Living Marxism

The original commune was the birth of humanity. It created an egalitarian society in which social relations were reciprocal and in harmony with nature. Without it, homo sapiens would not exist today. The rise of class society began with the overthrow of the commune and the domestic slavery of women by the patriarchy, followed by the wider exploitation of slaves, peasants and wage workers since. But humanity survived in the historic class struggles of the exploited and oppressed for the revolutionary overthrow of class society culminating in decaying capitalism.

We must rescue humanity from the deathly destruction of patriarchal capitalism in terminal crisis and create the conditions for its rebirth with the abolition of class in a future communist society returned to nature. To build support for socialist revolution we need to harness the power of the international proletariat in the uniting all workers of all ethnicities, creeds, nations, sexes and sexual orientations. The socialist revolution will build on the lessons of class struggle through the ages, founding a world party of socialism with a revolutionary transitional program that guides workers in the struggle for world revolution and a communist world yet to be born.

The Birth of Humanity

The birth of Humanity was the result of the original social revolution that created human society in which women organised the social relations between the two sexes as reciprocal and equal. To be human began when women over-rode natural selection to socially select male partners who would defer their sexual gratification for part of the monthly menstrual cycle. 

Women went on sex strike during menstruation synchronized with waxing moon to force men to hunt to provide meat for the children’s hungry brains. The men were then rewarded during the waning moon with sex when women were most fertile.  

This is not biological ‘essentialism’ or determinism, but rather the social determination of the reproduction of human life. Beyond natural selection, which is random resulting from genetic variation, this is social selection where women collectively organised the lineage social relations between men and women as equal sexes. The result was the original classless commune which lasted for 200,000 years before women’s resistance gradually succumbed to the patriarchy 40,000 years ago. The evidence of this timeline and the distribution of red oche used in the menstrual rituals in Mesolithic Africa shows the rise and fall of the original human commune.

Moreover, in many parts of the world there are communal societies surviving more or less intact to the present day. Therefore, the evidence for an historical commune at one with nature is unquestionable. Human society was egalitarian rather than a hierarchy ruled by men. Rosa Luxemburg wrote from jail that the ‘overthrow’ of the original ‘primitive communism’ more than 10,000 years ago was a “brief passing phase” within the total history of humanity. She venerated ‘primitive communism’ as a damning critique of capitalism and inspiration of its return in the future communism.

Marx, Engels and Luxemburg while marking ‘primitive communism’ as a major transition in human history, did not recognise it as a mode of production. But each for different reasons came close. Luxemburg saw communal property as the basis for allocating labour to meet social needs.   She read history forward from the ancient commune to recreate it a higher level. Marx and Engels, discovered the residue of the commune as a survivor within 19^th century capitalism and reasoned backwards that its fate was to make way for the development of the forces of production necessary for socialism.

 In the 1960’s the path-breaking Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock took on Luxemburg’s intuition that the egalitarian ‘primitive communism’ was more than a descriptive label. She used Marxist analysis to reveal the ‘communal mode of production’ (CMP), complete with social relations of production where matrilineal control of communal land was the material base for an egalitarian society that allowed unlimited personal freedom of expression.

The Overthrow of Humanity?

The existence of a CMP makes sense of the transition from ‘primitive communism’ to the ‘patriarchy’, as distinct Modes of Production.  It explains why women put up a continuous class struggle over 100,000s of years for the future of humanity, defending the CMP against men seeking to exploit their labour as propertyless slaves. 

For many millennia in all parts of the world the communal society could expand hunting and gathering into pastoralism and agriculture on the basis of its principle of equality and personal freedom. It could coexist in complex relationships with patriarchal bands that augmented hunting with pastoralism and were moving away from communal property ownership towards private property, and the hierarchy of social class or caste.

So historically significant was the ‘overthrow of mother right’ that Marx and Engels viewed the new social relations between men and women as like that of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’. Had they followed through their observation that women became ‘domestic slaves’ of men to provide surplus labour, they might have concluded that a patriarchal class society based on the exploitation of women’s labour was the forerunner of the Ancient Slave mode of production (SMP).

