Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by Brecht

The question of so-called human nature is one of the most commonly raised arguments against socialism. It's one of those illusory categories like free will. Human consciousness and society are always in a state of change. The way we think is determined by our social environment. If there was something like an objective human nature, what would be the point of fighting for a better world? The entire history of mankind is a history of permanent change. If the way people think didn't change, most of us would still be feudal serfs or worse because that would be considered as a natural order of things which you may call "human nature".

It is believed that settling into villages and adopting agriculture led to the creation of private property and patriarchal culture. Prior to that, lineage was traced through the female line and tribes were egalitarian democracies. Even ten thousand years later, hoarding, selfishness and greed don't sit well with most of us. The subjugation of women is a Pyrrhic victory at best. In all likelihood, humanity would tend towards more equal ways of distributing subsistence and wealth if the trashing of our environment had not caused the Sixth Extinction Event.

[Brecht]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

It is believed that settling into villages and adopting agriculture led to the creation of private property and patriarchal culture. Prior to that, lineage was traced through the female line and tribes were egalitarian democracies. Even ten thousand years later, hoarding, selfishness and greed don't sit well with most of us. The subjugation of women is a Pyrrhic victory at best. In all likelihood, humanity would tend towards more equal ways of distributing subsistence and wealth if the trashing of our environment had not caused the Sixth Extinction Event.

Yes and among the first to support this thesis was the great American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Both Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by Morgan in their writings on ancient societies.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

It is believed that settling into villages and adopting agriculture led to the creation of private property and patriarchal culture. Prior to that, lineage was traced through the female line and tribes were egalitarian democracies. Even ten thousand years later, hoarding, selfishness and greed don't sit well with most of us.

This is more feminist fantasy than anthropology or archaeology.

I've lived in Aborginal communities in Australia -- just two generations removed from hunter gatherers.

Feminist fantasies about an idyllic past don't last long when you've seen the real thing. Australian Aboriginal societies were not matriarchal, and were not at all nice to women. While they were "egalitarian" in a material sense -- no one had anything, basically-- they were not remotely egalitarian in a political hierarchical sense.

Western anthropologists have a history of projecting their idea of Eden onto "noble savages"-- says much more about the West than about subjects. Margaret Meade, for example, is all wrong about Polynesian society.

That's not to say that there weren't gentle and welcoming hunter-gatherers; just as today you can find Quakers alongside lunatic fundamentalists. Humanity has always had a diversity, right back down to the most ancient remains we have. We now have not a few sites of mass slaughter from prehistoric times.

As just one sample of the literature:

Originally Posted by Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya

The nature of inter-group relations among prehistoric hunter-gatherers remains disputed, with arguments in favour and against the existence of warfare before the development of sedentary societies1,2. Here we report on a case of inter-group violence towards a group of hunter-gatherers from Nataruk, west of Lake Turkana, which during the late Pleistocene/early Holocene period extended about 30 km beyond its present-day shore3. Ten of the twelve articulated skeletons found at Nataruk show evidence of having died violently at the edge of a lagoon, into which some of the bodies fell. The remains from Nataruk are unique, preserved by the particular conditions of the lagoon with no evidence of deliberate burial. They offer a rare glimpse into the life and death of past foraging people, and evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

{snip}

Ten of the 12 skeletons in situ show evidence of major traumatic lesions that would have been lethal in the immediate- to short-term. These include five, possibly six, cases of sharp-force trauma to the head and/or neck probably associated with arrow wounds, five cases of blunt-force trauma to the head, two cases of possible ante-mortem depressed bilateral fractures of the knees, two cases of multiple fractures to the right hand, and a case of fractured ribs. Only two of the skeletons in situ show no apparent evidence of peri-mortem trauma, although in both cases the position of the hands suggests the individuals may have been bound at the time of death. In all of the cases of cranial trauma, the compression of bones is localized and cannot be explained by taphonomic forces, as unaffected cranial elements retain the original size and shape around the fractured portions. Three artefacts were found within or embedded in two of the bodies (Fig. 3). The first of these was an obsidian bladelet found embedded in one of the male crania; the others were two microliths, a chert lunate, and an obsidian trapeze, found inside the pelvic and thoracic cavities of a male skeleton; all three showed impact scars. Interestingly, an obsidian lithic was also found embedded in the foot bones of a skeleton at the nearby site of Lothagam27. The fact that obsidian is relatively rare in other early Holocene Later Stone Age sites of southwest Turkana may suggest that the two groups confronted at Nataruk had different home ranges. The presence of projectile points embedded in the skeletal remains or within the body cavity is considered diagnostic of inter-group conflict, while fractures resulting from blunt and sharp force trauma, particularly to the head, neck, ribs, and hands, are indicative of deliberate violent trauma

Note that we have very little human remains from this period, so people have been free to invest prehistory with their fantasies in the absence of evidence. Now that we've gotten good at looking for human remains, we find more who were slaughtered, either as a group like in Turkana, or individually as with Otzi ("the Iceman")

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

This is more feminist fantasy than anthropology or archaeology.

