THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO CAPITAL
Part 3
Part 3
THE SUBORDINATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TO CAPITAL
By James Miller
Economy of time; productive labor
Marx commented on what was the most critical feature of the successful development of our human lineage (Grundrisse, MECW, Vol. 28, p. 109):
“If we presuppose communal production, the time factor naturally remains essential. The less time society requires to produce corn, livestock, etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or spiritual. As with a single individual, the comprehensiveness of its development, its pleasures and its activities depend upon the saving of time. Ultimately, all economy is a matter of economy of time.”
The secret of the evolution of human cultures, including the rise of civilization, is the productive use of free time by human communities. This is evident in the production and use of tools. Tools shorten labor time. Apart from that there is no significance to tool use. The hominin groups that discovered and took advantage of the modification of rocks, bones, and sticks to make this or that task easier or quicker were developing a lengthy process of adapting the products of nature to accelerate the pace of the production of the necessities of life. The fossil evidence clearly shows the record of how, generation after generation, for more than a million years, hominins and their successors, the ancient humans, improved the tools of labor and the weapons of defense and hunting, making them more productive. Tools became sharper, more specialized for certain tasks, more durable and more varied as the variability of tasks increased. As Marx said, the reduction of necessary time opened the way for the increase of free time, free time to be used in any way that seemed useful or pleasing for them. In this way at a later stage in the cultural evolutionary process pottery, cordage, basketry, weaving, together with poetry, song and dance were evolved. The development of spoken language quickened and sharpened the pace of the transmission of knowledge within and among populations. Warfare developed the strategies and tactics of defense and attack. Religion in its earliest phases developed common beliefs and sacred activities that served as forms of encoding vital information for the group.
The free time obtained by the shortening of necessary labor time not only reacted back on the processes of necessary labor itself, accelerating technological evolution, but also opened more space in the daily life of our ancestors to think, to arrive at solutions to problems, to develop further a transmissible cultural repository of lore and legend, along with music, dance, vocalization, and ritual, to be preserved and transmitted to the growing young. The secret of the success of our lineage is the capacity to transmit the knowledge of one generation to the next, so that the knowledge available to us is not dependent so much on the size of our brain, or on our capacity to learn from experience, but rather on the ability to preserve, improve and share the vital lessons of life throughout an extended series of generations. This of course applies not only to tools, labor, and production, but to geographical localization, knowledge of plants and animals, how to interact with neighboring groups, etc.
As anthropologist Joseph Henrich explains it on page 3 of The Secret of Our Success,
“The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative. That is, hunting practices, tool-making skills, tracking know-how, and edible-plant knowledge began to improve and aggregate—by learning from others—so that one generation could build on and hone the skills and know-how gleaned from the previous generation. After several generations, the process produced a sufficiently large and complex toolkit of practices and techniques that individuals, relying only on their own ingenuity and personal experience, could not get anywhere close to figuring out over their lifetime. We will see myriad examples of such complex cultural packages, from Inuit snow houses, Fuegian arrows, and Fijian fish taboos to numerals, writing and the abacus.”
In his book, Henrich gives examples of how explorers from advanced western cultures living in the 17th and 18th centuries died in the wilderness in which native peoples survived, because the latter were well-educated to utilize their cultural inheritance with its multitude of relevant skills, accumulated over thousands of generations. Had those doomed explorers only established contact with the indigenous inhabitants they would have survived and perhaps lived out their lives as members of the local group—provided that the hosts would accept their strange guests as friends.
But this cultural progress is only possible through the modification of the human organism through a biological-cultural evolutionary process as it adapts to, and is conditioned by, the growing complexity of the labor processes that provide the protection and sustenance of human groups. Culture becomes ever stronger as the determinant of the changes wrought by natural selection which governs the biochemical, neurological, and musculoskeletal evolution of our lineage. Natural selection means that our bodies adapt to the environment in which they develop. And as culture increasingly creates the elements of which our environment is composed, natural selection must operate within these culturally-imposed limits. Engels, in his 1876 essay, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (MECW, vol. 25, p. 452) explains how our neurological and muscular systems, our anatomy and physiology, and the interdependent form and function of our bodies, developed under the influence of persistent laboring efforts:
“Thus, the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.”
Engels here expresses a relationship between productive activity and the evolutionary changes that occurred to the physical adaptations that were critical to the further development of the same and subsequent activities. It was our laboring effort that not only provided our means of life, but also served as the foundation for the further increase of skill and efficiency of labor. In this way labor compounded itself as it became increasingly efficient. The continuing development of the coordination between cognitive acuity and physical capacity increasingly made our hominin ancestors different from their simian progenitors.
The first anatomical change in the early emergence of hominins was erect posture which both demonstrated and contributed to significant changes in the bones, joints, and muscles of the hips, back and legs in contrast to their knuckle-walking anthropoid predecessors. The form of the foot changed to enable walking and running. Bipedality freed the hands for grasping. The opposable thumb emerged as the grasp strengthened. The brain and its skull encasement evolved to occupy a growing fraction of total body weight. As our protohumans took on ever more complex tasks, the fraction of total body energy occupied by neurological activity increased. As tool-working developed over thousands of generations, hand-eye coordination allowed ever more precise movements. The upper body developed with bigger lungs and more pulmonary circulation to facilitate long-distance running. The shoulders and arms, as well as the back muscles were modified for greater accuracy and power in throwing stones or spears. The key here is to recognize the back-and-forth mutual interaction of genetic inheritance and daily practice. It is the genes that carry the molecular codes of inheritance, but daily practice changes in accordance with cultural inheritance. Natural selection—the survival of the fittest—weeds out those individuals whose daily practice fails or falls behind in the struggle for existence.
When Engels says that the hand is the product of labor, we recognize that our primate ancestors, with non-opposable thumbs, who spent a great deal of time in the trees, did not experience any appreciable adaptation pressure to develop a strong grasp, and they lacked the finger dexterity for the kind of tasks that hominins later mastered. At the same time, we can recognize that today’s chimpanzees use their hands for accomplishing survival tasks, and the abilities to accomplish tasks might harbor the innate potential to improve their hunting and gathering skills, though it might take them millions of generations to “catch up” with us humans (if they ever do). When we talk about chimps, we are aware that our ancestors of four million years ago were not like today’s chimps, but we study modern chimps because they have mental and physical characteristics that are likely to be similar to our ancient predecessors in certain key aspects.