De Ste Croix in his magnificent book The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, examined the Ancient Slave mode of production and concluded that women were largely propertyless. He questions why Marx and Engels didn’t draw the conclusion that in the ancient world women where an exploited economic class dependent on men:

“… [For anyone who believes that] Marx was right in seeing in the whole system of production (necessarily including reproduction) as the principal factor in deciding class position, the question immediately arises: must we not allow a special class role to that half of the human race which, as a result of the earliest and most fundamental of all divisions of labour, specialises in reproduction, the greater part of which is biologically its monopoly? Marx and Engels, it seems to me fail to draw the full necessary conclusion. Engels, in the Preface of the original edition of the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, acknowledged specifically that ‘the production of and reproduction of immediate life’ is ‘according to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history’…’The first division of labour is that between man and woman for the production of children’, and he added ‘the first class antagonism which appears on history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male’… ‘The nucleus, the first form, of property lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first form of property, but even at this stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour power of others’… Yet Marx and Engels seem hardly to have realised what far-reaching consequences ought to have been drawn from this particular specialisation of role, within their own system of ideas above all.

Meanwhile, this is the position I propose. In many societies, either women in general, or married women (who may be regarded as monopolising the reproduction function), have rights, including above all, property rights, markedly inferior to those of men; and they have these inferior rights as a direct result of their reproductive function, which gives then a special role in the reproductive process and makes men desire to dominate and possess them and their offspring. In such societies it is surely necessary, on the premises I have accepted, to see the women, or the wives (as the case may be), as a distinct economic class, in the technical Marxist sense. The are ‘exploited’, by being kept in a position of legal and economic inferiority, so dependent upon men (on their husbands in the first place, with their kin, so to speak, in reserve) that they have no choice but to perform the tasks allotted to them. Aristotle… could speak of the propertyless man, who could not afford to buy slaves, as using his wife and children in their place.” (p 100)

The Patriarchal Mode of Production

Following the logic of De Ste Croix, Marx and Engels should have recognised the first class in history as the ‘sex-class’ of women, exploited on the basis of their social reproductive labour. It is women’s sex that determines their lack of property and enslavement by men. This gives the radical feminist definition of women as a ‘sex-class’ a material basis open to the Marxist analysis of class relations. These class relations define the Mode of Production where men exploit women as a class to extract and accumulate labour time from their labour as reproducers and producers.  

If the original commune is essentially the same as ‘primitive communism’ (CMP) recognised by Marx and Engels as a classless, egalitarian society, then the overthrow of mother right was a revolution. It created a Patriarchal Mode of Production (PMP) which exploited women’s labour and accumulated their surplus labour in patriarchal families.

Similarly, the SMP revolutionises the limits of the PMP by extending the domestic slavery of women to the whole of society, allowing the harnessing of slave labour by slaveowners. The new ruling class could increase the labour productivity of slaves to develop the forces of production in pastoralism and agriculture beyond the limits of the PMP, until the SMP itself imposes a barrier to the further development of those forces. 

If this is correct, the concept of Patriarchy used by radical feminists today to signify the universal power that men hold over women, is given an historically specific material basis in the social relations of production of the PMP. It then becomes the original class mode of production and the precursor to the Slave Mode of Production (SMP).

Looking back from the standpoint of 19^th century European capitalism, Marx and Engels accepted that the end of the commune had allowed a succession of class modes (Slave mode, Feudal mode, Asiatic Mode) each of which overcame temporarily the limits set by the social relations of existing modes which had to be overthrown in order to develop the forces of production.  

For Marx and Engels, the object of human social development was in the reduction of necessary labour time – the labour time necessary to reproduce the material basis of life. Human freedom became possible with the development of the forces of production reducing necessary labour time and increasing the productivity of labour as the material basis of freedom.

In its essence then, the end of the original commune was a casualty of the first exploiting class, men who introduced slave social relations, reducing necessary labour time. Women as domestic slaves had their labour time expropriated to create surplus labour consumed by the patriarchs. The giant leap in freedom made possible by the original commune and the creation of universal human society, was now subjected to class rule and class struggle over the distribution of labour time.  

The exploitation of the labour of women, slaves, peasants and wage workers, was always contested by the resistance of the oppressed and exploited. Their fight for freedom from private property and the family was never abandoned. It was the class struggle, the motor of history, defending nature and revolutionising class society to further develop the forces of production. It created the conditions for the final social revolution to end class society and to create the new Commune where human society can return to a state of harmony with nature.