I've lived in Aborginal communities in Australia -- just two generations removed from hunter gatherers.

Feminist fantasies about an idyllic past don't last long when you've seen the real thing. Australian Aboriginal societies were not matriarchal, and were not at all nice to women. While they were "egalitarian" in a material sense -- no one had anything, basically-- they were not remotely egalitarian in a political hierarchical sense.

I was basing my statements on Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society and The Creation of Inequality by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus. Women had a voice and lineage was traced through the female line. That does not mean that life was idyllic and peaceful.

I am not sure how that worked. Tribes had to have some kind of mutual trading relationship with neighboring groups. Most likely that worked like the Lakota (Sioux) and Cheyenne being allies against their Crow and Arapaho neighbors, or the Haudenosaunee confederate tribes waging war on the bordering neighbors. When times were hard, a tribe would need help from neighbors. But we also know that ambushes, raids and skirmishes with neighboring groups were a frequent, even weekly, occurrence. Per encounter deaths were low, but given the frequency, few men survived to be elders.

Thus we know that in many tribes Native American girls were encouraged to be promiscuous prior to marriage and divorce occurred when the couple found themselves at odds. In several groups men moved in with the wife's clan upon marriage and if things didn't work out, he left with what he came with. Flannery and Marcus noted that certain cultures switched to male dominance, inequality, and empire building with the advent of agriculture.

One need look no further than the confederacy of tribes whites call the Iroquois to note that matriarchal cultures could be extremely aggressive and warlike. Also, women did most of the agricultural work, thus controlled the produce. Men were expected to provide meat and fish. Plus, the men had the duty of waging war on neighboring groups. Occasionally "meat" was provided in the form of a captured enemy who was tortured, then butchered. Note that the women would do some of the torturing.

Archeology has provided anthropologists with much information about the transition to civilization in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. For whatever reason, the Australian aborigines never moved beyond hunter gatherer.

I have a friend who is fond of observing that "our ancestors would kill us and take our stuff." That seems pretty accurate to me.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

I was basing my statements on Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society and The Creation of Inequality by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus. Women had a voice and lineage was traced through the female line. That does not mean that life was idyllic and peaceful.

Lewis Henry Morgan died in 1881; knowledge of human prehistory at that time was little more than mythology; his work is obsolete. Kent Flannery is more modern (born in the 1930s), but this is still not really up to date.

The paper I cited Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16477 is dated 2016, and far more accurately reflects present knowledge of human prehistory, which has expanded greatly in recent years. See AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR CRANIAL TRAUMA IN THE BRITISH NEOLITHIC [2005] for a look at the prevalence of bashed in skulls in human remains from stone age Britain
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...14E997F81DB38E

There have been more than a few other mass slaughter sites found, for example

The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe [2015]
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/36/11217
-- this paper also suggests that some of the deceased were tortured before being killed.

. . . and we've really just started looking in a systematic way for prehistoric human remains. It takes a ton of work, and we have very few sites-- still among the sites we do have, we keep finding evidence of violence. It seems plenty common among early humans-- indeed, far more early humans appear to die violent deaths than do modern ones.


"Women had a voice and lineage was traced through the female line. "

-- some places, some occasions, perhaps. Other places and times not at all. The "peaceful nurturing goddess culture" which is only later disrupted by toxic masculinity is a completely modern and ahistorical fantasy.

We have encountered many hunter gatherers. Some are matrilineal, some patrilineal. Some are peaceful. Some torture for fun. The imputation of some Eden to man before property is an entirely modern affectation, a product of us, not the hunter gatherers we've encountered.

"Marriage" in many hunter gatherer societies -- including the Aboriginals I spent time with-- was barely distinguishable from kidnapping and rape. Where I was, near the Roper River in the Northern Territory, the traditional "marriage" was for a young man to go across the river and carry off a girl from another clan. This wasn't necessarily voluntary. Oh, and these folks had been, apparently up until the early 20th century, cannibals (practical-- protein is scarce). They still joke about "long pig" (human meat) . . . no one does it any more, but they did remember that they particularly prized kidney fat.

Among the much studied Yanomami people of the Amazon, girls are promised to men as early as age 6, and they're polygamous. This is not some feminist nurturing society either.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

I've lived in Aborginal communities in Australia -- just two generations removed from hunter gatherers.

Feminist fantasies about an idyllic past don't last long when you've seen the real thing. Australian Aboriginal societies were not matriarchal, and were not at all nice to women. While they were "egalitarian" in a material sense -- no one had anything, basically-- they were not remotely egalitarian in a political hierarchical sense.

He's 100% spot on there, not at all nice to women is an understatement.
It was like that for many past generations and still is like that in today.

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by Estreeter

He's 100% spot on there, not at all nice to women is an understatement.
It was like that for many past generations and still is like that in today.

