The gens is the way to understand Society and how it operated before the State got in the way and possession became 9/10 of the law. Society still exists in the remaining tenth but has become increasingly dislocated by 150 successive generations of State activity. So, as a human in pre-State Society, how were things arranged?
It may be unfamiliar, and strange but this is how it worked in varying degrees of evolution throughout the major part of the history of humanity.
I am a man. I meet a woman. We decide to breed, or we’re just having sex. Either way there’s a baby, same as ever. I now enter the realm of the Gens and its relationships.
Now let us travel beyond the preconceptions of what we consider allowable within our contemporary moral framework. Let us lay moral judgement to one side. Anyone with a prior knowledge of Polyamory however, will maybe find the following arrangement easier to understand and accept.
It should be carefully noted by all who are concerned by sexual freedom beyond monogamy that there is no compulsion for anyone to engage with anyone else should they choose not to. Indeed the solution proposed here to solve our existential crisis does not rely on necessarily extending our sexual relationships at all. It only relies on building numbers to huge proportions through extending the family unit. Monogamy or indeed sexual abstention is a right should a person choose to exercise it. It is however important to understand how the system worked if we are to adopt it. But as with any modern adoption of a traditional system, we can take what we need to suit our requirements. So let us remain open minded in exploring the operation of the Gens in its entirety before then deciding what we wish to take from it.
To return to the man and the woman and their new baby. I am with her and with her sisters, equally. There is no compulsion for this new, wider set of sexual relations to occur but it is not forbidden, There is no exclusive possession. She is with me and with my brothers, equally. No exclusive possession. This system, this culture, is not as familiar with the idea of possession as we are, regarding land or other people.
To be drawn together we abandon all mechanisms that unnecessarily force us apart.
Her child may be mine or it may be the child of one of my brothers. Her sister’s child may be mine. The child’s mothers are its natural mother and her sisters, without distinction. There are no “Aunts” so far. The child’s fathers are his natural father (if known) and all his father’s brothers, without distinction. There are no “Uncles” so far. The child’s brothers and sisters are all the children of the mother and all her sisters. There are no “Cousins” so far.
Let us now consider the arrangement from the point of view of that often-forgotten rights-holder within the family – the child.
When I was about 10 years old, I visited my Aunt and Uncle in their new house. My Uncle was there with two of his very good friends, who I had not seen since his wedding. He is distantly related to one of them. The three of them together with myself and my two siblings had a game of croquet. As the afternoon wore on, I remember feeling that I wanted this more often, that I wanted these men to be around for me, to play a bigger part in my life. I felt rather over-exposed to those people I called my parents and terribly under-exposed to other trusted adults. I don’t remember feeling that around teachers. It was the other adults around my family and their close friends that I wanted to see more. That afternoon was never repeated and I next saw my Uncle’s friends at my Aunt’s funeral over 40 years later.
An adult may jealously guard their own children, but do the children want it this way? Amidst the epidemic levels of hysteria around paedophilia we have lost something. Children need more exposure to a greater number of trusted adults to learn what being an adult is like. We are retreating in to a shell of fear and being taught to view others with unhealthy levels of suspicion. Classic divide and rule.
From Greeks to Romans to American Indians, there is a universal social structure which, to quote Engels showed “the fundamental features of social constitution in primitive times, before the introduction of the State”. There are not many forms, there is basically, to all intents and purposes, one. It shows minor variations but clearly shows that it is arrived at organically since all cultures, prior to the State, evolve it gradually. As recently as 1892, Engels reports that the Gilyak Tribe of Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, still lived under this system, exactly the same as reported previously, apart from a minor detail.
Within the Gilyak Gens, a woman may have sex with the brothers of her husband and the husbands of her sisters. The people of a Gens clearly have not developed the culture of jealousy and possessiveness so familiar to many of us today.
Again, looking at this situation from the child’s point of view, father’s brothers are all “father”. All the wives of these are “mother”, subtly different in this one respect from the general case, where this woman would be called aunt. And Mother’s brothers are all Father too. And finally all the mother’s sisters are “mother”. Note that the mother’s sisters’ husbands are not “father”.
All the children of the child’s father’s brothers, and all the children of his mother’s sisters are not cousins – they are “brother” and “sister”.
We lay this out in detailed diagrammatic form later.
The tribe are unfamiliar with agriculture and pottery and thus are referred to as Savages. But they have a family structure far broader and more cohesive than our own.
Engels also cites Bancroft’s “The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America. 1875 vol.1” where amongst the Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands (off the west coast of Canada) household duties were shared amongst as many as 700 inhabitants under one roof. In the same region, the whole tribe of the Nootkas lived under one roof.
Engels points to the Punuluan family structure as being the evolved precursor of the Gens right across the world, and it works like this.
