some very serious, long-term questions relating to their capacity to preserve their social and political domination. They were in the process of forging a capitalist class on a national scale, with the same national and international requirements as any European capitalist class: private ownership of productive land and factories, means of transport of goods, military defense, a common currency, rules of commerce and banking, a reliable system of weights and measures, and a system of laws, civil and criminal, and means of enforcement. Further, they needed a uniform policy for managing the rights and duties of the workers and farmers—the majority of the population—whose labor would be required to provide the necessities of life for all, as well as profit, rent, and interest for the property owners. For most of these aims, simply building on European traditions would suffice. But the main question that remained unsolved by the “founding fathers” was that of the division of the population over the question of slavery.

The history of the United States involved many twists and turns from the time of the Pilgrims to the present stage of decline (in the 21st century), but it was the period of the construction of the capitalist economic institutions and relations before the Civil War that was decisive for the formation of American capitalism and its ideology. The industrial progress gained in the free labor sector of the nation, which predominated in the North, increasingly demonstrated to all fair-minded observers that the future of the nation lay in the hands of these industrial pioneers—not in the hands of the slaveholders. In the 18^th century the generation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could not have foreseen the immense achievements that lay ahead as capitalism grew and matured, nor could any of them have imagined what torrents of blood would be spilled during the process of forging the future.

Needless to say the founding “fathers” were concerned about the social feelings of the people whom fate had thrown together in the new world, and how they might overcome their religious or language differences. They dreamed of ways to create a common national identity and spirit. The means of communication between states and communities had to be considered of considerable importance. Before the Civil War, the newspapers and books enjoyed by the growing literate population were primarily devoted to issues of interest to the economically dominant classes. To the degree that class bias was featured, it was mainly either pro-free labor or pro-slavery. And on both sides of this divide, there grew specialists in communication, journalism, and propaganda, whether of the academic or the popular varieties. Apart from scientific and academic scholarship, there was a growth of popular literature devoted to satisfying the political or entertainment needs of the laboring masses who farmed the land, built the roads, rails, and cities, dug the coal, spun the yarn or wove the fabrics. And as for journalism, news reporting was promoted that served the needs of the propertied classes and their close associates in politics, business, and law.

Newspapers in the early 19th century newspapers were mainly published for the wealthy elites and their literate hangers-on. During this early period there was very little momentum—and not much in the way of technological resources— towards the development of a nation-wide means of publicity that would serve to unite the whole literate population. On the contrary, there were newspapers, but they appealed to widely separated readerships. As Batya Ungar-Sargon writes in her book Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy,

“It’s no surprise that the press was antilabor; in 1829, New York’s newspapers existed for the political and business elites. If you were a well-to-do businessman, you were served by mercantile papers containing shipping schedules, wholesale prices, ads, and international news. There were also political papers, which reproduced full-length speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made by politics.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Media-Undermining-Democracy/dp/1641772069

There was very little news available for the urban laboring people until 1833, when Benjamin Day, a New York printer, launched the first penny-paper, The Sun. Ungar-Sargon explains:

“Day brought the scandals of the upper classes to the working poor, and he forced the conditions of the poor on the upper crust. He also sold help-wanted ads looking for cooks, maids, coachmen, and waiters, which meant that those searching for work and those searching for workers met in his pages. Once he had the attention of the employers as well as the employees, Day advocated vigorously for higher wages and shorter working hours. In 1834, he printed in full a manifesto entitled “Union Is Power,” written by a group of girls who went on strike at the Lowell Mill. And when New York’s seamstresses went on strike, they had his full support, too.”
--Ungar-Sargon, ibid.

The growth of the factory system in the North in the early 19th century brought to the fore the harsh realities of the exploitation of wage labor and led to the formation of unions as vehicles of workers’ efforts to protect their vital interests. In those days, the class struggle was an everyday reality, known to all. Howard Zinn in A Peoples’ History of the United States explains:

“Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s. Eleanor Flexner (A Century of Struggle) gives figures that suggest why: women’s daily average earnings in 1836 were less than 371⁄2 cents, and thousands earned 25 cents a day, working twelve to sixteen hours a day. In Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, came the first known strike of women factory workers; 202 women joined men in protesting a wage cut and longer hours, but they met separately. Four years later, women in Dover, New Hampshire, struck alone. And in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, when a young woman was fired from her job, other girls left their looms, one of them then climbing the town pump and making, according to a newspaper report, “a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘moneyed aristocracy’ which produced a powerful effect on her auditors and they determined to have their way, if they died for it.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346

Farrell Dobbs, in Revolutionary Continuity: The Early Years, describes the growing class battles in the antebellum years:

“Experience gained through these isolated struggles led to the recognition of the need for organizational coordination. Central labor bodies consisting of all local unions within a given city began to take shape. Some of the skilled crafts launched national formations embracing specific craft units located in various cities. Efforts then followed to create a national federation of all the unions in all the crafts.

“. . . Parallel with this trend a broad campaign was opened in the mid-1820s to institute a ten-hour workday. Since the employers imposed exceedingly long hours of labor, there was a great incentive for this struggle; and it was conducted militantly. The specific goal was attained in certain instances and at least some cut in hours was generally won.”
-- https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/revolutionary-continuity-the-early-years_1848-1917_by-farrell-dobbs

As the country grew, class differences strengthened between those who needed to devote their lives to toil in order to survive versus those with significant ownership of property and wealth. The tensions of civil strife grew, in the North as well as in the South. In the slave states there was a tendency for white farmers and wageworkers in the to feel more acutely the burden of living under the thumb of the ruthless aristocratic master class. There was no democracy for white workers and small farmers; the slave power did not allow any of the populations in its domain to challenge their rule. Thus whites with little or no property were an underprivileged class. As Keri Leigh Merritt explains (Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, p. 67):

“Problems over white labor—the absence of full-time work, the lack of opportunities in general, and the inability of many workers to earn a living wage—created a potentially explosive society. Complete with large percentages of slaves and a sizable, disaffected poor white underclass, a constant state of anxiety engulfed much of the Deep South in the years preceding secession.

