As we have seen , this authority extends beyond the economic realm to management of the reproductive process itself , and the business of deciding who may marry when .sx Why do younger Karimojong put up with their subservience to the elders ?sx ( Why do sons everywhere put up with their subservience to their fathers ?sx ) Why do they not rebel and seize power and wealth ?sx In a sense they do , as time moves on and the pressure to turn over the generation sets increases .sx The phase of domestic fission is therefore very evocative of class conflict , raising as it does questions about access to productive resources .sx The elder generation is concerned to hang on to its authority and privileges , but passing time , the aging and the death of the elders , whittles down their numbers and their claims to authority .sx They certainly do their best to hang on as long as possible ; one ideological tactic at their disposal is their power to collectively curse juniors who have displeased them .sx But pressure builds up inexorably among the lower ranks for a succession ritual - which only the elders can sanction .sx The aging juniors resent their economic and political subordination to the old brigade , and are likely to be particularly hostile to their 'poaching' brides from an age cohort which the juniors consider to be rightfully theirs .sx If promotion to elderhood may be thought of as a kind of upward class mobility , the Karimojong are remarkable in that they synchronize this process ritually across the entire population .sx The Red-Yellow opposition could be thought of as an uneasy intergenerational truce .sx The competing interests are the familiar ones of domestic fission , but here they are given a concerted voice .sx In most societies the generations do not have this sort of solidarity , and the youngsters have to struggle on a more individual basis to make their way in society .sx In Karimojong social organization , the intergenerational tensions which are a dynamic force in all societies become a coherent central motif in their historical understanding of themselves .sx Our own thinking may not be so very different .sx But in our societies each generation , each overlapping cohort of subjective viewpoints , is left to form its own collective vision of society and experience of history .sx It draws on certain generally available , chronological cues to categorize itself as a generation :sx the Depression , Vietnam , etc. There is a moral dimension :sx each generation likes to claim that it has virtue on its side , and has had to face more serious economic and political challenges .sx This can go beyond a way of speaking to a way of acting .sx If we doubt the political force of generational conflict we should recall the worl-wide revolutionary fervour of the junior 'underclass' in the years 1968-72 , and the 1989 revolt against the gerontocracy in China .sx These movements are so impressive because they translate the squabbles between parents and children into a much wider arena than the household , pitching one generation as a mass against the other .sx Husbands can feel much the same categorical alienation when their wives resort to the rhetoric of feminism .sx Periodically , a generation makes itself evident by force of numbers :sx by dying in a war , or by deferring marriage in a period of economic slump .sx These effects are amplified by the demographic scale of industrial societies .sx As Reuben Hill puts it , " Each cohort encounters at marriage a unique set of historical constraints and incentives which influence the timing of its crucial life decisions " ( 1970 :sx 322) .sx How , we may ask , did households at different stages of development respond to the Great Depression of 1932-3 ?sx It seems likely that those in decline suffered most heavily , while those in the early stages of expansion were better placed to take advantage of Roosevelt's New Deal programmes .sx The point is that people neither make history nor respond to historical events as an undifferentiated mass .sx The reproductive cycle produces categorically distinct interests across a whole population , and how each generation responds will depend on its particular life experiences as well as its sheer size .sx As the proportion of old people increases in our industrial countries we can be sure that they will do their best to hang on to their wealth and voting power to secure their welfare .sx Although competition between generations may not be as concerted as it is among the Karimojong , the 'motor' of the reproductive process is massive in its effects .sx Most influential are the acquisitive pressures on the younger generation , which give society much of its historical momentum .sx Juniors must accumulate , must displace their seniors , and must in their turn ultimately relinquish control , divest , decumulate .sx But resources are not passed on mechanically and without a struggle .sx They must also be created :sx new lands must be colonized , livestock bred and technical innovations made .sx This progressive force is continually pitted against the constraints of environment and the limitations of technology .sx But all around us we see evidence of the extent to which youthful ingenuity has prevailed .sx This rhythm of progress is thwarted only by the countervailing rhythm of aging and death .sx Consider the possibility of a whole society which consisted exclusively of a younger generation :sx that , surely , would be extremely dynamic and progressive .sx Perhaps surprisingly , quite a few such societies exist .sx Almost invariably they have one central purpose :sx the pursuit of rapid economic development .sx An example is the Malaysian government's enormous land development programme .sx Between 1957 and 1980 more than a hundred thousand households from poor rural areas were resettled on two hundred rubber and oil palm plantations cleared from the jungle .sx The many applicants were screened on the basis of 'need' ( family poverty ) and 'suitability' ( efficient , able-bodied labourers) .sx Whole communities were thus created consisting of younger married couples with several children , additionally motivated by the fact that they had little or no land at home to support them .sx This active and acquisitive labour force helped to guarantee the remarkable economic success of the Malaysian land development schemes for several decades .sx The abnormality of these communities was evident in many ways , for example in the chronic overloading of the local schools .sx The Bukit Besar scheme , which I visited in 1972 , had ten simultaneous first grade classes