RedCloud [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2021

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  • Their general thesis seems to be that these societies were highly conscious about the political and hierarchical implications of their modes of production/ positions of authority … you name it, and thus consciously decided to form their societies in a way that accommodated their preferred type of social relations.

    I don't think this is the main theses of the book, although they do infer this at times. I think their main goal is to simply dispel myths surrounding early man: that they were all innocent, or all violent, or all stupid; or that certain ways of organising societies were natural or inevitable, or that human societies all developed in the same linear way. By helping people to gain a new understanding of the past, I think they're trying to help people think differently about how things could be in the future. That, for example, a city doesn't necessarily have to be hierarchical and authoritarian in order for it to function. There's also the stuff about finding out how we got "stuck" but I'm not really sure where they're going with that since they've only touched on it briefly where I am in the book.

    That said, I think that in the places where they do argue that some societies were arranged in a conscious way isn't necessarily incorrect per se. Like its possible that some societies had an aristocracy at some point but ended up overthrowing them and arranging things with the intention of stopping it from happening again - this wouldn't be too far-fetched if we're to believe earlier humans were as intelligent as we are, why wouldn't some of them seek to overthrow authoritarian systems just as we do, or punish those who seek to place themselves over others in the first place? Their thoughts are shaped by their conditions and experiences just as ours are, so I don't think its too unreasonable to say that some of these more egalitarian societies were responses to or attempts to prevent more hierarchical ones. Although, even if that was the case, I agree that the Davids would need to do a much better job in proving it, if something like that could even be proved at all.

    And with this framing, I don’t really see how this: [...] is supported by this [...]

    Yeah I agree with this. From what I can tell, their source doesn't exactly back up what they say, and I don't like that they don't mention the climate factors at play. Its still possible that they're partly right - that more people could have kept farming using the more resilient crops but perhaps chose not to because the crops failures made them lose trust in the benefits of agriculture, so they turned back to foraging the plentiful supply of wild hazelnuts instead. This could also explain the several centuries without agriculture even with the favourable climate restored. But again, they need to be more explicit with their reasoning for thinking it was a conscious decision and they need to provide better evidence for this.



  • The fluid social hierarchies of some societies are assumed without providing evidence, (I vaguely remember the talking about the builders of stonehenge), and it seemed to me that the thesis that they had a seasonal dependent social structure comes mostly by arguing from analogy to previous examples.

    I would really disagree with this, Graeber and Wengrow do provide evidence to back up what they're saying in the part you refer to, although I think part of the problem is that this evidence isn't presented clearly and explicitly in the main body of the text and they rely on the reader paying attention to the notes.

    At Stonehenge, for example, there have been a large amount of pig remains found. Most of these were "immature" (just less than a year old but not neonatal) and the bones showed evidence of them being butchered, cooked, and discarded in pits. Due to pigs generally being born in the springtime, and given the age of most of the pigs that have been found, its very likely that these were slaughtered and killed during the winter period. There is no evidence of large amounts of pigs being reared around the area of Stonehenge, and analyses of the bones of some of these pigs indicates that they were reared elsewhere in Britain - some as far away as Scotland - and brought to Stonehenge to be eaten (although admittedly I don't really understand exactly how this analysis of the bones is done, that part went a little over my head). That the remains of the pigs include many heads, hooves, etc. also suggests that the pigs were not butchered elsewhere and the meat brought to the site, but that they were likely transported along these long distances alive and then butchered at Stonehenge. There is also evidence that the stones that aligned with the midwinter sun had been adorned with decorations.

    This all happened in a period of roughly 2,000 years in which people in Britain had moved away from agriculture and reverted to foraging and herding livestock. This was likely caused by a colder, wetter period that negatively impacted crop yields and caused most people to turn away from agriculture - even for hundreds of years after the wetter period had ended (with the exceptions of people on some Scottish islands and a small amount of people in mainland Scotland and Northern England who stuck with agriculture but changed to more resilient crops).

    We also know that there were dozens, possibly even hundreds of people buried at Stonehenge, and that many of the bodies buried there pre-date the structures that were built. Because of this, some believe that the stones act as a monument to those buried there and, given that many of the people seem to have been buried with items, weapons, and decorations, some suggest it might be the case that these were important people, perhaps the leaders of a clan and/or their descendants. That this might be a place for ritually paying respects to either living or dead (or both) members of some kind of aristocracy could also explain why these people would be willing to spend thousands and thousands of hours transporting very heavy stones from places as far as 150 miles away to build such a monument. That they would go through the trouble of transporting live pigs that had not even reached maturity (when the most amount of meat could be gained from them) yet all the way across the country every year to be eaten at these feasts, I think, also lends weight to the idea that these may have been given as some kind of tribute.

