Page 199 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes privileged communities in isolated times and spaces, the key characteristic of most economies has
been scarcity : albeit a scarcity which is more or less intense and differently distributed according
to the dominant mode of production. At any point in time the productive potential of any specific
historical economy has been limited. At the micro level this is experienced in the struggle, more or
less intense, to survive. Over time, that is intergenerationally, this means that families cannot
produce unlimited numbers of children without involving themselves and their children in
deteriorating standards, which in the context of historic poverty may deny survival”. She points
out that in aristocracy or peasantry, property appears as the material foundation of the family, but
the general case is not one of wealth but of scarcity.
Martha Cimenez states that characteristic of Engels’ thesis on ‘origin’ is the tendency to treat
family and reproduction as relatively autonomous from production. She says that Engels treated
the family of his time and its supposed unchanging battle of the sexes as eternal and explained
sexual inequality in abstract and idealist terms rather than the materialist terms.
Moira Maconachie also criticizes Engels’ flaws on sexual division of the family. She states that the
naturalistic account of the division of labour i.e. men doing social production and women doing
the household work is contradicted by ethnographic and sociological data showing that women
regularly contribute to subsistence activity and thereby to social production. She comments that it
was Engels’ neglect of this that led him to overlook the fact that women’s entry into social production
could not itself transform relations between the sexes.
Kate Young and oliva Harris also stress that the evidence suggests that in primitive societies there
was no direct correlation between promiscuity and mother-right and the means of subsistence
appropriated by nature. They declare that the incidence of matrilineal societies cannot be used as
a proof of an earlier stage of mother-right because matriliny is the system by which inheritance
goes from man to his sister’s son, not from mother to daughter.
Engels’s assumption that once property is socialized individual sex-love will come into its own,
thereby liberating women as well as men is taken up and criticized by Mary Evans. She points out
that in the patriarchal form of family, liberalization of individual sex-love will not be advantageous
to women even though it could be so to men. She also notes that transition to socialism has not
brought about full equality and improvement of relations between sexes.
There could be many kinds of criticisms on Engels’ explanation of woman’s subordination. Engels
connects the defeat of the female sex with the rise of patriarchy and to ownership of surplus
wealth. It could be seen that in many places there was surplus wealth and yet it did not give rise
to patriarchy. Similarly, the claim that at a certain point of time there had been exclusively
matriarchy or patriarchy cannot be proved. The complexity of the human situation forbids to
make a generalisation either in terms of patriarchy or matriarchy at all placed simultaneously.
Similarly, the emergence of either patriarchy or matriarchy is not only related to the material and
economic conditions of life but it must be related to various physiological, psychological and
ideological constraints. The question as to why women themselves accepted their secondary role
and servitude for centuries cannot be explained by Engels’ theory.
Woman in the Three Stages of Human Civilization
‘Woman is a subordinate being’ had not been only an opinion or a belief but a knowledge-claim
backed by scientific knowledge at every stage of human civilization. As Feyerabend points out
‘Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break
up all existing institutions but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of
bourgeois society but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize
that western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was thought to be - but he
excludes science from his realization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science
would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation’.

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