In the Introduction of Dialectics of Nature, (MECW, vol. 25, p. 330), Engels states:
“With men we enter history. Animals also have a history, that of their derivation and gradual evolution to their present position. This history, however, is made for them, and in so far as they themselves take part in it, this occurs without their knowledge or desire. On the other hand, the more that human beings become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their own history consciously, the less becomes the influence of unforeseen effects and uncontrolled forces of this history, and the more accurately does the historical results correspond to the aim laid down in advance.”
By means of persistent labor activities, and with the coordination of the actions of the various members of the community, the capacities of memory, calculation, and imagination, so necessary for human society strengthened so that the ability to imagine and plan the future became an essential feature of the emergent human species. As Marx, explained in Chapter 7 of Capital, vol. I (MECW, vol. 35, p. 188):
“We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.”
Debate over matriarchy
The importance of the matriarchy in cultural anthropology began with the publication of Bachofen’s Mutterrecht (Mother Right) in 1861. Engels summarized Bachofen’s thinking in his 1891 Preface to the Fourth Edition of Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in this way:
“This history of the family dates from 1861, the year of the publication of Bachofen's “Mutterrecht” (maternal law). Here the author makes the following propositions:
1. That in the beginning people lived in unrestricted sexual intercourse, which he dubs, not very felicitously, hetaerism.
2. That such an intercourse excludes any absolutely certain means of determining parentage; that consequently descent could only be traced by the female line in compliance with maternal law--and that this was universally practiced by all the nations of antiquity.
3. That consequently women as mothers, being the only well-known parents of younger generations, received a high tribute of respect and deference, amounting to a complete women's rule (gynaicocracy), according to Bachofen's idea.
4. That the transition to monogamy, reserving a certain woman exclusively to one man, implied the violation of a primeval religious law (i.e., practically a violation of the customary right of all other men to the same woman), which violation had to be atoned for or its permission purchased by the surrender of the women to the public for a limited time.”
The scientific-minded theorists of the mid-19th century—including the Christians among them—were more-or-less forced to reject the concept that God had created Adam and Eve, and particularly that He had made Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. That there had been a stage of evolution when knowledge of paternity did not exist could scarcely be questioned. The great apes do not know who any infant’s father is, even in troops where an alpha male does most of the insemination of the females. But due to the observable facts of birth and weaning prevailing among apes and early hominins, the knowledge of maternity was certain, at least in the beginning. Among apes the infant-mother bond is protracted compared to other mammalian species. It would be logical to assume that the bipedal and larger-brained hominin species arising from the last common ancestor of humans and chimps would be knowledgeable about who everyone’s mother is. Thus, in light of these considerations, the concept of “matriarchy” is born.
Matriarchy did not necessarily mean women’s rule over men, in the minds of the early anthropologists, but it referred to the higher status or central role of women in primitive social groups. Robert Briffault, writing in The Mothers, 1927, (p. 83):
“The term has been loosely employed to denote a status of women in primitive society ranging within wide limits, from the mere reckoning of descent in the female, instead of in the male line, to gynaecocracy, that is, the exercise of supreme authority by women. It may, I think, be legitimately used in a relative sense, and in opposition to the term ' patriarchal,' when referring to a state of society in which the interests and sentiments which are directly connected with the instincts of the women play a more important part than is the rule in the civilised societies with which we are most familiar.”
But the notion of “supreme authority” of women over men was not common among 19th century students of primitive life. Generally, they began their discussion of kinship and sex roles by recognizing the centrality of women in social groups which did not recognize the link between sexual intercourse and fatherhood. Thus the reproductive basis of social continuity was a female function. The mother-child bond was seen as the foundation of the socialization of the members of the group. Further, it became widely understood that the central role of women is the result of the necessity for mothers to stay near the “home” location of the group to be able to properly raise the children. The men, on the other hand, are free to roam to more distant locations in search of food. This was the primordial pattern for early hominin/human groups which came to be called “hunter-gatherer” societies. But how is it possible to determine that women played a “central role” in primitive societies? Evelyn Reed, in her book Woman’s Evolution (p. 79) explains:
“In The Mothers Robert Briffault showed how mothercare in the animal world laid the groundwork for a broader and higher development in the human world that can be called “social care,” the mutual concern of all members of the horde or clan for one another’s welfare and security. To put it in other terms, the nurturing instincts of the females enabled them to lead the way in the modification of animal impulses and to gradually replace them with socialized behavior.”
Reed’s statement here assumes that there was an initial division of labor between males and females in the evolution of the lineage that ended up as Homo sapiens. This assumption is difficult to avoid. Even in the social groups formed by chimpanzees, there is a tendency for the behavior of females to differ from that of males due to their child-bearing functions. Females are less likely to participate in hunting monkeys, and more likely to use simple tools in their food-gathering activities. Some similar phenomena would have prevailed in the earliest, most chimp-like hominin species. Given their child-bearing functions, female hominins would have been limited more closely than men to the residential area occupied by the group. This should not be regarded as a hard-and-fast rule, given that there are millions of years of development between then and now, but the ethnological findings of the 19th century anthropologists showed that it was common to find matrilocal, matrilineal, and matriarchal kinship and social relations among the existing primitive residents of Africa, Australia, the South Pacific islands, and the Americas.
Many anthropologists have observed and documented matrilineal societies, but modern anthropologists generally do not regard them as survivals of some primordial social organization. Evelyn Reed argues, in Women’s Evolution (p. 16):
Non-evolutionary anthropologists, whether they adhere to the diffusionist, functional, empirical-descriptive, or structural schools, reject the existence of a prehistoric matriarchy. They admit that matrilineal kinship still prevails in some primitive regions of the globe, but they do not explain how such matrilineal relations originated if they are not survivals from a previous matriarchal epoch.