“If these two classes ever banded together against their common oppressors—as they had before repeatedly throughout America’s short history—they threatened the fortunes, the power, and even the lives of the region’s masters.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Masterless-Men-Antebellum-Cambridge-American/dp/110718424X

But to create the optimal social and economic conditions for the unrestricted growth of capitalism on the North American continent, it had proved necessary to defeat the slaveowner’s control over the federal government, and allow free rein to capitalist growth on a national scale with the continuing development of the free wage-labor system. But under conditions of free labor, working people were free to move about, change their occupations, and form associations to defend their interests. At the same time working people, as free citizens, developed the potential to form political parties, fight for voting rights, and strive for political power.

Solving the most critical question: slavery

In the 1850s, a sharp debate broke out over the question of whether new states admitted to the union would be granted the right of citizens to own slaves, or whether slavery would be outlawed. The future evolution of the nation depended on the outcome of this issue. See my essay on the necessity of the defeat of the slave power, Marxism vs. the New Historians of Capitalism. In this essay I state:

“Only if free labor were the law of the land could the burgeoning nation offer expanding opportunities for the mass of the workers, farmers, artisans and traders. But with the country in the grip of the slavers’ oligarchy, every new state admitted to the union would be turned into hellish tracts of drudgery. The Republicans understood this, and they pledged themselves to avoid that fate. The Republicans understood how a nation of free labor would develop the lands to the west by populating it with vigorous and resourceful pioneers; they also understood why the slave society of the South, if it continued as a dominant force in the national government, would continue to produce a deformed social existence, founded on a degrading and bloody business. This was not a future that decent people desired.”
--https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/marxism-vs-the-new-historians-of

Given the victory of the Northern armies in the Civil War, the nation’s future was henceforth determined primarily by the stronger power—that of the propertied classes of the North. The early phase of Reconstruction was disfigured by Andrew Johnson’s “soft on slaveowners” policies, and Congress impeached him, although he was not removed from the presidency. The new phase of “Radical Reconstruction” was developed under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, elected in 1868, to ensure the definitive end of slaveowner power. Federal troops were stationed in the former states of the Confederacy to guarantee the rights of the non-slave-owning classes. But during this period of turbulent social change, there were many political initiatives to form a fighting alliance of former slaves with Southern wage workers and farmers. These fights represented efforts by working people to expand the reach of their political power within the country and thus achieve a better life—higher pay, shorter working hours, safer working conditions, and time for self-development. And to gain these advances, they would need to make use of the freedoms enumerated in the US Constitution, especially the first amendment.

After the abolition of slavery in the U.S. in 1865, the elements of the capitalist class—manufacturers, merchants, bankers, and large landowners—were coming to grips with a new, broader horizon of national development. They were confronted with all the questions of how to best take advantage of the land mass under their control now that the slave power had been taken out of the equation. Would they try to offer the freed slaves jobs or farmland to sustain themselves? Or leave them on their own and let the chips fall where they may? But aside from this, the rulers, throughout the Reconstruction period and after, had to develop coordinated policies of limiting the growth of the potential power of the laboring classes as a prerequisite to preserving their own power.

The process of Radical Reconstruction failed to make significant progress in the provision of land because free land (in Sherman’s phrase, “40 acres and a mule”) would have provided the material foundation for the growth of a mass of free farmers. The rulers feared the emergence of a fighting alliance of workers and farmers, embracing the big majority of the population, which would be strong enough to effectively oppose the capitalists’ drive to obtain complete control over the nation’s highest levels of authority. The politicians in the federal government bickered over whether to limit the violent KKK-type thug attacks on the former slaves, and in the end did very little. They increasingly recognized that land grants to the freed slaves had the potential of undermining their own power. Black people with land would establish a stronger base for a unification of working farmers, both Black and white, as a unified fighting force. Radical Reconstruction was increasingly abandoned by the ruling classes North and South, as was the slogan “40 acres and a mule.”

Radical Reconstruction left the former Confederate states occupied by federal troops, which gave some free space for the ex-slaves to organize themselves politically. But the big landowners, primarily former slaveowners, remained politically dominant through their control of the Democratic Party. The close election of 1876 was referred to the Supreme Court to decide who was the winner, which led to the “Compromise of 1877.” This decision was adopted by Congress, naming Republican Rutherford Hayes the winner over Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate. This choice embodied the agreement among the ruling stratum —bankers, industrialists, merchants, and big landowners— to withdraw the federal troops while permitting the former Confederate states the authority to maintain what came to be known as the Jim Crow system, a form of rule based on exclusive government control by the “white race” and the division of the working people by race, placing the Black people in a subordinated status compared to the Caucasian wage workers, farmers, and other plebeian elements.

At the same time, the victory of the North in the Civil War was an enormous boost to capitalist expansion, both geographically in the North American continent, as well as in their capacity to expand all the human and material productive enterprises that served to amass enormous sums of wealth. As Farrell Dobbs writes in Revolutionary Continuity:

“Giant trusts were formed by industrial and banking combines in moves to establish monopolies. This trend soon produced a bumper crop of multimillionaires who fattened on harsh exploitation of wage labor and wanton depredation of national resources. These plutocrats became the real power behind the bourgeois-democratic governmental façade, and they dealt brutally with all who resisted their ruthless methods of coining superprofits.”
--Dobbs, ibid.

