User:RD/9k/The dawn of everything (Q618)
Main entry
- The dawn of everything (Graeber) [1] -> this book is claimed to disprove early historical materialism.
looking at this... it seems like it would be a problem for the very first texts by Marx but it wouldn't be a problem for meta-Marxism. meta-Marxism is able to accommodate the concept of transition from any Bauplan into any Bauplan, while also asking if any particular transition is a good idea.
I have to say, the phenomenon of anarchists constantly proposing transition to tribal society makes me angry. not because I think there is anything uniquely wrong with tribal societies that haven't transitioned to industrial societies. but because I already know transitioning the people that exist in industrial societies today to tribal society would be a terrible idea. the people that exist today have a real way of turning friendship toxic. I swear Christian theocracy would get worse and you'd get violent, malevolent sea-crusaders.
Motifs or claims (book reviews)
- Kandiaronk invented the Enlightenment (Lahontan, Graeber) [2] -> wow. that is a bold one. I can't say I'm surprised after seeing various things that looked like anarchists were claiming that Liberal-republicanism was the start of transition to anarchism that they would flat-out go all the way to claiming that this person named Kandiarok got the whole thing started by bringing people 'the way to free themselves' that Europeans presumably garbled. to be honest, this seems like a fun book, although I doubt it's correct.
- Organized violence has nothing to do with how people eat and occupy space / Classifying these groups according to how much they farmed, fished or hunted tells us little of their actual histories -> when you say it out loud like that, you see that there's a problem in the second part: occupy space. Graeber's book seems to be taking whole structures and splitting them in two, then trying to analyze the actions of the pieces, weirdly like Rothenberg split all interactions between people in two. if you look at the whole tribute structure as a single proto-empire, nothing is confusing. the group exacting tribute are doing that partly because they're part of the structure they've created. I don't really know this history well enough to tell you "why" they did that. I'm guessing there was maybe some kind of war and a classic process of throwing on debt as a substitute for continuing war; if that's anything close to accurate, you have the actual tension between the groups as independent identities to deal with, where the more the two populations inherently don't get along the harder it will be to put them together peacefully without an empire or a State forming.
- respect for the personal autonomy of the other (Leacock) [3] -> I like this article for saying things that sound like anarchism because they are in reference to a tribal population or similar, but not making it sound stupid. everything is in context. it actually bothers to say, here are the gatherer and hunter societies, you can see what they do, you can see what the discourse on egalitarianism is, the tension between the "close, collective community" and respect for individuals produces egalitarianism if it goes right. yes, fine! you have the material group of people and then the particular conflicts they go through that produce particular values.
bush people can have tent of freedom poles. it does make material sense there. there will be no mockery. I just do not like when it is sloppily applied to industrial societies like it's trivially easy in that context. - A form of societal structure is the space of variations possible before turning into another form of structure (a historical period is; a Bauplan is; Callinicos 2004) [4] -> wow, a regular Marxist defines Bauplans
this article is making me think more clearly about something I hadn't before: part of the reason I talk about "Bauplans" is to leave a little room for societies shifting to a different kind of structure for reasons that don't look like they have to do with production. although many times that's because people will just be perceiving that wrong and using the word 'production' wrong; for instance, First World countries putting pressure on workers' states to try to crack them open in order to fully integrate them into one freakishly big 'Napoleonism' is production, it's a logistical structure of store owners, retail stores, manufacturers, and finally workers. why is it perfectly intuitive to me that retail stores have to 'produce' things out of somewhere and anarchists can't figure this out.
Motifs or claims
Non-unique motifs or claims
- tribal empire -> the motif of various free-floating populations, tribal populations, or indigenous populations ending up in arrangements where one tribe has dominated another that it extracts tribute from. the anarchists are right about one thing: it's a good question to ask why exactly these happen.
for me the Aztec people versus the surrounding tribes comes to mind, although if I remember anything right they were somewhat stationary and that's getting into regular empires instead of perfectly fitting this. you could not really ask me about the history of the world's many tribal populations. but I don't really intend to exclude them from meta-Marxism. in my mind meta-Marxism is more tolerant than early versions of Marxism of different societies staying at different stages and existing on different trajectories in plurality. there is room in it for tribal populations to declare themselves to be an anarchism if they feel like it and not really have to fit themselves into a particular nearby named Marxism as long as they are willing to carve out their own place to be and leave nothing ambiguous. getting a named Marxism to cede a historical land? okay and good. making agreements to head off potential disputes between two populations when things are changing and there are new developments? good. the only thing tribal populations could do that meta-Marxism wouldn't like is starting disputes without trying to reach an actual goal and using anarchist logic to justify perpetual war. that is bad; anything but that can be integrated into meta-Marxism. to be fair, I'm saying that's a thing anarchists from First World populations do and are rather bad about, not a thing tribal populations would necessarily do.
Related
- Colonialism is when you don't doubt every single belief you have; this is to imply that if you don't doubt Third World national sovereignty and consider the benefits of being conquered by the United States you are basically a colonizer, imperialist, tyrant, or dictator [5] -> we really need to push back on David Graeber. this has gotten entirely out of hand and now standard cookie-cutter center-Liberals are citing his theory of anarchism describing various tribal populations in North America and elsewhere, ultimately having this weird accidental result of framing Native Americans as imperialist collaborators who all hate Third World countries and would just as soon the United States conquer them and exploit them as long as it spares the tribal populations there.
the tribal populations didn't do that to anybody. David Graeber did. so he's the one that should be taking the blame out of the two - Colonialism is when you don't doubt every single belief you have -> aw god you know what really gets me about this. that for the purpose it's intended for it's one of the most inefficient ways you could do it. they're so fixated on not checking things against history and reality that they go for the most inefficient route possible to get rid of bad beliefs. when that's totally inconsistent with people trying to teach history to get people to be less prejudiced. you should always ask people why it's worth learning history and why we shouldn't all refuse to if everything you learn could be wrong or prejudiced, or if we're supposed to focus on the utopian tomorrow instead of today
- Anarchists and prior-centuries fur traders in North America broadly have the same ideology, which is to say that when fur traders trapped as many beavers as possible and allowed rivers to drain into deserts, this event was approximately equivalent to an atrocity committed by anarchists, and anarchists' claim to be allied with tribal populations' attempts to restore natural ecosystems and transition from empty devastation back to tribal society is to some extent a lie [6] -> I can't be 100% confident but. David Graeber. I have my eye on you. I'm beginning to see through your
. - Blue anarchists do not materially function as allies of indigenous people -> see beaver proposition
- Kandiaronk betrayed his people / Kandiaronk screwed over the indigenous peoples of North America by letting Europeans think that reason could fix bourgeois society -> if you're going to claim that Kandiaronk invented the Enlightenment and in the development of countries overlook the relativity process of things originating separately, then this is just as fair.
Ideologies or fields
- ES / academic anarchisms