Sunday, June 12, 2011

Matriarchy and Gynocracy


       
  (Excerpts from Com. Sharad Patil's Primitive Communism, Matriarchy-Gynocracy and Modern Socialism. Chapter- Matriarchy & Gynocracy)
         Eurpean feudalism had decimated the primitives and tribals and hence Bachofen based his 'Matriarchy' on the study of ancient European literature. Morgan, as an advocate of the American primitives studied them for several decades, wrote     'Ancient Society'. Since then the term 'tribe' has been applied to all primitives. Indian adivasis, including those of the Himlyan adivasi states, are termed scheduled tribes. Ancient Indian literature, including Sanskrit grammar, has a special term for tribe: gana. All other non-gana primitives were called mrga (wild animal), vane-cara, ātavika, etc. It will be shown later that the term 'gana' originated with gynocracy. Morgan has described the Iroquois tribe in detail and after him by Engels. Though the fifty clans were matrilinear, their sachems (headmen) were males. Their basic unit was family. The clan (kula) and phratry (jnāti) councils were constituted by males and the tribal council also was made up of the fifty sachems.2 Treating Greek and Roman history similarly Engels intended to show that mankind's history since the rise of gens has been of liberty, equality and fraternity and monarchy came through usurpation by military commanders.3 Hence, socialism would come automatically after socialisation of the means of production. That is why, he concluded his book triumphantly-
'... The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self- destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knoweldge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes. (Morgan, Ancient Society, p- 552.)' 4
             The matrilinear origin of the gens all over the world, as will be shown in the overview of the papers presented in the '1st World Congress on Matriarchy' held at Luxemburg in 2005, came at a certain stage of the development of the means of production. Engels (and Marx) inspite of being cofounders of historical materialism, have deleted this basic factor in their subjective efforts to show the origin of primitive communism. It is the invention of food plants, mostly rice, by women that gave rise to gens everywhere in the world. Woman, due to her fertility, was equated to the Earth Mother, while the sky, due to its barrenness, was equated to the males. The primitives believed that agriculture could flourish only if it is cultivated by women and would perish if even touched by men. The primitives believed that every productive act would fructify only if it was accompanied by magical chants. Thus came into being agricultural magic, the mother of poetics, arts and sciences. The gens, their council, was constituted originaly only by women. Surveying all known accounts of the primitives of the world Frazer has established this in his monumental 'Golden Bough.' But being patrirchal he stopped at male 'kings' and did not go further.
            Engels restricted his research on Greek gens of the heroic period which ended their gynocratic epoch. That is why he concluded that kingship was usurpation.

       R. Briffault, in his IIIrd volume of 'The Mothers', assumes that mankind everywhere started with matriarchy, meaning rule of mothers and not women. He does not link it with agriculture and agricultural magic. The great British Marxist G. Thomson, who expanded his 'Aschylus and Athens' (1966) into multivolumed 'Studies in Ancient Greek Society', vacillates between traditional Marxism and gynocracy and hence leaves the relation between matriarchy and gynocracy undecided. The Luxemberg ‘World Congress on Matriarchy’ is named after matriarchy and hence the tie remains. 

            I have dwelt on the organic connection of matriarchy and gynocracy to show that gynocracy was not accidental and exceptional, but normal development of human society. Gynocracy's importance in the present context is not limited to its historical inevitability, but in the fact that the trinity of liberty, equality and democracy did not originate either in the patriacrchal tribal slave society or in the bourgecis republican society but in gynocracy, in which it was not formal but substantial. Tirbal society was based on blood kinship (sālohita). Capitalism has brought human society to extreme alienaton. Ties even in the nuclear family verge on alienation. Socialism will have to sublimate non-Kinship ties.  

Ref.:



1.      Stalin, J. ,Problems of Leninism, Moscow, 1945,p.14.
2.      F.Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Moscow, 1968, pp. 83-98.
3.      Ibid., p.161.
4.      Ibid.,p.175.
5.      Ibid.,p.161.

Friday, June 3, 2011

L(D)F’s Irrevocable Tragedy in the Assembly Elections!


Com Sharad Patil
MAINSTREAM, VOL XLIX, NO 21, MAY 14, 2011
Unilinear Marxism is in world crisis. Jyoti Basu, the CPI-M’s longest serving Chief Minister of West Bengal, said before his death that ‘socialism is not practicable’. The Left (Democratic) Fronts of Kerala and West Bengal can no longer lay claim to the titles of Socialist or Communist. That is why irrevocable tragedies wait for both these Fronts in the coming Assembly elections. Disillusionment will seize their sincere cadres in the post-election period and they will strive to seek the cause or causes that have led to this catastrophe. 

The Causal Chain
DR PRADIP GOKHALE, the illustrious authority on the Buddhist Dignaga School, has reviewed my Vol. IV: ‘Primitive Communism, Matriarchy-Gynocracy and Modern Socialism’ in the fore-most Marathi monthly Navbharat. He admits in it that I have discovered Dialectical Logic (DL). Soviet scholars claimed to have discovered DL. But Marxism even today considers that the mind is homogeneous. Christopher Caudwell urged that Freud’s discovery of dual mind should be included in Marxism; but it was the dark age of Stalinism and after his death in the Spanish Civil War, Maurice Cornforth denounced Caudwell as anti-Marxist.

