THOUGHTS ON THE MATERIAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When the primary course of the development of humans begins to take place through social rather than physiological mechanisms, new questions arise about the content and form of social organization, questions that must be answered in order to understand how society produces the types of exploitation that are responsible for the kind of mind and consciousness that is characteristic of Western civilizations. In answering these questions, that is, in discovering the laws of motion of society, humans, who are still a part of nature, have the ability to discover the laws of qualitative change in nature as a whole.

We can distinguish four aspects of the structure of society. There are 1) the means of production, these instruments that are directed toward 2) the objects of production as they exist in nature, and which through cooperative effort help man acquire those objects. 3) The forces of production define the level of technological development of a given society, and 4) the productive relations are the interrelationships between different functional social groups, or, in the West, social classes.

We have already discussed the primitive hordes and how early types of social organization developed out of the hordes. The outstanding characteristic of that social structure is extremely basic, and finds its expression in the drive for procreation and continuity of the species without having developed structures that can be described as a families or family groups.

With the arising of a division of labor we can observe a number of different stages, but these should not be viewed schematically - they do not imply an inherently necessary order of consecutive phases. The three major stages in the development of primitive society are extensive agriculture, a transitional stage, and intensive agriculture. Extensive economies are those in which the means as well as the objects of production are relatively unchanged by humans who use them as they find them. Intensive economic activity means an actual change of nature as a result of human activity.

Extensive agriculture in its earliest form was typified by the Tasmanian horde organizations and the Australian coastal tribes, (though care needs to be taken not to naively interpret these groups as unqualified examples of earlier stages). These tribes were representative in the sense that a certain division of labor existed and the concept of totem and taboo was embodied in their social organizations. Totem and taboo indicate that the division of labor is extensive enough to make it necessary for man to develop a concept in his mind of the totality of social relations, a concept which "explains" the interdependence of the member's activities and insures the group's cohesiveness. This need is first satisfied by what we have referred to as magic; there is no abstract concept of unity between individual and social existence, no distinct code of individual morality, no concept of justice. Anyone who violates the ordinary functioning of the tribe would, as Frazier describes it in The Golden Bough, simply goes out into the forest, sits down and dies, just as a part of the body that has begun to malfunction begins to wither away.

Inasmuch as the differences in nature in the Australian coastal lands were rather pronounced, as in New Guinea today, for example, the distinctions between different tribes were usually expressed in terms of the preoccupations of particular tribes at the time they began to form social organizations. This preoccupation is the totem of the tribe. Because of variations in natural surroundings and the absence of reproducible plants in the Australian coastal lands, intensive agriculture could not develop. Rather, a kind of specialization took place in terms of particular tribes and their occupations, and their products were exchanged. Social organization existed in terms of the totality of different tribes, because none could survive independently through resources offered by the particular environment. But because specialization of activities within each tribe was very restrictive, the inbreeding of such people all carrying on the same kinds of activities would lead to imbalances -- lopsided individuals, so to speak. Thus such a community can prevent this by compelling individuals to marry outside the tribe; the totem becomes a means of classifying marriage relationships, and becomes a complex system of classification known as totemism. It is important to understand that the roots of totemism lie in the effects of social existence and not in any external or psychic causes.

This extensive or exhaustive type of agriculture was also to be found among the Chinooks of Oregon and southwest Washington, although in this case agricultural development was somewhat less primal. A functional division of labor existed within the tribe, and there existed a type of abstract thinking that, while still linked to magic, linked together in the mind different operations and made the development of a primal tool technology possible. The Chinooks, for example, developed fish hooks and nets.

Large scale extensive agriculture initiates a transitional stage, and we have an example of this type of economy in the Iroquois. They at first inhabited the lands later occupied by the Natchez in the lower reaches of the Mississippi. The development of complicated water channeling systems for irrigation did not occur here, as it did in river valley economies. Nevertheless, we observe the beginning of the use of floods to increase the yield. The Iroquois built protective dams as an indirect means of overcoming the problems of primal exhaustive agriculture. Another form of this type of system was the primal artificial drainage agriculture of the Aztecs and Incas. These societies used water falling from mountain peaks or draining from high mountain lakes for irrigation. All these transitional economies utilize a natural water supply, and this stage culminates with societies like those of the Pueblo Indians, who created a fairly elaborate system of irrigation canals, taking a significant first step in improving upon the conditions provided by nature.

