WHAT IS POLITICS?

Elites use identity, particularly national identity, as a way of advancing their own interests, often against the interests of the populations that they pretend to represent.

But before we can understand this, we need an ABC of the conflict, to get a grasp of the basic events, and the conflicting historical narratives that Israelis and Palestinians learn, which interpret all of these events in completely different ways, with opposite moral implications, so that we can then proceed to look at what actually happened, and what the moral implications of that are for the present and future.

Doctors Without Borders in Gaza and West Bank: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.ca/gaza-msf-provides-medical-care-and-donates-supplies-amidst-conflict/

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net

If you’re in the U.S. demand that your representative vote to stop funding this massacre.

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When ideas and movements that threaten to overturn established hierarchies of power are absorbed into elite institutions like Ivy League universities and for-profit corporations, they get transformed into ideas that support the status quo, while remaining cloaked in the language and symbols of radicalism and egalitarianism.

The replacement of the word “equality” by the word “equity” in the worlds of academia, NGOs, activism, and corporate HR departments, is an example of the attempts by elite people and institutions to transform historical movements for racial and gender equality, into ideas that promote the interest of elites – in particular, economic inequality and the division of the working classes.

In this episode we explore how forms of oppression based on cultural factors like skin colour or gender or religion, etc, can only be understood and effectively combatted by understanding them in the context of economic exploitation and economic competition which is what the human propensity to discriminate evolved for in the first place.

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The leaders of the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 sought to establish socialism: a deeply democratic economic and political system where the employee/employer relationship is abolished, and where workers control their workplaces, the means of production and the government via the “free association of the producers”.

Instead the revolutions resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Union: an authoritarian state where the government became the sole employer and the state controlled the workers instead of the other way around.  This then became the model for “communist” countries around the world.  

Why did the Soviet Union fail at socialism? 

What can we learn about this failure to apply to our political struggles in the present and future?

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Why has every communist country so far been a one party dictatorship?  

Is it something inherent to Socialism or Marxism?  

Is human nature incompatible with political equality?  

Has “true” communism never been tried yet?  If so, then why not?

Is it “capitalist encirclement”?

Richard Wolff can’t answer this question for some reason.

Neither can Freddie de Boer. 

Yet the answer is very simple, and we can learn a lot from it.  

Listen, and find out…

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We cover the first part of chapter 3 of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything: ”Unfreezing the Ice Age”, and we investigate the authors’ claims that human inequality has no origins based on archeology from upper paleolithic europe.   

In doing so we also look at the difference between dominance hierarchy and democratic hierarchy, and what the necessary criteria are in order to establish a a dominance hierarchy.  

We also discover that Graeber & Wengrow actually have no arguments for why human inequality supposedly has no origins!

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In this episode we cover chapter 1 of David Graeber & David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything, entitled Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood; or Why This isn’t a Book About the Origins of Inequality.

In doing so, we look at the following:

How the book’s underlying thesis: that human social structure is ultimately a matter of choice and experimentation, is fundamentally incoherent, and how this idea sets us up for future dramatic political failures, similar to those of Occupy Wall Street or the Great Peasant’s Revolt of 1381.

What the standard narrative of human origins actually is, vs. the caricature elevator pitch version that Graeber & Wengrow claim to be debunking.

Why most anthropologists believe that human beings began as egalitarian hunter-gatherers despite knowing about all of the evidence that Graeber & Wengrow present in order to argue the otherwise.

How and why Graeber & Wengrow flush down the toilet the analytical tools that they need in order to answer their own questions about how we got stuck in dominance hierarchies.

How social structure actually works.

How Graeber & Wengrow’s arguments are great material for right wing talking points.

Why there is room for deliberate social change in a world where social structure is largely a matter of conditions and relative bargaining power, rather than a matter of “choice”.

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In this episode we read and critique the conclusion of Chapter 2 of Dawn of Everything, “Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of the Noble Savage”, which was previously released in French in 2019 as La Sagesse de Kandiaronk.

Given that the conclusion of the chapter is a tirade against the concept of “equality” we first examine what the world equality means in a political context, and what the term “egalitarian society” implies, followed by an examination of the history of the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies.  

We also cover material from Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and On Kings in order to look at how his treatment of egalitarian societies over his career routinely ignored 50 years of research on extremely egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, a practice which he and Wengrow continue in this chapter.   

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Bibliography

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BIBLIOGRAPHY / SUGGESTED READINGS

GRAEBER AND WENGROW

Graeber & Wengrow 2021 – The Dawn of Everything

Graeber & Wengrow 2019 – La Sagesse de Kandiaronk (deepl or googl translate will give you a decent English translation)

Graeber & Wengrow 2015 – Farewell to the Childhood of Man

Graeber & Wengrow 2020 – Hiding in Plain Sight, Democracy’s indigenous origins in the Americas.

