What Is Politics podcast

Politics is the only practical discipline where none of the main terms have any clear consensus definitions. Scholars write entire books about things like capitalism, markets, socialism, government, democracy, politics, the left and right, without defining them, or really knowing what they’re talking about.

When such fundamental words have no meaning they can be manipulated by powerful people to pit potential allies against each other, and to align people with their actual enemies, on top of making everyone generally more confused and apathetic than they would be otherwise.

If this was the situation in architecture or engineering we’d have buildings crashing down all around us. And this is exactly what’s happening in politics today.

The point of this podcast/YouTube channel is make sense of all of this muddle so that we can all understand what’s going on all around us and figure what it is that we want when it comes to politics, and how we can achieve it.

1. Worbs: When Political Terms Have No Meaning

Politics is unique among practical fields in that almost all of the main political terms are worbs: words that everyone (including academics and journalists) uses without really knowing what they mean.

This rots our brains. It makes us easy to manipulate and it divides people who share many common goals into competing tribes of hooting apes, and prevents us from achieving common goals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3valcuAqMA

Script

HELLO FELLOW KIDS! and welcome to the inaugural episode of the What is Politics podcast!

Why does the world need another political podcast? Because we are going to fill some of giant gaps left by most other wonderful and terrible political podcasts out there:

Gap #1 is that most other political podcasts don’t teach you how to actually do politics – like you want rent control in your area, you want a wage increase at your work place, how does one go about making these sorts of things happen?

In the introductory video on the What is Politics YouTube channel, called What is Politics, and Why Should I Care, which you can also find on this podcast feed – we talked about how bargaining power is the key to exerting your influence over people who have official authority over you, whether it’s your boss at work, or your government in the public sphere, or your mom at home – so in future episodes we’re going to focus on how ordinary people throughout history have maximized and exercised their political bargaining power to achieve their common goals – and we’ll be talking to various people who are organizing and making these sorts of things happen in our time.

Which brings us to gap #2 – many of us feel like the world of politics is broken and needs fixing – but before you can fix your broken car, first you need to know what a car is, and you need to know how a car works, and you need to know what all of the different parts are called, and you need to have the right tools to fix it and you need to know how to use those tools. So before you can become an effective political actor, first you need basic political literacy. Which is something that is extremely rare, even among political science PdD’s.

And that’s because politics today is almost 100% pure worbs.

A worb is a word that I just invented which means is a word that everyone uses, but that no one really knows exactly what it means. Like you think you sort of know what capitalism means, but do you really know what it means?

Whether you dropped out of high school at 16 years old or if you’re a political science PhD doctor professor, if you had to sit down, and write out definitions for all the basic common political terms you can think of – LEFT, RIGHT, CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, THE MARKET, GOVERNMENT, IDEOLOGY, DEMOCRACY, CLASS, ECONOMICS even the word POLITICS itself, I bet that you’ll mostly come up with a bunch of half-assed confused garbage.

Go ahead and try it and see what you come up with!

you can see how this plays out when you read popular, journalistic or academic texts about political subjects.

Like go to a library – a place of bo-oks – and pick up three books about capitalism written by important politicians or by important academic theorists or journalists, and see if any of them even bother to define what capitalism is. Like there’s a recent book called Capitalism in America by former US chairman of the federal reserve Alan Greenspan, which is all about how great Capitalism is and how we need to get back to that old time capitalisty spirit that made america so great back in the good old day.

Greenspan is so moved and so inspired by capitalism that in all the 200+ pages of his book, he somehow forgets to tell us what capitlism actually is. You know something’s gotta be good when you get so pumped up about it without even knowing what the fuck it is! Or maybe he does know what is, and he’s choosing not to share that information with us for some reason?

We’ll look into that a little later, but while youre at the library, keep picking out books on capitalism until you manage to find three books about capitalism that actually do define what it is. Do any of the definitions match eachother? Are any of them are actually clear and precise, or coherent? Or do they resemble this definition:

“Capitalism is not just private property, nor is it just profit; capitalism is private

property and profits and some income inequality within a framework of competition and social

fluidity, in which there is a great deal of independent policy determination and much movement between social classes. When it ceases to be that, in my opinion, it ceases to be capitalism.”

“uuh, it’s like business or something? uuuhlll huhihh huh huh

This feeble attempt at a definition is from economist and professor David McCord Wright, from a 1953 televised discussion that you can find online where he’s talking with hugely influential economists Milton Friedman, and John Kenneth Galbraith, both of whom are authors of books about capitalism that neglect to define what capitalism is. And while Wright’s own book on capitalism does offer a definition, it’s even more tortured and confused than I just quoted.

Now books about socialism, pro and con, are just as bad, or worse. No definition, muddled contradictory definitions, and lots and lots of clearly wrong definitions. Like take a look at american senator Rand Paul’s recent book The Case Against Socialism, where he defines socialism as “government ownership of the means of production”. Now on the plus side, that’s a clear and concise definition. it’s also a very popular a definition. And, it’s also a very wrong definition, at least if you care about what actual socialists believe and have believed throughout history.

Paul quotes a few contemporary politicians who call themselves socialists but who can’t define what socialism is, and he makes fun of them for that – fair enough – but beyond that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in what socialists think or what socialism is – because if he was, like if he had read any important books by socialists, past or present, he’d see that for many of the most important socialist thinkers including Karl Marx, a socialist society isn’t even supposed to have a government in the sense of a state at all. And for those socialists who have called for the state to control the economy, that’s traditionally been seen as a transitional measure towards a society where workers and consumers directly control the economy themselves, i.e. socialism.

When the Soviet Union started turning into an economy where workers became permanent employees of the state, many socialists started decrying this as a form capitalism, but with the state playing the role of the capitalist instead of the usual private capitalist owner – because traditionally, a central tenet of socialism has always been that you’re not supposed to have employees at all – according to most socialist thinkers, employees are to capitalism as serfs are to feudalism or slaves are to a slave society, and the whole point is to abolish those types of class distinctions, as we’ll see when we discuss the history of socialism and capitalism in future episodes.

Even in all of those infamous communist dictatorships like Stalin’s USSR or Mao’s China – the official excuse for dictatorship and for government control of the economy has always been that it’s just supposed to be a temporary transitional period – a period where the country develops enough wealth and productive capacity so that there’s enough to be shared comfortably by everyone – at which point workers can finally control the economy themselves, and where the state and all of it’s coercive institutions becomes obsolete – a point which never seems to actually materialize in these dictatorships, but again, we’ll make sense of all of this when we do episodes on socialism.

The point here is that if you truly want to argue against an idea, you’re going to want to argue against that actual idea. it’s really easy to win arguments, when you get to make up fake definitions of words that no one knows

It’s like, “I’m against universal healthcare, because health care comes from earth not the universe – stop living in comic books people! That’s an excerpt from my brand new book called “Against Universal Healthcare”… available for free to all my patreon subscriber.

When someone is making up convenient definitions for something, or purposefully not defining the central concept of their book, that’s a huge red flag that they’re trying to manipulate you, to get you to support or reject something that you might not actually support or reject so easily if you knew what the actual definition of that thing was.

Worbs Unique to Politics

This type or manipulation is completely rampant in politics, because unlike almost any other practical field, all of the main concepts in politcs have no clear, universally understood definition. Theyre are just big fat stupid worbs. Like most people who work in astronomy, or biology, or engineering have clear functional definitions for the main concepts that they work with every day in their fields. Astronomers might have some disagreements about what the definitions of certain terms should be – like different opinions on where you should draw the line between a planet and a dwarf planet, or between a super earth and a mini neptune, but everyone in the field knows what the going definitions are for these terms, and they probably also know most the main competing definitions as well. Even very abstract concepts like life and death have clear working definitions known to people who work in fields like biology or medicine. Meanwhile, most professional politicians and political science PhD’s barely even know the definition of the word politics.

Consequences

And this has some extremely dangerous consequences:

Bad at Your Job

Like imagine that youre a surgeon, but instead of knowing precise anatomy terms, or the proper names for your surgical tools, you just know a bunch of worbs. Like, uh – can you pass me that knife over the there so I can make a cut in the neckbone place? uh, not that knife, the other knife, like the bigger one or something? uh, yeah I think it’s that one – uh… ok I need you to check his heart beats and stuff on that videogame over there, I think its the number on the bottom. “the neck bone connects a to the chest bone “ huh huh huh

If you don’t have clear definitions for human anatomy, you are going to be a horrible surgeon, like a Dr. Steve Brule class surgeon and you are going to kill a lot of people. Even if you were some kind of intuitive surgery genius, and you could somehow just magically know how all of the organs work using the jedi force, midichlorians – you’d still be a horrible surgeon, because it takes a team to do surgery, and everyone on the team needs to know the same definitions of all the body parts and the tools that you’re going to use in order to work together.

Now you probably don’t realize it, because our political education is so terrible but one of your main jobs as a human being walking around in the world is politics. And if you don’t have a good grasp of basic political concepts, you are walking around making a mess just like a surgeon who doesn’t know anatomy.

I started this podcast and this video series because over and over I keep having the same conversations with people – someome will tell me something like “everyone deserves to have good healthcare coverage – this system we have now is just shameful!” or “we need to do something about this exploding rents, no one can even afford to live in the city anymore” – and then these same people will turn around and tell me, that’s why I’m voting for Ghengis Khan – like the guy who’s going to chop their heads off and hand it to their landlord on a silver platter so he can eat their brains and take a dump in their skull!”

I imagine you’ve had similar experiences with friends or relatives.

Political Jabba the Hutt and Darth Vader and Dracula are all running around out there taking advantage of the fact that people don’t have solid definitions of political terms so that they can fill up those words with whatever meanings and associations that suit them. and this makes it so much easier for the, to convince people to run straight off of a cliff and into into their giant human sausage meat grinding machine.

Like according to a recent article from Barron’s an investor’s magazine, half of the growth of the Standard & Poors index, which tracks the stocks of the biggest US corporations, half of the growth of those corporations since the early 2000s and one third of all current corporate profits are the result of “a redistribution of wealth away from Labour and to Capital”. In other words, out of your pocket and into your employer’s pocket. Now that is some straight up political Dracula shit right there

Blindness

Another dangerous consequence of worbs, is blindness:

Take the word “politics”. Most people think politics just means things related to the government, or to bickering political parties – because when you learn about politics in school, or you watch or read news segments called “politics” it’s always about something related to the government, and bickering political parties jockeying for power.

And while that’s a big part of politics, the proper definition of the word politics is “anything relating to decision making in groups”. That’s why we talk about things like “office politics”, people jockeying around to get promotions, or to exert their decisionmaking power or influence over the people who domhave power in different ways.

So, when someone little Peetie Buttigieg the democratic presidential primary candidate says that he wants to choose “non political” supreme court justices in order to “stop the descent of the Supreme Court into becoming yet another political body” that’s one of the most idiotic things that a person can say – because the literal job of any judge is to sit down and make decisions that affect groups of people all day long, i.e. politics. And this is even more true when it comes to the Supreme Court, an extremely political body whose, decisions affect the entire country not just a couple of litigants.

The only non political judge is a dead judge, and the only non political person is a dead person – even animals have politics, which we’ll see in a future episode all about animal politics. Even slaves have politics, because even if you no decision making power on paper, you can still exercise your power under the right conditions, as we’ll see in future episodes.

Now it’s not fair to judge Pete Buttigieg according to a definition of politics that he never learned – after all, he just went to Harvard and Oxford, where he graduated with honours in politics and he was president of the Student Advisory Committee of the Harvard Institute of Politics – so it’s not his fault if he doesn’t know what politics means.

But even if you use the definition that Mayor Peep had in mind – like if you read his interview, you can the that what he means is that he wants judges who are non-ideological, and who “think for themselves” rather than along left or right ideological lines. But the word ideology means ideas about how the world should be, based on ideas about how human nature is or how the universe works. If you’re alive and you don’t have an ideology, then you’re probably in a coma. And unless Mayor Pete wants more judges who are in a coma, what he really wants is judges who are ideological centrists – which is very much an ideological position, even if part of centrist ideology is thinking you’re a special super rational independent thinker with no ideology.

Anyhow, we’ll look into at all that when we do episodes on ideology and on the left right political spectrum, but back to politics. You have public politics, which means decision making involving the state, and you have private politics, meaning every other kind of decision making in groups. You have public law that the state makes, and you have private laws called contracts that people make, and that the state enforces if you can afford lawyers or that you can enforce yourself, if you can afford armed goons.

So whether you’re a supreme court justice making decisions for millions of people, or an employee taking orders from your boss all day at work, or just a person deciding where to eat with your friends, you are constantly engaging in politics. Someone who says “I’m not political” is actually saying “i let someone else make all the important group decisions that affect my life”.

Because we don’t learn the actual definition of the word politics, and because we limit our understanding of politics to the public government sphere – we also never learn that the same political concepts that we apply to the government, also apply to politics in our private lives and vice versa.

Concepts like government or democracy or dictatorship. A government is the person or body that makes and enforces rules. So there’s a public government running the state which we call “the government”, but there’s also all sorts of private governments in your life.

There’s a private government in your home – and that’s you if you own it, or it’s your landlord if you’re a tenant – if you’re a tenant, you decide that people have to take off their shoes when they come in, but your landlord decides if youre allowed to smoke or paint the walls – and a there’s private government in your workplace – and that’s the owner and management who tell the employees what to do all day, and there’s also private government when you and your friends are deciding where to go eat lunch – and that’s you and your friends – who making and enforcing the decision together.

And a government can be democratic, meaning that the people affected by decisions have a say in those decisions in proportion to how much they’re affected by the decisions – like when you and your friends decide where to eat, or it can be dictatorial, meaning one person or body gets to make decisions, regardless of who‘s affected, like a slave owner making decisions for his slaves, or it can be something in between like the representative governments of most western countries where you get to have a say in choosing the people who’ll be making decisions for you for several years at a time – or like a capitalist workplace, where the boss tells you what to do all day, and you have no say, except that you do have the option to leave – if material circumstances make that a viable option.

Most of us want the governments of our nation states to be democratic, but because we only think of politics and government as things that involve the state, we never even think about whether or not we want the governments of our workplaces to be democratic, and we rarely discuss the fact that most of our workplaces are actually opt-out dictatorships – and we certainly never discuss workplace democracy vs workplace dictatorship in political science courses or in the politics sections of newspapers or political websites.

Now maybe you think that workplaces should be dictatorships – and there are all sorts of economic and even moral ethical arguments for why that should be the case – but, our half assed definition of the word politics, makes us blind to even the possibility that workplaces don’t have to be dictatorships, that they can actually be democratic, like in a modern day cooperative.

On the flipside, not knowing the definition of politics also makes us blind to how political principles from our private lives also apply to the public government sphere. Like most of us understand that at work, your bargaining power is what determines your wages – like we know that dime a dozen workers with low bargaining power get low wages and crappy working conditions, and we know that rare, highly skilled workers with high bargaining power can negotiate higher wages and better working conditions – but because we don’t think of the workplace as an arena of politics, we don’t realize that when it comes to the state, the amount of rights and services that we get also reflects our bargaining power. And as we’ll see later, countries where people have more rights and more services, are usually countries where the population has leveraged their bargaining power versus the state at some point in the not too distant past.

Like how did women get the right to vote when they didn’t previously have that right? And how come women in some parts of the world still don’t have those rights? Or how did african americans in the united staes get all sorts of civil rights that they didn’t previously to have, or how did ancient athenians get democracy when most other societies at the time were monarchies and oligarchies, and why didn’t athenian democracy extend to all athenians, only to citizen males over the agr 25? Or why have germans had universal healthcare for all wage workers since 1883, but Americans still don’t have that today?

As we’ll see in future episodes, a huge part of the answer to these questions is bargaining power – having it, and knowing how to use it – but in order to understand any of this first you need to understand what the word politics actually means.

Apes

When no one teaches you the definition of a word, you have to figure out what it means by inference, by seeing how other people use it. And this is a huge problem when you have a bunch of professional manipulators running around changing the meaning of words on purpose so as to fool us into supporting things we don’t actually like or want.

Let’s say you’re a power hungry maniac who wants dictatorial powers, and you’re in a time and place where socialism is a very popular worb that people like but they don’t exactly know what it means – like in much of europe right after WWII where socialists and communists were very important in the resistance against the Nazis, and where the Soviet Union, which presented itself as the world flagbearer of socialism, played a decisive role in winning the war.

So let’s say you’re a Roumanian politician after World War II and you‘re trying to grab dictatorial power for you and your pal – and you’re being supported in this endeavour by the Soviet Union who killed off all your competing socialist rivals, and who are helping you establish a one party top down dictatorship.

You know that people like the idea of socialism, so you use the language and the imagery of socialism and you associate it with you and your pals having dictatorial power. And you know that people don’t like the idea of dictatorship, so you call your dictatorship a “worker’s democracy” or a “peoples’ democracy” so all the peasants don’t feel left out – because everyone loves workers, and identifies with the people and everyone loves democracy which is another worb that nobody understands – and then you twist the word democracy around to make it mean a dictatorship that cares about what workers need and want, even if workers have no actual say in anything.

And you know that people don’t want to be controlled or exploited by a foreign power, so you explain that the USSR isn’t a foreign power, exploiting us, it’s our big brother who defeated hitler, and who’s helping us achieve international socialism!

What’s international socialism? Well it’s you and your buddies in power waving red flags and talking about workers a lot, propped up by the Soviet Union. And you associate all this with images that people like, like progress and civilization and fairness and democracy and the people and workers and robots and freedom and sugar and spice and everything nice.

Meanwhile, if you’re around at that time, and you actually know what socialism is, you’d be listening to this with with alarm bells going off thinking “wait a minute – isn’t this the exact opposite of socialism?” which is what socialist George Orwell was saying about the Soviet Union and it’s satellite states at that time, which you can read about in his 1947 preface to Animal Farm.

And it’s also what a lot of socialists who had visited Bolshevik Russia in the late 19 teens and early 1920’s were saying, when Lenin and Trotsky starting turning the struggling revolutionary state into a centralized top down dictatorship. You can find some of their critiques online, like communist Rosa Luxemburg’s essay The Russian Revolution from 1918, or anarchist Emma Goldman’s books My Disillusionment In Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia which are from 1923 and 1924.