The Struggle for Humanity

Was Marx and Engels view of history as a succession of class struggles necessary to create the conditions for a new commune a grand narrative? Hardly, they saw the survival of previous modes in vestigial form within modern capitalism as evidence that a number of social revolutions had contributed to the development of the forces of production sufficient to realise human freedom in a future communism. Towards the end of his life, Marx argued in his draft letter to Vera Zazulich, that in Tsarist Russia there was the theoretical possibility of the survival of the rural commune “replacing capitalist production with cooperative production, and capitalist property with a higher form of the archaic type of property, that is, communist property.”

In the interests of historical accuracy, the possibility of the new commune was conceived in embryo in the Soviet Union until it was aborted by the counter-revolution of Stalinism and global capitalist reaction which halted and drove back the revolution.

So, for Marx the realisation of socialism and communism had to be the work of future class struggles, that unleashed revolutionary consciousness, opening the road to socialism. We agree with Marx and Engels that a future communism is no utopia. Humanity is capable of choosing communism against extinction. It can make the material conditions for the realisation of universal values of humanity, of equality and freedom from oppression and exploitation.

But there are many who reject Marxism as reeking of historic inevitability, of the suppression of human agency, and of the pre-determination of the future of humanity. Clearly, the onus is on those who argue for an alternative past and alternative future of human agency to put their theories to the test. What other mechanism for human progress can be conceived other than the powerful motor of collective class struggles by women, slaves, serfs and wage workers, whose accumulated revolutionary past unites them for the final struggle to end class society and reunite humans with nature?

In the end the only theory that can work is one which makes humans capable of understanding that though they may be driven by forces seemingly beyond their control, they have the capacity to break free from those forces to create their freedom. A recent challenge to ‘historically determinist’ theories that ostensibly suppress humans’ capacity to rise above historic inevitability is the empiricist theory expounded by David Graeber and David Wengrow in the recent book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

Inhumanity against Humanity

Bearing in mind that Rosa Luxemburg saw primitive communism as representing humanity against the inhumanity of capitalism, let’s consider the passive-aggressive critique of historical determinism byGraeber and Wengrow.

“One notable recent competing theory is that of David Graeber and David Wengrow, who in their recent book,The Dawn of Everythingargue against any original commune. Their method is a radical bourgeois empiricist rejection of any pre-determined historical evolutionary dogma which fails to cope with the diversity and complexity of human society. The absence of Marxism in their work is pointedly obvious. Yet the material presented in their book fits neatly with Marx’s non-dogmatic theory of evolution from the Grundrisse to Ethnological Notebooks. Rather than face this challenge to meet Marxism head on, the authors end up replacing the grand old narratives of pre-determined stages of development with the grand new narrative of a 21^st century anarchist version of the ahistorical radical bourgeois individual.

Their postulated ubiquitous blossoming of an anarchic ‘free will’ is substituted for the historical contradiction of kinship with kingship, of competing modes of production, where the original commune rules for millennia, is overturned and women enslaved. They struggle to resist kingship, are again suppressed, once more rebel, and are never fully subordinated. Far from being a schematic social evolution through the rear-view mirror of bourgeois ‘civilisation’, this resistance is the ongoing class struggle of the residual commune that survived the overthrow of women, their historic exploitation as slaves, serfs and wage labourers and which today represents the potential for the revival of the commune in modern form.”

The Dawn of Everything rejects class and class struggle as the motor of history because it rejects the material premises of human evolution, the biological determination of life and the mode of production and reproduction that determines class relations. Class struggle as the motor of history is erased. The mechanism for social development that replaces social class is individual agency and radical democracy as the ultimate driver of history. Humanity as the result of class-conscious agency, dissolves into the fragmented isolated agency of post-modern alienated actors magically choosing to defend an abstract democratic, egalitarian society, while the class conquests of the very real bourgeois warlords necessarily turn it into an actual authoritarian, hierarchical society.

Post-modernism is the ideology of late capitalism facing terminal crisis. It represents the degeneration of capitalism destroying the forces of production reflected at the level of ideas, and bankrupt of a revolutionary program.  This ideology is no challenge to Marxism since such radical individuals are not the motor of history. They are buyers and sellers of individual ‘wants’ and ‘desires’ in the market to feed their alienated identity in which they are separated from the process of production. Ironically, they are blind to the real material forces driving social development, and become cyphers in the laws of motion of capitalism. That is why this postmodern radical/liberal ‘woke’ ideology is being sanctioned by the state to destroy the unity of the only class that can put an end to the certainty of human extinction.