David Graeber 2004 – Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins 2017 – On Kings

David Graeber & Andrej Gubačić 2020 – Introduction to Pyotr Kropotkin 1902 – Mutual Aid

CRITIQUES OF GRAEBER AND WENGROW

Chris Knight 2021 – Did Communism Make Us Human? The Anthropology of David Graeber 

Christ Knight 2021 – The Anthropology of David Graeber (video)

Camilla Power 2018 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s ‘How to change the course of human history’

GENERAL 

Robert Kelly 1995/2014 – The Foraging Spectrum 

James Woodburn 1982 – Egalitarian Societies

James Woodburn 2005 – Egalitarian Societies Revisited, in Widlock & Gossa (eds) – Property and equality, Volume 1: ritualisation, sharing, egalitarianism

Richard Lee 2004 – Power and Property in Twenty-first Century Foragers: A Critical Examination

Richard Lee & Irving Devore (Eds.) 1968 – Man the Hunter

Richard Lee & Eleanor Leacock (eds) 1983 – Politics and History in Band Societies

CENTRAL AFRICAN FORAGERS

Jerome Lewis 2017 – Bayaka Elephant Hunting in the Congo

Lewis, J., 2014. Egalitarian Social Organization: The Case of the Mbendjele BaYaka

Morna Finnegan 2013 – The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies

Hewlett 2017 ed – Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin

Colin Turnbull 1961 – The Forest People

KALAHARI BUSH PEOPLE

Richard Lee 1969 – Eating Christmas in the Kalahari [“Shaming the meat”]

Richard Lee 1979 – The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society  

Richard Lee 1982 – Politics, Sexual and Non-Sexual, in an Egalitarian Society

Richard Lee 1984/2013 – The Dobe Ju/Hoansi

Helga Vierich 2021 – ‘Hunting is boring and unreliable. Let the men do it!’ (video)

HADZA

Frank Marlowe 2010 – The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

Frank Marlowe 2004 – Dictators and ultimatums in an egalitarian society of hunter-gatherers, the Hadza

Fearless & Far 2021 – Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions (video)

Coren Lee Apicella 2018 – High levels of rule-bending in a minimally religious and largely egalitarian forager population

NAYAKA

Nurit Bird-David 1990 – The Giving Environment, Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters

Nurit Bird-David 1999 – “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology

BATEK

Kirk & Karen Endicott 2008 – The Headman Was a Woman: The Gender Egalitarian Batek of Malaysia

MONTAGNAIS-NASKAPI

Eleanor Leacock 1981 – Myths of Male Dominance

CRITIQUES/DEBATES ON FORAGER EGALITARIANISM

Alan Barnard 1992 – The Kalahari Debate, a Bibliographical Essay

Edwin Wilmsen 1989 – Land Filled With Flies

Roy Richard Grinkger 1991 – Houses in the Rainforest

Richard Lee & Mathias Guenther 1991 – Oxen or Onions? The Search for Trade (and Truth) in the Kalahari

Ted Kaczynski 2008 – The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarchoprimitivism

WHAT IS POLITICS? is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://worldwidescrotes.wordpress.com/

A critical reading of “The Wisdom of Kandiaronk, The Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left” from David Graeber & David Wengrow’s upcoming book The Dawn of Everything.

In this chapter Graeber & Wengrow argue that:

The European Enlightenment was heavily influenced by Native American critiques of European culture.

That European intellectuals reacted against this by developing the theory of “stages of human progress” where we went from from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to farmers to market civilization.

That Jean-Jacques Rousseau synthesized the Native American critique and the stages of progress theory into a seemingly egalitarian critique of European social hierarchies which resigns us to accept hierarchy as the price of civilization. 

That this synthesis was the birth of the “intellectual left”. 

That the concept of human equality has no meaning and should be discarded [these guys *really* needed to listen to this podcast before writing this…]

TRANSCRIPT

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Graeber & Wengrow 2019 – “La Sagesse de Kandiaronk, la critique indigène, la mythe du progrès et la naissance de la gauche“, chapter from The Dawn of Everything (2021), published in French in Journal du MAUSS

Sally Roesch Wagner 2015, How Indigenous Women Inspired The Feminist Movement, Bust Magazine

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Interview with Arnold Schroeder of Fight Like an Animal, a wonderful and endessly fascinating show that looks through 20 years of experience of hardcore climate activism, at why left political movements are so weak and ineffective and how to change that, and which covers everything from history, to political psychology, to anthropology, psychiatry, animal behaviour, religious cults, and much more.  

I highly recommend everyone check out his show, and dig deep into the extensive bibliographies for every episode, which in and of themselves are a gold mine.

And look for my interview on Arnolds show in the coming days

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