There was considerable discussion in the early days of anthropology about how relatedness was calculated among the living primitive populations, and what were the rules about who could marry whom. Engels points to Morgan who managed to come up with a consistent explanation of “kinship.” In the preface to Origin of the Family, Engels states:
“At this point Morgan's main work, Ancient Society (1877), inserts its lever. It is this work on which the present volume is based. Here we find clearly demonstrated what was only dimly perceived by Morgan in 1871. There is no antithesis between endogamy and exogamy; no exogamous “tribes” have been found up to the present time. But at the time when communal marriage still existed--and in all probability it once existed everywhere--a tribe was subdivided into a number of groups—“gentes”—consanguineous on the mother's side, within which intermarrying was strictly forbidden. The men of a certain “gens,” therefore, could choose their wives within the tribe, and did so as a rule, but had to choose them outside of the “gens.” … The maternal “gens” has become the pivot on which this whole science revolves. Since its discovery we know in what direction to continue our researches, what to investigate and how to arrange the results of our studies. In consequence, progress in this field is now much more rapid than before the publication of Morgan's book.”
This discovery of the centrality of kinship to the analysis of social organization was not just Engels’ or Morgan’s work, but had developed from Bachofen to McLennan and Lubbock (19th century pioneers of anthropology), and had drawn in the active participation of many others during the 1860s and 70s. This was the origin and development of a branch of human science. These scientific-minded investigators linked the widespread existence of matrilineal societies with the hypothesized origin of kinship institutions in an early matriarchal stage of development. Early human (or hominin) groups, not recognizing the biological relationship between copulation and childbirth, were able to witness and celebrate the mother-child relationship without being able to identify the “father.” If the child were a boy, then the mother’s brother was the closest male relative and would naturally serve as the mentor, or role model, for the growing boy. In many matrilineal societies to this day the term “father” (as understood by the ethnologist) means “mother’s brother.” A boy was born into his mother’s gens and had to pass his life as a member of that gens. The sperm-donor who provided his genes to the boy belonged to a different gens and could not serve as role-model. As Evelyn Reed explained in Sexism and Science (p. 164).
“To understand this more clearly, a correction has to be made in describing the matrilineal kinship system. Usually, this system is taken to mean that descent was originally traced through the mother-line alone. However, while descent in general was traced through the maternal line, precisely because the clan was a mother-brother clan—male descent was traced through the mother’s brother-line.”
Matriarchal societies were assumed to be the norm in primitive conditions when cooperation was an essential feature of daily life. The objective was for human groups to survive against heavy odds. But some anthropologists ignored the necessity for harmonious cooperation among the early human or hominin groups. They assumed that “matriarchy” was merely the opposite of “patriarchy”—female rule instead of male rule. Robert Briffault in The Mothers (Chapter IX, p. 29) opposed this view, saying:
“The characteristics of societies of a matriarchal type are by no means a simple inversion of the parts respectively played by the sexes in a patriarchal society. In the most primitive human societies, there is nothing equivalent to the domination which, in advanced societies, is exercised by individuals, by classes, by one sex over the other. The notion of such a domination is entirely foreign to primitive humanity; the conception of authority is not understood.”
As long as the scientific anthropological investigators remained committed to a reliance on advancing the most likely explanations for events that occurred in the unreachable past, they had no problem recognizing the matriarchal character of the earliest human or hominin social formations. Only when they wished to imagine human origins as representing what they considered “normal” for all humans—the male-dominated nuclear family—they began to depart from the matriarchal theory and adapted to a male-centered theory of human origins. They bowed down to pressure from the most influential forces which affected the formation of the human sciences: history, economics, sociology, and cultural anthropology. As we noted above in the discussion on the building of the ideas to be promoted in the educational systems in capitalist societies, the capitalist rulers opted for theories that did not criticize their economic and political privileges, and their right to rule.
The bourgeois-oriented anthropologists, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Alfred Kroeber in the U.S., and Claude Lévi-Strauss in France, not only rejected the matriarchal theory, but they also rejected the evolutionary approach to the progress achieved by our primitive ancestors. Our ancient predecessors improved and diversified their tool-making and labor activities, not all at once or in the same way everywhere, but each at its own pace and in accordance with the varied climates and circumstances wherever human groups existed. But the anti-evolutionary anthropologists denied cultural evolution. Instead they advanced the theories of structuralism, functionalism, and cultural relativism. But how can one imagine a process of change from past to present without evolution? Every transition from lower to higher, or from old forms to new forms, whether in cultural evolution or biological evolution can only occur in the given circumstances that prevail at any given moment. Nothing appears out of nowhere. Everything that is real is a result of a real movement and transition, there is no supernatural influence.
Debate over cultural evolution
Evolutionary thinking flowed naturally from the growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the late 19th century. Many educated persons began to think that if animals had evolved, then some animal must have eventually entered on the path of becoming human. The ancient apes were considered to be the ancestors of humans, due to the biological similarities of modern-day apes and humans. This kind of knowledge inspired Morgan in his outline of a possible transition from an early horde-like stage to savagery, and then to barbarism. Naturally, such an early approximation of human evolutionary stages could not be considered the final word. Darwin himself promoted this connection in the preface to his book, The Descent of Man (1871):
“Nor shall I have occasion to do more than to allude to the amount of difference between man and the anthropomorphous apes; for Prof. Huxley, in the opinion of most competent judges, has conclusively shown that in every visible character man differs less from the higher apes than these do from the lower members of the same order of Primates.”
Morgan was the first to make an attempt at introducing a logical order into the history of primeval society. Until considerably more material is obtained, no further changes will be necessary, and his arrangement will surely remain in force.
[Engels then describes these stages, and continues:]
“… The sketch which I have here produced after Morgan of the evolution of the human race through savagery and barbarism to the beginning of civilization is even now rich in new outlines. More still, these outlines are incontrovertible, because traced directly from production. Nevertheless, this sketch will appear faint and meagre in comparison to the panorama unrolled to our view at the end of our pilgrimage. Not until then will it be possible to show in their true light both the transition from barbarianism to civilization and the striking contrast between them. For the present we can summarize Morgan's arrangement in the following manner: Savagery—time of predominating appropriation of finished natural products; human ingenuity invents mainly tools useful in assisting this appropriation. Barbarism—time of acquiring the knowledge of cattle raising, of agriculture and of new methods for increasing the productivity of nature by human agency. Civilization—time of learning a wider utilization, of natural products, of manufacturing and of art.”