As bourgeois ideology, trans ideology turns the reality of biological reproduction into its opposite, the fetishising of biological sex as gender oppression. Men appropriate women’s biology by synthesising prosthetics and erasing women’s control of their bodies. They celebrate gender to oppress women, substituting men for women in subordinate roles where surrogates are not ‘mothered’ but ‘othered’. Men become ‘women’. They cease to be brothers of mothers. Women become ‘men’. Material production and reproduction in nature becomes transformed into its opposite, the consumption of ‘people’ as commodities bought and sold on the capitalist market. Trans ideology can only be understood as the end game of capitalism to destroy mothers as part of nature for profit.

Against this ruling class ideology of othering mothers, Marxism fights to return mothers to their brothers. Against bourgeois empiricism, which alienates humans from nature, it practises dialectics. It arms the proletariat to act subjectively as a class for itself against the objective reality of decaying capitalism to create the conditions for the final revolutionary leap forward.  

Down with the trans Patriarchy!

As argued above, trans ideology is all about weakening women’s sex-class struggle against the surviving PMP within the ruling Capitalist mode to divide the working class. Its method is to justify the state-backed attack on women. The state uses transactivists to attack women in general, specifically terrorising young Lesbians ‘born into the wrong body’ to trans into boys, and Sex Self ID-ing AGP men to legally become transwomen to attack Lesbians. In arming these attacks on women, it is both misogynist and homophobic towards the same-sex attraction of women. The ultimate in post-modern gay conversion “transes the gay away”.

Why is this attack on women on behalf of capitalism legally sanctioned in the 21^st century? Precisely because the failure of neo-liberalism to restore post war profit rates at the end of the 20^th century has now become an existential crisis for Late Capitalism. Crisis can only be resolved in two ways, either Capital destroys the working class as the only class capable of overthrowing it, or, the working class rises up and overthrows Capital. To survive this time capital resorts to the same means it used in the major crises in the 20^th century – fascism. Only this time fascism takes the form not only of national chauvinism, racism and homophobia, to smash the working class, but is now an attack on the original minority in history – women as domestic slaves!

In 2021 we wrote about why trans activism (TRA) could be turning into a fascist movement here:

“Capitalism in terminal crisis is throwing up all the old crap of ages in preparation for fascism that divides and destroys the working class as the revolutionary class. It draws on the slavery and serfdom of all prior modes of production as wage labour ceases to deliver the profits. Most important it casualizes wage labour to break down the solidarity of social labour and replaces it with disorganized internal class warfare.

As if to rub our noses in this historic decomposition of social labour, capitalism dredges the underworld to make a new iteration of the patriarchy in the form of the trans cult seeking to destroy women whose historic resistance is an unbroken link back to the overthrow of the commune and introduced the original class society, the patriarchy.

Since then, all attempts by the patriarchy have failed to defeat women’s historic liberation struggle. So today with late-stage capitalism in terminal crisis, the bourgeois state now recognises men as legal women attacking the historic solidarity between men and women in the working class, uniting to defeat fascism and overthrow patriarchal capitalism.”

The resistance to trans ideology has been met with violent attacks on women’s rights to free speech, to assembly, and to women’s spaces separate from men.

“Women’s resistance to the threat posed by trans ideology has been countered by the trans cult with increasingly violent arguments directed at them as transphobes, even fascists, justifying open violence by the ‘left’ to shut them up. Judith Butler, a US academic influential in developing the argument that gender trumps sex, recently stated that those who criticise trans gender people are motivated by the alt-right and are fascists. Gender critical women are therefore fascists.

But Butler gets it all wrong. Fascists defend the patriarchy. So does gender ideology which insists that transwomen with penises are women. Therefore, for both alt-right and alt-left versions of the patriarchy, the common enemy is women who lead the resistance to patriarchal capitalism. The real left takes the side of women, especially lesbians, against the threat of the trans cult, against fascism and rotten capitalism.

Butler is wrong because she is essentially a liberal intellectual. She glosses over end-stage Capitalism and argues for human rights despite capitalism’s inability to deliver them to all but the ruling class and their agents. She rejects the determining influence of capitalist social relations. She takes the post-modern line that individuals can self-determine their identity as a matter of free choice.

This is an idealist erasure of production relations by exchange relations. The market rules, and freedom translates into freedom of choice. Into the vacuum left by the missing production relations Butler validates the alienated exchange relations of bourgeois individuals.

