Politicians and economists no longer have the words to describe the gravity of the situation: "at the edge of the abyss", "An economic Pearl Harbor" "A tsunami on the way" "The 9/11 of finance"[1]...only the reference to the Titanic is missing.

What exactly is happening? Faced with the unfolding economic storm, a number of agonising questions are being raised. Are we going through a new crash like 1929? How did it come to this? What can we do to defend ourselves? And what kind of world do we live in? 

Towards a brutal deterioration in our living conditions

There can be no illusions on that score. On a planetary scale, in the months to come, humanity is going to see a frightful deterioration of its living conditions. In its recent report, the International Monetary Fund has announced that between now and early 2009 50 countries are going to join the grim list of countries hit by famine. Among them are numerous countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and even Asia. In Ethiopia, for example, 12 million people are already officially on the verge of death from starvation. In India and China, these so-called new capitalist Eldorados, hundreds of millions of workers are about to be hit by brutal poverty. In the USA and Europe as well a large part of the population is facing unbearable deprivation.

All sectors of activity are being affected. In the offices, the banks, the factories, the hospitals, in the hi-tech sectors, in the car industry, in building or distribution, millions of redundancies are on the cards. Unemployment is about to hit the roof! Since the beginning of 2008 and in the USA alone, nearly a million workers had already been thrown onto the street. And this is just the start. This wave of redundancies means that housing yourself, eating, and taking care of your health is going to be increasingly difficult for working class families. This also means that for the young people of today capitalism has no future to offer them.

Those who lied to us yesterday are still lying to us today!

This catastrophic perspective is no longer hidden by the leaders of the capitalist world, the politicians and the journalists who serve the ruling class. How could they? Some of the biggest banks in the world have gone bust; they have only survived thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds and euros injected by the central banks, i.e. by the state. For the stock markets of America, Asia and Europe, it's a never-ending dive: they have lost $25 trillion since January 2008, or the equivalent of two years of the USA's total production. All this illustrates the real panic that has seized the ruling class all over the world. If the stock markets are crashing today, it's not just because of the catastrophic situation facing the banks, it's also because the capitalists are expecting a dizzying fall in their profits resulting from a massive downturn in economic activity, a wave of enterprises going bust, a recession much worse than all the ones we've seen over the past 40 years.

The principal world leaders, Bush, Merkel, Brown, Sarkozy, Hu Jintao, have gathered together in a series of meetings and ‘summits' (G4, G7, G8, G16, G40) to try to limit the damage, to prevent the worst. A new summit is planned for mid-November, which some see as a way of ‘founding capitalism anew'. The only thing that equals the agitated state of the politicians is the frenzy of the experts of TV, radio and newspapers... the crisis is the number one media story.

Why such a barrage?

In fact, while the bourgeoisie can no longer hide the disastrous state of its economy, it is trying to make us believe that it's not a question of putting the capitalist system itself into question, that it's a question of fighting against ‘abuses' and ‘excess'. It's the fault of speculators! It's the fault of greedy bosses! It's the fault of tax havens! It's the fault of ‘neo-liberalism'!

To make us swallow this fairytale, all the professional swindlers are called into action. The same ‘experts' who yesterday were telling us that the economy was healthy, that the banks were solid... are now falling over themselves on the TV screens to pour out new lies. The same people who were telling us that ‘neo-liberalism' was THE solution, that the state had to step back from intervening in the economy, are now calling on the governments to intervene more and more.

More state and more ‘morality', and capitalism will be fine! This is the lie they are trying to sell us!

Can capitalism overcome its crisis?

The truth is that the crisis ravaging world capitalism today does not date from the summer of 2007, with the bursting of the housing bubble in the US. For over 40 years there has been one recession after another: 1967, 1974, 1981, 1991, 2001. For decades unemployment has been a permanent plague, and the exploited have been suffering from mounting attacks on their living standards. Why?

