Was D. H. Lawrence a Primitive Communist?

Top: Quetzalcoatl by Hunt Emerson in Dawn of the Unread (Issue 7)

Bottom: Communist red flag with classic hammer and sickle design

 

 

I.

The concept of primitive communism is often credited to Marx and Engels and advances the idea that hunter-gatherer societies were traditionally based on egalitarian social relations and the common ownership of resources, distributed in accordance with individual needs. 

 

It seems that Marx and Engels took the notion from the pioneering anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan - best known for his work on kinship and social structure amongst the native peoples of North America (particularly the Haudenosaunee) - although it might be argued that the idea of primitive communism can also be traced back to Rousseau and his celebration of the noble savage.    

 

Wherever they picked up the idea, it obviously excited the imagination of Marx and Engels and they developed it broadly, applying it, for example, not only to wild hunter-gatherer societies and indigenous peoples, but to barbarian societies formed by the ancient Germanic tribes beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.

 

Marxist scholars and theorists - perhaps embarrassed by the romanticism of all this - attempted to downplay the significance of primitive communism in the work of their idols [1]. 

 

However, the madmen of the Khmer Rouge, looking to build on the revolutionary fantasies of Marx and Mao, really ran with the idea. Indeed, the party's General Secretary was so impressed with the self-sufficient manner in which the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived that he relocated the urban population to the countryside and forced it to work on collective farms. This resulted in approximately a quarter of Cambodia's population dying from malnutrition and disease, but at least he gave it a go.   

 

Still, never mind Pol Pot - what about D. H. Lawrence? Was he too someone seduced by the fantasy of primitive communism?

 

II. 

 

According to John Pateman, The Plumed Serpent can be read as an allegorical work that isn't so much concerned with ancient Aztec gods as promoting a political vision of a possible future Mexico based upon a model of primitive communism. 

 

For Like Marx, argues Pateman, Lawrence was interested in how human development might involve a radical return to pre-modern social relations. Thus, the hymns which Lawrence writes for his fictional neo-pagan religious movement should be heard as a revolutionary call to action, comparable to The Communist Manifesto (1848).

 

I have to say, I think there are problems with this reading of Lawrence's novel. And, push comes to shove, I'm with the German hotel manager who describes Ramón's Quetzalcoatl movement as another form of national socialism - not primitive communism [2].  

 

However, as I don't have advance access to the paper that Pateman is due to present to the D. H. Lawrence Society next month, I shall refrain from offering any criticisms here and now. Instead, let me just remind readers of my own readings of The Plumed Serpent, which can be found in several posts, including here, here, and here. 

 

In sum: The Plumed Serpent is - for me at least - Lawrence's rather frantic attempt to create what Deleuze and Guattari would call neo-territorialities based upon old fragments of code and the invention of new forms of jargon and myth [3]. 

 

Unfortunately, such neo-territorialities are, at best, artificial and archaic and, at worst, fascistic and malignant. As Kate's dead husband once told her: "Evil is lapsing back to old life-modes that have been surpassed in us." [4]  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] There was very little research into primitive communism among Marxist scholars and would-be revolutionaries beyond the 1844 study by Engels until the 20th century when some, like Rosa Luxemburg and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, took up the idea and developed it. 

      Non-Marxist scholars of pre- and early-history did not take the term seriously, although it was occasionally examined if only then to be swiftly dismissed; for it soon became clear that Morgan's work was flawed (to say the least). 

      Today, there are still those who insist that we could learn much from (matriarchal) societies that practice economic cooperation and communal ownership, but they rarely (if ever) use the term primitive communism. For such thinkers, it is the dominant culture's bias against any alternative to capitalism (and the patriarchy) that is the problem - and if it hadn't been for Western colonialism and imperialism, we'd still find many peoples living happily and peacefully in a non-alienated manner.   

 

[2] See D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 103. 

      It's interesting to recall that Kate, the middle-aged Irishwoman at the centre of the novel, refuses to accept this estimation of Ramón and his followers; for her, they were real men who wanted something more than modern pettiness: "She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life was drifting", writes Lawrence. But this, surely, is one of the great dangers of nihilism (and helps explain the attraction of fascism); one searches desperately for something or someone to cling on to. Even the most dangerous political invalids and the most fanatic of religious lunatics can suddenly seem attractive and find their ideas taken seriously - something that Nietzsche explicitly warns of.   

 

[3] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 257.

      Of course, it wasn't just Lawrence who oscillated from one pole of delirium to another and it's not just fascist society that works in this way. For as Deleuze and Guattari go on to point out, liberal capitalist societies - born of "decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine" - are also "caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritoriaizing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold." [260]

      In other words: "They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neo-archaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia [...] They are continually behind or ahead of themselves." [260]

      Having said that, sometimes  an unexpected force of radical change can erupt "even in the midst of the worst archaisms" [277], whilst, on the other hand, a revolutionary line of flight can quickly lead into a black hole of some kind. Thus, we can never say in advance with absolute certainty where a literary experiment or political revolution might take us.    

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 137.

      In a sense, this was also Lawrence's conclusion: you can't go back or cluster at the drum. See 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119-120. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Primitive', from the debut studio album Killing Joke (E. G. Records, 1980): click here for the remastered version (2005).    

  

Plutocracy

Plutocracy by Stationjack

neatoshop.com

 

 

Unfortunately, plutocracy does not involve being governed by an ancient Greek god of the underworld [1], nor the empowering of Mickey Mouse's dog. 

