How Did Classes Form?

This section is based on Chris Harman’s “A People's History of the World” and Paul Cockshott’s “How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day,” both Marxist accounts of world history. The section on labor in the Philippines is based on Eskum: Manggagawa’s overview. 

For 90% of human history, humans lived by hunting and gathering. Everyone did the same thing in order to live. The only differences were due to biological sex. In the case of women, they gathered plants and prepared vegetable foods since they were immobilized with the task of breastfeeding and child-rearing, and the men hunted or caught animals. But in case of burials and diet, men and women were basically the same. 

Other than that, there were no rich or poor people, precisely because there was no surplus. People ate what they hunted, day-by-day, and nothing substantial was left over. And even assuming something would be left over, there would be no use for it, since everyone had the same tools and furniture anyway. When plants and animals in an area were all used up, the rest packed up and moved to another area. Thus, no one could claim to own more than anyone else, nor were things bought and sold and profit made. People grouped in bands of around a few families, and when disagreements happened, those who disagreed just split off from the band without any need for conflict (since no one was fighting over space). In this way tens of thousands of years were spent. But when agriculture, and with it, a sedentary lifestyle developed, the first pure class division, between the ruler and ruled, and the accumulation of surplus, came to be. 

There are two main reasons why agriculture developed: 

First was that weather conditions around the globe, especially in the Fertile Crescent region became drier and cooler, there was a decline in the availability of wild grains and animals. Scarcity in food meant that more human effort was needed not just in hunting food (which used to take only two to three hours out of a man’s day), but also a need to make food (through planting and harvesting). 

Second was that due to improvements in hunting technology, the population had grown to the point where it was beyond the carrying capacity of the ecosystem in terms of game available. It was no longer possible for people to hunt and gather all available products, leave for a while, and then come back when earth has replenished itself. The natural development of spears and bows made killing and skinning animals and gathering nuts and fruits much easier. This caused a short-term surplus that caused more reproduction and therefore the surplus was eaten up by the increase in the population. 

Therefore, an already decreasing food source coupled with the ease of destroying the already-scarce sources meant that in order to live, the human species would need to completely change how they obtain sustenance. 

Thus, people started deliberately growing previously wild plants, and selecting their most desirable traits. This meant that people were tied to the land; agriculture was far more intensive in terms of manpower-hours than hunting and gathering ever was, upwards of eight hours or more were spent on farms. While people still hunted every now and then, the human diet now consisted of mostly grains like wheat and rice. 

Further developing agricultural processes (like double cropping) and technology (like the creation of plows and utilization of draft animals) meant that a surplus could now be made. The need for surplus was of course commonly-agreed upon, since a sedentary village should be able to withstand seasons of lean harvests (in cases of el nino or typhoon seasons). And in this time, although agriculture was invented 11,000 years ago, around 5,000 years still passed without the existence of class. But development and invention are natural things for the human species, and the human population never stopped growing, and with it came bigger villages which needed to be organized into bigger societies, necessitating bigger projects to be built. 

For example, when villages spread out in an area, it would be inevitable that some villagers don’t have the same access to water as their other neighbors. Thus, irrigation channels would be dug, and this required manpower to do. Some villagers also wouldn’t have access to the same fertility of land, and so natural fertilizers would have to be brought to them, hauled up by animals or through boats. 

The need to shape the land to sustain this agriculture and surplus (such as the aforementioned irrigation channel projects) created a class division between those who (1) supervised production, and (2) those who sowed, planted, raised animals, etc. Supervising took much more time because new technologies and a growing population meant that work was done by many more people, and thus the supervisors sought to be freed from mainly doing the planting like the rest of the population. 

Of course, being freed from doing planting meant that the rest of the population who were engaged in planting was a risk that the community was willing to take; they would have to work harder to provide for one less person doing the work, but if this permanent detachment was in exchange for possibly higher yields and surplus due to supervision increasing efficiency, then all the better. 

As Marx comments in Capital: “All directly social or communal labor on a large scale requires, to a greater or lesser degree, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious cooperation of the activities of individuals.” 

But it is not enough for supervisors to exist - they also had to exert influence on the mass of laborers. Otherwise, the supervisors would be a minority, subject to the will of the majority laborers, and surplus would still be evenly shared (or maybe even less would be given for the supervisors, since after all they did not do as much manual labor). The supervisors did this by changing the nature of their powers of supervision. 

