In an English preface to one of his most important works, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels summed up succinctly what he and Marx meant by “historical materialism”: “I use… the term ‘historical materialism’… to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.”[i]

Marx and Engels’ materialist account of historical change placed class division and class struggleat its heart. But Engels added an important addendum to the famous phrase in the Communist Manifesto that the history of hitherto existing societies is the “history of class struggle.”[ii] He noted that this was true only for written history. For most of our existence as species, humans lived as the Montagnais-Naskapi did—without any class division. For tens of thousands of years, humans knew “no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles [or] kings, no prisons.”[iii] People decided how long to work, and all things beyond personal possessions were communally owned and shared in what some have called “primitive communism.”

The Jesuit, historian, Pierre Charlevoix, who lived among Indians in French Canada in the early 1700s, writes in his History of New France: “The fraternal disposition of the Redskins doubtless comes in part from the fact that mine and thine, those icy words, as St. John Chrysostom calls them, are as yet unknown to the savages. The care that they take of orphans, widows, and the infirm, the hospitality they practice in so admirable a manner, are but a consequence of their view that everything ought to be common for all men.[iv]

The Iroquois Indians, who engaged in a simple form of agriculture and hunting, were fairly egalitarian. “All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned,”[v] Engels wrote of the Iroquois. “There can be no poor or needy—the communistic household and gens know their obligation toward the aged, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are free and equal—including the women. There is as of yet no room for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of alien tribes.”[vi]

The status of women in communal societies was far higher than in class societies that followed. Among the Iroquois, a woman could dissolve her marriage simply by placing her husband’s belongings outside the household door. “No matter how many children, or whatever goods [the husband] might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey,” wrote the anthropologist Louis Henry Morgan, who studied the Iroquois in the 1870s.[vii] This was due in part to the fact that women in Iroquois society did most of the labor in the fields (having previously been the gatherers, and therefore knew the most about edible plants), which accounted for more of the group’s food than did hunting.

Subsequent anthropological research has reinforced Morgan’s and Engels’ view that most societies that foraged for food—as well as many societies that engaged in simple agriculture (sometimes called “horticulture”)—were free of class division and women’s inequality. Such societies had no need for a group of people elevated above society and ruling over it.

Why, then, if people lived for so long without bosses or cops, did class divisions ever emerge at all? Starting about 10,000 years ago, some societies, as a result of the depletion of their food sources, moved to domesticating plants and animals instead of foraging for plants and hunting animals. This is commonly known as the Neolithic revolution. Foraging people had already gathered an enormous amount of knowledge about the plants they gathered. In foraging societies, the small bands necessarily produced only for immediate needs, with little thought of creating a surplus very much above their immediate needs. When food became scarce in one area, they simply picked up and moved elsewhere.

Some studies of modern foraging societies show that far from engaging in a brutish, relentless struggle for existence, people only spent on average something like 2-5 hours a day procuring subsistence.[viii] A 1960s study calculated that “!Kung Bushmen of Dobe, despite their harsh environment, devote from twelve to nineteen hours a week to getting food.”[ix] And the !Kung had been pushed to more marginal lands from the regions more abundant in food where in their ancestors thrived.

The depletion of these plants because of over harvesting as populations increased, or perhaps some climactic change, prompted some societies to turn to food domestication. Once people began to produce their food rather than just forage for it, they could sustain bigger populations that could stay in one place. In turn, this new, growing, more sedentary population had need of a surplus store of food as a hedge against disasters. (There were cases in which the food supply, for example of fish, in an area was so abundant that it allowed for larger, sedentary populations also).

Early agricultural societies therefore tended to reward those who worked the hardest to increase food production. The prestige of these “redistributor” chiefs—called in some cultures “big men”—rested on their ability to produce, and exhort their followers to produce and give away more than anyone else. Still, their status as providers placed them in control of society’s surplus. As the surplus grew, such chiefs could take some of the extra surplus and use it to pay for specialists—craftsmen, priests, servants, and warriors.[x]

“Under certain circumstances,” writes anthropologist Marvin Harris, “the exercise of power by the redistributor and his closest followers on the one side, and by the ordinary food producers on the other, became so unbalanced that, for all intents and purposes, the redistributor chiefs constituted the principal coercive force in social life. “When this happened, contributions to the central store ceased by be voluntary contributions,” writes Harris. “They became taxes. Farmlands and natural resources ceased to be elements of rightful access. They became dispensations. And redistributors ceased to be chiefs. They became kings.”[xi] In other words, a figure that begins as a giver turns into its opposite, a taker, that is an exploiter.