Because capitalism is a system which produces not for human needs but for the market and for profit. There are vast unsatisfied needs but they are not solvent: in other words, the great majority of the population does not have the means to buy the commodities produced. If capitalism is in crisis, if hundreds of millions of human beings, and soon billions, have been hurled into intolerable misery and hunger, it's not because the system doesn't produce enough but because it produces more commodities than it can sell. Each time the bourgeoisie gets round this problem by resorting massively to credit and the creation of an artificial market. This is why the ‘recoveries' always pave the way for even bleaker tomorrows, since at the end of the day all this credit has to be reimbursed, the debts have to be called in. This is exactly what is happening today. All the ‘fabulous growth' of the last few years has been based entirely on debt. The world economy was living on credit, and that now it's time to foot the bill, the whole thing collapses like a pack of cards. The present convulsions of the capitalist economy are not the result of ‘bad management' by the political leaders, of speculation by ‘traders' or the irresponsible behaviour of the bankers. All these people have done no more than apply the laws of capitalism and it is precisely these laws that are leading the system towards ruin. This is why the billions and billions injected into the markets by all the states and their central banks will change nothing. Worse! They are only piling debt on debt, which is like trying to put a fire out with oil. The bourgeoisie is only showing its impotence with these desperate and sterile measures. Sooner or later all their bail-out plans are bound to fail. No real recovery is possible for the capitalist economy. No policy, whether of the right or the left, can save capitalism because this system is racked by an incurable, fatal illness.

Against mounting poverty, solidarity and class struggle!

Everywhere we are seeing comparisons with the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The images of those times are still in our memories: endless lines of unemployed workers, soup-kitchens for the poor, factories closing everywhere. But is the situation today identical? The answer is NO. It is much more serious, even if capitalism, which has learned from experience, has managed to avoid a brutal collapse thanks to the intervention of the state and better international coordination.

But there is another key difference. The terrible depression of the 1930s led to the Second World War. Will the present crisis end up in a Third World War? The flight towards war is certainly the bourgeoisie's only answer to its insurmountable crisis. And the only force that can oppose this is its mortal enemy, the international working class. In the 1930s, the world working class had been through a terrible defeat following the isolation of the 1917 revolution in Russia and it allowed itself to be dragged into a new imperialist massacre. But since the major struggles that began in 1968, today's working class has shown that it is not ready to shed its blood on behalf of the exploiting class. Over the last 40 years it has been through a number of painful defeats but it is still standing; and all over the world, especially since 2003, it has been fighting back more and more. The unfolding crisis of capitalism is going to mean terrible suffering for hundreds of millions of workers, not only in the underdeveloped countries but also in the developed ones - unemployment, poverty, even famine, but it is also going to provoke a movement of resistance by the exploited.

These struggles are absolutely necessary for putting a limit on the bourgeoisie's economic attacks, for preventing them from plunging us into absolute poverty. But it is clear that they cannot stop capitalism from sinking deeper and deeper into its crisis. This is why the resistance struggles of the working class respond to another need, an even more important one. They allow the exploited to develop their collective strength, their unity, their solidarity, their consciousness of the only alternative that can offer humanity a future: the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a society that operates on a completely different basis. A society no longer based on exploitation and profit, on production for a market, but on production for human need; a society organised by the producers themselves and not by a privileged minority. In short, a communist society.

For eight decades, all the sectors of the bourgeoisie, both right and left, have worked hand in hand to present the regimes which dominated Eastern Europe and China as ‘communist', when they were no more than a particularly barbaric form of state capitalism. It was a question of convincing the exploited that it is futile to dream of another world, that there was nothing on the horizon except capitalism. But now that capitalism is so clearly proving its historic bankruptcy, the struggles of the working class must be animated more and more by the perspective of a communist society.

Faced with the attacks of capitalism at the end of its tether; to put an end to exploitation, poverty, and the barbarism of capitalist war:

Long live the struggles of the world working class!

Workers of all countries, unite!

International Communist Current 25.10.08

www.internationalism.org [1]

BM Box 869, London WC1N 3XX

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[1] Respectively: Paul Krugman (the last Nobel Prize winner in economics); Warren Buffet (an American investor, nicknamed the ‘oracle of Omaha', so much is the opinion of this billionaire from small town Nebraska respected in the world of high finance); Jacques Attali (economic adviser to French president Nicolas Sarkozy) and Laurence Parisot (president of the French bosses' association)

Pun Ngai is professor at the Social Research Center of the Peking University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. At present she is on tour in five European countries to present the book "DAGONGMEI - women workers from Chinas world market factories tell their story" (Arbeiterinnen aus Chinas Weltmarktfabriken erzählen) which she has published together with her colleague Li Wanwei from the Industrial Relations institute in Hong Kong[1]. The occasion for this series of public talks is not least the appearance of their book in German.