Meanwhile, during the period of Radical Reconstruction a severe economic crisis had precipitated mass discontent among workers and farmers throughout the nation. As Farrell Dobbs explains:

“Beginning in 1873 the capitalist economy fell into the worst crisis experienced up to then in the United States. Millions lost their jobs and unemployment remained high for several years. Taking advantage of the social turmoil and demoralization created by depression conditions, the boss class proceeded to inflict reverses upon organized labor. Wages were cut, hours of work lengthened, and the trade unions, lacking a federation to coordinate defensive actions, were dealt one setback after another.”

“. . . By 1877, radical reconstruction had gone down to bloody defeat, and not only Afro-Americans but the entire working class had suffered the worst setback in its history. The defeat was engineered by the dominant sectors of the industrial ruling class, who were incapable of carrying through a radical land reform in the old Confederacy and rightly feared the rise of a united working class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together as a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers.”
--Dobbs, ibid.

Against the conditions imposed upon them by the crisis, as well as by the harsh treatment they received at the hands of the bosses, the workers broke out in a wave of battles in 1877. Throughout the Eastern and Central states, thousands of railroad workers and their families, together with thousands of allied working people, fought massive battles for the rights of working people to earn a decent wage and to be able to enforce labor contracts. Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States describes the impact of the first U.S. party of working people which occurred in the summer of 1877:

“In St. Louis, itself, the Workingmen’s party called an open-air mass meeting to which five thousand people came. The party was clearly in the leadership of the strike. Speakers, excited by the crowd, became more militant: ‘. . . capital has changed liberty into serfdom, and we must fight or die.’ They called for the nationalization of the railroads, mines, and all industry.

“At another huge meeting of the Workingmen’s party a black man spoke for those who worked on the steamboats and levees. He asked: ‘Will you stand to us regardless of color?’ The crowd shouted back: “We will!” An executive committee was set up, and it called for a general strike of all branches of industry in St. Louis.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346

The birth of such a party of labor, and what it might be able to achieve on behalf of its working-class members and supporters, produced a major sensation in the minds of the wealthy rulers—and not a pleasant one. Now they understood they had a “worker” problem on their hands (if they hadn’t already understood that before). The employers understood there would be a volatile political constituency within the mass of workers which would pose a serious problem for a long time to come. But they were confident that this problem could be placed under control, provided these troublesome elements were properly educated and guided by the wise counsel of their social superiors—teachers, journalists, politicians, historians, philosophers, and celebrities. (And, needless to say, those trouble-makers who failed to learn their proper place in the social pecking order could be dealt with using more “persuasive” means.)

Indoctrinating the population

The memorialization of the national trauma occasioned by the Civil War turned out to be a starting point for the construction of a powerful framework that the rulers could appropriate for their use as a weapon to divide the working class against itself. As David W. Blight explained in his book Race and Reunion:

“Death and mourning were everywhere in America in 1865; hardly a family had escaped its pall. In the North, 6 percent of white males aged 13–43 had died in the war; in the South, 18 percent were dead. Of the 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union army and navy, 20 percent perished. Diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia claimed more than twice as many soldiers as did battle. The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it.

“Death on such a scale demanded meaning. During the war, soldiers in countless remote arbors, or on awful battlefield landscapes, had gathered to mourn and bury their comrades, even while thousands remained unburied, their skeletons lying about on the killing fields of Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia. Women had begun rituals of burial and remembrance in informal ways well before the war ended, both in towns on the home front and sometimes at the battlefront. Americans carried flowers to graves or to makeshift monuments representing their dead, and so was born the ritual of “Decoration Day,” known eventually also as Memorial Day.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/B004HOWT9K

The “great compromise” of 1877, worked out by the top Democratic and Republican leaders, sealed the fate of African Americans and their agrarian and proletarian allies, not only in the Southern states but also, to a lesser degree, in the North as well. The capitalist ruling class, now dominant throughout the country, had learned from the experience of the Reconstruction process that they would be much better situated for the future if the races were divided, black against white, so as to weaken their class struggle of the masses against the propertied rulers.

Great efforts were made to insure that “home rule” in the Southern states would be the established political condition, so that Black people would be denied their constitutional and civil rights. (“Home rule later was dubbed “states’ rights” so as to frame these policies as applicable to all states, not just those in the South). Thus racial antipathy, racist oppression and discrimination became a fundamental aspect of bourgeois ideology in the U.S., not because racism had become embedded in the popular consciousness, but because massive propaganda resources were devoted to promoting the moral virtues of the oppressive Jim Crow system in the South. The “separation of the races” was described as natural and necessary. And this helped to deepen and perpetuate the racial divisions within the working class. Over time, as the workers learned how to fight for their rights, they increasingly understood the necessity of overcoming these divisions, and in the 1930s they learned how to promote and practice racial unity.

Once the capitalist families in the U.S. had achieved unchallenged political power, they maneuvered to build up the social structures that would prevent all rivals—especially the wage workers and family farmers—from challenging their prerogatives. They managed to convincingly promote themselves as the protectors of all rights, the friends of the poor and oppressed, and the source of all social opportunities and benefits—in short, the best of all possible superintendents.

In the present era, having direct control of the corporations that own the newspapers, social networks, and television media, as well as control over the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S., has been a big advantage in dominating the ideological culture. Decisive influence over the education system is in their hands. Their political supporters exercise control over the content of textbooks used in primary and secondary schools, as well as over the education of the teachers. Much of this leverage depends on their ability to influence the university curricula. But we should not think that this control was, or is, exercised directly by the billionaires themselves, or by their capacity to enforce agreed-upon rules and regulations. Between the government and the institutions responsible for inculcating pro-capitalist ideology into the population there is a multitude of interconnecting institutions and processes.