The children of my mother’s sisters are called her children, and they call her “Mother”.
The children of my father’s brothers are called his children and they call him “Father.
And they are all my brothers and sisters.
But the children of my mother’s brothers are, as now, her nephews and nieces.
Similarly the children of my father’s sisters are his nephews and nieces.
And these last two groups are, as now, all my cousins.
I will lay out the exact arrangement of the Gens, in the chapter “Detailed Mechanics”.
Immediately, it can be seen that the Gens is a much larger and therefore less vulnerable unit than the modern nuclear family. But nevertheless with clear definitions and roles. In a nuclear family it only takes one parent to walk out to destabilise the unit. In the Gens, one adult leaving will cause upset to some, as it does in our system, but crucially it makes hardly any difference to the security of the unit. Better for children, not just because more contact with a larger number of adults means more security but it also means a wider experience to learn from.
Modern examples of child development in communes demonstrate that the child benefits from a wider contact with adults and other children – more chance of becoming socialised than is the case of a single child brought up by one or two parents.
With respect to the adults, the wider group of adults is more interesting, as can be imagined within such large and yet intimate groupings … parties, orgies and other morally defensible stuff to do with simple, natural, human pleasure and enjoyment of life.
Traditional religious types amongst us may react with horror at the idea of orgy. But consenting adults are free to do with their bodies as they wish and it is no-one’s business but their own. Our horror and intolerance should be reserved for sexual activity that happens without consent. In sexual terms, rape, sex without informed consent, is the only true outrage.
Left to our own devices, humans escape the yoke of nuclear insecurity and gather in numbers which gives genuine security. Ancient systems re-occur naturally all over the place. Communes are one example, Young people now seek alternative lifestyles from the nuclear marriage, the “job”, the car and the fitted kitchen. They gather in large groups and form a group, and call it a tribe. It is not technically a tribe as there is no blood relation, but their desire to belong to a larger unit is clear.
Look at single parents in hostels – maybe not an appealing reference and certainly not a choice made voluntarily, but ask the mother to compare it to her previous life. The fact is that in hostels, families are in close proximity and begin to co-operate and it is at this point, the mother finally has access to a pool of other adults with whom childcare responsibilities may be shared. For the first time, the mother has the opportunity to rediscover her own life in the new space created by sharing responsibilities with a wider group of adults. All of a sudden, accidentally, there is the space to meet, to talk, to go out, make friends, open up possibilities for the mother and so also for her children. Without the poverty that usually accompanies this situation the conditions for further co-operation would improve dramatically.
It is important at this stage to establish two points. The first is that the Gens as a unit of human organisation is not an idea, it is a tradition with a long, long history stretching right back into antiquity.
The second point is to realise the fundamental conclusion of Lewis Morgan. He ascertained the Social Structures of tribes all over the world by sitting down with the tribal Elder and asking questions about relations. For example, Morgan might say to the Elder “I call my mother’s sister my aunt. What do you call her?” To which the reply came as “mother”. And so on around the family tree of relationships. By constructing charts of different tribal arrangements, Morgan came to his stunning conclusion – that these different tribal arrangements are in fact not different at all. They all lie on the same line of evolution with all forms merely being either more or less progressed, and with only minor variations to this common pattern.
By showing the natural development from one form to another, Morgan proved that there is a natural and universally occurring method for humans to organise themselves. And that the pattern develops along the same lines regardless of which set of humans you’re talking about. The apparent diversity is accounted for simply by the fact that some tribes are further down the same road than others. Tribes the world over do not head down significantly different roads. To a very strong and general approximation, we all travelled down the same road. Until we were so rudely interrupted.
This conclusion runs parallel with the discovery that humans use the same grammatical structure, whichever language they speak, as demonstrated by Noam Chomsky in his now famous “Syntactic Structures – the universal grammar of language” published in 1957. In other words, if left to our own devices, humans are naturally equipped with tools to speak and to organise. We don’t need to be organised, we come equipped with inbuilt tools to organise for ourselves. In fact we did for many, many thousands of years before the much more recent Imperialist form came to prevail by greed and terror over the human race in the last three millennia.
The Gens is not an idea, it’s a tradition and an extremely universal one with a long, long history.
This original form of family typically lived in groups of about 150 per housing unit with a group of sisters at its heart with their chosen co- habiting male partners from other households. The daughters would remain and in turn seek their own chosen males. The sons would move out and join their chosen female partners in other households, further stabilising the community because you’re not going to make war on your mother in that house, your brother in that house, your two cousins over there, your grandfather over there etc. etc. Inbuilt peace.
No servants, no hierarchy. No family breakdown (bar flood or fire etc). Instead, a sense of belonging, stability, security, pleasure, life and safety in large numbers.