October 10 2008 Pun Ngai presented this book in Cologne. Given the importance of the economic and military rise of China in recent decades, and the questions posed in relation to the future of this "economic miracle" in the light of the present agonies of world capitalism, it was no surprise that there was a big turnout for the Cologne meeting.

The subject of study of Pun Ngai is migrant labour within China - the proletarianisation of 120 Million peasants during the last 25 years - in particular the conditions of the "Dagongmei", literally the "working sisters". Pun Ngai and Li Wanwei present a series of interviews with young working women who have come from rural areas to the industrial city of Shenzhen in Southern China, one of the first of the special economic zones created by the Chinese government to attract foreign capital. In her presentation, Pun Ngai gave examples from the personal experience of such workers.

But above all, she was concerned to place this experience in a more global context, to "make sense" of developments which, without doubt, are of world wide importance. She put forward two main arguments which are at the centre of her analysis of developments in China.

Production and reproduction of labour power

The first is the separation between the sphere of production, which takes place in the cities, and the sphere of reproduction in the rural areas. A large part of the labour power for the "world market" factories is recruited in the countryside. The reproduction costs of this labour are borne by the peasant families themselves, on the basis of tiny subsistence plots of land. This explains to an large extent why the wages in China can be so much lower than in the older and more developed capitalist countries of the West or in Japan, where wage labour is for the most part reproduced on the basis of the wage labour system (in other words: where wages have to cover not only the reproduction costs of the workers themselves, but also of their children, the future generation of proletarians).

However, as was pointed out in the ensuing discussion, this "secret" of capitalist development is no Chinese specificity, but provides the basis for similar developments elsewhere in Asia or on other continents. Many of those who came to this meeting were looking for an answer to the question why China seems to have been more successful in this development than most of its rivals.

Dormitory capitalism

Here, the second main idea put forward by Pun Ngai is of great importance. This is what she calls the dormitory system. In Maoist China, (as in Stalinist Russia, we might add[2]) the free movement of labour within the country was not permitted. In particular, the whole population was registered as being either urban or rural dwellers. A peasant needed permission to move to the city and visa versa. With the economic "reforms" from Deng onwards, this restriction of the movement of labour was maintained. At first sight, that is surprising, in view of capital's need for free movement of labour in order to thrive. But the maintenance of these regulations make of the migrants in the cities "illegals" in their "own" country, without insurance, health care or educational facilities. Nor do they have the opportunity to form working class communities of their own in the urban centres. They are obliged to live in dormitories owned by the bosses. As such they are constantly under the control of their employers. As Pun Ngai pointed out, they cannot refuse to sell their bodies without facing eviction and being sent back to their villages. They are at any moment at the disposal of the "just in time" production which the world market requires. Moreover, as the victims of this system themselves say, they are "instantly disposable", "throw away" workers who can be sent back to the countryside as soon as they are no longer required or when their health has been ruined.

16-year old girls applying toxic glue with bare hands

Pun Ngai compared this process of proletarianisation with that in the first industrial country, in Great Britain, as described by Friedrich Engels in his famous study of the conditions of the working class in Britain. While pointing out the existence of a number of similarities, she also underlined two differences. For one thing, in Britain the point of departure for the rise of modern capitalism was the violent separation of the producers from the means of production, of the peasants from their land. In China, the Maoist land reforms left the peasantry with tiny private plots of their own, enough to avoid starvation, but not enough to live on. For this reason, the migration of the rural poor is "voluntary", officially taking place in infringement of the laws of the state. Moreover, young women in particular are motivated by cultural factors (as was pointing out during the discussion) in fleeing the backward, patriarchal world of the village. Secondly, as has already been pointed out, there is the specificity (Pun Ngai called it an incompleteness) of this proletarianisation, that the workers are kept under the threat of being sent back to the countryside. She stressed the traumatisms caused by the insecurity of this "in between status", which in the long term is unbearable.

In reply to a question from the floor, she pointed out that the Chinese government is presently considering the possibilities of a land reform facilitating the acquirement of private land. But the meaning of this "reform" would not be to permit the peasantry to enlarge their plots, which would make subsistence farming more feasible, and thus put a break on migration from rural areas. What is planned is essentially the encouragement of large landed estates, which on the contrary would fan the flames of this migration and provide new supplies of cheap labour in the cities.