The needs of the ruling class are the foundation of all the mechanisms of mass influence. V.I. Lenin said, in State and Revolution, “the centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Marx and Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie is connected with these institutions by thousands of threads.”
-- https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/state-and-revolution_by-vi-lenin

Millions of workers in the U.S. learned to recognize which class has the power in its hands, and which class doesn’t. A good example of this is the statement by Malcolm X in his speech The Ballot or the Bullet:

“No, I'm not an American. I'm one of 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or flag-waver. No, not I. I am speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare."
-- https://www.pathfinderpress.com/pages/search-results-page?q=malcolm%20x%20speaks

But what were the aims of the capitalists as they surveyed the polyglot terrain of the national culture they were shepherding? Above all, they wished to have their fortunes protected, and to generate the ideal social conditions for the accumulation of wealth. This meant, among other things, taking measures against those elements of society who were likely to challenge their power and prerogatives.

The surplus wealth produced by the masses of workers and farmers accrued to the owners of the means of production, while the quantity of value was left to sustain the laborers was just enough to support them and their families with little or nothing left over. Capitalism is not just a society based on exploitation; it is a society whose central purpose is the extraction of wealth from the laboring people for the benefit of the exploiters who rule over them. And this is why it is so critical for them that the working people be made to believe that the capitalists are their irreplaceable guardian angels. Without the job-givers, how can you get a job? With no job how can you survive?

The institutionalization of the Jim Crow system, which embraced a broad range of legal and social restrictions imposed on the African-American residents of the U.S. (more strictly enforced in the South than in the North), placed these “citizens” outside the protection of the 14^th, 15^th and 16^th Amendments to the Constitution. While slavery was no longer legal, there persisted a widespread practice of temporarily enslaving Black workers, which came to be known as the convict lease system. Primarily institutionalized in the former states of the Confederacy, this was one of many discriminatory methods used to make use of unpaid labor in a Black skin that the former slavemasters believed was their natural birthright. Douglas Blackmon explains in his book, Slavery by Another Name:

“By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385506252

Working people—in manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation, banking, and commerce—are the overwhelming majority of the population in the world, especially in the developed capitalist world. If there were democratic processes of government, the workers would have more votes than the capitalists, who are a tiny minority of the population. It is for this reason that the capitalists must have the power to decisively influence the political and economic beliefs of the population. The universities and other institutions of higher education, if they are to be useful for the capitalists—who created them in the first place—must provide reliable scientific education in physics, chemistry, agronomy, mathematics, and anything related to advancing the technology of production. These skills are vital for the further development of modern technology, the material base that the capitalists control in order to rake off the surplus value of production.

As for the humanities: sociology, political science, economics, cultural anthropology, history and philosophy, their purpose is to mislead the working people about the basic foundations of human society and make them believe that they are living in a nation that is ruled by intelligent and magnanimous people who are dedicated to increasing the happiness of the majority of the population. Thus the humanities have become a mélange of myths and pseudoscientific doctrines that proclaim the superiority and perfectibility of capitalist institutions and traditions.

Above all, during the period of the consolidation of the modern capitalist regime after the Civil War, the leading bourgeois publicists and boosters needed to mold the political beliefs of the working people. One of the main institutions supporting this ideological conditioning is religion.

Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
--MECW, Vol. 3, p. 175

On the one hand, religion offers consolation for suffering by the ever-present vision of the “promised land.” The working people must suffer patiently while awaiting their “final reward.” To the degree that religion remains a vital force among working people—and the goal of the preachers is to make every effort to maintain that force—there is a persistent reluctance to struggle for a better life in this world. Nowadays religion is a greatly diminished force in the motivation of individual workers, but the ruling class in the U.S. persists in keeping up their tradition of honoring the Catholic pope (a symbol that links earthly power with heavenly authority), and emphasizing the importance of the religious beliefs and church observance of the leading politicians, especially the president of the U.S.

As we should understand, the national political culture is sculpted and fine-tuned by the primary arbiters of culture—the powerful people in or near the dominant class who are in a position to determine which books are promoted in schools, universities and in bookstores, which celebrities get the most prestigious places on the stage, which songs are sung at the beginning of sporting events, which ideas are favored, and which ideas are out of bounds. Jim Crow meant the denial of rights, and much more for Black people living south of the Mason-Dixon line; and for Black people living in the North, discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and more. But while the ruling class extinguished the emancipationist vision from all the honored institutions of the United States, this vision nonetheless survived in the Black population and among the class-conscious workers, and was constantly renewed by outbursts of defiance and struggle from the lower orders which interrupted the national harmony during the decades after the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. This question was ultimately resolved by another revolution in social relations: the Civil Rights movement.

The Civil Rights movement, a mass upsurge of protests and mobilizations, based in the trade unions and community organizations representing Black Americans, necessitated attempts by the government of the capitalist rulers to settle the issues posed by the democratic demands of the civil rights advocates. but also required an adaptation of the national ideology to the new situation. Instead of being considered a nonentity, the Black population became a “valued and respected” component of the American people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 codified the gains of the movement, and at the same time placed limits and restrictions on the scope and depth of the legal changes that were authorized. These limits and restrictions reflected the unwillingness of the rulers to grant any more political rights than were absolutely necessary. After all, they still supported the “reconciliationist vision” and only took a step towards the “emancipationist vision” because they felt that, for them, it was the lesser evil.

But in spite of the resistance of the capitalists and their political parties, the Civil Rights legislation, a product of the strivings of the masses of workers and farmers, had created the foundation for further struggles to advance and enforce desegregation in schools and places of public access, wider voting rights, anti-discrimination policies in housing, politics, and law, affirmative action in workplaces and schools, etc. These political achievements were widely recognized, and were absorbed by the large majority of the population. Among the working masses there was a decline of racial division and bigotry, and a growth of interracial solidarity. Among the professional middle class there were efforts to support affirmative action in workplaces and colleges, to rewrite the history books, to inaugurate African-American Studies departments in universities, etc. Martin Luther King’s birthday was declared a national holiday in 1983. Thus the ideological climate of the entire country shifted towards an appreciation of harmony between the races.