Dignaga’s (late 4th century) philosophy of Sautrantika Vijnana-vada was based on the epistemology of the dualism of the mind: sa-vikalpaka (consciousness) and nir-vikalpaka (subconscious). His great disciple Dharmakirti (7th century) took great strides in logic; but he could not reach DL, because his researches were limited within the confines of the mind and could not reach its projection into the two Srutis of Vaidiki and Tantriki, which later came to be known as the two currents of Brahmani and A-brahmani. The suppressed gynocratic (Vai-raj, Stri-rajya) current, with which originated the trinity of Sva-tantrya (Liberty), Samata (Equality) and Mitrata (Fraternity, Democracy), became the Subconscious of Indian history.

In the absence of DL, Formal Logic ruled the roost. Dialectics developed without its logic, and hence it was bound to be unilinear, class. Marxists or Communists in India hugged class, while the Ambedkarites remained votaries of caste. The representatives of the economic proletariat and social proletariat remained at loggerheads instead of uniting as the real revolutionary force of India. Both went on decaying and deterio-rating. The result is the predicted tragedy. Revolution and Reformism
GOKHALE thinks that the criteria of revolution and reformism I have presented respecting Buddha and Ambedkar upgrades Ambedkar also as a revolutionary and not as a reformist. All the revolutions that were accomplished beginning with the Russsian one to the post-World War II revolutions in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, took place in class societies and were of bourgeois democratic type. Each of them required methodological uniqueness and Marxist philosophy permitted it. But the Indian anti-varna-slavery revolution that Buddha accom-plished, being a non-class one, required the new philosophy of Dialectical Realism (Pratitya-samutpada). After accomplishing it, Buddha declared in the Vasettha-sutra that the new jati society that took its place would require a new Dhamma (philosophy) to abolish it when its time would come. The Mahayana acharyas formulated caste-abolishing philosophies from Tathata-vada to Sautrantika Vijnana-vada and teaching at the Nalanda Mahavihara, lived as bhikkhu pilgrims of the Stri-rajya of Sri-saila. It was the unparalleled age of Enlightenment of the caste-ending Bourgeois Democratic Revolution. Though Ambedkar was a non-Sanskritist, he could have perused great works in English on this age and could have synthesised Sautrantika Vijnana-vada with Marxism. But instead he embraced the Neo-Buddhist religion, though Buddha had forbidden formulating a new religion. He has in addition fashioned a bourgeois Constitution to perpetuate the semifeudal caste system, in the mire of which his followers are wallowing. How can he be called a revolutionary after all this?

Buddha’s so-called reformism should be seen in the context of the revolutionary strategy of the varna-slavery abolishing Pancha-othamma. When Japanese imperialism invaded China, Mao halted the New Democratic revolutionary programme of abolishing landlordism in order to absorb the landlord class in the anti-imperialist front. It was a temporary tactics for strengthening the New Democratic Revolution. Buddha’s reformist programme for the oligarchies should be seen as a tactics in the varna-slavery abolishing revolutionary strategy.

Revolutionary Proletariot
JOTIBA PHULEY was the first revolutionary thinker of modern times to define Indian feudalism from the a-brahmani methodological point of view and compare its abolition with Western bourgeois democratic revolutions. His disciple Ambedkar organised the untouchables separately from the general varna category of Sudras and was the first to call them social proletariat. Though the Dharma-shastra included the Adivasis in the Ati-Sudra category, Ambedkar excluded them from the category of social proletariat. Untouchables were the only section of the Indian people who responded and participated in his anti-caste mass struggles. First untouchables arose in the lifetime of Buddha in the feudal caste monarchies of Magadha and Kosala. Ex-untouchable bhikkhus like Sunita and Sopaka were in the forefront of the greatest revolution in Indian history led by Buddha. But they became social proletariat (SP) during the twilight period of British imperialism. British imperial capital had added economic proletariat (EP) to the age-old social one. His unconcern with the caste exploitation and oppression of the SP led to the split of the dual Indian proletariat in the post-independence period. The rural agricultural proletariat is also dual. The Caste-abolishing Bourgeois Democratic Revolution too is a dual one. The surplus land above the ceiling, according to the National Sample Survey, is 21 million hectares. (Actually it is far greater.) Being owned by the elites of the dominating peasant castes, it can be confiscated for redistribution among the land-poor and landless OBCs, SCs and STs in order to create the home market for industrialisation, but it can be acquired only by the Caste-abolishing Democratic Revolution. Hence this dual revolution has to be led by the industrial and agricultural SP. That is why this SP is a revolutionary one. The land-poor and landless STs and OBCs are its allies. The non-elite peasant mass, which today supports the caste-class system, can be made its ally only through unprecedented Enlightenment, the ideological arsenal for which has been made ready by me through my lifelong work.

     Therefore, the impending electoral tragedy can be transformed into revolutionary recovery.

The author is the General Secretary, Satyashodhak Communist Party, Dhule (Maharashtra).