A new generation of workers

Concerning the effects of these historical developments on the working class, Pun Ngai distinguished between the first and second generation of migrants. The first generation still had the hope of saving money and returning home. The men could hope to modernise their plots of land, the women to set up a small shops. But for the vast majority, such dreams were never realised, and many of those who attempted them ended up in financial ruin. The first generation was traumatised by this experience, marked by despair and an internalisation of their anger.

As opposed to this, the motto of the new generation is "no regrets" about leaving their villages. They are determined never to go back. The energy of these workers is directed towards the future and the outside, expressing itself in collective class actions. According to official figures, between 1993 and 2005 the number of registered "collective incidents" per year increased from 10,000 to 87,000. In the past three years in particular almost all parts of the class have shared experiences of this type. Protests and petitions are directed not only towards the employers but also the state administration and the official trade union apparatus. Pun Ngai reported discussions where militant minorities of workers were saying: "We must search for a great ideal! We need new internal values!"

These ideas, she said, are becoming more widespread today. She also reported that the women workers in particular are in some cases starting to transform the dormitories into places of contact, dissent and organisation between workers.

Participants also posed more general political questions. Somebody wanted to know when she thought China would become a democracy. She replies that this was not really her concern, and that democracy was something which needs definition. Her concern is the development of what she called grass roots democracy in the class. In reply to the question if workers today refer positively to what the questioner called the "socialism" of Mao, and if they have learnt anything positive from this "socialist" education for their present struggle, she said that workers sometimes use quotations from Mao in order to legally justify certain demands towards the state. On the attempts to stir up patriotic feelings about the new "greatness of China" (for instance on the occasion of the Olympic games) among the workers she said that this was fostered both by the west (through its aggressive discourse) and by the Chinese rulers themselves, and is a negative factor against the working class.

Of course everybody wanted to know how Pun Ngai expected the present world wide financial crisis would affect China. She said that it was likely to cause widespread unemployment and increase poverty, given the country's dependence on exports. After several years of rising wages, not least under the pressure of workers militancy, this would be likely to diminish the "bargaining power" of many sectors of the working class.

So many questions were posed by the floor that in the end there was unfortunately no time for the foreseen general discussion. However, it was pointed out that the system of making labour power illegal but tolerated, and thus particularly cheap and pliable, is not specific to China, but is increasing all over the world, including Europe and the United States. The specificity of China is the scale on which this weapon is employed. The dormitories regularly house between 5,000 and 10,000 workers per unit. The agglomerations of these compounds often cover areas as large as average European size cities.

In conclusion we can safely say that those who came to the meeting were profoundly moved by the presence, the combativity and the clarity of analysis of a representative of the working class from China[3].

Capitalism means world economy. Through world wide interconnection and the development of the class struggle, capitalism, against its own will, is creating conditions for the unification of its own gravediggers.

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[1] Pun Ngai has already, in 1995, published, in English, a book called "Made in China". Li Wanwei has published a thesis on: "The Dynamics of Restructuring and Relocation: The Case of Hong Kong's Garment Industry".

Both women are involved in the "Chinese Working Women Network" (www.cwwn.org [5]).

[2] South Africa under apartheid adopted a not dissimilar system with its "Bantustans".

[3] It should be noted that, as a result of the opening of China to the world market, left intellectuals there are becoming more acquainted with a wider range of Marxist literature, such as the works of Rosa Luxemburg.

Since we wrote the article ‘Are we reliving a crash like 1929?', the media has already changed its tone, no longer playing down the extreme gravity of the present economic crisis or its similarities with 1929. But it is important to put all the current talk about ‘the end of capitalism' into a clear perspective.