There was an agreement of the pioneers of anthropology that the pre-civilized human and hominin populations had, indeed, passed through “stages,” or “phases” that could be distinguished as lower or higher. This idea of a sequence of stages is regarded as “evolutionary.” These developmental periods of progress in one skill or another, in one community or another were often unique in the circumstances surrounding the given group, or in its previous achievements, since there were no “prescriptions” prepared in advance for all peoples. We should add that the recognition of progress does not exclude phases of regression in some populations (and these have been observed and documented). Also, there were many cross-cultural influences as human groups migrated and interacted with one another. Robert Briffault (The Mothers, p. 51,) says,
“It can scarcely be doubted that in the course of that portion of the evolutionary process which is represented by the history of the human race, new characters and powers have been developed, and that these have become fixed in natural heredity and are transmitted as inborn dispositions. But it is surprisingly difficult to demonstrate the existence of such innate racial acquirements, and they are not at all such as one might be led to expect. Although language and everything which is transmitted by means of language is not congenitally inherited, the capacity for acquiring such traditional heredity must needs be an innate character: and it might naturally be assumed that it has been gradually improved in the course of human evolution.”
The thesis advanced by the 20th century anthropologists that the nuclear father-family was the original form of kinship for the human race was assumed, not proven. It had to be assumed, since there was no evidence for it. It is true, however, as ethnological knowledge accumulated, many forms of kinship were analyzed, including patriarchal as well as matriarchal forms (with a variety of modifications and unique features) among the social units studied. There was enough evidence to support a wide range of kinship theories. But the forms that exist today cannot be taken as representative of what happened millions of years ago, perhaps among populations of Homo erectus, if not among ancient or modern Homo sapiens groups. The question of the “original” kinship form, that which preceded all those in existence today, and which characterized humans, or hominins, at an early stage in their separation from their primate past, still remained a bone of contention. It had to be either matriarchal or patriarchal. In the end, cultural anthropology swung over to the patriarchal theory. As Evelyn Reed explains in Woman’s Evolution (p. 19):
“The question of the matriarchy is decisive in establishing whether or not the modern father-family has always existed. The very structure of the maternal clan system precluded it. Instead of being the basic social unit from time immemorial, as most anthropologists contend, it is a late arrival in history, appearing only at the beginning of the civilized epoch.”
Briffault, writing in 1927 in The Mothers, (p. 435) argued:
“The patriarchal theory—that is, the theory that primitive society was from the first patriarchally constituted, and that the social relation between the sexes was essentially similar to that to which we are accustomed—is indeed, apart from any other evidence than that of primitive economic facts, a fantastic unreality. The visionary picture of a primitive patriarchal ruler of dependent women who have no economic value or power except their sex has no basis except in late myth and superficial speculation.”
The question of the matriarchy also illuminates another critical issue in the contradictory nature of human social evolution. The fact is that gains in cultural and technological achievements came at the expense of much human suffering. Not for nothing does the Christian bible say: “The righteous person may have many troubles, but the LORD delivers him from them all,” (Psalm 34:19). Engels explains in the Preface to the Fourth Edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:
“Monogamy, then, does by no means enter history as a reconciliation of man and wife and still less as the highest form of marriage. On the contrary, it enters as the subjugation of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of an antagonism between the sexes unknown in all preceding history. In an old unpublished manuscript written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the following passage: "The first division of labor is that of man and wife in breeding children." And to-day I may add: The first-class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first-class oppression with that of the female by the male sex. Monogamy was a great historical progress. But by the side of slavery and private property it marks at the same time that epoch which, reaching down to our days, takes with all progress also a step backwards, relatively speaking, and develops the welfare and advancement of one by the woe and submission of the other. It is the cellular form of civilized society which enables us to study the nature of its now fully developed contrasts and contradictions.”
Historicity in anthropology
The anti-evolutionary anthropologists, in order to evade the question of “evolutionary” cultural development, resorted to a phony antithesis between “history” and “evolution.” As Claude Lévi-Strauss posed the question in his introduction to Structural Anthropology (1963):
“After these preliminary remarks and definitions, we can formulate the problem of the relationship between the anthropological sciences and history as follows: Either anthropology is focused on the diachronic dimension of phenomena, that is, on their temporal order, and thus is unable to trace their history; or anthropologists attempt to apply the method of the historian, and the time dimension escapes them. The problem of reconstructing a past whose history we are incapable of grasping confronts ethnology more particularly; the problem of writing the history of a present without a past confronts ethnography. That is, at any rate, the dilemma which has too often halted the development of these sciences in the course of the last fifty years.”
What is the meaning of Lévi-Strauss’ terminologically overblown argument pitting “history” (‘descriptions of changes’) against the “diachronic dimension” (apparently the ‘sequentiality of change’? He means that if we stick to the facts, we can only recount the actual course of events within any given period of time. But in prehistory we do not know these events in their particularity. We cannot relate the transition of one “history” to another without recourse to some preconceived “theory,” which means counterposing our “theory” to the actual historical process. In other words, to discuss what happened in the “history” that took place in prehistoric conditions, we can reflect upon the occurrences that transpired over time—day-to-day, so to speak. But to speak of “evolution” we are starting from the standpoint of some abstract ideal, à la Plato, which takes priority over the facts. Thus, Lévi-Strauss paints himself as a realist, a positivist, a believer in “facts first.” But in his argument, Lévi-Strauss misinterprets the construction of evolutionary theories. The proponents of evolutionary anthropology can reconstruct the changes that occurred in part by studying the existing artefacts in archaeological sites, ruins, burials, cave paintings, etc., and using the best possible methods to determine their antiquity. This approach applies to the more recent changes. For the more remote changes one can examine the clues to the past that persist in the cultural heritage of existing primitive populations. The study of primate groups, such as chimpanzees, can also be helpful. Science is multifaceted and often experimental. As Evelyn Reed argued in Sexism and Science (p. 171):
“These static, mentalistic views of Lévi-Strauss have nothing in common with the thought of Morgan and other evolutionists. They saw society developing out of the material conditions of life and changing with the advances made in these material conditions. Historically, human thought, like society itself, has grown up from the infantile to a higher, or adult level. For example, primitive people resorted to magic to explain phenomena, whereas we explain them through science.”