Now we’ll explore socialism and the Russian Revolution in depth in future episodes- but the point of all this, is that when people don’t really know the meaning of certain words, they infer the meaning of those words from people that they identify with.

Political psychology studies since the 1960’s show us that the less information that we have, the more we rely on things like identity and social cues to shape our political opinions. Social cues are things like how people dress, what they look like, how they speak and what buzzwords they use – and these cues serve as shortcuts to figuring out which policies we support – like subconsciously you’re thinking “this person talks like me so they probably think like me, so if they think that making lucky charms cereal into a controlled substance is the best way to go, then I trust them”.

You can read about this in recent books like Can Democracy Work, or Democracy for Realists, or in a1964 book called The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics which you can find online. if you do read these books, keep in I’m not endorsing the conclusions of these books – we’ll talk about that research and my critique of these books when we do episodes on democracy and political psychology.

A great example of people voting based on social cues versus based on policy is the 2020 democratic presidential primary race in the United States – Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are at opposite ends of the political spectrum when it comes to the democratic candidates, in terms of their records, their policies, their donors, their beliefs – yet, polls show that a big chunk of Bernie voters choose Biden as their second choice candidate, and a big chunk of Biden voters choose Bernie as their second choice. The only thing those two guys have in common is that they’re two old white guys with gruff voices. And that seems to have been the deciding factor for a lot of their supporters!

And you have a similar phenomenon with Elizabeth Warren voters who choose Kamala Harris or Peetie Buttigieg as their second choice, and vice versa, even though Warren has way more in common with Bernie in terms of their politics, grassroots donors, record etc.

Now, the same thing we just talked about in terms of manipulating the popularity of the word socialism, also applies to the word capitalism in north america today. Let’s say you’re a big employer and you don’t want have to pay taxes, and you want to be able to pay your workers as little as their bargaining power commands without any stupid minimum wage laws getting in the way, and of course, you also want to be able to make your employees pee and poop in their diapers, that they have to pay for themselves – that way won’t steal your profits by wasting time on their selfish bathroom breaks.

Well, a society based entirely on the rules of capitalism allows you to do all of these wonderful things (so long as the bargaining power of your workers is low enough)! so you definitely want people to support capitalism – but, you also know that a lot of people are just selfish and unreasonable, and they don’t want to dump in their diapers at work everynday – so what you do is, you take advantage of the fact that nobody really knows what capitalism is, and you talk about capitalism in a way that leads people infer that it means a bunch of things that you know that they do like, like freedom and democracy and prosperity, and you make sure you just never explain what capitalism really is. let people just fill in the blanks with whatever they like.

and you ignore the fact some of capitalisms greatest advocates and theorists thought that capitalism is actually incompatible with democracy which we’ll explore in a future episode on capitalism and democracy.

Remember Alan Greenspan, who I mentioned earlier, who wrote the glowing book about Capitalism in America where he forgets to define what capitalism is? well Alan Greenspace doesn’t believe in a minimum wage…

And neither does Senator Rand Paul, who we talked about earlier, who wrote The Case Against Socialism – and his book also raves about how great capitalism without ever defining it.

Rand Paul takes advantage of the fact that people don’t know what capitalism or socialism are in order to get his readers to oppose anything that interferes with the rights of property owners, which is what his political career and his libertarian ideology are fundamentally about – which you can see from his own writing and speeches and voting record and everything he ever says and does.

Whether it’s socialism, or government regulations, or even democracy which Paul criticizes at one point in the book, if it interferes with property rights, he hates it, and he wants you to hate it too.

So whatever you hate, dictators, poverty, the holocaust, brown pants, doggie doodoos on your shoes – that’s socialism, and whatever you like, freedom, democracy, prosperity, your family, your neighbourhood your country, your flag, your ice cream, your baby jesus – that’s capitalism.

And if you happen to like atheism, pornography, and abortions – well that’s capitalism too – and if you hate that stuff, well then it’s socialism, guy, whatever you want, thats what im selling bro! Just don’t interfere with the rights of property owners. The End. By Rand Paul

In the same vein, lets take a look at democratic presidential primary candidate Mike Bloomberg, who is the 11^th richest human being on planet earth, and his definition of dictatorship: many of Mike’s zillions come from investments made in China which according to an interview he recently gave on PBS is not a dictatorship. Why isn’t China a dictatorship, even it’s functionally a one party state where the ruler has supreme dictatorial power over the country and the government? Because, says Bloomberg “ No government survives without the will of the majority of its people“ – nice!

By that definition Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and Ghengis Khan and Nero and General Zod – all not dictators. So, according to mega capitalist Mike Bloomberg Dictatorship is actually democracy if the dictator says he’s acting on behalf of the people – in other words Capitalist Mike Bloomberg has exactly the same definition of worker’s democracy as communist Vladimir Lenin. Ladies and gentlemen, the power of worbs…

Obviously the real reason that Bloomberg doesn’t call China a dictatorship is because people don’t like dictatorships, and because the rulers of China like to pretends that China isn’t a dictatorship,- it’s a people’s republic, and a peoples democratic dictatorship – brbrnrnrn -(and you can look up the definitions of those terms on line, and basically they mean brbrbrnrnrle) and if Bloomberg called China a striaght up dictatorship, then the leaders of China might get angry and harm his widdle investments, which is what the chinese government does to people who piss them off.

The reality is that everyone in every era uses the popular worbs of the day to get us to support things that we are actually against.

Not only that, but the malleable definition of worbs also helps politicians turn us into antagonistic tribes of mindless hooting apes who can be whipped up into hating our fellow humans, with whom we share many common political goals. Because without definitions worbs just become identity groups.

People Want the Same Things?

And this is why if you talk to people today who think that they support socialism, and you talk to people who think that they support capitalism – two fundamentally opposed ideologies, you’ll find out that most of them tend to want a lot of the same things, freedom, democracy,, healthcare, a job where you dont poo in diapers, a nice environment, prosperity, sugar, spice, things that are nice. So you have zillions of people who want a lot of the same things divided into opposing camps, deleting eachother on facebook and make fun of eachother on reddit, instead working together on those issues they have in common.

So, what we are going to do with this podcast, is we are going to turn worbs into words, so that you can become an effective political actor, participating in the major decisions that affect your life, and aboe to reach out to other people who share the same goals as you do.

But of course every single person listening out there knows that you’re the exception – you’re not being manipulated, you know who’s lying to you, you understand politics, not like all those other dumdums out there – ok, congratulations dr. professor einstein – but – you still want to listen to this podcast, because much like the jedi surgery ninja that I talked about earlier, even if you understand everything, you still need to learn how to communicate with all of those other non doctor professor einsteins out there, because politcs is inherently mass teamwork, and you’re going to need to work with other people if you want to accomplish your goals.

So on top of fleshing out coherent definitions of these concepts, we’re also going to go over all of the conflicting, confused or incorrect definitions that other people have in their heads so that you can understand what and how other people think so that you are able to communicate with them – because if you know all of the correct hip and cool definitions and terms but the people you’re speaking to don’t, you just become just an ineffective, extremely annoying gibberish spewing asshole.

We’re also going to spend time explaining the history of these concepts, where they come from, how they’ve evolved, how they’ve been used and abused over time so you can see for yourself why I’m picking one particular definition over other ones, or why in some cases I’ll even be putting forth my own definition. That way you can decide for yourself how you want to use and understand these terms, even if thag differs from how I want you to use those terms.

I have very strong political opinions, and ideally I’d love it if everyone shared those opinions – but when it comes to this podcast, I don’t care whether you agree with me politically or not – first and foremost, I want you to have to the tools necessary to decide for yourself what you believe and who you believe. I want you to be able to agree with me or disagree with me because you actually understand what is that I’m saying, not because I said some trigger words that caused your brain to implode and to see me as the enemy.

And very importantly I want to train your brain to demand precise definitions when you hear someone using political worbs, instead of just filling in the blanks according to whether or not that person dresses like you or talks like you. What does this guy mean by freedom? What does she mean when she promotes democratic socialism? When that person invokes democracy or the “people” or calls someone a globalist or a nationalist what are they actually trying to do?

2. What is Politics and Why Should I Care?

How can people who don’t have official decision-making power exert their influence over those who do? A quick overview of some basic political concepts:

Politics
Public vs. Private Politics
Polities
Government
Democracy
Autocracy
Consensus
Political Constraints
Economics
Capitalism
Ideology
Class
The Market
Bargaining Power
Contracts

https://youtu.be/dQjcmDGY2vA

Script

Hello, and welcome to this series where we’re going to learn all about politics, so that we can understand what’s going on all around us, and so that we can participate more effectively and intelligently in the decisions that affect our lives.

So first thing we need to know about politics, is what politics is in the first place! Like you watch politics 24 hrs a day, and get a PhD in political science and no one will explain to you what that politics even means.

And that’s why this episode is called what is politics and why should I care?

What is politcs?

Politics is anything to do with decision making in groups

It’s a pack of hyenas fighting over who gets the best piece of carcass meat.

It’s you and your mom arguing over cleaning up your room.

It’s your landlord raising your rent or your boss making you do things at work every day

And if course, it’s a government deciding for millions of people who will have access to healthcare and who will have to pay for it

And why do we care about politics?

Because we’re not dead, we care about what happens to us and the decisions that affect our lives. A lot of big changes are happening in the world, and most of them are scary, so what can we do about it?

So when we talk about politics, we’re talking about things like

who gets to make these decisions?

Why do they get to make these decisions?

What’s the process or system for making decisions?

What happens if people don’t follow the decisions?

And how can people who don’t formally get to make decisions still get to have influence over the people that do get to make decisions?

And that’s what this series is ultimately about. because you can’t just run into the halls of your government and be like “hey, I health care is really important to me, where do I go to participate in the big decisions that affect my life?”

Where you go is dragged out the door by the police, because you’re not wanted there, you’re not allowed to participate in those decisions directly. So we need to figure out how we can have influence over the people who do get to decide.

Now most of the time when people talk about politics they’re referring to public politics, meaning anything having to do with the state or the government. And that’s a big part of what we’re trying to understand – How do you get politicians to do what you want them to do? How do we know which politicians are the ones most likely to do what we want them to do? How do we know what we want them to do in the first place? Like before we exert out influence over politicians, we want to first know what we’re talking about and what we actually want!

But if you want to understand the world of public politics, the world of the state and the government, then first you also want to look at the world of private politics, which means every other kind of group decision making, family, friends, workplace – anything that isn’t the state – because private politics is something that we already have experience with and understand on an intuitive level. We all have experience arguing with friends, or dealing with family dynamics or the hierarchy of the workplace. And those same sort of dynamics apply to the world of public politics.

Meanwhile private politics are also huge part of your life. Most peple spend most of their waking hours at a job or some other kind of work. How much you get paid, how you’re treated at work, what you do all day, these are big decisions that affect you. So we also want to think about influencing politics and decision making in our private lives.

So what we’re going to do in this introductory episode is take a look at some basic dorkus malorkus situations from every day life and we’re going to analyze them and pull out all of the political concepts and give names to things that you already know but maybe never thought about in political terms. And then we’re going to apply those concepts in future episodes to the world of public politics and expand on them so you can start to understand what the hell is going on in the world and what we can do about it.

The Car

So you’re driving around in a car and you’re really hungry, “me so hungee, me so hungee!” And you have a big decision to make – do you want indian food, or chinese food?

This might feel like a big decision in the moment, but there’s no politics in this decision. It’s just a personal decision that mostly just affects you and is based on satisfying your own personal preferences.

Even if it were an actually important decision with serious consequences – like the consequences of having chinese food vs indian food is just what kind of diahrrea you’re going to have afterwards – but let’s say you’re going to choose between having indian food or else driving yourself off a cliff and killing yourself. That could truly be the most important decision of your life – but there’s still nothing political about it. You’re just making a decision involving you and your desire to have yummy indian food versus your desire to fly off a cliff and die,

But now imagine that you’re in a car with four of your friends. You’re all hungry – “we so hungee, we so hungee!”

You know what you want – scottish food: McDornalds. But Tito just converted to islam, so he wants to go to halal supermarket. Jermaine is jewish and he wants to go to shloimie’s kosher deli. Janet only eats vegan so she wants to go eat the sawdust barn. And LaToya is on some weird jordan peenerstone diet so she wants to go the cowabunga meat house. The car can’t go to five places at once. What are you going to do? Now we have a decision that needs to be made that affects a group of people. Now you have politics.

***

So as soon as there’s a decision involving a group of people, whether it’s a car full of hungee hungee friends, or it’s a state with millions of people, you have some political questions that pop up that you want to think about:

Who gets to make the decision?

Why do they get to make the decision?

Is there a process or system for making decisions or choosing who gets to make decisions?

Who has to follow the decision?

What happens if people don’t follow the decision?

Where does the decision apply?

What are some of the constraints that are going to limit the types of choices that are likely to be made.

So when it comes to our hungee hungee friends, who gets to make this decision about where to eat? And what’s the decisionmaking process going to be? Is it the person with the biggest muscles who’s going to beat the crap out of everyone until they all submit? Is it the person with the most charm who will convince everyone to agree? Is it the person with the most money who will bribe everyone to agree? Will everyone take a vote? Is it the person driving the car who gets to decide, regardless of what the others want?

Think about your own life, and how a situation like these would play out.

***

Normally when you have a group of friends who want to go somewhere together, you’ll all discuss where you want to go, and then eventually you’ll work out something that everyone can agree on. So this answers our first two questions: who gets to decide and what’s the decision making system – everyone in the car gets to decide, and the decision making system is consensus democracy.

Democracy means everyone who is affected by a decision gets to be involved in making that decision, in proportion to how much that decisions affects them. And consensus means that in order to proceed with a decision, everyone involved has to agree or at least accept the decision, vs like a majority vote wins system.

Whenever you have a decision involving a group of people you’re going to have a decision making system that is going to be somewhere on a spectrum from democratic, meaning everyone who’s affected gets to have a say, to autocratic, meaning a dictatorship, where one person gets decide regardless of everyone else’s needs or wants.

In general, when you have a situation like this where you have an important constraint of needing everyone’s cooperation to succeed, and it’s not realistic to use threats or violence to enforce decisions, it’s a recipe for some kind democracy. And that’s especially true when you have a small group like this, where everyone likes eachother and has the same goal.

***

when we ask “who gets to decide” we’re asking “who’s the government”

***

So first we can notice that the constraint of needing everyone’s cooperation without using force helps us predict that the system will be on the democratic side of the spectrum. Now what can all of the others constraints in this situation tell us about what the actual final decision might be?

You have five choices, and all of these dietary constraints and preferences. Jermaine can only eat something Kosher, Tito only eats Halal, Janet only eats Vegan, LaToya only eats beef and you don’t have any big dietary restrictions but you want McDornalds. Kosher rules are similar to Halal rules, except Kosher rules are more strict, so anything’s that Kosher is Halal but not the other way around. McDornalds is fast food and that’s pretty similar to deli food, so likely you’ll be OK with the Kosher place to get your grease quotient on. And deli’s serve lots of meat, so LaToya probably can probably pork up on all the beef she wants. The only person who might have a hard time would be Janet because there’s not a lot of fancy vegan options at a deli – but if I had to guess, I’s bet she’ll probably just go along with the rest and eat some cole slaw and pickles or a salad, because the Kosher Deli is the only place that really works for everyone.

Things might be different if these friends get together every week – LaToya might not put up with eating coleslaw for lunch every time, so this would change the dynamics of the system. Maybe instead of a consensus democracy you’ll have a rotating system where each week, a new person takes a turn being the dictator and deciding, and next week Janet will end up having water for lunch at the sawdust shack.

***

So we have a democratic consensus system, but that’s just on the surface, if we look more deeply we’ll find a completely different system hiding underneath.

So now imagine that we’ve all agreed and we’re rolling down the street on the way to the Kosher Deli. Suddenly LaToya gets a text from her x boyfriend. He’s a complete douchebag and everyone hates him, except LaToya is still totally obsessed with him and she’ll do anything to get back together with him. And he’s like “Hey Boo – I’m in town for the day, meet me at the Chicken Shack in 20.” All of a sudden LaToya is freaking out and insists on going to the Chicken Shack.

No one is having it. No one really wants Chicken Shack, but more importantly no one wants to enable LaToya getting back together with that jackass.

So now what happens?

Well our consensus democracy falls apart. If LaToya insists on meeting her ex, and no one will have it, she’s going to have to leave the car and go by herself. Our consensus democracy becomes a majority rule democracy, and LaToya defects and leaves.

But what of LaToya is the owner of the car? If LaToya owns the car, then that car is going to the chicken shack, and no one else complies then everyone else is going to have to get fuck out.

And if you don’t get out, LaToya can shove you out. And in some places she can even shoot you! Why?

Because according to the law, and according to capitalism which the law is based on, the owner of private property is the dictator of that property.

The car is actually a dictatorship. Before when everyone was deciding together, that was just on the surface – the dictator was just being nice and delegating her authority to her friends. But now when push comes to shove, democracy flies out the dictator asserts her authority.

OK, so lets go back to some of our initial political questions and see what we get:

Who gets to make the decision? In other words, who is the government?

Everyone in the car is the government. it’s a full democracy

Who has to follow the decision? Who are the subjects, the people subject to the decision?

Everyone in the car is subject to the decision. Because if you’re in the car you’re going where it’s going.

What’s the decisionmaking system? In other words, what’s the political system?

Direct democracy, with full participation of everyone, by consensus.

Where does this decision apply? What’s the territory for this political system and this government?

The car

Now if you roll up these things into one, your government, your subjects, your political system and your territory you have a polity – a political unit.

In the public sphere your polities are your countries, and in those polities younhave smaller polities, regional governments, and then municipalities, and then inside those you have all your private polities, your house, your workplace, your school, your sports team, your new wave band, your car full of hungee friends.