As the world's media documented the global financial crisis the IMF issued a report using less sensational language, but admitting the same recession. "The world economy is now entering a major downturn in the face of the most dangerous shock in mature financial markets since the 1930s." The IMF also knew that the future is looking difficult: "The situation is exceptionally uncertain and subject to considerable downside risks."[1]

Recent headlines have been more succinct when they have proclaimed the ‘disaster', ‘hurricane', ‘tsunami' or ‘tectonic shifts' that capitalism faces. Markets are in ‘turmoil', ‘meltdown' or ‘mayhem'. A head of an equities trading firm described a "horrendous, cataclysmic end-of-the-world environment."[2] A broker said "Nothing will be like it was before" as "The world as we know it is going down." [3]Some drew back from announcing Armageddon, but the French Prime Minister said the world was at least on the edge of the abyss. ‘Abyss' conjures up visions of the bottomless pit, primal chaos and catastrophe. For the religious, it can mean hell.

For once politicians and media were telling a sort of truth. They mostly don't think that we're going to have an exact replica of the Depression of the 1930s, but admit that capitalism's crisis will not be limited to the finance sector, and will go on to have its impact on industry, trade, jobs and all our lives. It will, as they say in the US, go from Wall Street to Main Street.

It is the end of an era, but not in the way they say

There has been a lot of propaganda surrounding this latest lurch in the crisis. With the massive intervention of the state around the world the demise of ‘neoliberalism' has been proclaimed by the Right and Left. Conservative Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, thought "laissez faire is dead"[4]. The Socialist Workers Party celebrated the end of Reaganomics and Thatcherism as "free market capitalism has imploded and "history sweeps away a failed ideology"[5]. Francis Fukuyama (who once declared that history was dead) even thought that "the Reagan era should have ended some time ago"[6].

What these remarks have in common is an idea that somehow the state has played a lesser role during the last 30 years, only re-asserting itself in this time of crisis. In reality the economic crisis is a crisis of state capitalism, within which ‘neoliberalism' was a particular ideology (supported by the Right and attacked by the Left with its own variety of state capitalist ideology). It was precisely because of the experience of the 1929 Crash that the already growing role of the state was accelerated. Official figures show that the US federal government was 3 percent of the economy in 1929, as opposed to 20 percent today - and that's not even beginning to account for all the areas of control that the 50 individual states and state bodies like the Federal Reserve have throughout the economy.

This is one of the essential lessons from capitalism's crisis over the last year. The bankruptcy of capitalism can't be hidden. The state has had to come up with plans to rescue banks, insurance companies, currencies and money markets. It has not acted to help out the working class in any way whatsoever. Also, the extent of the debt that was holding back a ‘crash' was only possible through the sustained intervention of the state and international economic bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF. With the massive injection of funds into the financial sector there will be even more likelihood of attacks on the living standards of the vast majority of the world's population, in a lethal combination of recession, growing inflation and unemployment, and government cuts.

It is the end of an era because material reality has shown the degree to which the economic crisis can get out of control. It has also demonstrated that capitalism is utterly reliant on the state. Most of those who set themselves up as opponents of ‘neo-liberalism' were supporters of the ‘protective' powers of the state. It's even clearer now that the state is there only to protect capitalism.

Watershed for capitalism

Lies are exposed by material reality. The so-called ‘celtic tiger' of the Irish economy has, in the face of the storm, gone the same way as the rest. India's ‘emerging' economy is not in such great shakes either as many sectors are already being impacted by the extent of the crisis. With the development of a recession China will suffer a sever contraction of the markets where it hopes to sell its goods.

More importantly it shows that capitalism is a global system. There's been a lot of talk about greedy bankers and the need for more regulation, but there's a general admission that we've been witnessing something that is ‘systemic', that is, it's a crisis of a world system.

Billionaire financier George Soros, looking at the economic policies pursued in recent decades said in a television interview that "This whole enormous construct is built on false conceptions," adding "You can go a very long way. But in the end, reality rears its ugly head and that's what happened now." [7] It rears its ugly head, and then reality bites.

Robert Zoellick the President of the World Bank[8] said that the crisis was a "man-made catastrophe" that would have real consequences for real people. He warned that "For the poor, the costs of the crisis could be lifelong," and for "The poorest and most vulnerable groups risk the most serious - and in some cases permanent damage". This is why he thought that "populations around the world will respond with anger and fear."

That is indeed the prospect that the latest stage in the crisis opens up. It should be compared with what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

2007-08 in comparison to 1989-91

The wall came down in 1989. The countries of eastern Europe broke away from the USSR, which itself broke up into 15 parts in 1991. People like Fukuyama talked about the end of history, the end of communism, the end of the class struggle. What existed in eastern Europe was a particular stalinist form of state capitalism, and, history, as has unsurprisingly been revealed, had not come to an end. However, the working class was just a bystander while great events occurred, and the bourgeoisie conducted a whole campaign which put over the idea of a world in which there is no working class, just workers who are citizens like any others. This was one of the factors that led to disorientation in the working class throughout the 1990s.

