History without nature? A response to Nancy Lindisfarne, Jonathan Neale and Colin Wilson
This article appeared in International Socialism Journal 140 (October 2013)
Unfortunately
I lack the knowledge, particularly in anthropology, needed to offer a
comprehensive response to either Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale [‘What
gender does’, ISJ 139] or Colin Wilson [‘Sexuality in pre-class society’, ISJ
139] . However it does seem to me that each of their articles suffers from a
serious and fundamental weakness and that, on inspection this turns out to be
basically the same weakness: a tendency completely separate human history from
its ‘natural bases’(Marx, see below).
Lindisfarne and Neale write, ‘The starting
point is that the natural world is of a piece and continuous. As human beings
we divide this world up into socially relevant continua.’ [p.135]. As a
statement about humans and ‘the natural world’ this is sometimes true but as a
generalisation it is false. Africa, for example, is a great continuous landmass
which has been divided up by humans, especially imperialist humans, into
‘socially relevant’ nation states. But Africa and America are not naturally of a piece; they
are divided from one another, not by humans, but by a vast ocean. Of course,
for certain purposes, say the study of the earth’s geological history, Africa and America could be considered part of the
same continuum but not for others, say the study of human history or travelling
from one to another.
Fortunately
we have dialectics, and specifically the dialectics of nature, to help us deal
with these problems. There is continuity and there is change, and there are
moments when quantitative change becomes qualitative change and there are contradictions,
opposing forces and ‘leaps’ in nature
not just more or less arbitrarily imposed by human ideology. ‘Gradualness and leaps …gradualness explains nothing
without leaps’ writes Lenin in his notes on Hegel’s Logic. [1]
This
matters here because Lindisfarne and Neale go on to say, ‘Continua lie behind the ways we characterise
all aspects of our bodies, including reproduction, sexuality and desire’.
(p.136). Now however true this may be for sexuality and desire it is not true
for reproduction. Put simply women are able to bear children and men are not.
And for most of human history the majority of women have needed to bear several
children for the clan, tribe, people and species to survive. Moreover, when it
comes to suckling babies, a biological necessity for most of history, there is
also not a continuum. Women (again most women) can do it and men cannot.[2]
And this, of course, is where ‘the family’ comes in.
Saying ‘the
family’ here does not involve imagining, as L & N imply, that the form of
the family remains constant over time or across different societies. Neither
Engels, nor any other serious Marxist, has ever argued this. It is simply shorthand
for referring to the different social arrangements established in order to deal
with the bearing and rearing of children (although it often performs other
functions as well).
At its core,
Engels’ argument, with all its flaws, and the argument of all the Marxists who
have followed Engels ( including German, Harman, McGregor etc.) is that at a
certain stage of human development, characterised by the emergence of
agriculture, the production of a surplus, the appearance of private property
and the division of society into classes, these social arrangements for child
bearing and child rearing became oppressive in a way that was not previously
the case and have henceforth remained so.
To me this
remains convincing, more convincing than L&N’s picture of sexism and
‘gender’ as purely or primarily an ideological mechanism for justifying class
inequality, enforced by physically stronger men. It is true that sexism and
gender have functioned as an ideological justification but one of the reasons
why it has operated that way so widely and effectively is that it ‘connects’
with the material lived reality of the family in its various forms.
Here also
is where L&N’s parallel between sexism and racism breaks down. At certain
points in history, racism has intersected contingently with biology in the
sense that the victims of European colonial expansion tended to have different
skin pigmentation bur racism is perfectly possible without any connection to
biology as the cases of British racism against the Irish and Zionist racism
against Palestinians demonstrate. Moreover race is not a scientifically valid
or useful biological category in the way that gender is. The notion of distinct
races really is a social/historical construction. The concept of distinct
races, genders, or sexes is not.
Which
brings me to Colin Wilson’s deployment of Foucault’s argument that ‘sexuality
is socially constructed’. I want to challenge this formulation because there is
a much better way of putting the matter; namely that human sexuality it
biologically based but then profoundly socially conditioned. The problem with
Foucault’s and Wilson’s formulation is that it severs human behaviour from its
natural or biological foundations in a way that is fundamentally
anti-materialist. Marx was quite explicit on this point.
The premises from which we begin are not
arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only
be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and
the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find
already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus
be verified in a purely empirical way.
The first premise of all human history is, of
course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be
established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their
consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either
into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which
man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing
of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification
in the course of history through the action of men.[3]
This error
leads Wilson into a number of very poor arguments in an attempt to justify it.
He tell us
that the ‘sexuality is a social construction’ position is the academic
consensus [‘most recent research’ page 161]. I’m sorry but there is scarcely a
proposition of revolutionary Marxism that hasn’t fallen foul of the academic
consensus in the last forty years especially in its post-structuralist,
post-modernist phase of which Foucault is probably the most important figure.