Intensive agriculture comes into existence when there are serious migratory population pressures at work. Population pressure, it is true, was already significant at the earliest stages of social organization, during the first glacial period when life space was narrowed by the freezing of the soil. However, at the end of the last glacial period a new form of population pressure came into existence as a result of clashes between migratory peoples and those already settled in the path of migration. Opportunities to take prisoners of war became more frequent. This was one of the preconditions necessary for the appearance of slavery.

Two tendencies are evident in social history at this point. Those societies that were driven into areas where there were major rivers that regularly flooded developed one basic kind of economic structure, while those that were pushed into areas where water was provided by adequate rainfall developed another type of economic structure. In both cases another necessity for intensive agriculture was the availability of reproducible food plants.

Where people moved into areas characterized by adequate rainfall, fertile soil, and reproducible plants, individual family groups became possible. It is interesting to note that the major areas of this type were peninsulas: Greece and Italy. Because there was no way out, the tribes that settled these peninsulas had to turn around and fight those who came after. In the early period, war prisoners were all killed, for this kind of small scale cultivation of individual plots could not sustain additional migrants.

In areas where periodic flooding occurred, and where there was an absence of adequate rainwater, the basic content of social organization was defined by the communal effort -- the building and maintaining of dams, large networks of irrigation and drainage canals, etc. -- necessary to make water available for agriculture. This communal effort was characteristic of the river valley economies along the Huang-Ho, Nile, Indus, and Tigris-Euphrates. The floods of these rivers are so massive and so effective in either removing soil or depositing new soil on top of the old that individual cultivation was highly impractical on anything but an extremely limited scale. Consequently, when large populations are pressed into such an area, populations already possessing a tradition of extensive agriculture, these peoples find it both possible and necessary to utilize the existing abundance of water at flood times through appropriate communal effort. The dams which are built become the basic structures that are the all-prevailing precondition for the existence of the society and hence they can be built and maintained only by socially responsible workers. Photographs of the Maribe dam in what is today Yemen show what enormous blocks were used, blocks fashioned so carefully that without cement they were secure against water. It is difficult to appreciate what incredible precision had to be exercised. The maintenance of dams and other water structures cannot be performed by slave labor, because the slave has no interest in what he is doing. He can only be made to do it by having a slave driver directly overseeing him, and thus no manpower could be saved through slavery in the basic productive work of river valley civilizations, it is incorrect to regard such civilizations as slave societies. Societies truly based on slave labor require a number of special conditions to be present, and these can best be studied in a somewhat later civilization, that of ancient Greece.

The early history of Greece begins with Mycenaean civilization, which is in an important sense an outgrowth of the river valley economies of Babylon, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. These civilizations had developed trade relations with the pivotal area of Crete, and Crete in turn developed trade relations with Mycenae at the time of the Trojan War. Two of the major products of Greece were olive oil and wine, both extremely valuable to the mainland river valley economies. Because of the absence of artesian wells the available water was not safe for drinking. The heavy syrup that is called Greek wine was customarily mixed with water because its alcoholic content was thought to make the water less dangerous. There was consequently a great demand for wine in the Black Sea areas and it was commonly traded for grain, for which these areas were famous. Indeed, these "black lands" of Russia in the later development of capitalism came to be known as the "grain chamber of Europe." The importance to Greece of this grain trade is reflected in the legend of the Golden Fleece. The Greek tribes, having at an earlier point passed through this Black Sea grain chamber in the course of their migrations, knew of its existence, and the story of the Argonauts tells of an early attempt to rob it. The Golden Fleece, a symbol taken from their own goat herds pasturing on the hills of Greece, was applied to the huge golden grain fields on the Black Sea that looked to the Greeks like one enormous goat's skin, representing all the wealth there could be. The knowledge that huge grain supplies existed a few hundred miles away could prompt a society with a developed warrior force to robbery, but this of course cannot provide any long range solutions, particularly so if the people to the east were successful in defending themselves. Thus exchange had to develop. As Marx says, "All trade was born in piracy."