But what about the crisis of 2007- 2008? How do Fukuyama and co respond to the bite of reality?

Fukuyama (in an article entitled "The Fall of America, Inc."[9]) admits that "The scale of the Wall Street crackup could scarcely be more gargantuan" and thought that "Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society." Accordingly "there is a growing consensus on the need to re-regulate many parts of the economy" and "The entire American public sector-underfunded, deprofessionalized and demoralized-needs to be rebuilt and be given a new sense of pride. There are certain jobs that only the government can fulfil." In the end he thinks that what was wrong with the centrally planned economies of eastern Europe was that they were "welfare states on steroids". For him "a certain vision of capitalism has collapsed" and all that the American model of capitalism has to do is "reinvent itself once again". So, after all that, all that was wrong with the economies of eastern Europe was the "steroids."

In the 1990s, with the collapse of the USSR, there were many in the West who behaved as though they had achieved a great victory, not only over the Russian bloc, but also over the working class. The crisis of 2007-08 shows the working class what that ‘victory of capitalism' actually amounted to. It's true that the economic crises of the past have not always led to mass strikes or revolution. The example of the 1930s is there for all to see. But today's open crisis, in its depth and obviously global nature, is a material reality that it will surely not be possible to ignore, or to disguise.

There was no end of ‘history', or end to the class struggle, as the ideologues of the 1990s claimed. But also, today, we are not witnessing the ‘end of capitalism'. Ruling classes across the world have looked into the abyss, seen catastrophe, and despite all manner of imperialist antagonisms, co-ordinated a response. There will be further massive attacks on the working class, continuing the offensive on wages, jobs, services, pensions etc. That's the only perspective that capitalism has, and if there is no resistance to it, capitalism will drag humanity not only towards the abyss of poverty but towards outright self-destruction. The only alternative can come from the working class in its struggles. These are limited at present, but have been slowly developing over the last five years. In the period to come workers will feel even more intensely the effects of capitalism's crisis, but, with some of the illusions from both Right and Left discredited, there is more possibility that not only workers' struggles but workers' consciousness of capitalism will grow. This will be at the basis of the mass strikes to come. Growing consciousness of the reality of capitalism also helps the understanding that it has to be overthrown by the revolution of the working class.  

Car 15/10/8

 

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[1] Financial Times 8/10/8

[2] Baltimore Sun 14/10/8

[3] Spiegel Online 10/10/8

[4] Daily Telegraph 13/10/8

[5] Socialist Worker 11/10/8

[6] Newsweek 13/10/8

[7] Daily Telegraph 13/10/8

[8] Daily Telegraph 13/10/8

[9] Newsweek 13/10/8

In WR 309, we published a contribution from one of our close sympathisers (‘Baboon'):  ‘Baboon's revenge: marxism versus feminism on the origins of humanity [15] ', a report of a meeting presented by Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group at the Anarchist Bookfair in London last October.

In our introduction we said that we felt that Baboon's contribution raised some interesting questions about human origins and early human society and that we hoped to come back to this at a later date.

Baboon's article is very critical of Knight's basic thesis, rejecting it as anarchist and feminist. Having recently read Chris Knight's major theoretical work Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of Culture (Yale University press, 1991), I feel that his work deserves rather more consideration, even if some of Baboon's key criticisms certainly express valid concerns.

Before saying anything about Knight's theory, some points about his political background. Knight is not as far as I can see an anarchist - rather he is basically a Trotskyist in political outlook. However, we should also bear in mind that he is a professional anthropologist and his work as such cannot be mechanically reduced to his politics. Furthermore, Knight does not espouse an overtly feminist ideology but sees his work in direct continuity with that of Marx and especially Engels. And while we are talking about general, historical questions, it is perfectly possible for academics who hold leftist views on more immediate political issues to make worthwhile contributions to marxist theory provided these contributions are evaluated in a critical manner from a proletarian perspective.

