No.2746
>>2734Based and Graeber-pilled. I put in on my reading list but my backlog is too long to get to it anytime soon. Haven't even read bullshit jobs yet.
No.2747
RIP Graeber.
No.2748
>Since the financial crash of 2008, and the upheavals that followed, the question of inequality – and with it, the long-term history of inequality – have become major topics for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes that levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world's problems result, in one way or anotehr, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Pointing this out is in itself a challenge to global power structures; at the same time, though, it frames the issue in a way that people who benefit from those structures can still find ultimately reassuring, since it implies no meaningful solution to the problem would ever be possible.
>After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like 'inequality' sounds like it's practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It's possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it's not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we've 'eliminated inequality'?) The term 'inequality' is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.
This bit from chapter 1 is a decent critique of the whole equality meme, but it's depressing that we're having basically the same argument that Marx was when he wrote Critique of the Gotha Programme.
No.2765
I"ve just finished the second chapter, Most of it I've already heard in a lecture they did, but it was still interesting. It's always nice to see how intelligent the so-called "savages" were. I was a bit disappointed that they (the authors, not the "savages") used the term "baseline communism" for what basically amounted to mutual aid, even though they did call it mutual aid first…
No.2776
> Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’. Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation.
Does this mean the reason I am so fucking dumb is because I have no friends to talk with?
No.2784
should I read Mauss first?
No.2786
>>2776That's a really nice excerpt. Thanks for sharing. To understand the world, it is necessary to actively try to change it, with theory as the scientific backdrop. Knowledge is a social phenomenon. Also, "intelligence" is overrated and misunderstood.
No.2787
I really disliked in chapter 3 how they used "baseline communism" for mutual aid, even though they admitted it was the same thing. Otherwise it was mostly about debunking the "myth of the stupid savage" and presenting seasonal variations.
Chapter 4 has some fascinating stuff about large-scale hunter-gatherers, plus some discussion on what "egalitarian" means (anarchists won't be surprised by the answer).
It's a bit overwhelming, it includes so many archaeological evidence, ethnographic observations and debunking of mainstream misconceptions that it is kind of hard to keep track of the main line of the argument.
No.2788
>>2787>"baseline communism" for mutual aidthey probably want to reappropriate the term for spooked americans
also reminder that stirner described children playing together as a union of egoists
No.2789
>>2788Wait, I was confusing chapter 2 and 3. It doesn't really matter.
In chapter 4 this is what they have to say about the confusion between mutual aid and communism:
> Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.While this is how they described "baseline communism" previously:
> … the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism. …[some stuff here about Engels and primitive communsim]> However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend.Of course I am just salty because there really is no point in using communism instead of mutual aid which is much more closely linked to anarchists and is therefore better propaganda for us :^)
No.2800
Chapter 5 presents two cultures in North America that frequently interacted with each other, yet had a way of life that was an almost opposite of the other. One with hereditary titles and slaves, the other deliberately refusing both. They argue that this is not a coincidence, but rather cultural differences are most often about what you refuse to adopt from your neighbours, and culture itself is not about what is positive in it but setting your people apart from the others. This means that inequality and equality might as well have emerged simultaneously, in response to each other. Anyway, the interesting part is that both were hunter-gatherers, which means that describing something by its "mode of production" tells us very little about the actual way of life.
No.2804
> Many earth scientists now consider the Holocene over and done. For at least the last two centuries we have been entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which for the first time in history human activities are the main drivers of global climate change. Where exactly the Anthropocene begins is a scientific bone of contention. Most experts point to the Industrial Revolution, but some put its origins earlier, in the late 1500s and early 1600s. At that time, a global drop in surface air temperatures occurred – part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ – which natural forces can’t explain. Quite likely, European expansion in the Americas played a role. With perhaps 90 per cent of the indigenous population eliminated by the effects of conquest and infectious disease, forests reclaimed regions in which terraced agriculture and irrigation had been practised for centuries. In Mesoamerica, Amazonia and the Andes, some 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have reverted to wilderness. Carbon uptake from vegetation increased on a scale sufficient to change the Earth System and bring about a human-driven phase of global cooling.
No.2807
> There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them. New work on the demography of modern hunter-gatherers – drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu – shows that residential groups turn out not to be made up of biological kin at all; and the burgeoning field of human genomics is beginning to suggest a similar picture for ancient hunter-gatherers as well, all the way back to the Pleistocene.
> While modern Martu, for instance, might speak of themselves as if they were all descended from some common totemic ancestor, it turns out that primary biological kin actually make up less than 10 per cent of the total membership of any given residential group. Most participants are drawn from a much wider pool who do not share close genetic relationships, whose origins are scattered over very large territories, and who may not even have grown up speaking the same languages. Anyone recognized to be Martu is a potential member of any Martu band, and the same turns out to be true of the Hadza, BaYaka, !Kung San, and so on. The truly adventurous, meanwhile, can often contrive to abandon their own larger group entirely. This is all the more surprising in places like Australia, where there tend to be very elaborate kinship systems in which almost all social arrangements are ostensibly organized around genealogical descent from totemic ancestors.
> It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism (even if we can’t stand our actual brother and haven’t spoken to him for years). What’s more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we’ve seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety systems across Australia. This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome.
> It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. This might seem odd, but from the perspective of cognitive science it makes perfect sense. It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates. Apes may vie for affection or dominance, but any victory is temporary and open to being renegotiated. Nothing is imagined as eternal. Nothing is really imagined at all. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans. Sometimes, as in the case of modern nations, these are imagined as being based on kin ties; sometimes they are not.
> In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time as ‘virtual reality’, a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not – and probably have not ever – lived in small-scale societies.
Family values BTFO
No.2808
>>2800>Anyway, the interesting part is that both were hunter-gatherers, which means that describing something by its "mode of production" tells us very little about the actual way of life.You mean in the orthodox marxist sense, I imagine? Since the mode of production of both clans are different. One employing slaves and the other doesn't. It follows that their culture will reflect that, and it does, with strong hereditary property rights. Right?
No.2809
>>2808In the anthropological sense, since, according to the book, they are both usually just described as "complex hunter-gatherers".
No.2826
I finished this book.
No.2827
>>2826so, what did you think?
No.2831
>>2827I am still thinking about it. It was a bit overwhelming with the seemingly endless descriptions of the practices of past societies, but I guess that's what makes it a book of anthropology. The subtitle of the book says it is a "new history" but it did not feel like it, it's more like an attack on the current understanding of history. Well, I guess history is a lot more complicated than we were told in school. It's probably too long and dry to achieve mainstream success but hopefully it will at least make a dent or inspire people to do more research in these ways.
No.2832
Plus it's kind of funny that they start from criticising Rousseau but end up pointing at the concept of property in Roman law as the possible reason for why we are stuck with the current social form.
No.3689
>>2746just read one, don;t let it pile up comrade
>>2809hw do i go back to hunter gatherer mode?
maybe i'll go out tommorrow and get lost buying vegetables
or i'll pick a day and just woooolk everywhere
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