But these changes were neither initiated nor appreciated by the ruling rich. The post-WW2 Democrats (aka Dixiecrats) and Republicans opposed the movement to overthrow Jim Crow segregation, and continued to back the status quo by placing obstacles in the path of civil rights fighters and painting these activists and their organizations as “communist,” “subversive” and anti-American. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1935 to 1972, instructed FBI agents to infiltrate and wreck the civil rights organizations and spread propaganda to defame and persecute the civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. Larry Seigle, et al, in 50 Years of Covert Operations, writes:

“What is known, however, makes it abundantly clear that the FBI's campaign of slander, frame-up, blackmail, and assassination against Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Black Panther Party, and other fighters for Black rights in the 1960s was not an aberration. It was the continuation of a course that began the day that the Roosevelt administration called on the FBI to go after ‘subversives.’”
__ https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/50-years-of-covert-operations-in-us_by-larry-seigle-steve-clark-farrell-dobbs

The conditions prevailing under the Jim Crow system, including the prohibitions against the organization of unions, had been an advantage to the profitability of the factories, mines, commercial enterprises, agribusinesses and banks, as extra profits were generated from the underpaid labor of the masses of southern workers of all races and nationalities.

Wherever the working class is divided into opposing wings that despise and disparage one another, workers won’t be able to successfully organize unions that can function effectively to strike and win higher wages and improved benefits. Every strike opens up the opportunity for non-striking workers to take the jobs of the strikers. It is important to understand that the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s were preceded by a series of changes within the workers’ movement that favored the unification of workers of all colors and nationalities. This unification generated actions of solidarity that prevented one group of workers to trample on the rights of another group by acting as strikebreakers. The Jim Crow segregation of the labor force that prevailed during the pre-WWI period began to breakdown during the strike waves of the 1930s. As Art Preis (Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO) explains:

“All the schemes of the employers to divide the workers and smash their strikes failed. During the postwar strike wave in 1919, the employers had brought thousands of unwary Negro workers from the South to use as scab labor. The end of World War II, however, found 1,600,000 Negro workers in unions, primarily in steel, coal, automobiles and meat packing. A third of the delegates to the CIO United Packinghouse Workers convention were Negroes, and hundreds of thousands of Negro militants bolstered the picket lines.

“. . . Particularly noteworthy was the role of the Negro workers in the Lackawanna strike. ‘No group played a more commendable role than the Negro workers,’ reported the March 8, 1941, Militant from Buffalo. ‘The lowest paid and the most oppressed of the Bethlehem workers, the Negro workers gave an unexampled demonstration of union courage and fighting qualities. Negro workers were in the forefront of every battle on the picket lines.’ Undoubtedly, their example helped to influence the Negro workers at River Rouge in the Ford strike a few weeks later.”
-- https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/labors-giant-step-first-twenty-years-of-cio_1936-55_by-art-preis

The struggles of workers to overcome racial barriers in the 1930s laid the foundation for the struggle to overcome Jim Crow in the post–WW2 period. The power base of the Democratic Party was the Dixiecrat wing: a group of U.S. Senators, Congressmen and state-level politicians who were elected in states where African-Americans generally were unable to overcome the obstacles that prevented them from voting (grandfather clauses, literacy tests, threats of violence, etc.). These politicians were white supremacists and segregationists, and could not be won over by arguments. They utilized Ku Klux Klan violence and intimidation to stifle protest for a century — from the 1860s to the 1960s. They did not prosecute lynch mobs, and would not allow Blacks to serve on juries or testify in courts.

Nonetheless, decisive sectors of the ruling class and its political representatives recognized that clamping down harder on civil rights fighters would precipitate even broader and more destructive battles, so the lesser evil was to give in to the civil rights pressure— but without giving any more reforms than they absolutely had to. And they promoted federal legislation to accomplish this end.

The rulers and their supporters in politics and education had convinced many that the main features of the Jim Crow system were “normal” and “legitimate.” But the victories of the civil rights struggles helps us understand an important feature of these self-serving mythologies — the more they convince us that the political conditions are “normal” and unchangeable, the more critical it becomes that we, as working people, learn to recognize the transitory nature of all phases of social development. What is “normal” in 1850 was “abnormal” in 1870.

Progress in human solidarity is anathema to the class interests of the magnates of capital. The fictions they promote are part of a system which relies on competition between capitalists and workers, between different ownership groups within the propertied classes, and between workers themselves, as they struggle to get employment and feed their families.

But all this competitiveness, while it pushes forward economic progress by spurring each one to maximize their economic activities, is nothing more than a passing phase in a world in which human solidarity and scientific thinking are growing but have yet to realize their full potential. The Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s showed not only that the discriminatory laws and traditions of Jim Crow could be defeated by mass mobilizations, but that millions of working people in the U.S.—of all races—were more than willing to struggle to put an end to the ugly and painful realities of racial oppression. During this period of history young people, workers, and farmers more and more realized that not only do the victims of racial oppression feel the pain, but the bigots undermine their own self-respect by their brutalization of others.

The Civil Rights revolution itself grew out of a higher level of consciousness that had evolved within the working classes in the U.S., as a result of the intensified labor battles that arose in the first half of the 20^th century. Workers changing attitudes were based their activity in building their unions and recognizing that they could gain better wages and working conditions if they refused to allow the bosses to divide the workers against each another on the basis of race, sex, nationality, or religion. Divide and rule is the key to success for the capitalists in the world where the meaning of success is defined by the possession of wealth.