Morgan placed no limits on the methods he was to depend upon to create his sketch of human cultural evolution. But he had no motive to distort the facts, since he was bent on making a serious attempt to understand that part of the past of humanity that preceded written history. He carried out an extensive study of the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois League, and he explains in Chapter I of Ancient Society, (p. 3):
“An attempt will be made in the following pages to bring forward additional evidence of the rudeness of the early condition of mankind, of the gradual evolution of their mental and moral powers through experience, and of their protracted struggle with opposing obstacles while winning their way to civilization. It will be drawn, in part, from the great sequence of inventions and discoveries which stretches along the entire pathway of human progress; but chiefly from domestic institutions, which express the growth of certain ideas and passions.
… The facts indicate the gradual formation and subsequent development of certain ideas, passions, and aspirations. Those which hold the most prominent positions may be generalized as growths of the particular ideas with which they severally stand connected. Apart from inventions and discoveries they are the following:
I. Subsistence, II. Government, III. Language, IV. The Family, V. Religion, VI. House Life and Architecture, VII. Property.”
We know that climatic changes (migrations to different ecological zones, advance and retreat of ice ages) often produce cultural innovations as primitive peoples struggle to survive. W.H.R. Rivers, writing in the quarterly review Folk-Lore in 1904, argues (in reference to the migrations of the Australian Arunta and Intichiuma aborigines resulting from the changing climate):
“The possibility of outside influence being cleared away, we must look in another direction to find the causes of evolution; for evolution there has admittedly been in one direction or the other. … As the climate thus became more and more unfavourable any human population must have become more and more segregated, leading to the formation of the present tribes clustered at and around the localities where human life is still, though with difficulty, maintainable. … The better supplied the country is with food and other means of livelihood, the less need would there be for magical ceremonies to produce them. Consequently, we find that as we get further and further away from the Arunta country the Intichiuma ceremonies assume less and less importance, until their magical aspect practically disappears altogether on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria.”
The opposition to the antievolutionary bias in anthropology continued in the writing of Leslie White. He not only rejected the retreat from the evolutionary analysis of culture, but he also indicated the social pressure coming from on high that provoked this retreat. He stated in the foreword to Evolution and Culture (1960, p. v):
“The repudiation of evolutionism in the United States is not easily explained. Many nonanthropological scientists find it incredible that a man who has been hailed as “the world's greatest anthropologist” (Kroeber, 1943) namely, Franz Boas, a man who was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, should have devoted himself assiduously and with vigor for decades to this antiscientific and reactionary pursuit.
… It is apparent, of course, that the foes of evolutionist theory were not liquidated with the triumph of Darwinism in the later decades of the nineteenth century; they were merely routed for the time being and eventually regrouped their forces for a counterattack. It may be significant to also note that evolutionism flourished in cultural anthropology in a day when the capitalist system was still growing: evolution and progress were the order of the day. But when, at the close of the nineteenth century the era of colonial expansion came to an end and the capitalist-democratic system had matured and established itself securely in the Western world, then evolution was no longer a popular concept. On the contrary, the dominant note was “maintain the status quo.” And, although the United States was born in armed revolt against its mother country, in mid-twentieth century it is determined that no other country shall do likewise, and the communist revolution which is spreading throughout much of the world is always called “aggression,” and is opposed on moral grounds as well as with economic and military means.”
The second wave of feminism in the U.S.
The rise of the women’s liberation movement in the United States in the 1970s provided a new opportunity for women and their allies to challenge the patriarchal denial of women’s freedom, particularly the right to have abortions. This movement was closely connected with other battlefronts that were established to end Jim Crow discrimination and win civil rights for Black people, Latinos, gay people, and others who suffered discrimination. The capitalist rulers wished to preserve, as much as possible, the tradition-honored nuclear family, the prohibition against abortion (‘killing a man’s heir’), the exclusion of women from men-only occupations, and the need for women to view themselves primarily as home-makers, mothers, and occasional workers in low-paid women’s jobs. By this time, there were many anthropologists who had already been prepared during the previous historical period to defend patriarchal institutions. On the other hand, many feminists and communists were prepared to step forward to defend women’s rights as fundamental to the struggle of the working class. The working class stood to gain by reducing the divisions that the capitalists had imposed on it over the decades: the divisions based on sex, nationality, race, religion, and employment status.
The emergence of women’s actions to counter sexist discrimination promoted the need for conservative writers to explain why such protest was abnormal and unreasonable. Social scientists such as Robert Ardrey, Lionel Tiger, Desmond Morris, and Robin Fox stepped forth to defend the dominant role of men in society, particularly due to their purported genetic inheritance for aggression, competition, and territoriality. Evelyn Reed, writing in Sexism and Science (p. 73), characterized this brand of literature this way:
“Their method consists in obliterating the essential distinctions that separate humans from animals and identifying the behavior of both through gross exaggerations and misrepresentations of the part played by instincts in human life. They argue that since mankind came out of the animal world, people are at bottom no better than animals; they are inescapably creatures of their biological impulses. Thus, modern warfare is explained by man’s “innate” aggression.”
Such books as The Naked Ape (Morris), The Territorial Imperative (Ardrey) and Men in Groups (Tiger) gave women the impression that “if your guy slaps you around a bit, just remember, he can’t help it. He’s an animal.” Reed quoted this passage from George Gaylord Simpson’s book The Meaning of Evolution:
“The establishment of the fact that man is a primate, with all its evolutionary implications, early gave rise to fallacies for which there is no longer any excuse (and never was much). …These fallacies arise from what Julian Huxley calls the “nothing but” school. It was felt or said that because man is an animal, a primate, and so on, he is nothing but an animal, or nothing but an ape with a few extra tricks. It is a fact that man is an animal, but it is not a fact that he is nothing but an animal. …Such statements are not only untrue but also vicious for they deliberately lead astray enquiry as to what man really is and so distort our whole comprehension of ourselves and our proper values. To say that man is nothing but an animal is to deny, by implication, that he has essential attributes other than those of all animals. …His unique nature lies precisely in those characteristics that are not shared with any other animal. His place in nature and its supreme significance to man are not defined by his animality but by his humanity [pp. 282–83].”