This was one possible path toward the emergence of classes. Classes arose in different ways, but always for the same underlying reason. In ancient India, for example, the first state evolved from those individuals “responsible for the collective maintenance of irrigation throughout the river valleys.” The first class division was between masters and slaves—the expansion of the old family structure to include war captives who could produce extra wealth. In any case, classes emerged on the basis that “production had developed so far that the labor-power of a man could now produce more than was necessary for its mere maintenance.”[xii]

Once agriculture is established, society becomes now capable of producing a surplus over and above subsistence. But that surplus is only possible on the basis of the hard toil of the majority, and can only sustain a small minority who are freed from that labor. Class division is a necessary result of society’s low level of productivity. As Engels put it, “So long as the total social labor only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labor engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society—so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labor, arises a class freed from directly productive labor, which looks after the general affairs of society.”[xiii]

Classes are therefore defined by their relationship to the production and control of society’s wealth, and in particular, the surplus product. Each ruling class used its position of control over the surplus to increase its own wealth and power over those it exploited—that is, to maximize the appropriation of surplus wealth. In any society, discover who appropriates and controls the surplus wealth produced in society and you have discovered the ruling class of that society. Find the class that produces the surplus wealth for the ruling class of a particular society, and you have found the exploited class.

Human progress—the advance of our ability to produce an expanding surplus over and above our basic needs—was impossible without the rise of class society. But the rise of class society has meant that every advance in human productive power has been advanced at the expense of the majority of humanity. “The power of these naturally evolved communities had to be broken,” Engels wrote of pre-class societies,

and it was broken. But it was broken by influences which from the outset appear to us as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral grandeur of the old [preclass] society. The lowest interests—base greed, brutal sensuality, sordid avarice, selfish plunder of common possessions—usher in the new, civilized society, class society; the most outrageous means—theft, rape, deceit and treachery—undermine and topple the old, classless gentile society. And the new society, during all the 2,500 years of its existence, has never been anything but the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed great majority.[xiv]

The rise of class society also necessitate the development of another institution which is often portrayed as something eternal and “natural” to all human societies—the state—”a public power distinct from the mass of the people,” wrote Engels.[xv] This special coercive power wasn’t necessary in a classless society, where the general male adult population could be armed because they shared common interests. But once you have a division into classes, there needs to be a body that can moderate class conflict, and keep it from threatening the economic interests of the dominant class. Wrote Engels, “This power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.”[xvi] The state, in other words, is at its core a political institution that concentrates in its hands the coercive power of society and removes as much as possible the means of coercion from the majority exploited class.

The most popular reason given for the existence of this “public power” is that without it human nature is such that everyone would be at each other’s throats. “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe,” wrote the 17^th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a great supporter of monarchy, “they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.”[xvii] In short, the state is a referee in a social brawl. But once it is acknowledged that a coercive state apparatus did not emerge until very late in human history, then this view can be seen for what it really is—more of a justification for state power than a real explanation of it.

Hobbes merely observed superficially that the state regulates conflict. The truth is that it arises to regulate a certain kind of conflict—class conflict, itself a historical product. But that doesn’t mean that the state is an impartial referee. It always rigs the game in favor of the wealthy classes in such a way that it wins most of the time. As Engels put it:

As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital.[xviii]

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[i] Engels, “Introduction to the English Edition (1892) of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” MECW27 (1990), 289.

[ii] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in The Communist Manifesto, A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document, Edited by Phil Gasper (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 39.

[iii] Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, MECW Vo. 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1990), 202..

[iv] Quoted in Paul Lafargue, Idealism and Materialism in the Conception of History (1895), Socialist Standard (UK), May 1915. Available at http://www.marxists.org.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid, 203.

[vii] Quoted in Ibid, 158.

[viii] Irven De Vore, Richard B. Lee, Jill Nash-Mitchell, Man the Hunter (New York: Aldine de Gruyter,, 1968), 5-6.

[ix] Richard B. Lee, “What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources,” Ibid., 37l.

[x] See, for example, Ernest Brandewie, “The Place of the Big Man in Traditional Hagen Society in the Central Highlands of New Guinea,” in Frank McGlynn and Arthur Tuden Editors, Anthropological Approaches to Political Behavior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 62.

[xi] Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Vintage, 1977), 113.

[xii] Engels, Anti-Duhring, MECW 25, 166–68.

[xiii] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (New York: International Publishers,1989), 70.

[xiv] Engels, Origin of the Family, MECW Vol. 26 (1990) 204..

[xv] Engels, Origin of the Family, 221.

[xvi] Ibid., 269.

[xvii] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13, para. 8, available at http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html#CHAPTERXIII. Get book references.

[xviii] Engels, Origins, 270-271.