The basic problem raised in Knight's book is the role of woman in the transition from nature to culture. An important point of departure is Knight's rejection of the dominant trends in official anthropology, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, which for a long time has been dominated by functionalist, empiricist and relativist theories which have moved very far indeed from the evolutionist spirit of early anthropological studies, which saw the study of ‘primitive' and ‘exotic' human societies as a key to understanding the origins of humanity and its basic cultural institutions. These later schools tended to focus instead on the workings of particular social groups and aimed to understand their cultural forms (myth, ritual, kinship, etc) purely in terms of the ‘function' they perform for that particular group. The avoidance of ‘grand theories of origins' and of ‘sweeping generalisations' about human society, as Knight points out, was particularly useful for colonial administrators (and the anthropologists employed by them) who had to ‘deal' with tribal groupings and only sought to understand their institutions as a means to controlling them for the economic and political benefit of the Empire. We could add that this retreat into the small and the immediate is a reflection of a general trend in the bourgeoisie's thinking about society and history in its epoch of decline, since any genuine historical and social clarity can only remind the ruling class of the limitations and unavoidable demise of the mode of production it serves. In any case, Knight makes no apology for returning to the fundamental issue of the ‘transition from ape to man' and the origins of culture, which had been of such central interest both to the founders of scientific socialism and to the early pioneers of anthropology[1].   

At the same time, Knight's thesis is to some extent a riposte to the theories of the French structuralist Levi-Strauss, who represents a school of thought that is less coy than the Anglo-Saxons about posing the question of origins. According to Levi-Strauss, culture emerges from nature through a kind of social contract among the males in early or proto-human society: it is the men who agree among themselves to exchange females in a manner regulated by custom rather than simply imposing a hierarchy of physical force to establish access to the females. Following Engels, Knight argues that ‘woman' in the earliest human societies was not a mere passive object, a simple instrument for the satisfaction of male desire. In fact, Knight sees the transition from primate to human culture in an act of conscious social rebellion by the female of the species, the ‘sex strike', through which the females overturned the rule of the tyrannical male who had hitherto won the ‘right' to enjoy his female through his monopoly of physical force - a right which was not accompanied by any ‘duties' such as the provision of females with meat or a settled space to look after their young, since females were obliged to follow the male hunters, carrying their young with them, in order to then compete for sexual favours in exchange for a share of the kill. In Knight's ‘myth', the origin of human culture lies essentially in the discovery of the power of solidarity, through the females' collective refusal of sex until the males had brought home the bacon; in doing so, Knight speculates, the females won over the less dominant males, previously excluded from the ‘harem', who could more readily understand the value of forgoing the immediate satisfaction of consuming the product of the hunt.

Furthermore, Knight argues, the sex strike was reinforced by the ability of the human female to synchronise menstruation and establish it as a ‘period' in which sexual relations are banned, enabling the men to go off and hunt without fear of the females being enjoyed sexually by rival males. The idea is that this synchronisation was timed by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon, which in turn regulated the period of the hunt.

Alongside the whole complex of moon and menstruation myths and rituals, Knight refers to a number of very widespread institutions and beliefs which for him are an echo of this formative ‘event' (or rather, transformative process) in human history. Particularly important is the ‘own kill' rule which appears as a crucial basis for the distribution of the products of the hunt in numerous hunter-gatherer societies. According to this rule it is expressly forbidden for the hunter (almost invariably a male) to consume, either in part, or wholly, the products of his own kill (or at least certain forms of kill, usually the larger animals). These products must then be returned to the community through a variety of often extremely complex totemic/kinship laws[2].    

Knight also talks about the ubiquitous ‘myth of matriarchy': according to many hunting peoples, there was once a time when the women had the monopoly over the tribe's sacred rituals, until the men rebelled against this state of affairs and appropriated control of the sacred for themselves. In Australia, these myths are connected to the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent and to the practise of male incision and circumcision. For Knight, who does not doubt that tribal mythologies (especially in a society with such a vast period of continuity as that of the Australian aborigines) contain an important germ of historical memory, all these symbolisms are a remnant of a phase in which female power played a crucial role in the formation of culture, and represent a real attempt of the men to reappropriate control over social life: in later myths and rituals, the androgynous Rainbow Serpent may be presented as a power that punishes females who break tribal taboos, while practises which draw blood from the penis are seen as an attempt to gain the power of female menstruation by imitating it. Indeed, Knight talks about a male ‘counter-revolution' which at some point followed the ‘human revolution' led by the females. He even constructs a possible scenario in the case of Australia, in which this process corresponded to the transition away from the hunting of large animals who were becoming extinct as a result of climate change and human predation.

