Eva:
>Classless society happened to humans for 100K + years,
>our relatively short written history chronicled only the
>class society that also happened to us - with it's
>exploitation, privilege, cruelty, etc.
You can believe that if you like, but I doubt very much that the first 100K
of human were without class and cruelty. But then of course none of us were
present, so how can we know? Incidentally, there is a very good novel
written on the theme of prehistoric cleverness and cruelty -- Willian
Golding's "The Inheritors", which deals with an encounter between
Neanderthal and modern man. Golding is better known for "Lord of the
Flies", which carries a somewhat similar message, though the setting is
modern.
Believe me, I too would like to believe that a series of social
transformations, such as going from hunting and gathering to agriculture and
thence to industry, accounts for the class system and resultant
exploitation. But I really have no evidence that exploitation did not exist
in earlier systems. And not only that. It is people themselves who brought
about the transformations, and for their own ends. That is, the class
system was not imposed on us by aliens from outer space. We created it,
probably a very long time ago, and amplified and broadened it each time some
new innovation made it possible to do so.
Hunters were displaced by farmers, and farmers by industrialists, and each
time those who were displaced became the lumpenproletariat who had to work
for the farmers or the industrialists. Perhaps the driving cause is our
need to invent and innovate, but that is something that we can't help doing.
It is a consequence of having large brains and opposable thumbs, or some
such thing.
Ed Weick