But wait – guess what? I lied to you. the democracy in our car, and everyone together being the government – it’s an illusion! It’s fake news. It’s all lies!!!!!

Imagine now that everyone’s decided to go to the kosher deli, and while we’re on our way there, then LaToya gets a text from Kenny G, this guy she’s had a huge crush on for years.

Everyone hates him because all he ever does is jerk her around and she’s just insane and pathetic when it comes to him and does whatever he says. Everyone is so happy that he moved out of town last year. But suddenly texts her “sup boo, in town 4 2 hrs, meet me @ meat shack in 15”

What’s going to happen? Probably she’ll try desperately to convince everyone to go to the meat shack, and when that doesn’t work, she’ll get out of the car can zip down to the meat shack herself.”

But what if LaToya was the owner of the car? You’re driving but she owns the car and she asked you to drive cause she wants to keep her hands free for texting. Now what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen is whatever LaToya wants to happen. If she decides to go to the meat shack, and everyone else wants to go to the Kosher Deli and refuses to go, and no one can change her mind, then she can order you to leave the car. And if you won’t leave she can shove you out. And if she can’t shove you out, she can call the police to get you out for her. In some places she could even shoot you!

Why? Because in most societies today, the real political system in a car full of friends is not a democracy, but an absolute dictatorship, and the dictator is the owner of the car. The only reason anyone else has any say at all is if the owner lets them have a say.

And why is the owner the absolute dictator?

Because the law, and because capitalism.

The Law, Capitalism, Culture

Wait what? The law? Why are we ruining our perfect little theoretical model with outside forces like the law? Because politics and decisionmaking never just takes place in a little abstract bubbule. The decisions that are made in one polity are almost always influenced by the material world, the real world, and that includes things like the existence of things like culture, which we’ll talk about it a bit, but also things like other polities.

So the first thing we notice is that our little polity, our car with it’s government and politcal system and territory doesn’t just exist in its own little bubbule. The decisions being made in our car are heavily influenced by the outside world and in particular outside polities. It’s one of our big constraints. So lets say our hungee hungee friends all decided unanimously that they wanted to drive to the kosher deli at 500 miles per hour so they can eat that much faster! Well, you’re run into two giant problems at least. One is you’re not alone on the city streets. Unless they’re driving around in rural wyoming, there are probably lots of other cars driving around and if we go that fast we’ll end up smashing into them. The other problem is that our little car polity is inside of a bigger polity, a municipality, that has speeding rules and police that stop you and make you pay big fines or put you in jail if you break those rules. So the choice to drive 500 miles per hour is possible, you can do it, but it’s really unlikely because of the consequences which exist because of other polities outside of the the little car polity.

Now the laws of the municipality has speed limits, but the laws of the bigger polity that the municipality is in, whether it’s a regional government or a nation state government, those laws establish and enforce property rights which say that the owner of property is the absolute dictator over that property. And property rights are at the core of capitalism, which is a huge influence on the laws of most countries in the world today.

So what’s capitalism?

***

Capitalism is an economic system, but it’s also a political system, and it’s an ideology, and it’s also a description of how things are produced a particular mode of production.

Say what?

What’s an economic system? Just like politics is anything to do with decisionmaking in groups, economics is anything to do with resources in groups. How are resources produced, exchanged, distributed, destroyed, stolen. What incentivizes people to make or buy or sell or steal things? An economic system is a system of rules for how people deal with resources, including who gets to make decisions about resources.

Making decisions about resources that affects groups of people is politics, so any economic system is always going to be a political system as well by definition.

Now what’s an ideology? An ideology is a set of ideas about how things should be, which is based on another underlying idea about how things actually are.

An ideology can be really simple like a general attitude or outlook, or it can be really detailed like a religion.

“You gotta just look out for number one, and take what’s yours in this world, otherwise other people are just going to take it and you’ll be left in the dust.” That’s a really simple ideology. What you should be doing is being selfish and looking out for yourself first, and that’s based on the underlying idea that everyone else is selfish too, so if you aren’t selfish people will take advantage of you.

Any religion is an ideology – you should follow the ten commandments and not covet your neighbour’s ass and follow everything else in the bible and the underlying reason is because if peoples’ inherent nature is sinful and if you don’t have faith then everyone will be killing and looting eachother, and also if you behave in ways he doesn’t like you’ll burn in hell for all eternity.

Now whether it’s as an economic system or a political system or an ideology, capitalism is just a set of a few rules for dealing with property.

***

So the first rule is that anything that exists, whether it’s man made objects, or land, or water, or even ideas, can be divided up and owned by private individuals, or else groups of individuals, but voluntary associations of individuals, not collective identity based groups like a tribe or a family or nation.

Next, there are only a few ways of legitimately acquiring property.

You can get something if a legitimate owner gives it to you as a gift, or by donation or inheritance. You can own something that you obtained by voluntary exchange with a legitimate owner, including trade or buying it (trading for money). You can own something that was abandoned by a previous owner. Or you can own something by homesteading,

Homesteading means you found something in nature that no one has claimed yet, and you mix it with your labour – so like you find a piece of land and you build a fence around it, or you till the soil, or you build a house on it.

As the owner of something you have two important political powers with one limit. You have the power of absolute dictatorship over your property, you can take care of it, or destroy it, or eat it, ruin it, sell it, whatever you want – and you can also defend it from being stolen or from trespassing by force, including murder. The only limit to your power is that you can’t do anything with your property that damages or trespasses on anyone else’s property, without their permission. And your body counts as your property, so you can’t hurt anyone directly, and you can defend yourself with violence if necessary.

We can go into a lot more detail about what that entails, and we’re going to do at least one whole episode on capitalism, but basically those are the rules of capitalism, and everything else about it flows from those few basic rules.

Culture

But if you think about it, isn’t the owner of something the dictator of that thing in every system in the world? Like even if you imagine a country where no one’s allowed to have any private property, and the government owns everything, the government is still the owner and they get to decide what to do with their property. Or like if the car our hungee friends was driving in was collectively owned by all the friends, wouldn’t the democracy in the car just be the democracy of co-property owners deciding over their private property?

Imagine that our car is a jeep driving around in the desert where the state in Jordan. Our hungee friends are all members of a beduin tribe. You’re the driver and the owner of the car. Everyone agrees they want to go to McDesert for some fast food, except for abu-Jermaine, who wants to go to Traditonal Halal Supermarket desert depôt. abu-Jermaine is 75 years old, and everyone else is in their 20’s. Guess where you’re going? Halal Supermarket.

Even though there’s such a thing as private property in Bedouin society, and modern Bedouin people usually live in countries which all have capitalist property rights, and you’re recognized as the owner of the car, in most situations the eldest male relative will be the one with the most authority. If you decide to invoke your private property rights or invoke democratic decision-making 4 against 1 and you ignore abu-Jermaine, he can’t call the police on you, but when word gets out that you disrespected your elder like that, your reputation will go in the toilet along with your honour. You’ll have trouble getting married, or finding a trading partner or anyone to help you in various situations and you’re going to have a difficult life until you can redeem your honour.

So here you see how when it comes to political decision making culture has a huge effect – it often trumps the economic system, and even trumps the law. And in a traditional Bedouin society, like before the state had any authority, you didn’t need a state to enforce the rules. The whole society would enforce the rules via the honour system. Before states existed it was largely cultural mechanisms which enforced the rules of society.

(hunter gatherer example, demand sharing and temporary property makes sense in a low cost property situation, but when people settle and it takes two weeks to make $200 and the your buddy begs you for it, it’s not cool anymore.)

Culture often trumps capitalism in our legal system as well.

So imagine a car this time with three people in it. Mom, Dad and li’l Beavis who’s 8 years old. They’re driving in grandpa’s former car. A few months ago, grandpa was driving little beavis to the ice cream hut, and lil beavis said “granda I love you, and I love this car. when I grow up, I want to be just like you and I want to drive a car just like this one.” Grandpa was so touched that he went home and changed his will so that Beavis can get the car, and then the next day he died from ice cream diabetes overdose because he couldnt afford his insulin because the price went up 3000%.

So now the family is driving in grandpa’s car to go first have some lunch at grandpa’s favourite restaurant, and then go to the ice cream hut in his memory. But little Beavis wants ice cream for lunch. He wants to go get ice cream right now! And it’s his car, he inherited it!

Beavis is not a reasonable child. So Beavis wants to invoke his capitalist property rights and demand that his parents do what he says with his car, his property. But they won’t listen. So Beavis gets out his cell phone that he inherited from grandpa and he dials 911 and tells the police to enforce his property rights.

Well that’s not going to work is it? Beavis does have property rights, but in most legal systems, parents are the administrators of their kids property until a certain age, could be 12, 14, 18. As a culture, we don’t believe that an 8 year old should have total dictatorship over his own property, regardless of what capitalism says.

***

So we have this legal system that is inspired by capitalism and enforces some aspects of capitalism which a bit weird because according to the rules of capitalism the state isn’t a legitimate organization – you can’t have an involuntary collective organization with powers to forcibly take your property in taxes – but we’ll save that for our episodes on capitalism and libertarianism – but anyhow, the state imposes property rights and enforces them for you, so the owner of our car is ultimately the one with power.

But as we saw before despite having that power, the actual system that’s being practised is democracy, because the constraint of wanting to keep friends together, which is basically a cultural constraint, strongly incentivizes democracy regardless of what the system is on paper..

We saw in our earlier example that if LaToya was the owner and she was desperate for the attention of her ex that she’d be likely to invoke her dictatorial power and ditch democracy. The same would be true if there were some emergency – like if everyone wants to to go eat chinese food but the owner needs to get to work on time or go to a hospital emergency room. Emergencies in general tend to incentivize autocracy. LaToya getting a chance to meet with her ex is basically an emotional emergency for her, even if it’s ridiculous to her friends. Similarly if everyone in the car couldn’t agree on anything, and the arguments are going on and on and time is running out, the owner might just make a decision and impose it. When democracy isn’t working efficiently, it incentivizes more authority, more hierarchy.

Influencing the Deciders

We’ll explore these ideas in depth in other episodes, but for now, let’s imagine that the owner of the car is a huge libertarian and doesn’t care about his friends and insists on using his capitalist authority to make the ultimate decision. Libertarianism is the ideology that your political system should be based entirely on capitalism.

So here we have a situation where the owner is the one who’s going to decide where we’re going to eat, and no one else has any formal decision making power. So is everyone just going to bow down to the owner and give up on getting what they want? What are some ways the others might be able get what they want?

Solo Politics, Class, Markets

Solo Politics

So far, we’ve learned that politics is decision making in groups. And we saw that choosing which restaurant you want to eat at, isn’t political because it only involves you and your own tastes.

But now imagine you’re alone in your room in the house where you’ve been living for many years.. And you’re looking at your lime green walls and you don’t ever want to look at this disgusting colour ever again. You want to repaint your room your favourite colour – vomit green.

Nothing political about this, just a decision involving you and your personal preferences right?

Class

Well that depends on whether you’re the owner or renter of the apartment. In other words what’s your social class? Class just means a category that you group people together in according to some useful characteristic that they have in common. So you can have classes of boxers which you group by weight, then by ability, classes at school by education level, and social classes by income level, and by position of power, like landlord and tenant or owner and employee.

Class allows us to make broad generalizations, like tenants tend to want the best possible place for the cheapest possible rent, and landlords want to charge the highest possible rent and do the least possible repairs or other work. It also helps you make predictions – like if half the population of a town leave then the remaining tenants will enjoy cheaper rents, and landlords will have a harder time renting or selling their property. Or if rents get high, poorer tenants move out of town and wealthier tenants start buying places because mortgage are cheaper than rents.

Class isn’t a science, it’s just a useful tool, there are always exceptions or subcategories to every category or every generalization you make about a category. So in general tenants are people who rent because they can’t afford to buy their own place, and tenants are usually poorer than their landlords, but that not always true, there are plenty of exceptions – there’s a whole sub-class of tenants who are actually wealthy, but they choose to rent because it’s less of a pain in the ass than owning a place and being responsible for it, or else they’re only in town for a year or they’re waiting until they get married to buy a place, etc. So you can always refine and subdivide your classes depending on what you’re trying to predict or describe or figure out.

So anyhow in the case of you and your bedroom, as with other things, your decision making power depends on your class. If you’re the owner your decision about whether or not to paint your room is a matter of personal preferences, but if you’e a tenant and you want to paint your own room, then this is a political situation, involving you and your landlord. And generally, you can’t paint your own room the colour you want unless the landlord allows it.

Or unless your lease or tenancy contract allows it.

Contracts

So a contract is just any agreement. And agreements bind you for a certain period of time and they some kind of enforcement mechanism. The enforcement can be the court system backed by the police, or it can be a bunch of gangsters coming to beat you up, or if you’re in a pre-state society or in a tight community it can be loss of reputation and being shunned by your neighbours and potential trading partners or marriage partners etc.

We tend to think of contracts being these documents written by lawyers, but any agreement is actually a contract, which is why we talk about things like verbal contracts which are enforceable in most legal systems. So in theory if your friend promises to help you move, but then doesn’t show up and get screwed and have to pay really expensive movers to move you at the last minute, you can sue your friend for damages.

But are you actually going to go through with that, and if you do will you actually have enough proof to win is another story – contracts, just like laws – and contracts are basically private laws – are not always enforceable, or the cost and pain in the ass of enforcing the, is often not worth it, relative to the losses that you suffered from the violation, or maybe even if it is worth it in terms of money, you just can’t afford the court and lawyer fees, or else there could be a huge risk involved if you’re in a vulnerable situation.

That’s often the case with labour contracts or labour laws especially for lower wage workers. Your boss makes you come in 15 minutes early every day but doesn’t pay you for it, or he keeps you late and doesn’t pay overtime. And you can sue him in court to get your extra pay, and even if court is free and you’re likely to win, you’re also afraid of getting fired in the meantime, and if you’re a low wage worker, chances are being unemployed for a week or two means you can’t may your rent, which means you get evicted which makes it much harder to find anither job or another apartment and your whole life can fall apart. So you’re not going to do what it takes to enforce your contract, or the law.

In theory, if someone violate the terms of a contract, even just a verbal agreement, the other party to the contract can use the courts and ultimately the police to force you to comply with it. In cultures where you had no state, you had other enforcement mechanisms, like reputation, or revenge violence.

So like in the hungee car situation where you have an owner who is an absolute dictator over his car and then a bunch of powerless friends who can get kicked out by force at the whim of the owner, you have the owner or the house who’s the absolute dictator of his property, and a tenant who’s subject to the will of the owner. Except in this case the owner’s will is limited by the tenancy contract. It’s still the owner’s will, but it’s his will at the time he signed the contract. It’s also the will of the tenant at the time the tenant signed the contract.

So in a way, it represents the will of both the tenant and the landlord. But most of the time it’s going to represent the will of one party more than the other, and most of the time, that’s going to be the landlord. Why? Because the agreement in a contract reflects the relative bargaining power of both parties at the time that they made the contract, and tenants tend to be more desperate than landlords in general, so they’re more likely to agree to things that they don’t like or want.

Rental housing tends to be les stable and more expensive month by month than buying housing, so people in the tenant class tend to be people who can’t afford a downpayment and therefore have to put up with higher monthly payments and more insecurity.

If at the time of signing the contract, there were lots of people looking for apartments, and it was hard to find an apartment, then probably the terms of the contract will favour the landlord and give him more power to dictate the terms of the apartment. The rent will be high, you might have to pay a big damage deposit, pay an application fee, submit to credit check, and the tenant probably won’t have the right to paint anything and the terms will be really strict, if you’re 5 seconds late you can be evicted etc, monthly lease, and the landlord won’t feel the need to clean the place up or take good care of it. You might end up paying so much rent that you can barely afford to eat, but you have no choice because there are so few apartments available and you need to find a place immediately. This is the situation in most big cities today.

But if you’re in a smaller town, where people are moving out of because it’s harder to make a living there, and there are lots of apartments available and not many people to rent, and the landlord lives in a duplex and needs the rental income to be able to afford to pay his own mortgage, the terms might start to be more even or even favour the tenant. Lower rent, no damage deposit, and you can paint the walls whatever colour you like without asking permission, 5 year lease at the same rent, and the landlord will think twice about evicting you if you’re play a lot of loud music or pay late because it’ll be really hard for him to replace you.

So ultimately the owner of property is the absolute dictator over their property, but if they need or want something, they can make a contract or agreement with someone to use that property and give them some rights over that property for a particular amount of time in exchange for some money like when you rent an apartment or a car, or for something else, like labour when a boss rents you out to perform tasks for them.

Your contract basically lays out the rules for what each party can and can’t do and what rights each party has, including the party that isn’t the owner of the property. So in that sense a contract is like a private constitution or a private set of laws in a private polity.

Market

the market is the collection of choices that people make about buying, selling, and saving their resources.

like when market is bad for landlords, often they dont rent at all

And the choices that people make because of their relative power or desperation or needs or wants is called “the market”. The market just means the aggregate choices that individuals tend to make given existing conditions. When it rains, less people tend to go shopping and they wait for a nicer day. When people have less money they buy less luxuries. If something is illegal, less people will choose to sell it, and those people will tend to charge more for it because of the danger involved. So when the conditions are that there are lots of people looking for apartments and not many apartments, landlord will tend to choose to raise the rents they’re charging, and to impose all sorts of conditions and restrictions on tenants, and tenants will choose to pay more than they want to for those apartments, and to put up with all sorts of annoying conditions. Or some tenants will choose to live further away from where they want to live, or to move out of town entirely. Not everyone will make the same choices, maybe there’s a nice landlord here and there who won’t charge more because they believe in affordable housing and want a nice relationship with their tenant, or else they just don’t know that they can charge more – but in general and on average those are the choices people make in these kinds of conditions and that’s what the market is.

Culture

Now if your landlord decided that instead of money, they’ll let you live in their place for free, except you have to have sex with them three times a week. This actually happens pretty frequently, especially when the bargaining power of tenants is really low and rents are high, creepy landlords will offer women rent discounts for sex.