At this late stage it’s not necessary to take up more time on the content of these anti-feminist books. They were more-or-less early responses to the rise of the women’s liberation movement and its literature. But however antagonistic they were to feminist ideas and actions; they were closer to the mid-century mainstream of anthropology than were the themes advanced by the Marxist and working-class women’s liberation advocates. Anti-matriarchal and anti-evolutionary theories still reigned supreme in academia. The continuity of pro-capitalist ideology proceeded onward with the appearance of the “sociobiology” and “evolutionary psychology” theories presented by Edward O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, and many others.
Sociobiology
Wilson’s book, Sociobiology, came out in 1975, contemporaneously with many of the other anti-feminist works. Wilson had a highly- praised reputation as an industrious biologist, with a specialization in the social insects: ants and bees. Indeed, his work was very impressive. But no matter how painstakingly he pursued the cause of scientific discovery in nature, he remained skeptical that human culture could cause such a qualitative difference between humans and animals. He “biologized” human culture, transferring the conception of human progress out of the realm of culture and into the realm of genetics. As he posed the question (On Human Nature, 1978):
“Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and completely replace genetic evolution? I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects in the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behaviour—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.”
In her book Sexism and Science (p. 46), Reed commented on the emergence of trends of thought that sought to explain human social evolution in genetic terms:
“Mechanical-minded thinkers, however, could not pass beyond the biological factors that led to human life. They inflated certain characteristics common to both humans and animals while underplaying or erasing the vast distinctions between them. The school of biologism gave birth to two main trends of thought: one emphasizing animal competition and the other animal cooperation to account for human competition and cooperation.”
The first school fostered “social Darwinism,” which is sometimes called the “nothing but” school. Man, its proponents said, was nothing but an animal with a few extra tricks. The catchwords “struggle for survival” and “survival of the fittest” were bandied about to buttress the thesis that animal jungle relations were carried over into the modern capitalist jungle. The proposition that “human nature never changes” meant that human nature is nothing but animal nature.
The other tendency, offended by the one-sidedness of the tooth-and-claw theorists, affirmed that not only competition but cooperation could be found in animal behavior. They pointed to the “social insects” as confirmation. This thesis was popularized by Wilson’s predecessor at Harvard, W.N. Wheeler, another renowned entomologist. In 1922, after the First World War and the Russian revolution, he gave six lectures on the cooperative insects that were subsequently published in the book Social Life Among the Insects.”
The arbiters of capitalist dominion would like working people to think of themselves as distant cousins of rats or cockroaches instead of persons who can use their human traits of cooperation and creativity to forge a new, more human social environment for their children and for future generations. The capitalists, as individuals, don’t worry about what sociobiologists say; they are convinced of the rightness of their social authority. They believe that they have risen far above the lower orders of mankind by means of their courage, vision, and greater intelligence. And they are firmly convinced that, in any case, they have the political power to determine the future course of all countries. But they tend to think that sociobiology is an appropriate philosophy for the working people. And in order for the workers to catch on to the themes propounded by the biologistic writers, it’s first necessary that the bourgeois intelligentsia take on this reactionary pseudoscientific doctrine as part of their ideological repertoire.
Richard Dawkins is one of the more influential writers of the late 20th century in the continuation of the tradition of sociobiology. He tried to go even farther than Wilson in biologizing human culture by advancing his “selfish gene” hypothesis. According to this logic, the human body, like the body of any living creature, is a repository of the genes that determine the body’s behavior. The human genes came first, then a body was constructed in the uterus according to the instructions encoded in the genes. Thus, the body is a product of the genes. Part of the genetic instructions to the human body is to reproduce, so as to perpetuate their own existence. To put in Dawkins’ own words:
“They [the genes] are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”
Dawkins created a schema that could be likened to individual self-enslavement. Since genes ruled the human “personality,” the personality had no means of escape from genetic control. Humans, who would strive to be free, are slaves to their own “out-of-control” genetic masters. But Dawkins advanced an overly-simplistic model for the functioning of the human genome. There’s not much room for human creativity or progress in this scenario. Nonetheless, Dawkins was well received for a period of time by those who were enthused by novel biologistic schemas. But, due to the many questions that remained unanswered by the selfish gene concept, it tended to lose its attraction after a few years, especially because Dawkins insisted upon inventing “memes” as units of communication. Despite the fact that some communicators still throw around the term “memes,” this is only slang for “catchy notions.”
Language
Steven Pinker, for his part, tried to build a theory based on the biological evolution of human language capacity. Taking his cue from Noam Chomsky’s “innate universal grammar” concept, Pinker conceived of the ability for vocal communication, as well as the history of the formation and evolution of human languages, as a function of a particular brain region. It is an “instinct” conceived as a specific functional unit in the brain. In his book The Language Instinct (1995, p. 18), Pinker argues:
“Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. For these reasons, some cognitive scientists have described language as a psychological faculty, a mental organ, a neural system, and a computational module. But I prefer the admittedly quaint term “instinct.” It conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs.”
But, unlike spiders, humans have neural networks in our brains that coordinate thoughts with vocal activity, and that link our physical vocal apparatus with the thoughts in our brains. For lack of a better term, Pinker calls language a “special skill.” Obviously, it is not a “skill” as the term is generally used, nor does it develop spontaneously. If it were to develop spontaneously, it would be akin to vision, hearing or muscular contractions. In fact, it can only develop with conscious effort as human babies listen, think and make attempt to imitate what they hear. Their urge to mimic sounds might be spontaneous, but the learning process is extensive and involves a growing effort to “get it right.” Further, it is wrong to use any specific pre-existing category into which we can fit “language.” It is a multifaceted range of skills involving many brain areas and neural networks. Linguistic evolution connects not only several brain areas, but controls many neuromuscular functions in its usage. For decades now, linguists and neuroscientists have been using modern techniques to study the mental and physical interconnections involved in gestural and vocal communications. Cultural evolution develops the motives, environment, and conditions for language, but Pinker wishes to avoid dealing with cultural evolution, focusing on gene evolution only. Pinker says (ibid.):
“The story I will tell in this book has, of course, been deeply influenced by Chomsky. But it is not his story exactly, and I will not tell it as he would. Chomsky has puzzled many readers with his skepticism about whether Darwinian natural selection (as opposed to other evolutionary processes) can explain the origins of the language organ that he argues for; I think it is fruitful to consider language as an evolutionary adaptation, like the eye, its major parts designed to carry out important functions.”