spread out over morning and afternoon sessions .sx By the 1980s , however , the schools were emptying and the children were taking their educational advantages to the expanding towns and cities .sx After reaping the short-term benefits of this 'unnaturally' skewed population , the Malaysian government is now confronting the long term costs :sx both the settlement scheme populations and the tree crops they have been tending are aging simultaneously .sx Dwindling crop yields are exacerbated by the declining physical capacity of the settlers themselves , and additional labour ( much of it drawn from neighbouring Indonesia ) has to be hired to do the work .sx Billions of dollars of investment in more than two hundred schemes is now under threat , and the government is understandably vexed to see its ardent young proletarians turn into aged , underproductive capitalists .sx Recently it has even felt obliged to renege on original contracts to hand the land over to the settlers .sx The dream of profitable , self-sustaining smallholder communities has evaporated , and the settlement schemes remain government-managed estates .sx Evidently , the Malaysian planners either did not understand or chose to ignore the significance of the reproductive process in the making and breaking of their land development schemes .sx Experience tells us repeatedly that the success of economic projects is not guaranteed solely by the efficiency of productive arrangements .sx Either optimism , shortsightedness or plain ignorance blinds us to the fact that the generational cycle involves decumulation as well as accumulation .sx Folk wisdom may know better - 'riches to rags in three generations' goes the old saying .sx Individuals move out of one social class and into another , but the consolidation of a dominant class undoubtedly depends on its capacity to resist this sort of mobility .sx For a minority to retain control of capital it has to keep outsiders at bay , and prevent its own offspring from dropping out .sx This is hard work , involving the sort of economic , political and cultural tactics we shall consider in the next two chapters .sx Reproduction poses the most serious threat to the maintenance of class power .sx But if reproductive processes are excluded from a definition of class , then class itself is doubly deficient as an analogy for understanding the inequalities of generation and gender , and their impact on modern society .sx However conspicuous they may be , political and economic definitions of generation and gender are always secondary social constructions of the fundamental reproductive distinctions .sx This is why trying to explain inequalities of gender and generation from a political-economic point of view has proved so frustrating .sx For a start , the two sorts of categorization ( class on the one hand , and generation and gender on the other ) are not mutually exclusive .sx Thus , Dyson-Hudson is at pains to point out that Karimojong generation sets do not equalize wealth :sx there are still richer and poorer elders , more and less advantaged youths .sx In a broad survey of age-set organization in Eastern Africa , Baxter and Almagor make the point that the sets do not corporately own or control productive property :sx that remains vested in households and patrilineal descent groups .sx Consequently , " When the interests of domestic and familial loyalties diverge from those of set loyalties , set loyalties are likely to be the ones which give .sx " Indeed , as domestic issues claim more of their attention , older men may " ooze away " from involvement in their age set ( 1978 :sx 22,13) .sx In a zealous effort to apply Marxian explanations to pre-industrial societies , the French anthropologist P.P. Rey ( 1979 ) has used the model of class conflict in industrial societies to explain the relations between " exploiters and exploited " in societies like the Karimojong .sx Juniors keep their own company in a kind of working-class solidarity in the face of the economic and political domination of the elders .sx In reaction to Rey's argument , but still from a materialist perspective , Meillassoux points out that people distinguished as a generation within a community cannot constitute a class , because the one is defined by the passage of time and the other by access to material resources .sx Elders can only be elders by virtue of having been juniors ; but people do not have to be proletarians before they can become capitalists ( 1981 :sx 80) .sx Classes , Meillassoux implies , are fixed , but people are not :sx " Age , even understood in its social sense , is only a transitional moment in the life of an individual .sx " However , classes are only 'fixed' because we choose to think of them so .sx A central interest in maintaining class status is to resist downward mobility within and between the generations - in other words , to counteract the turbulence of the reproductive process .sx Gender and political economy .sx Similar problems have arisen with political-economic explanations of gender .sx The central dilemma for feminists thus becomes one of loyalties :sx to a 'class' of women , or an economic class which is comprised of both sexes .sx Classes are historical developments , but women's subordination seems timeless .sx Playing men at their own materialist game , likening women to a revolutionary proletariat , may actually obscure the issues , for example by reducing explanations of women's subordination to arguments about the nature and value of their labour , and whether or not it should be 'waged' .sx It seems that feminists are gradually returning to the view that an explanation of women's subordination must be sought in the organization of re production .sx Rossi declares firmly , " Gender differentiation is not simply a function of socialization , capitalist production , or patriarchy .sx It is grounded in a sex dimorphism that serves the fundamental purpose of reproducing the species " ( 1985 :sx 161) .sx However real and potent class distinctions may be , they are also historically more recent than reproductive categories of gender and generation , and are thus in some sense more superficial .sx Generation and gender are categories which divide households , social classes and whole societies .sx Social classes , on the other hand , divide whole societies but do not divide households .sx Class conflict widens the gap between households ; it does not necessarily close the generation or gender gap within families .sx Nor does class differentiation eradicate distinctions of gender and generation , it superimposes itself on them .sx