This is a perfectly fair transaction according to the rules of capitalism, but again, in most countries the legal system won’t allow it for cultural reasons. So in most cultures we’ve decided that it’s ok to charge enough rent that they need to work 80 hours a week in horrible humiliating conditions to pay for it, but it’s not OK to require sex in exchange for things, because that’s seen as unacceptably humiliating.

Most people don’t want to be in a position where they ever have to make that choice, and that’s a cultural preference which trumps capitalism in most legal systems. If you poll peopke most would agree with that, but others would think it’s more humiliating to have to work 80 hours a week at a fast food place than sleep with some creep twice a week.

So in a way, it represents the will of both the tenant and the landlord. But most of the time it’s going to represent the will of one party more than the other, and most of the time, that’s going to be the landlord. Why? Because the agreement in a contract reflects the relative bargaining power of both parties at the time that they made the contract, and most of the time, historically, but particularly today in big cities, landlords have more bargaining power.

Incontract relationships, you can have situations where both parties are happily making an exchange on the basis of relative equality, or you can have situations where one party is taking advantage of the desperation of the other party to get a really good deal at the other’s expense.

So like if you have a guitar to sell, and you don’t really use it that much, and you would rather have $500 to put towards a nice vacation, and someone else has $500 lying around in their savings, and they really want the guitar you’re selling, then you have a transaction where both partners are getting what they want, and exchanging something they don’t really want to get it. Yay, capitalism, win win.

But, if you play guitar for a living, and you only have that one guitar, but you’re diabetic and this month the price of insulin tripled and the only way for you to afford it is to sell your guitar, without which you won’t be able to make a living unless you start working at a fast food job, and it’s a really nice guitar and worth $5000, but you need the insulin by tomorrow and you don’t have time to find a buyer who has $5000 your bargaining power is extremely low. You’re utterly desperate and in urgent need. If you can’t find a better offer by tomorrow, you’ll sell your guitar for $500 to get that insulin.

So in one sense, the exchange is voluntary, and both sides come out on top. The buyer gets a $5000 guitar for $500 and the seller gets to have insulin and to live for another week. The buyer wanted to live for another week more than having that guitar, but selling the guitar threw his life into chaos and it was a horrible choice to have to make.

3. The Left-Right Political Spectrum is About Class Conflict

Most journalists and Doctor-Professor academics don’t really know what the left-right political spectrum is about, but you will after listening to this episode!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3cmjNrXWms

Script

Hello fellow kids!

Welcome back to What Is Politics,

In the first episode of this podcast, we talked about how politics is unique among practical disciplines in that most of the political terms and concepts are worbs – words that everyone uses without really knowing what they mean – words like capitalism, socialism, left, right, government, ideology, democracy – even the word politics. Everyone has their own different vague idea of what these words mean, even journalists and political science Phd Doctor Professor academics – and people have huge arguments about politics without anyone knowing what they’re actually talking about.

We talked about the noxious effects that this has on us and on our politics, how it makes us easier to manipulate by people who fill in the blanks in our heads of undefined terms with whatever ideas suit them so that we end up supporting or rejecting things that we might not actually support or reject if we had clear definitions of what those these terms actually meant.

And we looked at how this turns politics into a game of competing identity groups, where people who agree on all sorts of things are divided into red team vs blue team and pitted against each-other based on terms like left and right that most people don’t really understand, instead of working together on common goals and against common enemies.

In episode 2 we defined politics as decision-making in groups, and we asked how we as ordinary people who don’t have official decision-making power, might be able to exercise our influence over the people who do have official decision-making power – like our government representatives, our bosses at work, our landlords. And we came to the conclusion that whether we’re talking about public politics, meaning decision-making involving the state, or private politics, meaning any other kind of group decision-making, like at work, the way you get someone with authority to do what you want is by exercising your bargaining power.

But before we start looking at how we exercise our bargaining power, we need to figure out what sorts of things we want to use our bargaining power for – and to do that we need to understand what the political right and left are all about.

There are no political worbs more misunderstood, more confused, more abused, more mindlessly tribal, than left and right.

Since 1964 when The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics was published, to today, you have study after study showing that a large majority of people can’t identify a far left position from a far right one. People routinely describe themselves as right wingers while supporting mostly left wing economic policies, or else describe themselves as hardcore left wingers while supporting extreme right wing political structures, and people describe themselves as moderates or centrists while holding all sorts of extreme right wing and left wing views. And I personally see this almost every day in real life, which is what motivated me to start this podcast, as I mentioned in episode 1.

These same studies show that for many people, left and right are mostly identity groups, rather than a description of political ideology – ideology meaning a set of ideas about the way you think that things should be, based on a set of ideas about human nature is, or how the universe works.

In general, people of all education levels and social classes tend to identify as being on the left or right based mostly on how politicians, parties or peer groups that we identify with describe themselves, and then we often tend to choose the policies that we support based on the policies that the politicians and peer groups that we identify with support.

You can read about this in some recent books that I mentioned in the first episode, like Can Democracy Work, or Democracy for Realists, about the psychology of voting, or else books which are more more specifically about self-description and political ideology like Ideology in America, or Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. And like I mentioned in the first episode, I don’t endorse all of the conclusions of these books, which tend to be rather skeptical of democracy, but we’ll explore all of this further when we do episodes on representative democracy and political psychology.

I should also note that the terms liberal and conservative are terms closely associated with left and right, and often used synonymously with left and right, but that’s a mistake. While left and right are related to the terms liberal and conservative, they’re not the same thing – liberalism is a combination of ideas that are on the left and right, and to some extent, so is modern conservatism. We’ll talk about liberalism and conservatism in another episode so we can focus on the more basic left and right to get the foundation we need to understand more complicated topics.

Obsolete?

Anyhow, as a result of the confusion around the terms left and right, more and more people think that these are obsolete terms. By the mid 1950’s you already had certain authors complaining about these terms being outdated. You can find a short piece Neither Left nor Right by libertarian capitalist Leonard Read from 1956 online, where he writes about how left and right end up being are same thing at the extremes, like you get Hitler’s Nazi Germany on the extreme right and Stalin’s USSR on the extreme left, which resemble each-other in some important ways, and therefore according to Read, the real divide in politics is not left and right but authoritarianism versus the libertarianism.

This idea that left and right converge at the extremes, sometimes called horseshoe theory is very popular, but also very incorrect as we’ll see shortly, because properly defined, left and right are totally incompatible opposites, just like actual left hand and right hand directions, or cold and hot, up and down big and small. Never the twain shall meet, at least not at the same time and place as we’ll see in a bit.

In recent years, you have political parties all around the world from green party candidates in Canada, to Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, to fascist parties in Italy with almost the exact same slogan “neither left nor right, but forward!” And every few years you get people trying to replace left and right with supposedly more useful concepts like “open vs closed”, which is like making a super insulting new political spectrum with open hip and cool geniuses on one side and closed stupid foolish dumbasses on the other.

And even though many people identify very strongly as being on the left or right or on the center, or as being too independant-minded for such foolish worldly classifications, very few people know what these terms actually mean.

You can read article after article or book after book discussing left and right, and not find a definition of terms anywhere, and in large part that’s because most of these writers, including PhD Doctor professors of political science don’t know what left and right mean any more than anybody else does.

When you do find a definition, more often than not it’s the wrong definition. And this absence of definitions, and incorrect use of the terms is true of even of books and articles written by PhD Dr. Professors specifically about left and right.

So for one example, you can read The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Left and Right by PhD Dr. Professor Yuval Levin. In 350 pages about the birth of the left and right he somehow forgets to define what left and right actually mean. Uhh, it’s like different directions or something? uh huh huh, huh huh. So what’s the book about? Birth? A penpal bromance? I’m not 100% sure – and neither is the author apparently…

Or you can read Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of the Left and Right by political science doctor professor Timothy Brennan.

As I explained briefly in the second episode, culture is one of the main determinants of politics, of group decision-making. So in different times and different places, being a member of a particular cultural category can determine your level of decision-making power – like Protestants and Catholics and Jews had different rights in different european countries in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, or women couldn’t own property until the 19^th century, and they couldn’t vote until after WWI, or black and white people had different rights in the US or in South Africa, etc.

As I’ll be explaining shortly, the concepts of left and right are crucial to understanding which side is which in cultural battles where people with less rights are trying to get equal rights. But you wouldn’t know this from reading this Wars of Position book, where the author manages to fill 300 plus pages without defining the main concepts that’s he’s supposedly talking about. He just expects you to feel what they mean. Blue team vs red team, black hats verus white hats, good guys vesus bad guys, another 300 page academic book about basically nothing.

There is a 2014 article in the Atlantic monthly called The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus, by Crispin Sartwell, another political science PhD doctor professor. Sartwell throws up his hands and says that you just can’t define left and right, because they’re ultimately meaningless terms. All the common definitions like the state versus the market, or equality versus liberty, or collectivism versus individualism, can’t possibly be right if you go over what and whom these terms have been used to describe over the years – again, he points to Hitler and Stalin, the same example Read was complaining about in the 1950’s – how can they be so similar, yet at opposite ends of the spectrum? So according to this author, it’s time to throw these categories out the window entirely, and replace them with a new political spectrum of equality versus hierarchy – for which he gets the idiot savant tard prize for political theory for reasons that will become obvious a bit later.

Why Do We Need Left and Right?

All this confusion and irritation with these terms begs the question – why do we even need these terms anymore? Isn’t lumping people into tribal identity boxes the very problem that this podcast is trying to fight in the first place? Don’t we want people thinking for themselves instead of according to some pre-packaged stereotyped ideological scripts?

Works for Whom?

You’ll often hear politicians say things like ‘we need to abandon tired old ideas like left and right just find solutions that work’. Like you can imagine Turing Test Pete Buttigieg saying something like this. And this resonates with a lot of people who want politicians to work together for the common good, instead of the red team versus blue team mentality of political parties who prioritize getting elected over finding solutions to our problems that work for everyone.

But, the problem is that there is no such thing as a “solution” that works for everyone – you always have to ask, works for whom? Because if even when something improves the lives of the vast majority of people, there are always some people who were better off when everyone else was worse off.

Unicorn Fairy Health Care Example

Like imagine if you could set up a magical fairy dust healthcare system that would have all the top technology and best care available, and you get your choice of doctors and you get a high number of doctors per population, and everyone has access to healthcare and everyone is enrolled automatically, and it’s absolutely free. And I don’t mean free as in free at the point of service, paid for by taxes, I mean free like crazy gumby gold free, like magic. Like it’s paid for by the secret, like that book, The Secret – the government just manifests the money and equipment by rubbing a genie lamp and it’s there.

The only caveat is that when it comes to things that aren’t emergencies and that can wait, like certain non-urgent scans or non-serious boo boos, you have two wait three days to get seen, and no one is allowed to get health care outside of the system.

Well this would undoubtedly improve the lives and healthcare quality of 99.999% of the population, and it would also undoubtedly be the greatest healthcare system ever in the history of the world, for 99.999% of the polulation.

But, there would be the other 0.0001% of the population – a handful of super ultra wealthy people who currently, whenever they scrape their knee, can afford to have Doctor Phil flown in by helicopter to come in and kiss their boo boo right away – well those people wouldn’t be able to do that anymore in this new system, they’d have to put on a band aid, and wait two days before Dr. Phil comes. So even though this is the greatest healthcare system ever devised, this tiny group would be at a relative disadvantage, and they might oppose the new system, because being able to fly over Dr. Phil makes them feel better than their employees who can’t do that.

Actually nevermind the caveats, even if someone came out with the best magical system possible – healthcare is absolutely totally free and comes from a magic genie lamp and you don’t have to wait for 3 days and you could still fly in doctor oz to kiss your boo boo and you can still have private insurance if you want it for some insane reason – if this system were put into place in the united states, it would lower the value of the shares of various corporations involved in health care insurance, so their shareholders would be worse off.

So even the best most fantastic imaginary drug induced imagination scenarios, solutions don’t just work, they work for some people, but not for others. And what the right left political spectrum does, and why it’s so important and useful, is that it helps you identify who any given policy, or politician or political party or ideology works for, and who it works against.

Different Means to the Same Goal?

There’s an idea out there that used to be a lot more prevalent than it is today in our increasingly polarized times, but that is still very common, that left and right are just different ways of achieving the same basic goals.

Like it is true that most people, whether they see themselves as being on the left or on the right, often share many of the same goals – we usually want a society where people are generally safe, secure and prosperous, where people have freedom to speak and act and believe and live their lives as they please, and have opportunities to improve their lives, and we want to live in a society where government is responsive to the needs and desires of the people, and we don’t want to deal with annoying bureaucracy.

And according to this idea of left and right as different means to the same ends, people on the right think that the best way to achieve these goals is through the market and personal responsibility, and treating everyone as individuals, and people on the left think that the best way to get there is by using the state to do things like regulate the market and protect people in the name of the collective good in various ways, like a social safety net, safety and consumer protection regulations, and to actively protect specific collective identity groups from the effects of discrimination.

But even if most people share a lot of similar goals, left and right are not primarily about different means to get to a similar end – they are very much about opposing and incompatible ends, opposing and incompatible visions of what the ideal world should look like, about who should get what and why, and who should be in change and why, and about who shouldn’t be in charge and why not. Who gets to make decisions and who has to put up with those decisions.

And if many people who define themselves as being on the left and on the right have similar goals, that is mostly because they don’t know what left and right mean.

Inherently Opposing Interests

Left and right are about which side you are on in situations where people have inherently opposing interests.

On an issue by issue basis, there are all sorts of situations where different people simply have opposing and incompatible interests.

Tenants normally want to have an affordable rent, and landlords normally want to charge the highest possible rent. Employees usually prefer a job that’s interesting and pays well, but employers generally want you to work as much as possible for as little as possible and they want to control what you do as much as possible. Citizens want their government to be as transparent and accountable as possible, but governments usually want to be able to do their work without people watching over their every move and telling them what to do. Governments and corporations want to spy on your every move because it makes their jobs easier and improves profits, and citizens want to have their privacy.

Sometimes the interests of these parties align temporarily, and maybe you love your boss or your landlord, but in general some of your interests are always opposed on a fundamental level, if your rent goes down you’re better off and your landlord is worse off and vice versa.

In a country with democratic institutions, politicians who are pursuing really unpopular goals for the benefit a minority of people, like lowering your wages to benefit employers, raising your rents to benefit landlords and real estate developers, selling off well functioning public utilities or services to benefit private corporations, or giving the government and corporations more power to spy on you – politicians who have that sort of agenda can’t be honest about what they’re trying to do because they’ll get voted out.

So, they either need to flat out lie and pretend that they’re pursuing things that people do want, or else they have to convince us that the things that we want are impossible or irresponsible, and that we’ll actually be better off by doing the opposite of what we want.

Oh no silly, you can’t have rent control, that will just make the housing crisis even worse – the way to have cheaper housing in the long term is let landlords raise the rent as much as they want so more people will be incentivized to build more, and that will increase supply and lower rents!

Oh no silly, you can’t force employers to pay higher wages, that will just cause unemployment, if you want higher wages and more jobs, you need to let employers pay as little as the market allows, and cut their taxes so they have more money to pay you with.

Now sometimes these types arguments have some merit, so we’re going to do a whole episode on some shortcuts that you can use to figure out who’s making these arguments in good faith and who’s trying to manipulate you – but what matters for this episode is that one of those shortcuts is the left and right political spectrum.

One of the main things that the concept of a left and a right does, is it helps you asses who a policy works for when it comes to situations where these types of opposing, incompatible interests are at odds and it helps you figure out what a person’s ultimate goal actually is. It helps you understand who’s lying to you and why they’re lying to you.

That’s why it’s so important to have the correct definitions of left and right – because all of the other popular definitions out there that have emerged since the cold war, like big government versus small government, or the state versus the market, or the individual versus the collective – those definitions make us focus on way less important things, and peripheral things, and often just plan nonsensical things that make us confused and stupid, and that obscure our ability to focus on what politicians real underlying motives are.

Hierarchy vs. Equality

So what do left and right actually mean? And how do we know what they mean?

Remember that article I mentioned, The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus, where the author decides that left and right are meaningless terms and that we should replace them with equality versus hierarchy?

Well for this the Dr. Professor gets the idiot savant prize – because unbeknownst to him, that is already exactly what left and right refer to!

For the past 12,000 years, or longer depending on which anthropologist you talk to – and we’ll look at this more in future episodes – there have been societies where some people have had more power, more rights and more wealth than others.

And since that time, in every society, there have been people who think that these inequalities are morally justified and necessary and good, and have been people who think that these inequalities are morally unjustified and unnecessary and bad, and that they should therefore be reduced or eliminated.

And the people who think that these inequalities are just or necessary are on the right, and those who think they should be reduced or eliminated are on the left.

How do we know that left and right mean equality vs hierarchy instead of things like the market versus the state or individualism vs collectivism etc or big versus small government?

We know that these are the correct definitions of left and right because of the circumstances that gave birth to left and right as political terms, and from how they were used from that time up until the the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States mixed everything up and created the confusion about the terms that we have today.

History

French Revolution

The terms left and right enter our political vocabulary with the French Revolution which kicks off in 1789. The king of france had lost much of his authority as a result of a succession of bungled crises, wars, and famines, and eventually delegates from all three of the traditional feudal era social orders – the nobility, the clergy and the common people – gathered independently of the King in what they called the National Assembly or the Legislative Assembly to make decisions about the present and future of France.

Two major orientations emerged among the various delegates: people who wanted to maintain the monarchy and the traditional feudal era social order as much as possible, and people who wanted to move away from the traditional order and towards liberal enlightenment principles – at first more political and cultural equality, and then as events progressed, pushed on by labourers and small shopkeepers in the streets, towards more and more radical political, cultural and economic equality.

And because birds of a feather flock together, this split was reflected in the physical positioning of the delegates in the room.

On the right side of the room, meaning to the right of the president of the assembly, you had the pro-monarchy delegates who wanted to preserve the traditional hierarchical order as much as possible, and to the left of the president you had the pro-revolution delegates who wanted more and more equality.

And voila, the political left and right are born.

