Reflections on the Birkbeck meeting: the political implications of sex strike theory

We recently gave a talk to the Birkbeck college Marxism discussion group, the text of which is in a previous post (see below). Here are some thoughts provoked by the questions and comments (all excellent, interesting and relevant) from that meeting. We deal here only with the wider, political implications of the theory discussed. More technical, scientific or nitpicking questions are either easily answered by consulting the literature (especially that which I recommend in the list at the end of my talk) or form part of the legitimate debate over human origins. If you wish to pursue the latter, you're better off talking to Chris Knight and his colleagues for yourself, either by email (see here ) or by attending the Radical Anthropology Group classes in London, if feasible.

Political economy is more important than sociobiology


Understood narrowly, we agree with this. Clearly, an understanding of why and how we are dominated and exploited as a class is more urgent politically than speculation about which behavioural strategy we would expect to be stable over evolutionary time in a population of ants. However, sociobiology as we understand it is but one strand of a body of thought that Chris Knight calls the "Clapham Junction" of knowledge: anthropology. Seen in this light, political economy is not more important than what we’ve been discussing, but a mere branch of it. Not that we want to make too much of this claim. As in the debates over the taxonomy of hominid fossils, you can be a lumper or a splitter if you like. Is political economy a branch of anthropology? Or are they two different subjects? A case could be made for either, but, like Marx, we are more interested in the development of "a single science". Call it what you will.

Is the theory communist?


Again, we don’t want to get bogged down in matters of definition. We agree with Richard Dawkins that we have to make a distinction between what is the truth of the matter, and what we would like to be the case. We might prefer on communist instinct a theory that said we became human because we are naturally cooperative, and we all got together to figure out how to organize our lives in a nice, cooperative, sex-blind way. But there is a big difference between what we would like to be the case and what makes sense scientifically. However, the theory certainly is communist in a sense we will consider below.

Why should anyone be interested particularly?


There are political reasons for being interested, and we'll look at some of those below. But from a purely intellectually curious standpoint, the questions raised are awe-inspiring. Science often proceeds by subjecting what is blindingly obvious to curious questioning. Why do apples fall out of trees and to the ground? We can imagine Newton's contemporaries raising their eyebrows and patting poor confused Isaac on the head. Obviously, they just do, and that’s that, they might have said. Similarly, today it is taken for granted by most thinking people that human beings evolved from ape ancestors. This is obvious, but absolutely fucking mind-boggling when you think about it. How on earth did we get from swinging in the trees and grunting to walking on the moon and discussing evolutionary theory over the internet? Why did these apes start wearing necklaces and make-up? Worshipping gods? Drawing on walls? What happened? Frankly, anyone who comes up with a theory to explain this and doesn’t end up sounding a bit mad just isn’t thinking hard enough.

What are the political implications of the theory?


I can think of at least five direct political lessons that we can take from an understanding of Chris Knight's theories. We will be extremely brief, but will happily expand on any theme in the comments box if anyone would like us to.

1. The theory is specifically about how Stone Age females forced men to provide for them and for their offspring through a revolution that seized collective control of sexual signals. Today, the problems they were trying to solve have not gone away. The collapse of the nuclear family and the decline of the welfare state has important implications for the burden on women of raising children, and the effects of this on their freedom and power. And the modern day equivalent of sexual signals are today controlled not by women collectively, but by the sex industry, understood broadly: child brothels in Bangkok, sex tourism, images of pop stars and supermodels in the media, the cosmetics industry, housewive’s slimming and keep fit clubs, pornography, prostitution, and so on. The theory has a great deal to say about all this. Just as important as the theory, however, is the practice .

2. The theory also shows us the importance of political strategies. Most human origins stories focus on some narrowly technological or structural feature of what makes us human. Walking upright. Making tools. Exploiting fire. A bigger brain. These theories have a problem when it comes to the evidence. Our ancestors were walking upright, making crude tools, expanding their brain size and exploiting fire opportunistically for millions of years before anything spectacularly and uniquely human (we mean symbolic culture) appears, very suddenly, about 100,000 years ago. In Marxist terms, what this means is that the answer to social and political problems is to be found in social and political strategy, not in technological development. To use the language familiar to many Marxists, at a given stage of development, the forces of production are fettered by the social relations of production – in the Stone Age, by sexual relations; in our own time, by the class relations that forces millions to die of starvation or preventable disease in a world of potential plenty.

3. Words are cheap. The theory tells us that, without group level trust, words become meaningless. We can say that we are committed to change until we are blue in the face, we can say that we want a better world, that we want our politicians to behave better, or whatever. But nothing will happen unless we back up our words with collective action. This commitment to change has to be demonstrated with costly and hard to fake signals. That means we need picket lines that can enforce what we want. It means banners and drums and noise and dance. It means, in a word, carnival.

4. Science is revolutionary. Engels said that the more science becomes true to itself, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the proletariat. Using the environmental movement as a model, Chris Knight says that we need scientists to get active and activists to get scientific. We agree with this.

5. Most importantly and perhaps most obviously, the real issue addressed by the theory is, can communism work? The result of applying the insights of political economy to animal societies (sociobiology) is that we have firm and compelling evidence that early human life was communist – and that it worked. Marx and Engels believed that communism would be a dialectical repetition, on a higher scale, of the small-scale communism of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Chris Knight puts this theory on a stronger scientific footing.

UPDATE: More discussion here .