Note here Pinker’s use of the term “language organ.” This is not too different from the term “language module.” What’s implied here is that the “brain” or “mind” is an assemblage of separate components that can be added or taken away. This stems from the brain computer analogy. If you begin to compare the brain to a computer, you will be hopelessly lost before too long. Biological organisms and all their internal structures evolved with no help from a higher power, while tools, machines, and computers are deliberately constructed by conscious humans.
Language is a product of the evolution of culture, and culture cannot be equated with biology, although culture emerged from the previously evolved biological preconditions. The eye, whether of the toad or of the ant, (like other physical structures) has evolved many times without any need for culture. (Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker has an excellent chapter on the repeated evolution of the eye in one lineage after another.) Language is not like the eye, or the spider’s web. Human society is not like ant or spider society. Humans are different because of their culturally evolved capacities to create increasingly complex products through social labor guided by imagination. Humans convert their experiences and ideas into art, machinery, cities, and spaceships. Some of Pinker’s statements now seem antiquated to many educated people, but perhaps there are many who still appreciate his biologistic approach.
Pinker’s term “instinct” to characterize the language facility, is unscientific. “Instinct” is a word we relied upon before we understood much about the complexities of cognition and the interaction between genetic inheritance and environment. Now we recognize not only how the reproductive process blends the chromosomal contributions of the parents, but also how the embryo and fetus are built. The interaction between genetics and environment begins not after birth, but at the moment of fertilization. The newborn human individual emerges not through the unfolding of a “genetic” program, but through multiple interdependent, probabilistic, biochemical processes. The evolution of the human brain, with its social as well as individual capacities, is a product of eons of evolution. The body and brain together can only be understood as an organic unity. When we recognize these features of evolution, we can understand that language is inseparable from the social interaction within human groups combined with their individual physical and cognitive activities. So why did Pinker use the term “instinct”? First of all, Pinker explains (The Language Instinct, p. 17–18):
“For I will be writing not about the English language or any other language, but about something much more basic: the instinct to learn, speak, and understand language. For the first time in history, there is something to write about it. Some thirty-five years ago a new science was born. Now called "cognitive science," it combines tools from psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neurobiology to explain the workings of human intelligence. The science of language, in particular, has seen spectacular advances in the years since.”
Pinker leaves out of account all the evolutionary processes that occurred over millions of years to produce our species with all its biological and cultural capacities, which, incidentally, all turn out to be quite interdependent. To talk about language without analyzing the conditions for its evolution is like talking about space flight without mentioning aviation and the prior develop of land and sea transport. When we analyze all the interacting functions needed to produce articulate speech, we are immediately aware of the correspondence between hearing and speaking. Babies learn language by listening and mimicking what they hear. We take note of the physical structures involved: mouth, jaw, larynx, tongue, lips, lungs. We recognize that our bodily actions, in producing normal speech, are intricately interlinked with our thoughts about meaning, pronunciation, syntax, etc. Our emotional states, influenced by the endocrine system, influence the tonality, emphasis, and content of our vocalizations. We accumulate multiple alternative expressions, with an infinity of nuances, to express the same or similar concept or intention. We learn these things growing up, and we understand that much of our speech comes out more-or-less spontaneously, while some of our statements seem to require more deliberation.
Commenting on the notion that psychological or social attributes are rooted in the brain (or mind) as if they were discrete “modules,” UK neuroscientist Gina Rippon, in her book Gender and our Brains, explains:
“Evolutionary psychologists come firmly under the heading of scientists-as-explainers-of-the-status-quo. Effectively, they work backwards from what appears to be a well-established fact today; they find an explanation in evolutionary history that could fit this fact and offer it up as the reason for the status quo.
… Human behavior is assumed to be made up of many sets of functions or “modules,” each of which has evolved to solve the kind of problems that we might encounter at any stage of our lives. This has been called the “Swiss Army Knife” model of the mind, with thousands of specialized components, each underwritten by associate brain structures, which have emerged over evolutionary time as required. And there appear to be two types of knife: one (presumably pink) kitted out with the tools for the brow-soothing, household management, child-rearing-type tasks for the female of the species, whereas the other (a martial navy blue), apart from being bigger and more resilient, has the essentials for the life of spear throwing, political power and scientific genius that is the lot of the male of the species.
… Newer models based on the ability to image brain dynamics, rather than producing static images, show that many parts of the brain are simultaneously involved in all aspects of behavior, briefly networked together and then swiftly uncoupled, in time-scales it would be difficult to capture with fMRI techniques.19 So, again, if one group is characterized by a size difference in a particular area of the brain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that group is better at a particular skill. What matters is often how the different components of the network operate together, not the size of an individual member of the network (which anyway might be linked to any number of different skills).”
When Gina Rippon describes evolutionary psychologists as “explainers-of-the-status-quo,” she is pointing to the “status quo” as conceived by these purportedly scientific popularizers of what and who “we” are. As it has turned out in practice, one of the principle themes of modern life propounded by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists is the difference between men and women. Millions of pages have been carefully written in order to convince the curious reader that men are the organizers, builders, and innovators, while women are the nurturers, child-raisers and helpers.
Joseph Henrich, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, writes in “A cultural species: How culture drove human evolution,” a science brief for the American Psychological Association, Nov. 2011):
“Overall, much theory and evidence now converge to indicate that we are an ultra-cultural species —unlike any other—whose brains, genes, and biology have long been shaped by the interaction between cultural and genetic evolution. Culture appears to have opened up entirely new evolutionary vistas not available to less cultural species.”
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in their book, The Dialectical Biologist (p. 259), provide another insight into how human cultural achievements alter the conditions of natural selection and impact biological evolution:
“All mammals live intensely, at high metabolic rates. We share with other mammals the mechanisms of temperature regulation—shivering, sweating, changing the distribution of blood between the body's peripheral circulation and the deeper organs. But we also use clothing and shelter and burn fuel to warm or cool us. The use of these cultural mechanisms to control our own temperature has made it possible for our species to survive in almost all climates, but it has also created new kinds of vulnerability. Our body temperature now depends on the price of clothing or fuel, whether we control our own furnaces or have them set by landlords, whether we work indoors or outdoors, our freedom to avoid or leave places with stressful temperature regimes (restaurant workers often move back and forth between refrigerated storerooms and hot kitchens). Thus, our temperature regime is not a simple consequence of thermal needs but rather a product of social and economic conditions.”