Anthropology and history

Anthropology, another arena that provided a forum for the development of ideological class conflict, began in the 19^th century as a field of investigation into the beliefs and practices of the world’s existing primitive cultures. It was pioneered by explorers, missionaries, and colonizers, and then taken up by educated persons who utilized the data collected by the former groups to initiate the systematic study of these cultures. Before long, the students of culture developed the practices that could systematize the gathering of cultural information while living among the primitive groups. The information gathered over a number of decades prompted further efforts to produce hypotheses about what had happened in human society before written history had begun.

During the period from the 1860s through the 1890s some anthropological writers attempted to put together some plausible cultural evolutionary sequences of developmental stages which linked modern society with its pre-civilized past. They based their theorizing in part on ethnological analyses of currently existing primitive societies, in part on studies of Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian historical writings, and in part on tools, weapons, pottery, basketry, and other artefacts of long-dead cultures unearthed by archeological digs. But after considerable progress in developing evidence-based theories of human cultural development, these theoretical findings formed some of the starting points for the elaborations pseudoscientific doctrines in the early 20^th century.

Active investigation and theoretical writing on the practices of primitive human groups and the origins of human society were pioneered in the 19^th century by Johann J. Bachofen, Sir Henry Maine, John F. McLennan, Edward B. Tylor, and Lewis H. Morgan. Their research often took into account the observations brought back to Europe by explorers and colonizers who had traveled to remote areas of the world. They advanced theories of how our species had developed and improved its modes of survival from the incalculable antediluvian past up to the dawn of civilization, passing through successively more productive stages. They were able to find clues in ancient writings as to how the civilizations of the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean regions had emerged. It also became possible, during that era, to study existing pre-civilized social groupings to find out what key features of social organization enabled these primitive groups to sustain themselves and create the foundations for higher levels of social development.

The endeavors of the 19^th century scholars who investigated human prehistory made good progress until around the turn of the 20^th century, when anthropological scholarship began to abandon the evolutionary approach to humanity’s pre-civilized past. On the one hand, the evolutionary approach remained very much alive in paleoanthroplogy, archaeology, and physical anthropology—branches of science based on the discovery and analysis of ancient bones and products of human labor—which developed more advanced techniques to trace the early stages of evolution of protohumans and humans. At the same time, in human anthropology and ethnology there was a considerable expansion of useful ethnographic work which became increasingly professional and disciplined. However, what was left out of the writings of the early 20^th century “cultural relativist” anthropologists, was any regard for the advances made by their predecessors regarding the transformation of primitive groups into civilized states. The idea of the emergence of states that were based on the division of society into separate classes became taboo. The idea that human cultures evolved through stages, leading from the primitive to the advanced was discarded.

Cultural anthropology restricted itself to studies of the patterns of culture of current primitive social groups (ethnology) and the cultural practices that might furnish clues to help us understand better the culture of modern capitalist society. However useful that might be, there was no tendency to combine anthropological findings with a knowledge of history. A sharp division was established between anthropology and history. How primitive humans evolved to the point of the founding of states and empires based on slavery, and how feudalism, and later capitalism, emerged from these evolutionary processes was considered outside the scope of modern anthropology.

As for the more recent prehistoric past, the question arose: how did humanity change and develop so much during the past 10 or 15 thousand years, the epoch that separates the hunter-gatherer level of development from the early slave states and tributary empires? What changed in terms of religion, art, family, production, property, and knowledge that characterized these sequential forms of social organization? For the investigators of the pre-civilized past, the question of how to explain the transition from the earlier cultural forms to the more highly developed stages was posed in the context of the wide-ranging debates following the 1859 publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This new approach to the explanation of biological evolution provoked consideration of a similar evolutionary process in human society. The early theorists of anthropology took advantage of the opportunities to examine existing pre-literate societies in the world, as well as the discoveries of long-buried artefacts of ancient civilizations of pre-civilized peoples. Clues to the inaccessible past were often found by comparative ethnology—the comparison of the different levels of cultural complexity among the preliterate populations

Thus, it became a challenge to the inquisitive scholars of the day to explain how it came about that our primitive ancestors developed and used implements that cumulatively altered their living conditions and mode of group life. And while developing the manual techniques that they used to protect, defend, and feed themselves, they elaborated modes of self-explanation fused with attempts to interpret the mysteries of the world: mythologies, totemic symbolizations, animistic beliefs, and legends. These cognitive achievements served as means of molding their concepts into intelligible forms, communicating them to other members of their groups, and transmitting them to the rising new generations.

At the same time, anthropologists made generalizations about hypothetical primitive stages that demonstrated aspects of “human nature”—a static, timeless concept — that still seems to persist as norms of behavior in the modern culture of advanced societies, supposedly based on “democracy” and “free enterprise.” This tendency ultimately produced “cultural relativism” as defined by Charlotte Nickerson:

“Cultural Relativism is the claim that ethical practices differ among cultures, and what is considered right in one culture may be considered wrong in another. The implication of cultural relativism is that no one society is superior to another, they are merely different.”
-- https://www.simplypsychology.org/cultural-relativism.html

If no society is ethically or morally “superior” to another, then it becomes difficult, or even counterproductive, to claim that one society is “higher” than another. If we are to believe this, then we can see that the idea of “evolution” from lower to higher stages should not be taken seriously. Later in the 20^th century “sociobiology” emerged from this relativistic framework as an unscientific reimagining of the prehistoric past using concepts derived from modern capitalist culture. Evelyn Reed explained the necessity of the evolutionary approach to anthropology in her book, Sexism and Science:

“The science of anthropology did not originate with the historical materialists, but the creators of Marxism drew upon the materials provided by the nineteenth-century anthropologists to extend their own historical reach and substantiate their materialist interpretation of history. They drew out to their logical conclusions the sharp contrasts between capitalism, the highest form of class society, and primitive, or pre-class society. These conclusions are set forth in the renowned work by Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which appeared in 1884.

