The question is - why would you need to? People attach that kind of value to things nowadays because that’s how the system has been structured, but alternative systems have been in place. And nobody is that much of a stranger that there can’t be a trust network of some sort that you can build between yourselves - I annually participate in one such network with 10 000 people.
To be frank, this sounds like the sort of hippyish stuff that got bandied about in the latter 1960s: “if only we let go of crass materialism and showed more peace and love to our brothers and sisters”. The thing was though, when said people formed communes to try to drop out of The Establishment, they quickly discovered that commune members who spent more time smoking weed than working didn’t accomplish much. Sooner or later people get tired of their “brother” being a worthless sponger.
I have no idea what @Persimmon is saying that’s intended to be a reply to me. Either Persimmon didn’t understand me or I’m not understanding Persimmon. Perhaps both simultaneously.
The post to which Persimmon was replying was one in which I said that the system of money isn’t rewarding or punishing people effectively, if the intent is to get people to carry their own weight and only partake of the share of the goodies that they’re properly entitled to as a consequence of their labors and participations.
Maybe Persimmon thought I was recommending a better and more efficient way of implementing rewards and punishments? (I wasn’t). The majority of Persimmon’s post involves comparing the unfair differences in amounts of money people earn for different professions. The preface and tone seem to imply that this would be a counterargument to what I was saying. (It isn’t, or at least I don’t see how it could be).
I guess I didn’t write very clearly.
I was saying money doesn’t work. (At least not if the purpose of money is defined as “making sure everyone does their fair share and only consumes their fair share”). Any complaint about inequalities and unfairnesses that still involve money are not counterarguments to that.
I was pointing out that other economic systems have existed in which sharing the wealth gives you a reputation and reputation functions as currency (meaning they don’t use money, the way you get people to do things or share things with you is to have this kind of reputation — period!!) I went on to say that I wasn’t recommending we switch to that modality per se but to think of it as Exhibit A for “yes we’ve done other systems, including those that don’t even use money”.
I’m no hippy, and egalitarianism doesn’t have to mean a suicidal degree of tolerance. Social ostracism and peer pressure are valid tools for conducting non-transactional societies (as was already alluded to by LHOD’s Alan example) .
Does the individual have needs (food, shelter, dignity)? If so, should every need be a protected right?
Do groups of individuals (ethnic and cultural minorities, economic classes) have protective rights? Or people not yet born, or even conceived, have the right to a world not polluted by us or loaded with crushing debt?
So far, so good. Next: does the overall group: Society in general, have rights: protection from those who hoard at the top, or refuse to contribute at the bottom? Can we reward individual honest effort, while not rewarding cheaters and backstabbers? Can we reward group effort, but not impose group punishment?
Can we develop a system that respects all these rights, conflicts notwithstanding? Are we even trying at this point?
We can. We just haven’t because some of the people getting screwed over have decided that they would rather keep getting screwed if it means that those they don’t like get screwed over even more. The way to reach that goal is to convince this group to change their minds and elect a government that will make sure that those who hoard the wealth are unable to do so.
Thanks for the feedback & book recs. I’ve got some work to do here.
There’s several threads here that discuss/mention the book: especially - the one explicitly:
and this one extensively:
I used to think agriculture was obviously superior and that’s why humans switched to it. But than I got to thinking about it, if most of what I knew was hunting & gathering, how are you going to convince me to give it all up give this new farming thing a try? Okay, realistically it’s not like anyone suddenly discovered agriculture and decided it was a good idea to switch over. I tend to believe that people don’t make wild changes to their lifestyle without something driving that change. Perhaps humans got so good at hunting and gathering it became hard for them to sustain their population?
More likely that the gathering part slowly morphed into planting, leaving and gathering later, and then into sticking around and gathering. Lots of cultures that were thought to be just foragers turned out to have quite sophisticated horticultural practices - using fire to encourage the growth of favoured edible plants, for instance.
Other areas like the Levant favoured year-round sedentary HG settlements with wild cereals.
And then there’s the influence of climate change.
My hypothesis on agriculture (and cities, for that matter) is that they evolved as a defense against nomadic raiding cultures. Sedentary, organized, large populations were the best defense against those who survived by attacking the local tribes and taking resources (and probably slaves too).