The theory of ‘gender’ demonstrates this perfectly. Production relations under capitalism are class relations. Gender identity denies the production relations of labour and sex and the necessity of class struggle to revolutionise these relations. Instead, the alienated subjectivity of exchange relations defines self-identity as the buying and selling of commodities to meet socially contrived needs, that is, the ‘performance’ of self-determination.

The performance of gender miraculously erases the historical oppression of gender grounded in the exploitation of women’s reproductive power. By privileging gender over sex, men re-define women as determined by their gender, that is, subordinated to their oppression. They attack women’s human agency as a revolutionary force that can overthrow the patriarchy as part of the socialist revolution.

That is why it will be women, and lesbians in particular, that lead the struggle against trans ideology, as part of the socialist revolution that ends capitalism and builds socialism.”

Forward to Communism

The first commune was made by the collective agency of the human revolution. It created the conditions for homo sapiens to emerge and then survive other branches of hominids. The sex-strike theory is best in explaining how women during the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, used their collective power to socially ‘select’ men creating a social division of labour in reproducing hunter-gatherer societies. This egalitarian society was dominant until its gradual overthrow by men which began from around 40,000 years ago in Africa, but later elsewhere, usurping common lineage property as private property. This patriarchal private property then became the model for the ruling classes in successive class modes of production to the present day.

Marx, Engels and Luxemburg recognised the overthrow of ‘primitive communism’ (CMP) as a class revolution, but failed to realise that it comprised a new PMP in which gender ideology now justified new social relations between the patriarchal ruling class and women as domestic chattel slaves.  If we are correct then the PMP was the model for the SMP.

Why is the analysis of modes of production so important?  Marx’s method was to abstract from the surface features of capitalist society to penetrate below the level of appearances to discover the defining elements of the mode of production.  We have argued that the CMP, or Leacock’s PCMP, is a non-class egalitarian society which long pre-existed, co-existed with, and was in Africa, and parts of Eurasia and America, overthrown by the PMP, or successive modes, surviving as a subordinate mode. The PMP privatised land and slave labour to turn pastoralism and subsistence agriculture into a new source of wealth that was accumulated by the patriarchal ruling class.

Similarly, the SMP generalises the social relations of the PMP to create a class of chattel slaves. When slave rebellions and territorial wars weakened the ancient city states of Greece and Rome this led to their breakup into smaller-scale Feudal or Tributary modes extracting ‘rent’ or ‘tribute’ from workers and peasants. The bourgeoisie, the new ‘middle-class’ of the market and the bazaar, was born in the Eurasian city states to expand trade and accumulate wealth. Their new wealth challenged the existing tributary modes based on rent and tribute that were holding back the development of the forces of production.

Capitalism arrived when the bourgeoisie plundered the existing modes to create private ownership of the means of production, exploited the labour value of slave and wage labour as a commodity to increase labour productivity and develop the means of production. It became the revolutionary class by removing or subordinating the existing modes of production, colonising their forms of labour appropriation to augment capitalist wage labour.

This is not an evolutionary sequence of ‘stages’ in which ‘progress’ necessarily follows with each social revolution. One could justifiably argue that the PMP was inherently a counter-revolutionary mode subordinating women as domestic slaves to men who valued their labour not in the survival of children but as so many cattle. Yet the overthrow of women as a sex-class was met by never ending resistance by women. We need the Marxist concept of Mode of production to reject historic inevitability and show how human agency has been kept alive in the ongoing class struggle between ruling and exploited classes throughout history.

It is this historic class struggle that determines revolutionary change, harnessing the subjective force of revolutionary ideas and actions, creating the class consciousness necessary to overthrow the CMP, and to create the pre-conditions for the future commune. We learn the lessons of the actual history of revolutions that overturned existing Modes, subordinating them to the new dominant mode. At the same time, we recognise that each revolution is the result of the class struggle that is devoted to defending the interests of the oppressed classes advancing the conditions necessary for the future commune.

We learn from Marx on India. He condemns the brutality of the colonisation of India by British imperialism, but at the same time says that the development of capitalism that resulted produced in the working class and its relation to nature, the seeds of the future commune.

“These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

The class-conscious struggle to defend the original commune against inhumanity’s ‘unconscious tools’ never ended and will not end until it has created the conditions for the new commune. To win that objective we have to defeat the assembled reactionary fascist forces of patriarchal capitalism and all of its agents of inhumanity, and revive the revolutionary class agency of women and men united in the working class to bring about socialism and ultimately, communism, to rescue humanity from extinction.