Political Hierarchy and Equality

We’ll talk a bit more in the next episode about the french revolution to convince all of you people who insist that left and right mean a bunch of other things instead of hierarchy and equality, why your definitions can’t be right. but in this episode I want to focus on hierarchy and equality, why these concepts are so fundamental for politics.

First what do hierarchy and equality have to do with politics?

We all know what equality means – the condition of being the same. And because we’re talking about politics, we’re talking about decision-making equality. And remember from episode 2 we talked about four categories of politics, four determinants of decision-making power – Political institutions, Economics, Culture and Intepolity relations – so we’re thinking about political institutions that give everyone an equal say, like direct democracy, we’re thinking about equality of rights between different cultural groups, we’re thinking about economic equality because usually the more wealth you have the more decision-making power you have, to buy things to hire people and tell the what to so all day, to donate to political parties and we’re thinking about equality between different polities, like nations and other political groups like tribes, or different levels of government.

Meanwhile hierarchy means inequality but inequality ranked according to some value. So an apple and a banana and a watermelon are unequal, but they’re just randomly unequal. There’s no hierarchy. But if you start ranking your fruits according to which one has the most sugar, or which one is bigger, or which one you like more, when they you end up with a hierarchy of fruits, ranked according to sweetness, or size.

When it comes to humans, any given number of people are all unequal in the sense that one is taller, one has a bigger nose, one has darker skin, one lives on a hill, one lives by the ocean, one has a wee wee and one has a hoo haw, one is better at math, one is better at music, one is better at sports. And these random inequalities become hierarchies if you rank them according to who’s better at chess, who’s taller, who’s stronger, who has the curliest hair etc.

But again, given that left and right are political terms, we’re interested in hierarchies of decision-making power – who gets to decide, and who doesn’t, who has rights and who doesn’t, who gets to give orders and who has to obey orders, who gets to do what they want all day, and who has to do what someone else wants all day.

So we’re not interested hierarchies of hair curliness or “hierarchies of competence” as Dr. Professor Jordan Peterson likes to talk about, unless they have some relationship to inequality in decision-making power, like if having curly hair gives you more rights than having straight hair, then that becomes political. If being a more competent violin maker gives you more money that a less competent violin maker, them that becomes political.

And again we’re looking at the four axes of politics, so we’re looking at hierarchies in political institutions, culture, economics and international or interpolity relationships

Hierarchical political institutions are things like monarchies or dictatorships, the top down command structure of the army, or the opt-out dictatorship of the owner in a capitalist workplace.

Cultural hierarchies are like when people of one religion or with one skin colour or gender has more rights than an other because of cultural beliefs.

Economic hierarchy, means where there are rich people and there are poor people resulting in different levels of decision-making power.

And we’re al looking at hierarchy between polities, usually nations, so we’re looking at situations of empire or colonialism, where the decision-making power of people in one nation is impeded or determined by people of a stronger nation. But it can also be power relationships between tribes, or else the hierarchy between a city and a state and a federal or national governments.

So when you see an article like the one by Robert Reich called America’s Real Divide Isn’t Left vs. Right, it’s Democracy vs. Oligarchy, you can laugh and shake your head because democracy and oligarchy are left and right, but on the axis of political institutions. Democracy means everyone gets an equal say in decision-making, so that’s on the left, and oligarchy, means a small group of people get to make all the decisions for everybody else, which is a hierarchy of decisionmaking power, so that’s on the right. And further on the right would be a monarchy or a dictatorship.

Or those four quadrant political compass memes that are popular, where you have a horizontal left right axis and then a vertical axis with authoritarian on top and libertarian on the bottom, both axes are actually different left and right axes. The horizonal one is economic left and right, and the vertical one is political left and right, where authoritarian is the right and libertarian is the left.

Practical Examples

So for practical examples, those situations I mentioned earlier, when there’s an inherent conflict of interest between people in a hierarchical situation – for example business owners and their employees – so you a political hierarchy, meaning a decision-making hierarchy, with owners on top, they have all the decision-making power, and they give some to management who are in the middle, who use that power to control the workers, who are on the bottom.

So when it comes to conflicts between labour and management or labour and owners, the left wing position is the one that flattens out or equalizes the hierarchy the most – in other words, the one that favours the workers, gives more money or power to works – while the right wing position is one the favours, or strengthens the existing hierarchy, in other words, one that favours the owners and managers, or gives more money or power to owners and managers.

The left wing position makes the hierarchy more equal, higher pay for workers, more freedom for workers, more decision-making power for workers, the right wing position is one that gives more power or preserves the powers of the owner, like eliminating minimum wages, allowing employers to fire you for any reason they want, eliminating government regulations on working conditions or paid overtime, not allowing you to force your employees to poop in diapers at work, etc.

Same thing with tenants and landlords. The right wing positions are the ones that give more wealth and power to the landlords, who are the owners and therefore are on top of the political hierarchy between landlords and tenants, things like allowing landlords to raise rents as much as the market allows, and the left wing positions are the ones that give more money and power to tenants, things like rent control, or free lawyers for tenants in courts etc.

Or if you’re talking about a cultural hierarchy where men have more rights than women, the left would be on the side of giving women equal rights, and the right would be on the side of preserving the hierarchy of rights. If women were the ones with more rights, then the left would be on the side of men.

In terms of economics which means anything to do with resources in groups – if you take the fantasy health care examples I gave at the beginning of the episode, the left wing position is the one that gives everyone equal health care, and the right wing position is the one that maintains the current system because it gives more power to those on top of the economic hierarchy, whether it’s ultra wealthy people who can fly in dr. Phil or else the shareholders of medical corporations who would lose profits in a magical free system.

So like a Bernie sanders type of government funded health insurance plan is a left wing plan in a number of ways – first of all, everyone has the same healthcare plan, regardless of your income. So it eliminates the hierarchies of healthcare coverage, where some people have amazing plans, some people have crappy plans and some people have no coverage. It eliminates private health insurance plans, so it takes away decision-making hierarchies by taking away decision-making power from insurance companies and puts it in the hands of doctors. It eliminates one of the effects of the hierarchies of wealth – having more wealth can’t buy you better coverage under Bernie’s plan, and it also reduces wealth hierarchy to begin with in that it forces wealthier people to pay more taxes into the system than poorer people to pay or the system.

Now some of you are thinking what is this crap, I’m on the right and I hate the left, and I hate dictatorship and I love democracy and freedom, leftist communist governments are the authoritarian governments – two things to understand are, if you support democracy over authoritarianism , you might be politically conservative, but you’re not actually on the right on those issues, you’re on the left – conservative and liberal are not the same as left and right – and those authoritarian communist governments might be on the left when it comes to economic distribution, and they might call themselves leftists, but they’re on the right when it comes to political organization.

Class

Confusion

So one thing that causes confusion about left and right is that you can be on the right in one area, but on the left in another area. So you can think that only heterosexual couples should get married, so you’re on the right wing on a cultural issue, but you also think there should be more economic equality, so you’re on the left on economics even if you think of yourself as a big right wing Trump fan nationalist. Or, you can think that you need a strong dictatorship to impose economic equality, so you’re on the right when it comes to political institutions, but on the left on economics, even if you think of yourself as a big left wing communist.

Another thing that causes confusion is that people lie about are in denial about where they really stand on things, because they really want that right wing or left wing label either for PR purposes of to preserve their own self-image. Like if you tell a Stalinist that they’re on the right in terms of political organization, or you tell a Trump voter that they’re on the left on economics, their heads will explode.

So one of the main points of this podcast is to get people to forget their identity label and start thinking about right and left on particular issues that you can work together on with other people, even if they call themselves something different from you, and they have different opinions on other issues. You may favour really harsh treatment of illegal immigrants, and I may favour welcoming treatment of illegal immigrants. but we both want universal health care, so lets work together on that issue, and duke it out later on immigration – or maybe in the course of our common struggle on health care, we’ll come to a better understanding on eachother’s positions on immigration.

Another thing that can sometimes be confusing is that since left and right are relative, like hot and cold – something that’s considered a left wing position today, might be considered to be a right wing positing 100 years later. So early on in the french revolution, the positions of the delegates on the left were things like a constitutional monarchy with elections and equal representation for everyone regardless of their noble, clerical or common status, and things like protection of private property, and everyone having freedom to trade without government or guild interference. 70 years later those were positions of right wing parties in France, because at that point you no longer had a monarchy, and you had socialists further to the left demanding economic equality on top of the representational political and cultural equality which had already been achieved.

Hierarchy

But back to hierarchy:

A typical political hierarchy is what you usually have in an army. You have a commander in chief on top who gives orders to generals, who give orders to captains, who give orders to lieutenants who give orders to sergeants who give orders to privates etc. Or in a workplace in capitalism, whether it’s a private company or a government bureaucracy, you have the owner on top, who hires managers who give orders to the workers. And these hierarchical political institutions usually also have matching economic hierarchies. The owner not only has the most authority, but also usually makes the most money. The generals make more money than they captains who make more money than the lieutenants etc.

Political hierarchies develop in social animals, like humans, for three main purposes which are all related to one another.

#1 is that political hierarchies increase efficiency so that a group of people can act like a unit and accomplish tasks without everyone constantly arguing about what should be done and who should do it – two familiar examples are in an army or in a capitalist workplace like I just mentioned – and the idea is that even though it’s more fun to give orders than to take orders, everyone, even those people at the bottom, is theoretically better off working together and accomplishing things versus arguing over everything and accomplishing very little.

#2 is that hierarchies reduce the amount of conflicts that people have by deciding in advance who wins and who loses in situations of potential conflict – and theoretically, even though people on the lower ranks have to give way to the needs and choices of those in higher ranks, the lower ranks still get more than they would have gotten if everyone had to fight about everything all the time. So a fast food service employee makes way less than the CEO, but theoretically they wouldn’t make anything at all if no one was producing anything because they would be arguing about everything all day.

And #3 is that hierarchies allow some people to hog power, wealth and freedom at the expense of other people – so even when it’s not beneficial to society as a whole, even if there might be more efficient and more egalitarian ways of organizing things, it is beneficial to the people at the top to maintain the hierarchy, so they just want to keep hogging as much power, rights and wealth for themselves as they can get away with.

So maybe a McDonalds employee would make a lot more money if McDonalds were a worker owned and controlled cooperative, and the worker would also have more decision-making power, and maybe the company would even be better run and offer cheaper prices to consumers as is often the case with cooperatives, and maybe they would make choices that respect the environment and local communities more if all the workers had decision-making power, and it would just be better for society as a whole if it were a cooperative – but if that happened, the owners wouldn’t be able to hog all of the profit and power for themselves, so they insist on running it as a corporation.

People on the right will normally focus on reasons #1 and 2, while people on the left will focus on reason #3

Now hierarchies always have some kind of justification. Like even if it’s a 100% #3 exploitation hierarchy like slavery, which has zero benefits for those at the bottom, there’s always some kind of justification for it – an efficiency justification, a necessity justification, a religious justification, a moral justification, a natural/scientific justification or a combination of those – and sometimes its pretending that there is no hierarchy. Like in a couple of episodes when we look at the cold war between the US’ and the Soviet Union, we’ll see how both sides would offer all sorts of justifications for their hierarchies, but sometimes they would also argue that there was no real fixed hierarchy in their societies! Sure you have rich bosses and poor workers, but any poor person with talent and gumption could become a zillionaire business owner in the United States like John Rockafeller did – and sure you have dirt poor peasants and comfortable communist party bureaucrats with summer homes – but any dirt poor peasant with talent could rise to the top of the Soviet Union, like Nikita Krushchev did – two classless societies apparently fighting for world supremacy, Marx’ wet dream!

So in left right debates you’ll see people who are on the right on any given issue (even if they’re pretending to be on the left) making justifications for hierarchy or pretending that it doesn’t exist, and people on the left on any given issue (regardless of what they call themselves) are always pointing out that hierarchies exist, and arguing that they’re unjustified, and making moral and practical arguments for why things should be more equal.

For example, in a truly capitalist workplace, the boss has dictatorship authority, and the worker’s only option if he doesn’t like something is to give up his salary and leave. And if a worker produces $10,000 a month in value, if he has a lot of bargaining power maybe he can keep $7–8,000 of that a month and the owner keeps the rest but if he has low bargaining power, he only gets to keep $1,000 a month or even less and the owner keeps the rest. And high bargaining power workers don’t just get more of a share of the value they produce but they also get better working conditions, while very low bargaining power workers have to harm their bodies and pee in diapers like at amazon warehouses or purdue chicken processing plants, or foreign sweatshops. So you have a political, meaning decisionmaking hierarchy, and you have an economic hierarchy between owner and workers, based on ownership, and more fundamentally bargaining power, because ownership is what gives owners their bargaining power advantage over workers. And you also have economic and work condition hierarchies between high and low bargaining power workers.

Is that fair? Is it necessary? Is it the best way of organizing economic production? And is it right or necessary that workers only get paid according to their bargaining power instead of their work or their level of contribution to production, so that someone with high bargaining power who only works a little gets way more pay than a low bargaining power worker who works very hard?

The right wing position will be yes it’s fair, the boss puts in the risk and the work and investment to start up the workplace so he earned the right to have the authority and the surplus over wages paid, and yes it’s necessary because if there was no potential to earn profit, then no one would take those risks or start any businesses, and if workers want more pay then it’s their responsibility to increase their bargaining power by making themselves more useful to employers, or else to start their own businesses and become owners themselves, and that everyone has equal opportunity to succeed, there are no laws in pure capitalism to prohibit a poor person or a black person or a woman or a jew from becoming an owner or getting an education so it’s fair and it’s not really a hierarchy anyways, people are choosing to be workers instead of owners because that’s what they prefer.

That’s a right wing position.

And the left wing position would be no, it’s not fair, why should some people spend their entire lives taking orders from other people just because the owner inherited the money that he started his business with, or he inherited the whole business from his dad – and why should a person have 90% of the value of their work sucked away just because they’re weak and the other person is strong? And just because there are no laws preventing someone from becoming an owner doesn’t mean that there aren’t a million other obstacles that make it impossible for most people, and why should people who are good at business deserve so much wealth and power while people who aren’t deserve to die from lack of healthcare? And it’s not necessary, it’s just legalized hogging where people who have more wealth gain mire wealth – there are other successful ways of organizing workplaces, like cooperatives where are the workers are owners and get to have democracy at work instead of dictatorship, or socialism where the whole community that’s affected by an enterprise, from the workers to the local neighbourhood to the consumers, gets to have a say.

So those are your right and left positions, and remember left and right are relative to whatever you’re comparing to, like comparing to the status quo, or relative to what your question is – in this case the question is capitalism fair.

And you can also have an intermediate centrist position which is a compromise between the left and right positions, so in this case, you keep capitalist power relations, but you make laws to give workers a little more bargaining power, like minimum wage laws, or overtime pay laws, or laws that say that you have to give workers bathroom breaks.

But justified or not, people who support existing hierarchies – meaning people on the right – particularly those people who benefit from those hierarchies – they don’t usually like it when people asking questions about whether the hierarchies that they benefit from are legitimate or not. They usually want you to take it for granted that they’re legitimate, that these hierarchies are not only justified and necessary, but part of nature.

They want you to think about how the hierarchy is one great organic natural unit, like different limbs and organs of one unified body which form an integral mutually beneficial whole. The working class are the hands, the ruling class are the brains, the clergy are the heart, the slave class is the anus, all working together for the survival of the whole – and if you got rid of the ruling class, the whole body would die. If you equalized the classes nothing would work, like a human body with 5 hands and no head and no feet. Civilization would collapse. Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature – which is the title of a book by anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard.

So if you look at any right wing movements, they generally don’t talk about hierarchy versus equality. The capitalist libertarians for example believe in a system which can generate infitine economic hierarchy and corresponding political hierarchy, but they usually talk and think in terms of liberty and individual rights versus the collectivist tyranny of state power.

Fascists and ethnic nationalists promote cultural, economic, political, and international hierarchies, but they talk and think about unity, about the collective good of the nation, and how workers and bosses all play their roles in the fight for national greatness.

Medieval political philosophy was all about how the nobility fought, the clergy prayed and the common people worked, all for eachothers’ benefit.

Right wing politics is always about social unity, but unity in a hierarchy, and we need to fight the usurpers who want to disrupt our harmonious social order. Right wing political figures talk and think about other things, but between the lines they are promoting hierarchy.

Left wing politics is always about social unity via equality. And we must fight the evil elites who keep us locked in these unjut exploitative hierarchies. And where right wing figure talk about other things than hierarchy, left wing political figures think talk about equality constantly.

And if you have a left wing figure that isn’t talking about equality, then that’s a hint that they’re not really on the left! Like politicians in the USSR talked alot of economic and cultural equality, but less and less about political equality, because in terms of political decisionmaking, the USSR was an extremely hierarchical authoritarian régime.

And this is why the left-right political spectrum is inherently a left wing spectrum – by making you look at politics in terms of hierarchy versus equality, it implicitly invites you to notice the existence of hierarchies – and the fact that some people think that they’re not justified. That’s why the right has always been uncomfortable with the left right political spectrum from the very beginning of the use of those terms in the national assembly in france right up until the cold war when the right changed the meaning of those terms to mean market versus state, or collective versus individual or liberty versus equality, as we’ll see later.

So if we look at the book I mentioned earlier by self-identified conservative author Yuval Levin, The Birth of Left and Right. He doesn’t define left of right in the book, but you can infer that he thinks that left and right are just about one’s attitude towards change, not about hierarchy versus equality. Even though almost every quote he cites from Edmund Burke is about justifying hierarchy, and almost ever quote from Thomas Paine is about the morality of equality, according to Levin what makes someone a right winger is that they want slow, cautious evolutionary change, like Edmund Burke did, while the Left wants fast, thoughtless revolutionary change that throws away the wisdom of the ages.

Compare this to socialist writer Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind, a book about the nature of right wing thought – reactionary is another term from the french revolution that means someone who wants to turn back away from revolutionary changes. Robin doesn’t define left or right either, but his book takes for granted that the left seeks equality and the main thesis of the book is that the right’s primary M.O. is inventing new justifications for hierarchy, and new ways to preserve hierarchy.