When supervisors first emerged as a distinct “group,” (not yet class), they were also leaders. They worked to coordinate the mass of working men in producing greater and greater surplus and other necessary public works, and still sharing equally between all who needed it. This naturally led to prestige being placed upon the status and act of supervising; the community wanted to depend on someone who specialized in more advanced methods of agriculture, and who studied to get better at them. These leaders never sought to take surplus for themselves because the prestige was enough. At least, for a time. 

Because of this prestige, this power to coordinate slowly morphed into the power of the supervisors to control surplus itself and where it went. The supervisors would claim that their direction not just of labor but of the fruits of labor, the surplus, was in everyone’s interest. This was rationalized in several ways, but the most important of this was spreading the ideology of  “dependence.” Simply put, those working on planting in the spring were fed by the surplus grain harvested the previous year. Therefore, the present workers were “dependent,” in a sense, on those who supervised previous projects. This psychology of “we must give thanks to those who worked before us, since their forward-thinking assured our present well being and surplus” was present; the supervisors wanted society to know that a village or group of them only existed, not because of the workers, but because of the supervisors as a class, and therefore their prosperity directly impacted the prosperity of the community in a way that the prosperity of the laborers did not. After all, to the supervisors, continuously expanding their knowledge and skill in supervising helped the laborers to produce a bigger surplus. On the other hand, the laborers did not need their knowledge expanded in order to do manual work, and what did it matter that there were lean seasons or even natural disasters where some laborers and their families were starving - the surplus could be put into better use as directed by the superior knowledge of the supervisors which would, in theory, make up for the periods of hunger. Or at least, that’s what the supervisors wanted to believe would happen. In this way, “leaders” who supervised became “rulers.” 

In this way, the rulers started peddling the notion that it was they who were the source of people’s livelihoods.Thus, the thinking was not a matter of “we are also working for the future generations, so this just cancels their work and our work out,” since those past generations were “entitled to respect.” This respect became caught up with the religious practices of people. Thus, the first seeds of what Marx calls “false consciousness” were planted, when the fact and rate of exploitation was concealed from the masses. Thus, burial mounds deifying ancestors were put up, using the labor of who else but the workers themselves, and presided over by the supervisors, who were also sometimes members of a priestly class.. 

But the masses aren’t always going to be swayed by invocations of respect or religion. As much as natural developments in agriculture would produce surplus, it couldn’t have escaped them, at least those first few generations who lived through the shift between leaders to rulers, that the leaders were taking control of the surplus, and allowing people to endure longer periods of starvation. And in that period, there must have been those who wanted to fight against rulers. But the rulers also weren’t blind to that idea. Thus, they created another class division - armed groups of men. They were ostensibly created to protect the village from raiders, whether from other agricultural societies or hunter-gatherer bands who did not yet find it expedient to shift to agriculture. But they also served a dual function - coercion of those who challenged the ruler. Hiring these armed men and making them loyal to the ruler gave the latter monopoly over the means of killing. Of course, this killing was backed by legal codes which made it seem “fair” to the masses and thus further deepened any false consciousness being perpetuated. And in exchange, an army would also be freed from having to spend all their time in agriculture. The rulers also invested in expensive techniques such as metal working which could give them a monopoly of the most efficient means of killing. 

In sum, the rulers did not just have the job, as they had in the past, of controlling surplus - they claimed that they were entitled to direct where surplus went, and for them, it should go to their maintenance, especially for insulation from hunger during lean seasons or calamities that would hit the laboring masses, and to do this the would need to oppress others. But this was, in their mind, good also for the laborers, just in the eyes of religion and the virtue of respect for one’s predecessors, and if anyone would disagree with the rulers, they would be put to death. 

And not only supervisors, but those who sought to do craftwork, prepare or planned for warfare, and trade with other villages sought to be freed from planting, and were paid in surplus. This definitively marks the first time hierarchy and class divisions had been formed. 

The reason for this discussion on the origin of class is important because through the march of history, the proletariat was born, who according to Marx are the most keenly aware of the effects of the divide between classes. Therefore, we have to know how and why classes exist and what constitutes a class. As we’ll talk about later, in our semi-feudal system, the well-being of the proletariat is inextricably linked with the well-being of the peasantry, and the solidarity of both groups will bring about the economic and social liberation of our country.