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Class Struggles
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Class Struggles Having declared in the opening sentence of the Manifesto that all history is the history of class struggles, Marx adds immediately in a footnote "of written history". For prior to the invention of writing, societies were nomadic, organized in tribes, each tribe made of less than 100 individuals. There was hardly any division of labor, other than sexual. The tribe would designate a chief, and modern ethnology tells us the chief had very little power. His main function was to defuse any conflict among tribesmen, not as a judge, he had no power to judge, but more by using his charisma to talk people out of their quarrels. His authority would be limited to leading the hunt and, of course, the war. That's all. In his essay, The Origin of Property, Family and the State, Engels describes social life in these primitive tribes very much as something like "anarchy". I would like to add here that modern anthropology supports Engels' analysis. Primitive societies did not know anything that resembles political power, let alone a state. They had no use for it. Pierre Clastres, in his fascinating book, Society Against State, notes that the only distinctive feature between "primitive" and "modern" societies is not agriculture, it is not sedentary life, it is the institution of a state. A modern society is a society that is subject to the power of a state. So called primitive societies were not. In economic terms, nomadic tribes (which Engels calls gens) do not accumulate a...
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