And like you! When I first asserted that left and right refer to equality versus hierarchy, if you’re someone who’s really into politics, and that made immediate sense to you, you’re probably someone whose politics are generally on the left. If you’re really into politics and you think hierarchy versus equality is irrelevant or archaic, or childishly oversimplified, or it just doesnt speak to you, then your politics probably lean right, even if you see yourself as a liberal or a centrist, because you’re not thinking about hierarchies or inequalities, you’re taking hierarchies for granted and instead you’t thinking about about things like collectivism or statism vs individualism and liberty or you’re thinking about commonsense win-win solutions to our problems that work for everyone, or complicated technocratic policy wonk solutions to our various problems.

When Equality is Bad

Now where justifications for hierarchy tend to be based on efficiency, arguments for equality tend to be moral. We usually believe in democracy even if it might be less efficient than dictatorship in some ways, because we think it’s morally right. If it turns out to also be more efficient, then even better! For example, Finland’s education system was designed with equality as its main goal, so that the richest kids would get the exact same education as the poorest kids even if the quality of the education was expected to be less than what the richest people could afford privately. By accident, it turned out to be one of the best systems in the world, and Finland ends up in the number one or two spots each year for best education results – so there are also efficiency arguments to be made for equality, just like there are also moral arguments to be made for hierarchies – but in our democratic age, people tend to think of equality as a sort of baseline, and hierarchy needs an excuse or justification, so you’ll tend to see more moral arguments for equality and more efficiency arguments for hieararchy.

But just because something is more equal, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any good, even morally.

Like there’s a book by philospher dr. Professor Harry Frankfurt called On Equality where he argues that no one should care about economic equality and that we shouldn’t worry about the fact that some people have enormous unimaginable mountains of wealth, so long as the poorest people have enough. Now this is a really naive 3^rd grade argument, for reasons that I discussed briefly in a short video that you can find on the What is Politics youtube channel – and the book is basically garbage in my opinion because it completely ignores how wealth equals political power and when inequality gets too high those with the biggest fortunes end up being your boss and your landlord and your president and your media provider and your biggest client – and they use all that power to make sure you can never threaten their economic and political power in any way – see mike bloomberg 2020 – except Dr. Frankfurt’s book has one useful passage where he clearly illustrates how equality can sometimes be a bad thing.

He says imagine if you have 8 people with a potentially fatal disease and there are only 7 doses of the cure. If you don’t get a full dose, the cure doesn’t work. So if you divide the doses equally, everyone dies.

So even if sharing equally might be your moral ideal, sometimes there just isn’t enough to be shared equally if you want a functioning society, and you have to figure something else out – maybe you’ll draw straws at random, or else you’ll have to establish some kind of hierarchy of importance – maybe the oldest person or sickest person should die so the rest can live.

Futhermore, while human beings can and have organized in very egalitarian societies – and we’ll take a look at perfectly functional hunter gatherer societies where men and women are equal, and there are no fixed authority positions in society – any large organization of people doing complex coordinated tasks needs some kind of structure or organization, and it’s really difficult to organize anything complex without some kind of hierarchy.

Like if you’ve ever worked at a badly organized cooperative health food store, or an anarchist bookstore, you’ve experienced what it’s like to have an organization with no structure – it sucks – people droning on about nothing at endless meetings, endless arguments, voting about every minute issue. It kind of feels like a human body with 5 hands and no head and no feet. And the more people that are involved, the more it sucks. And half the time some power hungry charismatic lunatic ends of taking advantage of the lack of structure to control everything themselves.

Organizations need structure, they need delegation of duties and division of labour. For larger organizations you usually need some kind of hierarchy. But hierarchies can be more authoritarian, or they can be more democratic – in other words they can be more right wing or more left wing.

On the right you have your regular autocratic or top down hierarchies where authority flows from the top down, like in an army or an ordinary business, and on the left you have democratic, “bottom-up” hierarchies where all members have an equal say in choosing who gets to have authority, like in a large cooperatives where workers elect their managers and their CEO and can even be involved in decisions about how much people get paid etc.

If we’re talking about political systems, on the right you would have a dictatorship or a monarchy which are a top down hierarchies, and a bit to the left of that would be an oligarchy like the ancient roman republic where a a small group of families shared power and got to vote and participate in politics, and then to the left of that would be representative democracy where everyone gets to vote for a small group of people to rule them for 4–6 years at a time, and to the left of that would be something like ancient greek democracy where every citizen takes turns at all government offices, and to the left of that would be something like the ideals of classical socialism or anarchism, where all workers and consumers are supposed to control economic production and government directly without any state at all.

The socialist ideals may sound fanciful, but if you read about the spanish civil war which happened from 1936–1939, you can read about how anarchists took over large parts of Spain, including rural areas allmover Catalonia and major cities like Barcelona, and they ran and coordinated the activities of major urban and rural villages alike from the telephone company to the trains, to barbershops and farms and coordinating bodies linking all of them up via these interesting bottom up hierarchical structures, where workers directly ran everything just like in Marx’ wet dreams with no capitalists and no state. Anarchist military units had men and women fighting together and they elected their officers! George Orwell talks about it a bit in his book Homage to Catalonia, and you can read all sorts of in books on this like Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff which is a series of eyewitness participant accounts.

Similar sorts of democratic stuctures emerged in the Russian revolution in 1917 in the form of councils called Soviets, which popped up where people gathered to make decisions in cities, villages, and even military units, and in factory committees where workers directly ran their workplaces. And youd have networks and congresses of Soviets and Factory committees all coordinating with eachother across the country.

Wrap Up

Now we’ll see what happened to these democratic socialist political and economic structures in future episodes, but let’s wrap up for today and summarize what we learned so far in this episode:

Politics means decision-making in groups, whether that group is a country, a workplace or a bunch of friends.

Groups of people working together, whether it’s a small workplace, or giant economies that span the globe, need some sort of organization to be efficient. One way to organize for efficiency is via political hierarchies, where people are ranked unequally in terms of their decision-making power. This efficiency comes at the price of equality – some people end up with more power, more wealth and more rights than others.

Sometimes people organize into hierarchies mostly because people on top can get away with hogging more power, rights and wealth than people at the bottom, and they use efficiency and other reasons as an excuse.

Regardless of the reasons for a hierarchy, some people support the inequalities of a given hierarchy, and some people oppose them.

Those who oppose these hierarchies are on the political left in respect to that particular hierarchy, and those who support the hierarchy are on the right, and centrist positions are ones that compromise between the two – in other words, the left represents equality and the right represents hierarchy.

Hierarchies are necessary for complex organizations, but you can have top down autocratic hierarchies on the right, and democratic, bottom up hierarchies, where everyone chooses who has temporary power, on the left.

When it comes to every day situations where there is a problem or conflict involving different

classes, meaning different ranks in a political hierarchy – employer versus employees, landlord versus tenant, government versus citizen, men versus women, officers versus enlisted soldiers – left wing solutions to the problem are those that make the parties more equal in terms of decision-making power and wealth, which confers more decision-making power – whereas right wing solutions are the ones that preserve existing inequalities, or else that make the parties more unequal.

Four major determinants of how much political power – meaning decision-making power that a person has are: political institutions, economic wealth, culture and interpolity relationships – or politics, economics, culture and international for short – the four categories of politics.

You can have hierarchies or equality in all of those four areas, and therefore you have people who are on the right or left in each of those areas, and some people can be on the right in one area but on the left in another, which causes confusion as to what these term mean because people are often only thinking of one of those areas when characterizing a person or party as being on the left or on the right.

Another thing that causes confusion is that left and right are relative positions. So something that is to the left of the status quo in 1875 ends up to right of the status quo in 1914.

Another source of confusion is that most people don’t know what left and right mean so they describe themselves as right wing even when they favour more political or economic equality in certain areas, and people describe themselves as left wing even when they favour more political hierarchy.

The ambiguity of these terms means that they end up becoming identity groups that divide people who agree on many things, preventing us from working together where we do have common goals. It also leaves us vulnerable to more manipulation as people take advantage of the confusion around these terms in order to manipulate people based on which terms are popular or unpopular.

Next Time

OK, so that’s enough information for this episode – keep this stuff in mind as you go about your day and encounter political writing or shows, or the various hierarchies in your life, and hopefully the world will make a little more sense than it did before.

On the next episode we’re going to go back in time and do a bit of an in the the weeds look at which ideas and people and political parties have been categorized as being on the left and on the right from the French Revolution until the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

And the reason I want to do that is first because it helps us get a better understanding of right and left in general, but also because lots of people today, including many people listening to this podcast, will continue to insist that right and left mean the market versus the state or the individual versus the collective, or big versus small government, or equality versus liberty. So, by looking at how the terms were used historically, we’ll see that none of these definitions can possibly be right – it’s not about the market or the size of government, or the individual or the collective, it’s about what you want to do with the market or the state or what you’re invoking the individual or the collective for.

If you’re want big government to achieve equality, you’re on the left, but if you want big government to reinforce hierarchy, then you’re on the right. If you want less interference with markets because you think that will lead to greater equality you’re on the left, but if you want less interference with markets because you think that will lead to greater equality, like many early 19^th Century socialists and anarchists believed, then you’re on the left. If you invoke the rights of the individual or the collective good to promote equality, then you’re on the left, and if you invoke the rights of the individual or the collective good to promote hierarchy, then you’re on the right.

And then, we’ll look at the Cold War where these incorrect definitions came from and we’ll see why they’re so popular and what happens to your brain if you start looking at politics via the lens of a political spectrum based on those definitions instead of one based on hierarchy vs. equality.

But before we go I want to leave you with a quote that captures some of the spirit of left and right in today’s politics:

In Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez’ endorsement video of Bernie Sanders, she talks about when she used to work as a waitress and says:

“I had been working 12 hour days, I didn’t have health insurance, I was being paid less than a living wage, and I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things. I thought that that’s just how life was…”

That’s the right wing view of the world. There are these big hierarchies of wealth, hierarchies of power at work, of access to important resources like health care, and that’s just how the world works – if you’re at the bottom of those hierarchies it’s because that’s where you deserve to be, you’re not working hard enough, or you didn’t go out and get the type of skills or traits that one needs to be successful, or you didn’t inherit enough money because your parents were irresponsible. And a right winger would go further – these hierarchies are good, they incentivize people to make the right choices which benefit themselves and society as a whole, and these hierarchies are necessary for society to function, and the only way to avoid them would be massive government tyranny.

And then after telling the same story at a rally, AOC continues “It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, and a living wage.”

And that’s the left wing view of the world. Every person inherently deserves the benefits of what society and civilization have to offer. And for that to happen, people need to fight the established hierarchies of our day, political, economic, cultural and international – like big corporations who dominate the government, or like racism in the application of the criminal justice system – and these hierarchies are not only unfair and immoral but they’re unnecessary and counterproductive. They serve mostly to preserve the power and wealth of those on top, and to keep everyone else from prospering. And these are messages that you’ll hear over and over in one form or another in the speeches of leftist politicians like Bernie Sanders’ and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

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OK, so until next time, rate and review it on iTunes, sign up and donate on Patreon, and most importantly share the podcast and tell people about it!

Until next time, Seeya!

4. How Political Definitions Shape Reality

Definitions of political terms affect what we see and don’t see in the world around us, and turn us into effective or ineffective communicators and political actors.

The definition of government that journalists and academics use makes us blind to the people who rule over us in our private lives.

Popular definitions of left and right propagated by media and academia (the state vs. the market, big vs. small government, liberty vs. equality), frame the world in right-wing terms, while the historical definition (hierarchy vs. equality) frames the world in left wing terms.

Competing definitions of racism have different consequences in terms of peoples’ ability to discuss racism, and on how we relate to people from different cultural categories than our own.

https://youtu.be/TaFkzIQk-1o

Script

Greetings fellow dumdums,

Welcome back to What is Politics – where our ultimate goal is to figure out how we, as ordinary people can achieve our political goals, even though we don’t have official decision-making authority.

But before we can achieve our goals, we need to know what those goals are and before we can do that, we need to know what words mean, because as we saw in the first episode, political terms are a cesspool of meaningless worbs – words that everyone uses without really knowing what they mean – which as we saw in that episode, makes us more confused, more powerless and easier to manipulate.

In the second episode we defined politics as anything to do with decision-making in groups, and we saw that although journalists and academia talk about politics as if it’s just about decision-making involving the state, that the word politics actually refers to decision-making in any kind of group, whether it’s a state, or you and your boss and your coworkers, or you and your friends, or you and bunch of fellow chimpanzees deciding on who gets to eat some bananas that you found.

And we divided politics into public politics meaning decision-making involving the state, and private politics, meaning every other kind of decision-making in groups, and we saw that the same political principles, like government, democracy, dictatorship, class and bargaining power apply to both kinds of politics.

In the third episode we saw that most human societies over the past 12,000 or so years have been organized into political hierarchies, where some people have more decision-making power, more wealth and more rights than other people. And we saw that hierarchies serve three related purposes: they facilitate efficient group cooperation, they facilitate conflict avoidance, and they also facilitate the exploitation of less powerful members of the hierarchy by more powerful members of that hierarchy.

And then we saw that what the left right political spectrum is all about, is where one stands in regards to these hierarchies. If you support the interests of the people on top of a given hierarchy then you’re on the right on that issue – and if you support the people at the bottom, then you’re on the left.

In short, left right political spectrum is about hierarchy vs. equality i.e. about class conflict, conflict between the different ranks in our various political, economic, cultural and international hierarchies.

Today’s Episode

In today’s episode we’re going to continue talking about left and right but this time with the goal of illustrating the power that definitions have in shaping our our perceptions, and how good definitions give you galaxy brain and help you understand the world around you and help you communicate effectively with the people around you and help you act more effectively in your own interest – and how bad definitions make you confused and more likely to alienate the people you need to align with, and more likely to shoot yourself in the face or walk off of a cliff.

And in doing so, we’re also going to explain the criteria that we use – and that I use in this podcast when I’m evaluating how to define all of these ill-defined political worbs.

Left-right

Last episode I asserted that the left right political spectrum refers to the opposition between political hierarchy on the right and political equality on the left and I briefly mentioned some popular competing definitions, like the market versus the state or equality versus liberty or the collective versus the individual – which I asserted were incorrect, but I didn’t really explain why those definitions are incorrect or what makes a definition correct or incorrect in the first place.

The merriem-webster dictionary website has a short article on how they choose new words to add to their dictionary, and at one point they say “A dictionary isn’t an idea museum, it’s a user’s manual for communication.” – in other words, don’t inherently mean anything – they’re just social conventions – they’re communication tools – but even if definitions of words can’t be objectively right or wrong, they can be right or wrong in practical terms in the sense of whether or not they do their job communicating the ideas that we want to convey.

So when we’re choosing definitions for words, there are some criteria that we use which I call the 4C’s – Consensus, Clarity, Convenience, and Consequences.

Consensus means does everyone agree on the general definition of a word. If everyone thinks a word means one thing you’re going to have a hard time using it to mean something else.

Clarity means three main things:

does the definition make sense – in other words is it coherent
does it help clarify some important real world phenomenon, and
are you using a clear formulation of the definition, versus a confusing formulation of the same idea. Like you can define your ring finger as the third finger from the thumb, or you can define it as the finger that’s not you thumb or your index finger or your middle finger or your pinky, but it’s the other one. Two different formulations of the same definition.

Convenience means things like:

is the definition you’re using an easy way of getting your idea across – does it fit in with the general associations that people have around that word, does it match recent historical use so that you can read older books easily and make historical analogies that people will understand? or do you have to explain yourself every time you use the word and does it cause antagonism and confusion instead of conveying the idea you want to get across because it has connotations that clash with your intention?

And most importantly, Consequences is the effect of your definition on peoples’ perception.

Does the definition you’re using help people see important connections or important distinctions that give them more power to navigate the world, or does your definition mix up unrelated things, or divide things up that belong together and keep your focus on superficial things that make people more confused, and powerless to achieve their goals.

In other words does your definition give people galaxy brain, or does it give them pudding brain.

Sapir-whorf

In psychology we talk about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, the idea that peoples’ perceptions of reality are shaped in part by the language they use – so like if you don’t have words for certain things in your language, you tend not notice or think about those things.

So in some cultures, you don’t have a word or even a concept for depression. People just say they’re “tired”. And as a result they don’t seek counselling or therapy or psychiatry, they just rest and sleep and treat it like fatigue, or like you’re just being a wus. If you’re from Nigeria or Thailand or India or else you have grandparents from those countries you might recognize this.

Another example that’s discussed often is that many cultures don’t have a word for the colour blue.

Ancient Greek, ancient Hebrew, ancient Chinese and Ancient Japanese all had no word for blue, and you have several cultures where this is still the case today, like the Himba who live around the border of namibia and angola. Himba people live from animal herding and have an environment where it’s really important to distinguish between different different greens and brown but not blues and other colours which appear less frequently.

The himba language lumps together dark blues with darks reds, greens and purples, and lighter shades of blue with certain shades of green.

In 2006 psychologist Jules Davidoff and his team did colour experiments with Himba speakers and English speakers, where they showed them a bunch of squares where 1 is blue and the rest are various shades of green, and asked which one is different. And then they were shown another set of squares which were all one shade of green, except for one which was a slightly different shade of green. Most of the Himba speakers spotted the different green square immediately but had a harder time noticing the blue square in the other set. Meanwhile for the english speakers it was the opposite, they all spotted the blue square immediately but most of them failed to notice the different shade of green, or else took a long time to find it.

Your vocabulary shapes what you notice and what you don’t notice.

So when it comes to political words we want definitions that make us notice important things, instead of obscuring them.

OK so let’s apply our criteria to something easy – the definition of the word square as a closed geometric shape with four equal sides.

That’s a really great definition.

First of all, it’s a consensus definition.

Almost everyone who uses the word square in english knows what it means and if you present that definition to them, they’ll agree that that’s the correct definition.

The definition is also clear: it doesn’t contradict itself, it makes sense, and this particular formulation of the definition is also nice and tight.