The principal merit of Knight's book, in my opinion, is that by seeking to return to the question of the origins of culture it offers an alternative to the dominant trend of blinkered anti-theoretical empiricism in anthropological theory. Knight sees himself as a sociobiologist, but one who has tried to take the findings of this approach out of the hands of those who have used it to develop deeply reactionary arguments about the ‘territorial imperative' and the inevitability of male domination. He does this by emphasising the central role not only of women but of solidarity in the evolution of the modern human being.

This said, Knight's book is stimulating as much for the arguments that seem convincing as for the questions it does not seem to pose or to answer satisfactorily. Some examples:

• - for Engels, the "world historical defeat of the female sex" which he talks about in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State takes place as a result of the rise of private property and the gradual emergence of class divisions. For Knight, there is already a ‘male counter-revolution' at the most primordial level of human culture (as in the ‘paleolithic' culture of Australia, for Testart the epitome of primitive communism). The material basis of this counter-revolution is only partly dealt with and there is no attempt to explain why his views differ substantially from Engels on this point. Furthermore, Knight does not explain why different hunter-gatherer societies do not have the same degree of male monopoly of social life or the sacred as they do in the Australian tribes (although there as well there are many counter-tendencies to this);
• - One of Baboon's most important criticisms of Knight's thesis is that, apart from a couple of references in the book that are not followed up, he seems to show no interest at all in what for Marx and Engels was an absolutely central element in the emergence of the specifically human consciousness of the world: not only the question of reproduction, but the question of production, of labour, and the social relations which permit its development. Indeed, when Baboon raised the question of tool-making as a factor in the evolution of human consciousness, Knight described this as an "anti-woman" approach (as though the use of tools were the exclusive privilege of males). It is here that Knight seems to slip into a purely feminist approach, as there can hardly be a serious marxist account of human origins that doesn't at least acknowledge and assimilate the contribution of Marx, Engels, Pannekoek and others on "the role of labour in the transition from ape to man";
• - Baboon also takes exception to Knight's view of primate existence, challenging his tendency to see primate society as a ‘war of each against all'. In fact, marxist theorists have always see the existence of certain social instincts inherited from our animal ancestors as playing a key part in the development of human solidarity and moral feelings. Also questionable is Knight's view that human culture, with its characteristic elements of art, language, symbolism, etc, only emerged relatively recently (around 70,000 years ago, perhaps less), excluding previous forms of homo sapiens including the Neanderthals. A number of paleoanthropologists would not agree that Neanderthal man was totally devoid of culture;
• - One final point, although there could be many: Knight notes certain similarities between his scenario and Freud's ‘revolt against the primal father'. But he does not follow this up. For Freud, the inauguration of human culture also coincided with the inauguration of guilt and repression, a problem that Knight does not consider at all, at least not in this work. In my opinion (and however ‘symbolic' Freud's scenario in Totem and Taboo may be) a serious attempt to understand humanity's origins cannot do without a thorough engagement with the questions that Freud posed.

This text is an individual contribution, as was Baboon's, and I hope it will provoke further discussion of these issues.  

Amos 4/10/08

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[1] In doing so, Knight is aware that in a certain sense he is constructing a myth or ‘Just-So' story, rather in the manner of Freud with his idea of the rebellion of the young males against the ‘Primal Father' who held the monopoly over the females, as expounded in Totem and Taboo. We are not asked to take Knight's scenario literally but as a model to be examined. 

[2] In his work Le Communisme Primitif (1986) the French anthropologist Alain Testart takes the own kill rule, or the rule of ‘what is mine is not mine but yours' as the key to understanding the social relations of primitive communism. Knight acknowledges Testart's work, particularly his investigation of the "ideology of blood" in primitive society, although he finds his ultimate explanation for this ideology "disappointing". I would agree with this; but it is unfortunate that Knight doesn't seek to investigate the key question posed by Testart's book - the definition of primitive communism as a mode of production. Knight uses the term in a rather loose manner throughout Blood Relations.