I found Professor Michael Sandel explain better what I’ve been trying to say. Since I am not allowed to post any links, you’ll just have to go to youtube and type in: “Talk to Aljazeera - Professor Michael Sandel”
starting at 12:38
The challenge with global capitalism and justice.
While global capitalism brings more money into this world, most of it generally goes to those at the top.
Earlier in the interview, he also addresses the same thing I brought up about whether it is just that someone who plays pro sports can make 30 million dollars a year and a teacher only 45k. He also believes it needs to connected to “contribution” to the global community.
Thanks for those thread links. My library had The Dawn of Everything immediately available & I’m into it already. Once I’m far enough into the book I’ll poke into those threads. I now have two of his other books on hold which will eventually arrive: Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. For whatever reason, his Debt was not available at all. I’ve got some backup libraries to access before I turn to Amazon used.
While we’re all talking about capitalism and alternatives, I’m also in the middle of this semi-related book whose cover pretty well tells the tale of the contents: Trade Wars are Class Wars by Matthew C Klein & Michael Pettis.
Their point being that export-led mercantilism as practiced by first the UK, later the US, then the Asian “Tigers”, and now China (plus a still-gathering attempt by India) is a serial effort to impoverish your own workers by selling their excess production to other countries instead of to the workers themselves, while keeping the gains for the capital class of the exporting country. Fascinating stuff. Especially when you consider how things change once there is no “other” to sell to.
I remember talking about that in one of my anthropology classes many, many years ago. I want to say it was the difference between agriculture and cultivation. With cultivation, you just made environmental changes that were favorable to whatever plant life was already there so it would thrive.
Trying to imagine the May Day sales for Socialism Prime subscribers.
Maybe primitive man learned Capitalism from crows
** nods to both of you **
The lectures I attended stressed one thing in particular: hunters and gatherers didn’t have a strong vested interest in any particular individual growing things as theirs; they were nomadic pretty much by definition. But in order to plant a bunch of stuff and tend it, you have to defend it. The nomadic hunters and gatherers wandering from the east may have no comprehension of the newly-minted farmers’ “yo, dudes, these are OUR crops”, and even if they do, not much reason to respect that. On top of that, the planting and tending is a lot of hard work in and of itself.
The in-between stuff like MrDibble describes mostly doesn’t invoke that, although it probably generates a little bit of “hey these are ours” if they happen to be right there in the area when nomadic types come over yon hill.
Once a lot of people are defending what they’ve planted, being all territorial about it and all, it probably has a tendency to spread, because that sort of ruins the nomadic hunter-gatherer technique. But the latter is a lot less labor-intensive.
Several of my profesors said, in essence, “Why the fuck would we want to do agriculture until we had no choice?” although to be fair neither they nor I was around at the time to watch. Still, it’s a pretty compelling conjecture at least for me and from my vantage point.
ETA: they also said the areas where earliest permanent dwellings and settled societies seem to have originated were fertile areas surrounded by far less hospitable areas, which means once a batch of folks switches to farming and defending, saying “screw this, we’re going out over those hills and find areas where we can still be nomadic hunter-gatherers” wasn’t a readily available option.
HGs can be very territorial in terms of hunting rights or foraging locations. The richer the locale in resources, the more territorial they are.
No. There were many sedentary HG cultures.
Auda Abu Tayi: The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor! Because I am a river to my people!
I came across a social media post from a random 29 year old Argentinian socialist that made me think of this thread.
Basically, the thought that came to mind is, I tend to not trust anyone who has a crystal clear vision of what the world would look like after major social upheaval. I think such certainty speaks poorly of some aspect of their judgment, and I don’t think anyone can even start to guess. Yes, things once thought unimaginable have happened, but it seems to me that any contemporary prediction that came true in the midst of the millions that didn’t just got lucky. It could be better, it could be worse, hell, it could be both at the same time. But when the key is change of a certain magnitude, I don’t see how the results aren’t basically a crapshoot. We humans are unpredictable that way.
Hm, reading this again, I’m not sure how clearly I’ve expressed what I’m thinking. I’ll have to consider if there’s a better way to put it into words…