I understand the general Marxist theory about why class society arose, there was surplus production and that lead to the institution of private property and the rest follows.
All of that makes sense on a high level but what exactly happened on an individual human level? Conceivably those early civilizations could have elected to go for a more equitable and democratic distribution of the surplus value even if the result would probably not be 100% equitable and would result in some poverty due to material constraints at the time. How do you explain the first appearance of private property and class society on an individual level without delving into some evopsych nonsense about evolutionary instincts or whatever?
I just wrote a comment about this in the last few weeks, but idk if it got removed or what.
In Marx’s ethnological notes on Lewis Morgan, he reviewed Lewis’s work on the ancient Roman gentiles, and their communal lifestyle. So I’m basing what I’m gonna describe on those notes. Keep in mind these social forms existed like 50 BC to 500 ad, and feudal/monarchic society predates that by like 8000 years or something.
There were these egalitarian communes of families with a shard ancestor called the Gens, which were genuinely fraternal social organizations where people shared resources and personal property was redistributed upon death of a member. Over time, distinct sections of the Gen seemed to accumulate different forms of social capital. So you got a group of like doctors, or academics, or leaders, engineers, or manual workers. Not formal divisions mind you, but if you were a member of the Gen you knew which people to go in order to get some function of your society. There was still like a genuine fraternity among the Gens at this point, and the functioning of society for the individual members was formally dependent on egalitarianism.
As this social capital concentrated within a group, the informal divisions hardened into castes, called Gentes. There was still respect and fraternity among the members of the Gens, but Gentes are now starting to act according to their own best interests. The egalitarianism still exists informally, but its more like a principle or value than a need in order for each little Gen society to function. Cultural momentum, not a necessity for survival.
Eventually, the Gentes start jockeying for political power and social position. This process destroys the genuine egalitarianism in every form, and replaces it with social competition and hierarchy. Eventually, one caste, one gent, dominates all others. This creates the “ruling class”, which simultaneously creates the other hardened classes. All egalitarian sentiment has been wiped away, both formally and informally, as far as it existed as an essential way that society functions.
In older forms of society, there were many classes that depended on each other for their established place in the hierarchy. Under feudalism the church existed as part of the power structure that maintained monarchic rule. This was extremely stable. But the creation of the bourgeois class created a new middle class that was driven by the relentless search for profit. This relentlessness means that the bourgeois class could not share power. They destroyed the formal power of the church, then the formal power of the monarchy. The capitalist’s ability to buy people, to change society, to formalize their own rule, led to their ability to subordinate the old classes and transform them into capitalist institutions. This is the process that leads to the two formal classes of capitalism, worker and capitalist. But I think its worthwhile to treat informal classes, such as peasant and lumpen, middle and small capitalist, nouveau riche and tech oligarchy classes, though there are others, as “real” since they reflect peoples experiences and real accumulation of social capital.
At the same time, there is one relentless search for profit, one global system that determines the character of all others, that determines the central contradiction around which is accumulated the material possibility for a new socialist society
Gentes is the plural of gens, he was talking about the same clan-like family structures at different stages of history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gens
This legit confused me, thanks, so I should just refer to the emergent castes as castes?
I guess so? I’ve read Origin of the Family by Engels which is also based on Morgan’s work, but not Marx’s notes.
Iirc he talks about how in Ancient Greece and Rome the gentes lost their power and importance as the economy became more regionally connected and based on slavery, and local war chieftains or kings became more powerful. So politics came to be based more around geography and military might than family structures, and class society emerged as some people were captured or sold into slavery and disconnected from their gentes, or became more powerful through military conquest and/or priestly administrative roles and chose to ignore the old social order of the gentes.
Oh interesting, Marx had some comments about the how the nuclear family arose alongside monarchy but wasn’t created by monarchy, but Tue nuclear family inherited the contradictions of society at large.
I haven’t read that one, but given my interest in this subject I’ll have to look it up.
Yeah I guess the core of my question is exactly what makes this kind of process tick. How come the cultural momentum swung in that particular direction rather than the other.
Like, why did it swing toward consolidation of power rather than deeper forms of egalitarianism? Probably crisis, scarcity, natural disaster, war. We have to think about these systems globally and locally. The conditions didn’t exist in one place to develop into castes and classes, but they did in the next area over. Scarcity of resources or opportunities to accumulate material or social resources drive expansionist, imperialist development. What makes the process tick, according to Marxism, is a dialectic relationship between opposing forces.
Spinoza has a line in Ethics which I think is interesting:
If this has some merit, which I think it does but there’s def problems with Spinoza though you gotta love his efforts to construct human nature from first principles, then the “cardinal sin” of class society is one part of society, which is a part of nature, begins to consider itself above and beyond nature. But what drives this IMO is a slow process of material need which leads to accumulation of social capital, that negates the old egalitarian material basis and replaces it with an informal caste that negates the old formal egalitarian basis for human society.
The truth is you are probably just gonna have to work to find specific answers to your question, in my experience these questions exist as a sort of discomfort that drives us to seek answers. Recognition of some objective factor conflicts with something subjective within you that drives you to seek an answer outside of you. This inside/outside, negating old ideas with new ones is the motor of revolutionary criticism. Something like this process happens to people when society goes through changes. This happened to those people who formed those old egalitarian societies when they followed external pressures to change their own societies, just as it happens to us. This inside/outside struggle is the driver of human and social change. All social questions resolve themselves in the practical activity of the people who make up the society. In order to really understand, we have to get rid of abstraction and seek evidence.
But since these class societies arose at different times and in different ways, and much of the old ancient records didn’t survive, then we can look at more recent examples of revolution to understand social change. Detailed analysis of the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the American civil war, the Haitian revolution, WW1, WW2, the Chinese revolution, and the times leading up to them, can provide some insight.
Black Reconstruction by WEB Dubois is one of the best such analyses. He really gets into the weeds of the classes, the opposing forces, the material and social negations, that led to a drastic and necessary material change to the means of production in society. Another good example is Gramsci’s study of the Risorgimento and Passive Revolution. But just by the way you ask the question, seems to me like you are on a personal journey that won’t feel satisfied until you’ve basically transformed yourself and the way you think about the world. At least, that’s how it worked in my experience and from what I’ve seen in the experiences of others
Didn’t expect to be clocked like that lmao but yeah kind of I guess. Thanks for your input the answers in this thread definitely clarified some stuff at least a little bit.
Sometimes it did push in the other direction. Western and central Europe had more class differentiation during the bronze age than the earlier iron age for example. But then the commodity form re-infiltrated them through the greek and phoenician merchants, more militarism became necessary to defend against encroachment from the south (and from neighbours later on), their warriors grew wealthy from raiding greek and roman colonies (or from serving the same as mercenaries), etc. The same sorta push in the other direction has happened countless times, usually leading to what the nobles view as “dark ages”—but so long as any class societies exist they will re-establish themselves
Itz why the revolution needs to be global and must struggle to abolish commodities or “the whole rot” (as marx called it) will just re-establish itself again