 

It means, rather, living in a society where a super-rich global elite lord it over the rest of us; i.e., where 1% own and control everything and 99% fight over the loose change thrown their way [2]. 

 

It's not a new word: it's not a new idea: it's not a new phenomenon. But plutocracy is very much the reality of the world we're living in today; a socio-economic and political reality that I would describe as undesirable and, in the long term, unsustainable (as the elite eventually discover to their cost).     

I suspect that most people would agree that the tyranny of wealth is vulgar and objectionable, wherever they are on the political spectrum [3]. Indeed, opposition to plutocracy as socially destructive is one of the few things that unites everyone from Nietzsche to Noam Chomsky [4], including Ursula Brangwen, who declares a preference for an "aristocracy of birth rather than of money" [5] and seems to believe, naively, that only a toff can save us ... 

 

Unfortunately, however, the hereditary model holds out no hope; something that even the Queen's grandson, Prince Harry, has grasped, thus his and Meghan's decision to up sticks and move to California. As Nick Cohen writes, they have "judged the modern world with calculating eyes and placed the ultra-capitalist entertainment industry above old royal privilege" [6]. 

 

He continues:     

 

"The Sussexes have followed the prophecies of Marx and Engels by concluding that the traditional aristocracy is finished. [...] If you doubt me, ask how many British people can name a duke or an earl [...] The power of inherited wealth is stronger than it has been in a century and the explosion in inequality [...] will make it more powerful still. Yet in terms of the status the Sussexes seek, the old aristocracy of birth counts for next to nothing [...]" [7] 

 

I think that's probably true, though it's not a particularly new insight. For as Cohen indicates, Marx and Engels were announcing that the old world order was dissolving way back in 1848 [8]. 

 

And when, eighty-years later, D. H. Lawrence published his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, he'd also reached the conclusion that the old aristocracy no longer existed as a distinct social class; they may belong to a super rich 1%, but like the rest of humanity they have become robot [9].

 

Cohen concludes his interesting piece:

 

"The Sussexes present a real threat to the monarchy because they have seen its irrelevance, as many more will once the Queen dies. They have soberly concluded that whatever privileges it brings are as nothing compared with the money and status that belongs to the real aristocracy of the celebrity industry they are so determined to join." [10]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] There is often confusion regarding the etymology of the term plutocracy. It does not derive, as many people mistakenly think, from Ploutōn (Πλούτων) - i.e., the ruler of the underworld in classical mythology. It derives, rather, from the name of the Greek god of wealth, Ploutos (Πλοῦτος). However, Ploutōn was frequently conflated with the latter because, as a chthonic deity, he ruled the deep earth where mineral wealth is located.   

 

[2] In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street Movement popularised the term 1% in reference to America's richest people, who, at that time, controlled at least a third of the country's wealth. We are the 99% quickly became a unifying slogan of the protestors and is now implanted as an idea in the cultural and political imagination. 

      In May of that same year, the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article published in Vanity Fair entitled 'Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%', in which he criticised growing inequality and argued that the United States has become a plutocracy. Click here to read this article online. 

      Finally, it might be noted that another economist, Paul Krugman, has since questioned whether we ought to refer to the 99.9%, as it has been an even smaller group - the top 0.1% (i.e., the richest one-thousandth of the population) - who have made the most outrageous gains in recent years. This is also the argument made by Chrystia Freeland in her book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, (The Penguin Press, 2012).

 

[3] It's interesting to note that both communists and fascists were united in their opposition to capitalism on the grounds that it would eventually lead to a plutocracy. 

      The Nazis, for example, liked to characterise the Third Reich as a People's Community [Volksgemeinschaft] in their propaganda and contrast the life of a typical German worker with that of their British counterpart. Hitler claimed that National Socialism rejected the rule of money and he prided himself publicly on being the only head of state who didn't have a personal bank account. 

      (It should be noted, however, that the German Führer did have several secret accounts in Switzerland in which he deposited the not inconsiderable royalties earned from Mein Kampf and that the NSDAP received financial support from big business and wealthy benefactors from its earliest days. It is often wise to take what the Nazis say with a pinch of salt.) 

 

[4] Noam Chomsky describes America as a plutocracy masquerading as a formal (but dysfunctional) democracy. See, for example, his essay 'Plutonomy and the Precariat: On the History of the U.S. Economy in Decline', The Huffington Post, (May 8, 2012), which can be read by clicking here.

       Nietzsche, like Marx, recognised the increasing dominion that money had acquired over every aspect of modern life and whilst little interested in developing a detailed political critique, he repeatedly voiced his concerns with this trend. Even in his earliest writings, such as 'The Greek State' (1871/72), for example, he makes clear his contempt for the moneyed aristocracy (i.e. the plutocracy) who threaten social cohesion. 

      Readers who are interested can find the above essay in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 164-173. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 427.

 

[6-7]  Nick Cohen, 'Behind the glitz of the Sussexes lies a simple truth: our aristocracy is dead', The Guardian (28 August 2021): click here.

 

[8] In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels describe how all values are resolved into exchange value and old social structures and modes of existence incorporated into the global market place, as people increasingly look to the latter for answers to questions that are not merely economic, but metaphysical; questions of what is worthwhile, what is ethical, even what is real. In the end, money determines everything and there is no other nexus between people than sheer self-interest.    

 

[9] As Connie informs her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, he is not a genuine master of (or amongst) men: "'You don't rule, don't flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you [...] or threaten them with starvation.'" [9]  

      D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 193.

      

[10] Nick Cohen, op. cit.