And because it’s clear and has consensus use, it’s also very convenient. It’s a quick easy way to convey the idea of a sape with four equal right angled sides with one little word. And it’s consequence is that it if you learn this definition, you will have a concept of a square so you’ll notice objects with four equal right angled sides more readily, and you can do all kinds of architecture and engineering and art and design more easily with that concept in your head.

Now lets say for some reason that you started to have a bunch of people running around who insisted on using the word square to mean: any shape with four sides regardless of the length or angle of the sides. Like let’s say that these people want us to focus on all quadrangles – rectanlges, rhombuses and squares – equally.

That definition is nice and clear, and it conveys an important geometric concept – but because it goes counter to the consensus definition, it would be incredibly inconvenient to use. Every time you talked about squares you’d have to spend time explaining to people what your definition is as opposed to the consensus definition. And if they pointed to old textbooks that use the other definition you’d have to start arguing about how those textbooks are old and we need to expand our focus to include all four sided shapes.

And if over time, that definition somehow became the consensus definition, then the consequence would that there would be no specific word for what we now call squares and people would notice them and think of them less readily. And if you wanted someone to make something in square shape you’d have to specify say “a square with all equal sides and right angles” each time.

Government

When it comes to political terms it’s the consequence criteria takes on some extra weight.

So for example, LuckyCat who has a cool youtube channel asked me where I got my definition of the word “government” from.

In episode 2 of this series I defined a government as a person or group of people that makes and enforces rules in a given polity meaning a political unit – and I also pointed out that a polity can be a public polity like a state, but it can also be a private polity, like a home, or a business – meaning that if you own your home you are the government of that home and if you own a business you are the government of that business.

Now I didn’t invent this definition, but I didn’t copy paste it from anywhere either. I took the standard definition and I shifted the emphasis away from the state in order to highlight that government exists in the private sphere and not just in the public sphere.

Why did I choose this definition?

Let’s look at our criteria.

First consensus – if you look up government in a bunch of dictionaries and encyclopedias you’ll find two main definitions – a general one that has room in it for private polities, and a specific one that specifies that government is about the state. I don’t know where to find statistics for the prevalence of different definitions, but I found that the majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias use the general definition but usually with a formulation that nonetheless emphasized state and other public polities like villages or tribes.

Only the Oxford English dictionary which is a gargantuan 75 volume affair mentioned a private polity at all – the government of a school, which was in its quotation section.

Either way, most people aren’t consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias to learn what a word like government means, they’re inferring the meaning from context, usually from newsmedia, political journalism, academia and every day conversation.

And if you look at newsmedia, political journalism and academia, they use the word government almost exclusively to discuss the state. The same goes for everyday conversation.

So the consensus among ordinary people, and journalists and academia seems to be the state-specific definition, and the consensus among dictionaries and encyclopedias is the general definition, but almost always with a major emphasis on the state. And in books about politics I only know of one book, Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson which specifically focuses on government in private polities.

So why did I buck the almost consensus trend of emphasizing the state? Why did I formulate it without even mentioning the state?

Lets look at the other criteria:

Clarity: both the general and state specific definitions are clear and coherent. They both highlight something important that exists in the real world.

What about convenience: you could bring up the fact that historically it was common in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and earlier to use the word government to refer to any kind of authority, and in Anderson’s book she talks about US president John Adam’s correspondence with his wife, Abigail, about her famous “All Men Would be Tyrants” Letter. And in that correspondence, he uses the word government to describe household authority, employer employee authority, master slave authority and teacher student authority.

But we’re in the 2020’s now, and most people aren’t reading those kinds of texts – why do we want to resuscitate an older definition that might make people have to stop and think a little when you use it.

The answer is the Consequences criteria – because my definition makes people have to actually stop and think every time I use it! Restricting the word government entirely to the state public sphere makes us completely oblivious as to how so many of the exact same principles and dynamics that apply to the government of states also apply to us in our workplaces, and families and schools.

For example private polities can be democratic or they can be dictatorial just like states can. A large cooperative enterprise is a representative democracy, and a regular enterprise is an opt-out dictatorship, just like Sweden is a representative democratic state and China is an opt out dictatorship state. States have class conflict between government and citizens who have different interests, just like businesses have class conflict between workers and owners and management – who are the government of private businesses.

States have laws and constitutions and private citizens have contracts, which are basically just private laws and constitutions with rules and enforcement mechanisms. We all know that the contents of contracts reflect the relative bargaining power of the two parties but we don’t think about how public laws and constitutions reflect the relative balance of power of different actors in a public polity – workers, owners, farmers, renters, landlords, men, women, the elderly, the young, specific industries etc. And just like contracts, laws are only worth something if they’re enforceable.

State governments use many of the same techniques to control their citizens that business owners use to control their workers. And citizens use many of the same techniques to get legislation they want from states that workers or unions use to get concessions they want from their employers.

Government is government and politics is politics – the same principles and analytical categories apply.

Seeing those connections gives you power. Not seeing them takes away that power. Galaxy brain vs pudding head.

And since there is no other word in the english language for private government, if we don’t broaden the term government to include the private sphere, then we have no words for the concept of private government at all, which mean that it becomes an almost invisible force in our lives – like the blue square for the himba, or the slightly different shade of green square for the english speakers.

When the state spies on you and controls what you do and say, that’s considered oppression that must be resisted, but when private companies spy on you and censor you or control what you do, that’s just the way the world works, if you don’t like it get another job or start your own facebook, or your own youtube.

If your video is blocked on a quasi-monopoly platform like youtube almost no one will see your video, which in effect is the same as when a state like china blocks your video. But because of our stunted definition if government, we expect freedom of speech and other constitutional rights to apply to the state, but not to private monopolies. When we realize that the directors and owners of private companies are in fact governments that regulate the lives of millions of workers and consumers, we may want to start thinking about things like extending constitutional rights to the private sphere.

Now there are arguments for why we should not to do this and we’ll look these when we talk about capitalism and private property rights, but we can barely even ask the question if we think government is only about the state.

And because of these consequences, I revived the emphasis of the general, historical use of the term government, and then I use the term “the government” or else “public government” to refer to state government, and the term “private government” to refer to every other type of government.

And the exact same logic applies to why I used the broader definition of politics as decision-making in groups, vs the state specific definition of politics which is much more popular in journalism and academia, although you’ll tend to find the general definition in dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Racism

In a few minutes we’ll see how the different definitions of left and right have hugely different consequences in terms of perception, but first I want to look at the competing definitions of the word racism to highlight the convenience criteria.

The word racism emerged in the early 20^th century as a version of the term racialism that was used at the same time and had been popular in the late 19^th century in connection with all of the scientific race theories that were popular at that time. The term became more popular in the 1920’s and 30’s with the rise of Nazism and fascism, and especially after WWII when much of academia became preoccupied with trying to understand what led to the holocaust. And then became it became most prevalent during the rise of the Black civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Until recently there were two standard definitions of racism which were used more or less interchangeably. A general one, that just meant a hostility or antipathy towards a certain race – and a more specific one that meant the belief that there are biologically different human races, that these races have distinct characteristics that determine the respective cultures and behaviour of their members, and that some races are superior to others in various ways that give them the right to more wealth, more power or more rights than inferior races.

In 1967, two leaders of the American Black Power Movement, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton put forward the idea of Institutional or Systemic Racism, which is when institutions and systems of power consciously or unconsciously treat people favourably or unfavourably according to their racial classification – for example in the United States today, African Americans and White Americans use marijuana at about the same rate, yet African Americans are arrested for it about 4 times as often, for a variety of reasons.

In the 1970s some white anti-racist educators and academics came up with and started popularizing a new definition of the word racism, which they defined in shorthand as “prejudice plus power” which is basically the same concept as institutional racism.

This new definition has become almost standard in academic humanities departments in the last 10 years or so, and it’s also popular among certain activist groups, but it’s still largely unknown outside of those circles.

This new definition is clear and concise, but it has huge problems in the convenience department because the overwhelming majority of the population who went to university before 2010, or who never went to university, have one of the classic definitions deeply ingrained in their heads.

As a result you see the same scenario over and over, and I’ve seen this myself a bunch of times – you have a younger university educated person having a conversation with an older person or someone who didn’t go to college, and the young persons says something like “well black people can’t be racist” and the older person is like “huh? so are they missing part of their brains? or are they’re like magic unicorn people? isn’t that racist?” and then the students get offended or start explaining the prejudice plus power concept, and the older person is “no, racism is a feeling or an attitude, every human can be racist – just because someone is oppressed doesnt meant they don’t have the same feelings as I do” and then they end up having some long twisted conversation about how jews can be racist against arabs in israel but when if they live morocco they’re not racist anymore they’re just discriminating and everyone gets more and more irritated at eachother.

But if you try to restart the same conversation but using the term “institutional racism” the older person immediately understands what’s going on – and if the student says something like “in America institutional racism only oppresses Black and Brown people and benefits white people and never the other way around” there might an argument about it, but everybody knows what the other one is talking about and they can have their discussion or their argument without needing to have a confused irritated 45 minute pre-argument argument about the definition of racism first.

Now people who insist on using the newer definition will argue that all of this inconvenience headache is worth it because of the consequence criteria – for example the new definition forces dominant groups to focus more on how they personally benefit from institutional racism and it focuses our gaze on systemic issues rather than on individual personalities and feelings. And they argue that we can use the word discrimination to talk about prejudices and dislike at the individual level.

Now you can choose whatever definition you like best – but – changing the definition of a word that most people understand one way, to mean something else that we already have a word for is extremely inconvenient – so if you’re going to do that the consequences payoff better be worth it.

Personally I think that the more recent definition is a total failure as a communication tool if you’re interested in talking about racism to anyone outside of a university, but in 20 years if that definition becomes the consensus, then it won’t be inconvenient anymore. I would still have a problem on the consequences level because I think it implicitly dehumanizes and fetishizes oppressed people, but that’s just me!

Left and Right

OK so let’s look at the consequences of the different definitions of left and right.

So why am I so adamant that hierarchy versus equality is the best definition, even the correct definition?

Again, let’s look at our criteria for choosing definitions – consensus, convenience, clarity and consequences.

For consensus, there is no consensus, you have all these competing definitions.

Now no one ever sat down and invented the concept of left and right with a specific definition that they presented, like I did with the term worbs in episode 1 of this series.

It was an analogy from the French Revolution in 1789, based on which side of the national assembly the pro and anti revolution delegates were sitting or standing at – revolutionaries on the left, monarchists on the right. and you have to infer the meaning of that analogy from how people used it.

Historical Convenience

What about convenience?

Next episode we’ll see that historically, from the french revolution until the cold war, the consensus use of left and right was consistent with hierarchy vs. equality and not any of the other definitions.

But, just because something was used a certain way historically, doesn’t mean it makes any sense to keep using it that way today. So like in old english, the word Silly originally meant happy. And later it meant fortunate or blessed and then it meant pious, and then it meant innocent, and then harmless, and then weak, and then foolish and now it means absurd or ridiculous. The original definition is clear, and precise but it’s also completely inconvenient because it has a completely different and totally consensus meaning today. And using the old definition would make everyone confused and irritated and no one would know what you’re talking about and you would just be some annoying pretentious asshole.

In the case of left and right however, there is a strong convenience argument for hanging on to the original historical definition – because in politics we constantly make historical analogies and read historical texts, and we constantly refer to historical examples of left and right. So we often talk about the nazis and the communists and we call people fascists and and we’re having a revival of socialism and of left and right wing populism, and we still refer to the french revolution and the bolshevik revolution and we have an anarchist movement and a capitalist libertarian movement and all of these were historically classified as left and right in ways which are congruent with the hierarchy versus equality concept but not with any of the other definitions.

For example it would be inconvenient and confusing if all of sudden we had to start thinking of nazis as left wingers, and anarcho-communists as right wingers which is where the big versus small government definition of the political spectrum would place them. And we’d have to start sticking absolutist and feudal monarchist on the left, even though the forces of monarchy in the french revolution are the original right wing, the very thing that the original left was revolting against. All of the non hierarchy vs equality definitions would mix up who we traditionally classify as being on the left and on the right

So hierarchy vs. equality wins in the historical convenience criteria, and it’s still in use today which also helps.

Market Versus State: Incoherent

So that’s convenience and consensus, now let’s look at clarity. Here things start to get interesting.

Remember clarity means the definition is clear as in easy to understand, it’s coherent, and it clarifies some important phenomenon.

Let’s start with the market vs. the state.

That’s easy to understand. But is it coherent? Like are the market and the state actually opposed to each-other?

Remember that we’re talking about a political spectrum, which means you’re moving between two opposite poles. Like cold versus hot, up versus down. Even a colour spectrum is a spectrum between high visible wavelenghts and low visible wavelengths. Spectrums require opposites. You can’t have a spectrum between Pizza and Apples, or cold versus yellow.

What about the state and the market. The term “the market” refers to the collection of choices that people make in terms of exchanging resources in a given context. And I’m not going to define the state right now because it’s complicated and I haven’t yet decided on a satisfactory definition – but the state is most certainly not the opposite of the market, nor is it incompatible with the market. The state is in fact the context that most markets exist in nowadays.

The state can impose restrictions or constraints on the choices that people make regarding exchanging their resources, and it can even snuff out a market entirely by making it really onerous to exchange your resources at all – so in those situations the state can be opposed to the market. But the state can also be used to encourage markets or even make them possible in the first place.

For example, having food safety regulations for processing plants and restaurants can increase the costs of selling food which might lower sales, or prevent some people from opening food businesses – but at the same time, if people are constantly getting food poisoning whenever they they go out to eat or buy food at the grocery store, then it’s the absence of those regulations that stifles markets, as less people will bother taking the risk.

Even most so called libertarian capitalists believe in maintaining some form of state, despite the fact that the very existence of a state violates the fundamental principles of capitalism which we saw briefly in episode 2. and that’s because if you don’t have publicly funded courts enforcing contracts or police enforcing property rights, then people who can’t afford their own private enforcement armies or private courts, will be too afraid to enter into contracts or to exchange goods and services except with their most trusted friends and across short distances, because the risk of getting ripped off and robbed will be just too high for most people most of the time.

And sometimes you can’t even have a market at all without the state. So one famous example is ancient Rome, where you had flourishing trade all across europe and into africa and Asia, in large part because Rome built, maintained and protected huge roads all across the territories it controlled. But once the western part of the Empire collapsed, and there was no state there to maintain and protect the roads, you couldn’t transport goods across long distances on land anymore unless you had your own private army to fight off bandits. And even if you did have a private army you still could’t trade across the increasing number of roads that were no longer passable because no one was maintaining them.

And even though almost everyone benefited from these roads, conditions were such that no private entities were able to emerge to provide the kinds of maintenance and services that were required to keep trade by land going across long distances.

As a result, long distance travel and trade across land basically stopped, and the sharing of knowledge and skills across long distances stopped along with it. Economies became extremely local, skills and arts deteriorated and vanished with no access to great schools or great masters to teach students outside of local areas. Western Europe went from being an advanced world civilization to a rural backwater. And this lasted for hundreds of years, until enough political consolidation re-emerged and european states got bigger, and capable of maintaining and protecting long distance roads and trade routes again.

The state is not the opposite of the market, the state is just another context that a market exists in. It’s like the weather – good weather can facilitate or encourage markets and bad weather can discourage trade and stifle markets like during a blizzard or a big storm at sea.

So the state vs market paradigm is a huge failure in the clarity criteria. Instead of clarifying a real phenomenon, it creates a false binary and makes you assume that two things are opposed to eachother when they aren’t, thus making you more confused and less intelligent.

It’s a Pudding brain generator.

Equality vs Liberty: Incoherent

What about Equality versus liberty?

Are those opposites? People on the right will insist that they’re opposites, and that the only way you can achieve any equality is via the intervention of massive state power that stifles liberty, and they’ll point to the Soviet Union and other so-called communist countries as the ultimate examples.

But if you ask the french revolutionaries, or almost any socialist or anarchist up until the rise of the Soviet Union, they would tell you that there’s no such thing as liberty if you don’t have equality, because people with more power use that power whether it’s state power, economic power or cultural power, to dominate people with less power thus reducing their liberty.

Like your boss tells you what to do all day and not the other way around because your boss has more wealth than you do, which is why you entered into a contract that takes away your liberty for 8 or more hours a day in exchange for money to live. And the government can tell you and your boss what you can and can’t do for the exact same reasons. Whether it’s the inequality between your boss and you, or between the state and you and your boss, economic inequality is the main source of political i.e. decision-making inequality.

That’s why the slogan of the French Revolution was Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – liberty, equality, fraternity or brotherhood. You need the sense of kinship and brotherhood in order to maintain equality, and you need equality, in order to have and safeguard liberty. And that’s just the most famous slogan that we remember today – there were other slogans floating around among the revolutionaries at that time – liberty, equality, security – liberty, equality, property – liberty, equality, strength, – liberty, reason, equality – but in all of these slogans, liberty and equality were always seen as inseparable. The idea that they’re opposed only becomes popular with the cold war and the rise of so-called communist countries which justified their dictatorial powers in the name of enforcing equality.

In the French revolution they were particularly thinking of political and cultural equality but it applies just as much, if not more, to economic equality as well.

Now there is a legitimate question about how you can enforce equality without some giant state power that crushes liberty – but anarchists and socialists have had ideas about this for the past two hundred years or so, and we’ll look at these as well as some historical and anthropological examples in the future. But even if the relationship between liberty and equality is complicated, they are by no means opposites, and what’s way less complicated is the relationship between liberty and inequality.

You could much more easily propose a spectrum between liberty vs. inequality and show a million historical and anthropological examples where the more inequality you have the more servitude and slavery you have – like a 1:1 correlation!

This is why fans of so called libertarian capitalism have a very peculiar definition of liberty where signing a terrible contract out of pure desperation that puts you in a position of abject servitude is considered to be voluntary and liberty, as we’ll see in future episodes.

Anyhow, equality vs. liberty is another false binary that fails the clarity test, and gets another pudding-head prize.

Big vs Small Govt

What about big government versus small government? Now that’s actually a coherent concept! These are actual opposites! So it passes the most basic part of the clarity test.