“The reactionary flight from materialism and evolutionism arose out of the effort to counter this challenge of Marxism. But in the process of disowning the views of the Marxists, they were obliged to also turn against the pioneers in their own field of science.”
-- https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/sexism-and-science_by-evelyn-reed

The idea that modern capitalist society had emerged as a result of the evolution of society through stages of development was anathema to the budding anti-evolutionary theorists of the 20^th century—Franz Boas, Branislaw Malinowski, A.L. Kroeber, Margaret Mead, and others. Such a notion could only give the impression that the Marxists were the scientific analysts, not those authorities who earned their living under the protection of the ruling elite. The growth of these retrograde tendencies can be found intertwined with the proliferation of anti-scientific attitudes in the typical divisions of academic disciplines throughout the universities in capitalist countries.

The historians specialized in strictly historical themes, and they avoided topics that belonged to the economists; the philosophers did not take up topics that properly belonged to the anthropologists, etc. Not only were the humanities artificially separated, but they all adapted their course material to that which was unobjectionable in the eyes of the wealthy patrons of the universities, and the foundations and grants which these moneyed benefactors of education funded. The universities, after all, were founded by the rich to serve the needs of the rich. This fracturing of academia was radically different from the scholarship of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when the scholars were expected to learn Latin and Greek and absorb the history of science and jurisprudence, as well as the philosophical traditions that underlay social norms and practices of modern society.

The differentiation of academic specializations into mutually exclusive bailiwicks reflected a deeper underlying impulse. The universities were designed from the beginning to be the intellectual resources of the wealthy members of the ruling class. More and more the education of the sons (and later, daughters) of the ruling strata insisted that the human sciences educate the youth in principles that validated the necessity and authority of the capitalist rulers and their political servants. After all, it was the members of the capitalist class (bankers, industrialists, merchants, landowners) who fought their way into the highest levels of power in the space of two or three centuries, all the while regarding themselves as the most deserving of citizens, and the most qualified to be the leaders and supervisors of social affairs.

Different methodologies for different anthropologies

We referred above to the distinction between cultural anthropology and physical anthropology. Those anthropologists who specialized in physical anthropology, working with unearthed fossilized bones and other long-preserved remains associated with ancient human and hominin populations, developed scientific methods to calculate the antiquity of such finds and construct hypotheses for the behaviors of these populations based on these findings. The findings of human-made stone and bone tools and weapons are particularly informative since they form a chronological record of important advances in the growth of labor skills. Thus, for the most part, because their work focused on the artifacts of the distant past, physical anthropologists had no need to abandon scientific methods. In fact there have been many technical advances made in the examination of fossils and other ancient remnants that greatly enhanced the depth and precision of the findings in physical anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology.

Cultural anthropology, on the other hand, has developed in the twentieth century under strong pressures to conform to the prevailing cultural norms which favor the interests of the billionaire rulers. The capitalists and their intellectual agents have viewed any criticism of the “beneficial” characteristics of their profit-generating system to be worrisome. Of course these pro-capitalist tendencies in academia do not reflect overt or conscious admiration of capitalist exploitation. Bourgeois ideology is far more subtle. In the 20^th century, the prevailing notions about life and fate develop spontaneously and are absorbed by everyone as they grow to maturity in an atmosphere that has been refined over and over again by millions of teachers, politicians, entertainers, novelists, TV shows and movies. Our own conceptions of right and wrong have been formed within the sphere of bourgeois prejudice. This cultural atmosphere reflects the biases of the ruling rich not because they themselves monitor and supervise the evolution of this culture, but because they, or their trusted representatives, occupy the bulk the positions of authority in the institutions of business, government, education, the mass media, etc. The social scientists of the 20^th century grew up in this environment and did not have the opportunity to learn what historical forces had created the cultural habitat into which they had been born.

And so, cultural anthropology abandoned any concern for how humanity had made the transition from its primitive cultural achievements to the modern world of technology and wealth. By turning their backs on the genuinely scientific endeavors of the pioneers of anthropology in the 19^th century, the modern anthropologists could not understand how primitive, collective, and egalitarian social institutions had been transformed into the class-divided society of today’s world. They ended up believing there were two different worlds—the primitive and the modern—and that it was not part of their vocation to analyze the transition of the one to the other. Not only this, but they developed the habit of trying to reimagine the prehistoric past by using criteria derived from 20^th century social institutions. But in reality, every epoch is born within the conditions existing at the time, and as time produces changes, each epoch in turn gives birth to subsequent conditions.

Looking back to the pioneer anthropologists of the late 19^th century, we recall how Morgan, in his preface to Ancient Society (1877), explained the goals of anthropology:

“It is both a natural and a proper desire to learn, if possible, how all these ages upon ages of past time have been expended by mankind; how savages, advancing by slow, almost imperceptible steps, attained the higher condition of barbarians; how barbarians, by similar progressive advancement, finally attained to civilization; and why other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress — some in civilization, some in barbarism, and others in savagery. It is not too much to expect that ultimately these several questions will be answered.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Society-Classics-Anthropology-Morgan/dp/0816509247

Morgan wanted to know how the prehistoric past gave rise to civilized history, setting the stage for further historical development. Why should that be considered so taboo? As Morgan said, it’s a “natural and proper” desire. It’s a question that should lie at the very core of anthropology, but it became the norm in anthropological discussions to avoid the topic of class divisions altogether. Scholars in the 19^th century had many resources to consult in order to reconstruct the multiple processes relating to the transition from barbarism to the early forms of class society. Friedrich Engels refers to many of the sources with which he became familiar in his anthropological researches in Origins of the Family Private Property and the State:

“In the poems of Homer, particularly the Iliad, we find the upper stage of barbarism at its zenith. Improved iron tools, the bellows, the handmill, the potter's wheel, the making of oil and wine, the advanced working of metals developing into a craft, waggons and war chariots, shipbuilding with beams and planks, the beginnings of architecture as an art, walled towns with towers and battlements, the Homeric epic, and the whole of mythology—these are the chief heritages carried over by the Greeks from barbarism to civilisation. If we compare with this Caesar's and even Tacitus' descriptions of the Germans, who were at the beginning of that stage of culture from which the Homeric Greeks were preparing to advance to a higher one, we will see what wealth was embodied in the development of production at the upper stage of barbarism.
-- MECW, vol. 26, p. 138

Beyond this, Engels contributed his own research on the evolution of the Germanic barbarian tribes in The Mark, which then became a sourcebook for learning about the social structures that not only provided the forces that defeated the armies of Rome in the Fifth Century AD, but developed into the social basis of agricultural and artisan production in the European Middle Ages:

“Two fundamental facts, which arose spontaneously, govern the primitive history of all, or of almost all, nations: the grouping of the people according to kindred, and common property in the soil. And this was the case with the Germans. As they had brought with them from Asia the method of grouping by tribes and gentes [clans], as they even in the time of the Romans so drew up their battle array that those related to each other always stood shoulder to shoulder, this grouping also governed the partitioning of their new territory east of the Rhine and north of the Danube. Each tribe settled down upon the new possession, not according to whim or accident, but, as Caesar expressly states, according to the gens-relationship between the members of the tribe. A particular area was apportioned to each of the nearly related larger groups, and on this again the individual gentes, each including a certain number of families, settled down by villages. A number of allied villages formed a hundred (old high German, huntari; old Norse, heradh). A number of hundreds formed a gau or shire. The sum total of the shires was the people itself.”
-- MECW, vol. 25, p. 441

And Engels, in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, described the features of the transition of barbarism to slavery in this way:

“The increase of production in all branches—stock raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts—enabled human labor power to produce more than was necessary for its maintenance. It increased at the same time the amount of daily work that fell to the lot of every member of a gens [kin group, clan], a household, or a single family. The addition of more labor power became desirable. It was furnished by war; the captured enemies were transformed into slaves. Under the given historical conditions, the first great division of social labor, by increasing the productivity of labor, adding to the wealth, and enlarging the field of productive activity, necessarily carried slavery in its wake. Out of the first great division of social labor arose the first great division of society into two classes: masters and servants, exploiters and exploited.”
--Engels, ibid.

We should take note of the key term in this last paragraph, “productivity of labor.” This means the amount of output produced per unit of time. If an hour of work produces more output with a new technique or new tool, or a newly-modified tool, the likelihood of its adoption is increased. The productivity of labor is an important factor in all kinds of activities that concern the well-being of human groups. Human beings prefer to protect themselves as well as possible from being eaten by predators. Thus the more quickly weapons of defense can be produced, the better. Additionally, the saving of labor time in the making of weapons or tools makes possible greater time for the elaboration of more precise or efficient productive techniques that render superior or more effective implements.

Their conceptions of what was real and reliable about the world were obtained from their experiences of daily life and labor. While their conceptions about the larger world and their place in it were necessarily naive and limited, they were the starting points for scientific development. As George Novack explains in The Origins of Materialism:

“In pre-civilized life the practices and beliefs of magic do not function apart from the practices based upon propositions of empirical knowledge. The two are matted together in a single outlook upon the surrounding world. Procreation and production, the twin material bases of group existence, are enveloped in the mystifications of magic. The primitive mind looks upon the making of an image of the creature to be hunted or the mimicking of the slaying of a tribal foe as no less potent and instrumental in ensuring the success of hunting and warfare than the physical acts of tipping and shooting the arrows or crashing a club over the enemy's skull. The magical rites play the same role as prayers, holy water, and the blessing of the priests in later religious ceremonies.

. . . Evidences of sympathetic magic have been traced back thirty thousand years or so to the creators of the paleolithic cave paintings found in France and Spain. These earliest artists almost exclusively painted or modelled game animals. Many of these meat providers are depicted as pregnant.”
---- https://www.pathfinderpress.com/products/origins-of-materialism_by-george-novack

As Edward B. Tylor, the founder of cultural anthropology, observed in his Primitive Culture (1871)

Thus, when in surveying the quaint fancies and wild legends of the lower tribes, we find the mythology of the world at once in its most distinct and most rudimentary form, we may here again claim the savage as a representative of the childhood of the human race. Here Ethnology and Comparative Mythology go hand in hand, and the development of Myth forms a consistent part of the development of Culture.
--https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/primitive-culture/30955C7CED270E1AF80CB7FEECF85010

But long before Tylor’s “childhood of the human race,” there was a process of emergence of a variety of new species out of the many species of apes living 4 to 6 million years ago. Hominin species were produced in various parts of the world, especially in Africa, many of whom left their bones in the earth to fossilize and later become material for the physical anthropologists’ studies. Bipedal, tool-making species denominated Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis (and others) evolved by means of natural selection, some of which might have persisted and produced daughter species leading towards more advanced species. Homo sapiens emerged from one of these predecessor species, while others went extinct as evolutionary dead ends. Commenting on the advancing survival modes of these developing hominin species, anthropologists pointed to the increasing cooperative modes of labor and defense, the developing tool-using and tool-making skills, and the division of labor between males and females which allowed the optimization of the efficiency of child raising alongside the tasks of food-gathering and production.

Through all these transitions over time, there was one constant: the unity of human groups. It is striking how much the world of today resembles the cultural practices observed among these preliterate peoples. E.B. Tylor, in the Introduction to Primitive Culture (1871), comments on our contemporary sense of cultural continuity:

Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages.
--Tylor, ibid.

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