Perhaps this is why the native peoples of Australia never moved beyond a primitive hunter gatherer stage. Or was it a lack of plants to domesticate?

The lack of draft animals in the Americas may have impeded the development of agriculture in the Americas, but there is evidence that the forest dwellers of Amazonia and the Southeastern United States were actively managing their environment to favor edible species.

We have evidence of women having a more elevated status in some North American tribes, some European groups, and in Polynesia. In all known cultures, violence and male warrior cults are pervasive. Our chimpanzee and orangutan cousins provide evidence that male violence is a common feature of primates. Indeed, male violence and intergroup violence seems to be found in all sorts of species.

Steven Pinker makes a good argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature that modern human civilization has greatly reduced the level of human violence. We will have to see if it lasts, because the 20th century provided plenty of evidence that we still possess plenty of murderous tendencies.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

Perhaps this is why the native peoples of Australia never moved beyond a primitive hunter gatherer stage. Or was it a lack of plants to domesticate?

Oddly, the ancestors of the Australian aborigines were much more technologically sophisticated than their more recent descendants.

The Tasmanian aboriginals, for example, had once had the ability to cross oceans -- they lost that ability.

Why?

One hypothesis is that if someone with the knowledge to do something dies -- the community as a whole loses that knowledge. Australia was once a much more fertile continent than it is today-- central Australia had lakes and rivers, savannah-- now there's just desert.

So aboriginal populations seem to have become more isolated over time, seems likely they lost much of the cultural/technological capital that they'd had.

But bear in mind-- the ancestors of Australian aboriginals had been extraordinary human explorers. They're out of Africa early, cross through South Asia, get to Australia 60,000 years before anyone else.

So we don't really know. Why did the Polynesians retain the ability to navigate across thousands of miles of open ocean, while Australians lost the ability to cross the Bass Straight?

Maybe Steve the navigator and Al the guy who could caulk boats died before teaching someone else. Human capital is more easily preserved in a dense population.

But that's just a guess.

Originally Posted by Brian249x

We have evidence of women having a more elevated status in some North American tribes, some European groups, and in Polynesia.

The operative word is "some". If you look at native American pre-contact history -- there were peaceful tribes, and there were violent tribes, and some in between.

So what we know of pre-history and hunter-gatherers doesn't support the idea of some nurturing Goddess culture. Just the normal range of human behavior, from less violent to more violent. What hunter-gatherers don't have is a professional warrior class. Every man is a warrior, when they have to be, but none of them spend all their time on warrior skills.

Once you get beyond hunter-gatherers, people start to specialize: that makes society much more productive, but that's also the dawn of what we call "war" -- not just a fight between two clans, but systematic military conquest. But even then, we see peaceful civilizations, and much more aggressive ones.

Originally Posted by Brian249x

Steven Pinker makes a good argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature that modern human civilization has greatly reduced the level of human violence. We will have to see if it lasts, because the 20th century provided plenty of evidence that we still possess plenty of murderous tendencies.

Yes, both at the level of mass violence, and at the level of criminal violence. But even there, you can see tremendous range. Pinker is pretty convincing on this . . .

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

So what we know of pre-history and hunter-gatherers doesn't support the idea of some nurturing Goddess culture. Just the normal range of human behavior, from less violent to more violent. What hunter-gatherers don't have is a professional warrior class. Every man is a warrior, when they have to be, but none of them spend all their time on warrior skills.

I have never been arguing for "nurturing Goddess culture" although the druid priestesses seem to have been skilled in herbal medicine. Queen Boudica demonstrates what happened when you pissed off a Celtic woman. Irish legends contain similar tales and we know that Greek encounters with Scythian women were the basis of the Amazon legends. The goddess cults were based on the awe in the presence of the mystery of women creating new life. But the cults never stopped the practice of acquiring brides through rape and kidnapping.

In the one group of related Native American tribes that included the Haudenosaunee, women had a voice in the councils and could depose the male war chief if he disrespected the grandmothers. Since the males moved in with the wives's families, you didn't have the concentrated male clans in the village and that gave the women much control over running the lodges and the villages. The long houses contained a whole clan's worth of related women and males from other clans due to the marriage restrictions. These tribes had the advantage of limiting intramural conflict and related casualties, which in turn preserved warrior numbers for external aggression. The women in these tribes had a well earned reputation for their fiendish torture of war captives. It also seems that the men spent most of their time away from the village with only older males and youths as a guard force. This makes sense if you have ever been around family structures dominated by female relatives. The men would be only too happy to get away and do guy stuff like hunting game and ambushing the warriors of enemy tribes.

In other tribes, lineage was traced through the male lines and polygamy was common. Likely, polygamy was necessary due to higher levels of warrior attrition.

[Mal Hombre]

That shows that a society with strong roles for women is not necessarily peaceful,The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee exterminated the Hurons.They were known to practise ritual cannibalism,The name "Mohawk" is derived from Mohok an Algonkian word meaning Flesh Eaters..