With the Dorian invasion, the second major wave of migrations into the Greek peninsula, the problem of the inadequacy of the food supply was accentuated, and increased exchange became imperative. But exchange can only take place where there is a surplus available to exchange. Because Greece could produce olives and grapes, and because it was continually engaged in warfare, it could use war prisoners at a minimum of expense as workers who could be made to produce more than they were permitted to consume. The surplus thus obtained was exported through the navigable areas of the Aegean Sea, the Bosphorus, and the Black Sea -- an extremely calm stretch of waterways with many islands, (This early "island-hopping" precluded the development of more sophisticated methods of navigation or ship building.

All these factors contributed to the outbreak of the Trojan War, the mythology of which reflects real conditions in that area of the world. Helen was the symbol of prosperity, of Mycenae, whose king was Agamemnon. Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother, was king of Sparta. Troy, at the entrance to the Dardenelles, was extorting increasingly large customs duties from passing ships, so that all the profits of the Greeks were going into the pockets of the Trojans. Such was the meaning of the theft of Helen. All the Greek tribal heads engaged in import-export trade, Argos, Mycenae, Sparta, including the then -- independent entrepreneurs (as represented by legendary figures like Ulysses, the first travelling salesman ) banded together for the first time in order to defeat Troy.

The emergence of slave society of Greece made it the first exploitative society in Western history, though we may regard it romantically as the first democracy. Out of a series of specific and concrete conditions, exploitation first begins by enslaving the barbaroi, the foreigners. But once introduced, exploitation penetrates and transforms the whole existing mode of labor, gradually making citizens into debt-slaves, introducing a schism into society, and then into consciousness in the form of alienation.

To reiterate, in the river valley economies exploitation never developed in any absolute sense. Whereas there may exist a high degree of exploitation of the peasantry, these peasants never became slaves. Indeed, when exploitation became too intense the social needs of the civilization became increasingly difficult to achieve. Because of the absence in such an economic system of a definitive class schism, there was also an absence of an alienated social consciousness.

On the other hand in Western societies, that is, those societies that trace their history back to Greece, there is a clear class dichotomy between owners and non-owners. The non-owners, initially slaves, had no political rights, which means that they are defined by not being able to participate in the political life of the social organization. They are regarded, as Aristotle tells us, as animals. They have no "soul, " and by this he means that which binds people together. The owners, of course, by their very class function, are prevented from participating in the actual process of production. As a result Occidental society generates two fractured parts of an inseparable whole, neither of which fully participates in or comprehends the life of the whole. The consciousness of each is alienated from the total social reality, giving rise, as we said earlier, to two forms of consciousness: Utopianism and ideology. Neither the slaves of Greece on the one hand, nor the nobility and merchants on the other, could possibly experience more than "half" of the community's social life, and yet in order to function at all each must have conceptions of it.

Society can be defined as the cooperative effort of humans to produce more than nature provides. The very existence of society is dependent upon this basic economic effort, and hence this effort fashions society, provides society with motion and change. In the case of Greece -- the historical foundation from which all subsequent Western class society arises -- this basic economic effort was provided by slaves. They could not as yet possibly conceive of the real nature of their society, but they could directly experience the motion of society in the sense that they created that motion. And just as an amoeba must respond in a particular way, though not conscious of its response, so the working people responded without being, at that stage, socially or class conscious. They could not say, "because of this or that condition we are in such and such a situation, and we will undertake certain actions to get out of that situation." But they did have an indomitable, unquenchable confidence -- not articulated but expressed in their very being -- that there would be a day of reckoning, a return to equitable conditions. Regardless of the particular form of Utopianism, this idea we find expressed in the thought of the common people, in one manner or another, ever since the appearance of class society. We observe it developing historically from unsubstantiated hopes in ancient Greece and Rome, through the arising of Christianity, the heretical philosophies and the peasant movements of the Reformation, the Utopian forms of socialism that come into being almost immediately with appearance of industrial capitalism, and finally to modern Marxism, where experience confirms hopes for an impending reordering of things, where workers become conscious of themselves as the foundation of society and grasp the need for political activity; the need, in fact, for political control.

BIBLIOGRAPHY(to be completed)

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