Genes, and their capacity to mutate and adapt, are the starting point of evolutionary change. The evolution of certain primate species, beginning 5 or 6 million years ago, got us to where we are now. But as we evolved physically, there were multiple cultural, behavioral, and social tendencies that emerged out of biological evolution and became critically involved in further shaping the course of biological evolution. We must keep in mind that culture is not baked into the brain or into any physical structure. Culture keeps itself alive and deepens itself by active, working, cooperating human beings consciously and deliberately absorbing the wisdom possessed by their kinship groups, and then transmitting it to the rising generation of human social groups.
The labor process itself, whether it involves collaboration among individuals, or individuals working alone for a time, forces the members of a group to orient their bodies in specific ways in order to accomplish specific tasks, which they increasingly imagine in advance as they work. The evolution of the tool kits over the past million years shows how their own productive activity provided a template for improvements in the variety and effectiveness of the stone tools they made, and later the bronze. Their labor activities have the long-term effect of adapting their muscular development and neurological functions to conform to their cultural and physical needs. There is mutual feedback between the mental and the physical, the individual and the social, or between cultural and genetic evolution. While natural selection favors genes, and genetic regulatory processes, that tend to optimize survival in the shifting and emerging natural and social environments, the behavior becomes increasingly based on self-awareness, group awareness, and the existence of choices. Behavior moves, by fits and starts, from the spontaneous to the deliberate and from self-absorbed individual activity to the absorption of the individual into social activity. This is the process of advancing from the primate to the hominin, from the hominin to the human.
Terrence Deacon, biological anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, challenges the limited schemata of Chomsky and Pinker, as he explains in his book The Symbolic Species (p. 27):
“One of the most influential views of grammatical knowledge conceives of it as built in prior to language experience, like firmware in a desktop computer (depicted as a computer chip inserted in the brain). The structure of language is imposed on strings of words (that presumably would still be meaningful, just less useful, without this structure). This view was first explicitly formulated by the linguist Noam Chomsky. The extreme innatist view of knowledge of language conceives of it as an external reflection of an internal lingua franca of the brain called “mentalese.” In Steven Pinker's words (The Language Instinct, p. 82), “Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.”
Deacon’s book makes it clear that language is not a separate instinct or organ; not an add-on component or an evolutionary serendipity—far from it. Language is deeply integrated with human emotional states, social development, neurological, and musculoskeletal evolution. Such a high level of development is unique among all species on the planet, and could only have evolved over many hundreds of thousands (or millions) of years as the interconnections between brain and body grew and the motor and sensory neural capacities became adapted to increasingly complex vocalizations. The physical structures of the larynx, tongue and lips developed higher levels of precise motor control at the same time as the thought processes became coordinated with conscious control over the vocalization structures. Such complex evolution cannot be conceived without a close coordination of the brain and body together as the basis of linguistic capacities. Some early pre-linguistic forms of communication must have emerged among one or more of the hominin species preceding Homo sapiens.
The idea that body or facial gestures evolved as precursors to vocal language has been recognized for a long time. Adam Kendon in his paper, “Reflections on the ‘gesture-first’ hypothesis of language origins,” (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, July 20, 2016) argues:
“The idea that humans were first able to communicate in a symbolic way by gesture, and so were able to develop language, has a long history (Hewes, 1999). From the beginning of the eighteenth century onward, when the natural origins of language began to be discussed, the “gesture-first” idea was put forward by several prominent thinkers—for example, by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, in Paris in 1746 (Condillac, 2001), or by Giambattista Vico, in Naples in 1744 (Bergin & Fisch, 1984). It was further sympathetically discussed in the nineteenth century by Edward Tylor (1865), Garrick Mallery (1881/1972), George Romanes (1898), and Wilhelm Wundt (1901/1973), among others.”
As we have seen, pressures emanating from the members and representatives of the capitalist class, as they work to strengthen their dominant social role, have played a major role in retarding and corrupting the development of the sciences which focus on the history and nature of our species. But this influence does not need to be conscious or deliberate. Like the core activities of the owners of the means of production in manufacturing, mining, transportation, commerce and banking, there is but one goal: the accumulation of wealth. But their wealth depends on the continuation of their political power. In their more politically-oriented activities, there is but one goal: the protection of their domination over the subordinate classes. And, of course, there is a wide variety of methods to accomplish these ends that don’t require the personal intervention of the capitalists themselves. What the owners of capital do is not so much develop ideas; rather, they act as a filter to eliminate ideas which tend to undermine their power, and promote ideas that tend to reinforce it.
Ownership of the means of communication (news media, public entertainment, publication of books) allows many opportunities to spread their influence. Control over the universities through funding, grants and foundations helps to promote capitalist ideology in of the curricula of higher education. Control over the public school system through influence over local school boards and the textbook selection process helps to create the kind of guidance that will prepare the workers for the life they are expected to live as producers of wealth for the rulers.
As Jack Barnes stated in “Capitalism, the working class, and the transformation of learning,” in Are They Rich Because They’re Smart (p. 91):
“The purpose of education is to give “the educated” a stake in thinking they are going to be different—better off, more “white collar”—than other people who work all their lives. In the process, the rulers hope to make those who manage to get a college degree more dependable supporters of the status quo.
… Most young people in capitalist society never get taught they have anything to look forward to after their compulsory schooling is over. They never get taught in such a way as to make them believe the educational system is based on the assumption that their lives are worth a damn. (Many of us can remember teachers and principals who reeked of this attitude, I’m sure.) Instead, young people in our society learn they have nothing to look forward to.”
Perhaps most important is their control over the two political parties—the Democrats and Republicans—that represent their interests. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of capitalist rule, for the candidates who run for election must pretend to represent the basic needs of the majority working-class electorate while at the same time concealing their loyalty to the master class. This trickery is basic to capitalist rule, and it requires that the bourgeois politicians learn a complex amalgam of misrepresentations, evasions, and false promises. This two-party system as of this writing, July 2021, is beginning to show the strain, and is stumbling from crisis to crisis. There are clear signs that millions of working people are fed up with capitalist exploitation and are opening their minds to possible alternatives to the capitalist mode of production.