He counterpoises ‘sex as fundamentally social’ to ‘sex as natural’ in a crude
and false polarisation when sexuality is precisely nature/biology shaped by
history/society. Again Marx is explicit:
The production of life, both of
one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double
relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social
relationship. [4]
He argues
that he is following in the tradition of Engels’ project in The Origins of the Family, where he
demonstrates that ‘the state has not existed from all eternity’ and that the
family also ‘far from being the direct expression of human biology has changed
form in different societies’. Clearly
neither the state nor anything else is eternal but one thing is certain, human
sexuality is far older than the state and must reach back to and develop out of
pre-human, i.e. animal/natural sexuality. Of course neither Engels nor McGregor
nor any other Marxist thinks either sex or the family is a ‘direct expression’
of human biology, any more than politics is a direct expression of economics.
But that doesn’t mean that politics has no relation to economics or that the
family or sex has no connection with biology.
All Wilson’s examples of the rich variety of
human sexual practices and attitudes, important as they are for other purposes,
are irrelevant to this argument. It is as if someone were to claim that the
immense variety of food eaten by human beings in different parts of the world
showed that eating was a social construction and not a natural necessity.
Indeed the variety of human social practices are more constrained by biology
that is our diet. Consider for example: attitudes to and the practice of oral
and anal sex may and do vary enormously from society to society but for the
most obvious and compelling reasons. All societies without exception have
practiced on a large scale heterosexual vaginal intercourse and no society has
attempted to prohibit this except for specific groups (priests, the unmarried,
children etc). As we have said nothing is forever and it is conceivable that in
some ‘brave new world’ this may change, but we are discussing the past and
present, not the future, here.
Wilson’s confusion on this point also leads him to confusion on a couple of
very basic points in Marx. He says that Marx maintains that ‘through
labour….human beings interact with nature and so change themselves’. He quotes
Marx in Capital directly;
Labour is, first of all, a process between man
and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates,
regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature… He sets in
motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head
and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to
his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes
it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. [p.164]
Here it is
noticeable how Marx stresses the ongoing interaction or ‘metabolism’ between
humans and nature. And Wilson continues in the same vein, noting
how labour ‘transforms the human being as part of nature’. Then in the next
sentence there is a slippage. He writes ‘the nature of human beings is that we
do not have a fixed nature, but create ourselves’ (page 165).
Yes, but
only up to a point. We do not construct ourselves from scratch but repeatedly
modify ourselves on the basis of what we biologically and culturally inherit.
Human nature is indeed not fixed but there are real continuities in it
including as Lindisfarne and Neale point out, the need for
‘clean air, water, food and warmth because we are animals…nurture because we
are mammals…love and friendship because we are social animals’.
There are
good revolutionary reasons for insisting that human beings, including their
sexuality, are not totally socially constructed or socially malleable. I am
sure it is unintentional but on this question Wilson has made a concession to bourgeois
ideology in one of its numerous fashionable academic forms.
My last point
is this. I do not have the empirical evidence to pronounce on the benevolence
or otherwise of sexual practices in pre-class societies. Maybe Wilson is right that the evidence doesn’t
exist and maybe he is not. Lindisfarne and Neale are fairly confident on this point.
Scholars now know a great deal
about the past. What information we now have suggests that for at least 100,000
years people managed their access to food, water, shelter, love, sex and
nurture in more or less egalitarian ways. (p.145)
However if it is the case that in non-class,
non-alienated primitive societies there was a general tendency to sexual
cruelty, bullying, rape etc. this would raise serious difficulties for our
whole argument about oppression. First we would need to have some explanation
for this behaviour.[5] Second
it would suggest that sexual oppression might continue to exist not only ‘after
the revolution’ but in the future classless society, which would open the door
to patriarchy theory and various forms of identity politics and separatism. If
on the other hand Lindisfarne and Neale and McGregor are basically right on this then it is certainly
a position socialists would have every reason to defend.
[2]
Continuing in the same vein L & N write, ‘In fact the entire gamut of
social behaviours can also be seen this way. Take for example the continuum
between life and death. Then consider the debates about living wills, brain
death, assisted dying, euthanasia and organ donation.’ (p.136). As if in reply
Mandel wrote, ‘According to scientific dialectics, the ‘absolute’ difference
between life and death is negated by by
the existence of transitory situations. Everything is relative and hence also
the difference between life and death, reply the sophists. No answers the
dialectician: there is also something absolute and not just something negative
in the difference between life and death’.. Mandel (1982) p. 167. Ernest
Mandel, Introduction to Marxism, London,
1982.
[3] Marx and
Engels, The German Ideology http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2
[4] As above.
[5] Foucault and other Nietscheans might
well be inclined to explain in terms of an innate ‘will to power’.