    When you put all of this together, I don't think it is at all unreasonable for Graeber and Wengrow to argue that people in Britain in this period lived in smaller, dispersed foraging and herding societies who would congregate in the winter for a feast, possibly in deference to some kind of aristocracy (whether living or dead). Of course we'll almost certainly never know for sure about any of these things, and there's obviously going to be other theories on all of this, but I think there is definitely evidence to back up Graeber and Wengrow's claims - they, at times, just do quite a poor job of making this evidence clear to the reader, probably in an attempt to make it more accessible to your average reader.


  • As ever, I'm behind with the reading and I'm only on chapter 5, but so far I really like the book. I feel like it does exactly what the Davids set out to do in the introduction which is dispel many of the myths surrounding early humans - whether this be the noble, innocent savage, the violent savage, or the stupid savage - and early human societies - such as certain hierarchies or ways of arranging things being natural or inevitable. I do think that the Davids sometimes make some claims that they don't really back up properly with evidence or sources, and I think they sometimes can linger on a particular point too much or invest a little too much in a particular source but on the whole they make their overall argument well and I look forward to the rest of the book. Hopefully I can catch up with the reading and contribute more to the discussion next week.






  • I agree on Kandiaronks, I don't really see how the authors thought a second-hand account of what he supposedly said, written like a decade after the fact by a guy who probably wasn't being particularly honest would be a good source to base a large section of the chapter on. But as you said, it was very entertaining reading his roasts of European society.

    I don't really mind the "completely rewrite human history" angle they've taken though. Obviously it doesn't really seem as spectacular as that to us, but then again they're preaching to the choir here. I think it would probably be much more illuminating for those who share more of their views with the likes of Pinker.


  • I think on some level the only viable position is to at least allow for a tiny bit of room for human agency and the power of ideas. Otherwise, there’s not much reason to choose to pick up a radical text (or to choose to do much of anything!). Material conditions may give us a revolution, but we can’t leave the heavy work, the decisions, or what we do with our day up to material conditions.

    I think you're both thinking about things the wrong way. Its not that a revolution is historically determined and that in the meantime we could just use our agency and ideas to do some good in the world or to prepare ourselves for said revolution. A revolution born out of material conditions, and the actions and ideas of individual agents are not independent of one another, they are one and the same - the revolution will only happen precisely because those agents involved have chosen to take the necessary steps to make it happen in the first place, and those agents will have chosen to take those steps because of the material reality of which they are a product. The development of history both produces the thoughts and actions of these agents and is then itself advanced by those thoughts and actions. In other words, even if historical materialism shows us that the revolution is an inevitability, it will still not fall from heaven, it will still need to be constructed by revolutionaries, there will still have to be people to carry it out and bring it to fruition.

    I think that suggestions that revolutions are an inevitability that our agency has no or little involvement in not only misunderstands materialism but also kinda implies that we are external observers of this phenomenon, waiting for it to unfold in front of us rather than us being subsumed and acting within it. I feel that this kind of thinking can too often cause people to downplay the importance of their own actions and struggles and what they themselves can do to contribute towards building the revolutionary movement when really I think a proper understanding of materialism should encourage us to get involved in struggles and do what we can to contribute to building the revolution.

    Materialism understood in this way, I don't think this work by Graeber and Wengrow can be considered idealist. Challenging capitalist myths and enabling people to grasp a different conception of history and of what the future might be - as this book seeks to do - is an important step in opening people up to more revolutionary ideas. This is particularly important in those who are not currently on the left, as expanding the number of people who share our views is quite obviously beneficial to the movement. I think drawing in people with different political views is something Graeber was particularly good at, especially with Bullshit Jobs, Debt, and now hopefully this book too. If none of us ever sought to change people's minds and left it entirely up to "material conditions" to do it for us, we'd never achieve anything.

    "It is far more difficult —and far more precious— to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist, to be able to champion the interests of the revolution (by propaganda, agitation and organisation) in non-revolutionary bodies, and quite often in downright reactionary bodies, in a non-revolutionary situation, among the masses who are incapable of immediately appreciating the need for revolutionary methods of action." - Lenin, 'Left Wing Communism'.






  • Yeah I think there are some similarities. When MLK was killed he was in Memphis to support some striking workers and he'd also recently started the "Poor People's Campaign". I know that Bobby Seale has also claimed that MLK had reached out to him to see about him and the Black Panthers working together but he was killed before anything could come of it.