But does it clarify an important conflict or division that actually exists in politics? If we look around us and across history, do we actually see a huge struggle between people who cherish big government and those who love small government?

No, we don’t. The same right wing parties who want to get rid of government when it comes to regulating employers and markets and corporations, love HUGE government when it comes to surveillance, the military the police, immigration, and regulating where you put your pee pee and your wee wee. And then you have left wing parties who typically want the government to get the hell out of your wee wee or your bedroom, and to reduce the state in terms of military, police and immigration control, while beefing up the state to the max when it comes to taxation, providing health care and education etc.

So big and small government are on both sides of the left right divide. Right wing politicians in the United States and the other anglo-saxon countries might like to talk about big vs. small government but the actual conflict is about what we should be doing with the government, and not about the size of it.

A political spectrum based on big versus small government fails the clarity criteria in that it fails to clarifying what actual political conflict is about. It misses the point, and makes you focus on something superficial aspect of the size of the government – instead of on what the real conflict is about – what government is for – promoting equality or protecting hierarchies.

Like left wing libertarian-socialists and right wing libertarian-capitalists both oppose the state – but for completely different reasons. What is that reason? A left-right spectrum based on big vs small government gives us no insight. It puts them on the same team.

Focusing on big versus small government is like if you had a bunch of red guns and blue guns and a bunch of red berries and blue berries, and then you divided them up into red things vs. blue things instead of into guns vs berries.

Pudding brain!

Individual vs Collective

You can apply everything I just said about big vs. small government to the individual versus the collective definition, which is very popular among libertarians.

They’re clear opposites so it’s coherent, but they don’t reflect a real cleavage between political forces. Right and left wing political parties and coalitions want more collectivism and more individualism, but in different areas. Left wing parties invoke collectivism in terms of our economic responsibility for eachother, i.e. to push for greater economic equality.

Right wing parties invoke collectivism in terms of national identity versus competing nations or vs immigrants, or vs competing racial, ethnic or religious groups, i.e. to enforce cultural hierarchies. Right wing parties also invoke collectivism to foster a sense of solidarity between the rich and the poor of the same identity group, thus bolstering economic hierarchy.

Left wing parties invoke individualism in terms of promoting equality of individual personal liberties, like rights to artistic, sexual, and religious freedom, freedom of expression etc.

And Right wing parties tend to invoke individualism in terms of the right of individuals to amass as much wealth as they can – i.e. to increase economic hierarchy.

You don’t see coalitions of political parties where one person is like “i believe in the collective responsibility for every person’s economic needs” and another person is like “i believe in the collective superiority of the white race over the mongrel races!” and theyre like – hey, we both love collectivism, let’s make a political party together!”

Hierarchy vs. Equality: Clarity

The only definition of left and right that clarifies an actual real political division is hierarchy vs. equality.

So if you ever wonder why right wing parties or coalitions of parties often have this seemingly contradictory alliance between religious groups who want the government to make sure you only have sex when you’re married, and big business groups and libertarians that would love to be able to use straight up hard core porn to advertise toothpaste to children – the common thread linking these seemingly opposed groups is hierarchy – they support the dominant economic and cultural classes – the business groups want government to foster more economic hierarchy, and the religious groups want the government to impose more cultural hierarchy. And those different types of hierarchies reinforce each-other in various ways so those people will tend to coalesce when faced with egalitarian coalitions, despite their internal contradictions and their disagreements, even if they don’t think of themselves as interested in hierarchy or ever even think about hierarchy

Similarly in left wing political parties or coalitions of parties you typically see alliances between sexual minorities and feminist groups on the one hand, and ethnic minorities and immigrants on the other who are often religious and culturally conservative and not really enthusiastic about giving more rights to trans people and gays and women. And both these groups are usually allied with organized labour in these left-wing coalitions, which seems totally unrelated to gay rights, feminism and immigrant rights.

But what unites these groups on the left, is that despite their disagreements and contradictions, they all want more equality for their members vis à vis established economic and cultural hierarchies.

A left right political spectrum based on hierarchy versus equality helps us easily explain these alliances. The other definitions give us no insight. Just pudding.

Consequences: Hierarchy Versus Equality

Where it gets really interesting though is when we look at the consequence criteria – the consequences on our perception. The consequences criteria helps us understand why so many bad definitions of left and right that total blow the clarity criteria are nonetheless so prevalent. When bad ideas are popular it’s usually because they either fulfill some kind of psychological need, or they serve the interests of some powerful group.

So, in terms of consequences, a hierarchy versus equality spectrum makes you notice hierarchies all around you, and it makes you notice that some people don’t like these hierarchies. It makes you think about arguments for and against existing hierarchies.

And in this sense, it’s frames the world in left wing terms because noticing and thinking about hierarchies and opposition to hierarchies might make you question those hierarchies, versus if you don’t even notice that the hierarchies exist in the first place.

That’s why the writers who still use the hierarchy versus equality paradigm tend to be socialists or otherwise on the left, like Noam Chomsky or Corey Robin, with the very notable exception of Doctor Professor Jordan Peenerston on the right.

Consequences: Everything Else

What about the perceptual consequences of all of the other definitions?

We’ve already pointed out that they make you focus on superficialities and miss the big picture – but not only do they make you confused and blind, but they make you confused and blind in a particular way that frames the world in right wing terms – specifically in right wing terms that benefit the elite classes at the top of the hierarchies in capitalist countries in soviet style state communist countries!

So for example the market versus the state paradigm.

Big business owners and the think tanks and lobbyists and right wing tv pundits that serve them, love to screech against regulations and laws that interfere with their ability to maximize their profits. But despite all of their money and power and influence, they have one big problem – people have the right to vote, and a lot of these regulations and worker protections and minimum wages that they want to get rid of, are very popular.

It’s hard to get people to vote to lower their wages and raise their rents, and allow your boss to demand that you to poop in diapers at work if you want to keep your job.

Well if you come up with a whole ideology that the market is this supernatural magic force that brings us all of the wealth that we enjoy and all of the freedoms that we love, and it can never do anything wrong by definition, and that the state is this horrible evil tyranny that interferes with the holy market, and that enslaves everyone and ruins your life, and it can never do anything good by definition well then you can convince people to vote for candidates who support cutting minimum wages and laws that prevent your boss from requiring you too poop in your diapers.

And the same thing goes with the individual versus the collective. Any human society tries to balance the two. Total collectivism or total individualism would be seen as forms of insanity in most society.

But, if you can convince people that collectivism is pure evil – nothing more than an illusion which justifies the mindless tyranny of the majority oppressing the individual, and that things like taxes and social programs are bribes by tyrants invoking collectivism to control the masses – and that the only thing that guarantees anyone true freedom is the ownership of property – then you’ll be delighted when politicians get rid of minimum wages and mandatory bathroom breaks and when they keep lowering taxes for the wealthy.

The same for big versus small government, or liberty versus equality.

All of these paradigms are part of a class war narrative designed to make you hate anything that might benefit workers at the expense of their bosses, and love everything that will benefit bosses at the expense of their workers. Every regulation that tries to gives you more power and money will only make you poorer and a slave of the tyrannical state – the only real way to improve your life is be to more useful to your boss, or become your own boss.

But if you do start your own business, and you start to cut into the market share of the big companies that fund all of the AEIs and Hoover and Cato and Fraser institutes, and Praeger U‘s that promote these ideas, you’ll find that those same companies that throw a tantrum whenever government raises your wages, won’t hesitate for one second to use the power of government regulations to crush you out of existence.

It’s no surprise a lot of these fair-weather freedom lovers are huge fans of murderous state dictatorships when those dictators use their tyrannical powers to support business owners while crushing workers. So for example Milton Friedman, the big government-hating, the market worshipping, freedom loving, nobel prize winning guru of 20^th century capitalism was delighted to be an advisor to the brutal dictator of Augusto Pinochet in Chile to help him impose the supposedly free market by force.

Note that all of this hypocrisy makes perfect sense in a hierarchy vs equality paradigm.

Soviet Pudding Brain

But it’s not only capitalist hypocrites who gain from these definitions! If you just reverse the stigma of these nonsensical paradigms, you get an equally pudding brained justification for the tyranny of the hypocrites in charge of the Soviet Union.

So if instead of idiotically worshipping the market like a god and demonizing the state, you idiotically worship the state like a god, and demonize the market. And instead of mindlessly venerating the individual and making the collective into conspiracy by evil statists who want power, you mindlessly venerate the collective and make individualism a conspiracy by capitalists who want to divide and conquer and enslave you. And instead of saying that brutal inequality is the price we all must pay for glorious liberty, you say that dictatorship is the price we have to pay for the moral superiority of equality, and the eventual promise of freedom.

According to this narrative, the market is just chaos and anarchy which give the rich and powerful all the power and take it out of the hands of the workers, while the state is the only instrument which can carry out the rational will of the people. The individual is selfish and destructive and immoral, and what separates moral human being from animals is that individuals are capable of setting aside their selfish interests to serve their community, as we all must do to serve our glorious country so that our nation can survive versus the evil capitalists who threaten us, or the evil nazis who are really just capitalists with their masks off. And all of this is why we need the leadership of the communist party, which is made up of the smartest, most altruistic members of all of society, from every ethnic group and social background.

So a left/right political spectrum based on market versus state, or equality vs liberty or individual vs collective might be incoherent, and it might make you a blind pudding head who can’t see what’s happening right in front of your face, but it makes you the kind of pudding head that is easier to manipulate into supporting policies that benefit the elites in the USA and in the USSR.

Next Time

OK, that’s enough information for today.

Next time we’ll finish up with left and right, and we’ll do a little history tour to see how left and right were used in different time periods, and then we’ll the see how lenin and trotsky changed the definition of the word socialism which gunked up the popular understanding of left and right, and them we’ll finally be able to answer the question of why communism is on the far left of the political spectrum and nazism is on the far right, when Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR seemed to have so many important similarities.

In the meantime, if this podcast makes you feel your galaxy brain glowing and burning away all the pudding in your brain, please, please, please share this with your friends and social networks, and rate and review it on itunes because it helps more people find it, and I need to know that people are listening and watching to stay motivated to keep doing this!

And if you can afford to, please subscribe to the What is Politics Patreon.

This project is insanely labour intensive, and even when I’m not working, if takes me almost a month to do one episode, from research to writing to editing the sound and video versions, so I need support to keep doing this.

Because it usually takes me so long I’m currently charging per episode not per month, and you won’t get charged more than 12x a year maximum.

And as always, if you have any questions, critiques, corrections or comments, send them to worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com or post them on the youtube videos

And until next time, seeya!

Understanding the News: How Tax Cuts Fuel Police Brutality

Politicians’ dependence on police as a revenue stream, prosecutors’ dependence on police for convictions, and falling tax cuts on the wealthy combine to give police incredible power. This is a key reason why they’re rarely punished, even for the most egregious abuses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-l5frz1EVg

Script

Hello fellow kids,

And welcome back to What is Politics where we’re figuring out how ordinary people can achieve our political goals. This will be a Bleep Bloop edition, where we’re talking about current events versus the usual political literacy theory episodes.

So, For the past two week cities all over the US are on metaphorical and sometimes literal fire after the absolutely senseless murder of George Floyd by minneapolis police sparked protests against police brutality and racism, which have since spread across the world, and which makes this the perfect time to talk about bargaining power about why the police have seem so much of it, that they can get away with literal murder over and over again.

Bargaining Power

Thanks to these protests and the conditions surrounding them, Black americans and poor people and everyone who wants police reform are in an unusual position of having tremendous bargaining power vis à vis government authorities right now, particularly in cities and states controlled by democratic mayors and governors.

And that means that now is the time to bring forth specific demands, and to target specific politicians to implement those demands.

Laws are a lot like contracts between citizens and the state, and massive protests and riots are a lot like labour strikes to improve labour contracts and get better working conditions and better pay.

If you take countries that have laws that favour citizens – i.e. more freedoms and more public services, free healthcare, free education, good infrastructure – it’s usually because the ordinary population has flexed their bargaining power at some point in their history.

For workers on strike, the bargaining leverage they have is the money that bosses lose for every hour they’re not working. For citizens who want something from their government, the bargaining leverage they have is their votes and money – money that the government has to spend on paying phalanxes of riot police overtime to beat up protestors and money that they have to spend to pay municipal workers to work overtime to clean up after the riots day after day, and money that they have to waste jailing everyone and pushing them through courts – all of which blows a big hole in ever-strained city and state budgets and which makes life difficult for mayors and governors who have to make unpopular cuts to deal with that hole in the next budget.

And this is happening during corona when budgets are already taking a major hit.

Sometimes public opinion turns against protestors and reduces their bargaining power and gives authorities more license to abuse them – but right now for a bunch of reasons, a surprisingly large segment of public opinion is on the side of the protestors – newsweek reports that 74% of americans either fully or partially approve of protestors burning down minneapolis police stations. The Wall Street Journal report that Americans are more troubled by the actions of police in the killing of George Floyd than by violence at some protests by a 2 to 1 margin.

These are huge numbers given how averse americans normally are to property damage and how much they normally love the police. Police and the military are usually the top two or three most trusted institutions in polls in the United States among republicans and democrats. To compare that, 2/3 of americans disapproved of martin luther king in 1966.

And presumably these numbers are a lot higher for democratic voters and black voters than other voters.

And as we saw in the presidential primaries, black voters make up a key voting constituency for democratic politicians. Democrats can’t win elections without black voters. And they can’t win elections without white and other voters who sympathize with the black people and the poor white people and everyone else who are being harassed and beaten and senselessly murdered by police on a continual basis.

So on the one hand the protests are costing mayors and governors zillions of dollars and blowing a hole in their budgets, which they would normally respond to by breaking everyone’s heads and locking everyone up – but on the other hand, they have to be really careful not to respond to these protests in a way that turns off black voters and everyone who sympathizes with protestors.

This is why even the most cop-cowed and cop loving democratic mayors and governors are kissing protestors asses, and renaming streets black lives matter avenue and taking a knee in front for cameras and hugging protestors three seconds before imposing curfews and ordering the police to gas them and crack their heads open.

Democratic mayors and governors are stuck between the cops and a hard place – which means that whether they know it or not, people who want police reform have them by the balls. Which is incredible because it’s usually the police who have them by the balls.

Police Power

One thing that isn’t being talked about much yet is why do police have so much power?

Why do cops routinely murder and abuse black and brown people and poor white people and mentally ill people on a regular basis and get off without criminal penalties or serious consequences? And why do police have such inflated budgets?

There are two main reasons for this:

number one is that municipal governments are enormously and increasingly dependant on all of the stupid fines and fees on top of fines that the police run around collecting for them every time you sneeze the wrong way.

Big money makers and campaign donors in rich neighbourhoods will get pissed off and retaliate against politicians if the police try to collect fines from them, so instead police spend their time targetting poor, politically disorganized people.

And if politicians start punishing police for being abusive, or if they piss off the police for whatever reason, the police can just tank a hole in the budget by slacking on collecting their precious fines and missing their quotas, or by just refusing to collect fines at all.

A crucial part of this story which isn’t part of the conversation yet is something that I mentioned in my short video about inequality – the wealthiest people and corporations in our society and all around the world have effectively used their bargaining power over the last 40 years or so to pay less and less taxes as a percentage of their ever exploding incomes – and as a result there’s not enough money in the system to pay for civilization.

So like everyone is kissing NY governor mario cuomo’s ass fo being such a hero at managing this covid crisis – but whats gets very little attention is that one of the main reasons why the situation in NYC hospitals is such a shit show, is that cuomo has been slashing hospital healthcare funding like the grim reaper on human wheat since he first got elected as governor in 2009, in order to help keep taxes down for his real estate and other donor pals. So even while the pandemic was at its peak in april Kung Fu Kuomo approved another $400m in cuts to NYC hospitals for next year’s budget. So when covid comes back in the fall and winter, NY will be even less equipped to deal with it than this year.

As a result of this sort of thing happening all over the United States for 40 years, in the wealthiest society in human history, schools are falling apart, hospitals are falling apart, transportation systems are falling apart, and infrastructure is falling apart. The money that used to be available for all this stuff is just sloshing around in billionaires investment portfolios and being used by corporations to buy back and inflate the prices of their own stocks.

But while services get cut more and more each year, police budgets somehow keep going higher and higher. Like in LA the mayor’s original proposed budget for 2021 had cuts to almost all services but a sweet 7% bump for the already enormous police budget.

Why is police funding trending in the opposite direction of funding for everything else? Because on top of collecting revenue for cities, police also end up acting as a stopgap to replace disappearing social services.

So for every $100 you cut from mental hospitals, you add $20 to the police budget because now they have to go beat up unmedicated schizophrenics yelling about 5G and bill gates at people on the streets. You cut $100 from schools, so now you have giant class sizes of 45 kids who are totally neglected and teachers cant pay attention to anyone who’s having a hard time at school or at home, so you add $20 to police budgets to go beat up delinquent neglected kids. You cut $100 from public housing, you add $20 to police to go shoot homeless people in the face with rubber bullets. You cut $100 from addiction services, add $40 to police because there’s more burglaries by crackheads and heroin addicts on top of people overdosing who need to be roughed up by cops who show up when you call 911 about an overdose for some insane reason. And on and on till the break dawn.

And the more services fall apart, the more expensive school gets, the more expensive health care gets, the more expensive rent and housing gets, and the poorer and more desperate people become, the more people tend to commit crimes to get by, and the more people also commit petty crimes and self destructive behaviour out of resentment and nihilism – which means you need more to police to go beat them up and choke them to death for buying cigarettes with a fake $20 bill.

The more desperate people are, the more property owners need to be protected from them. The Real Deal, a real estate trade publication, in article about the real estate sector’s views of the protests, quotes Bernard Harcourt, a political science professor at Columbia University who says “The whole function of our police system is to enforce private property … At a point in which 800 New York City residents were dying a day [from Covid-19], there was no curfew. But break the Rolex window and you get a curfew. That is probably the most vivid illustration of the way in which policing is about private property.” unquote

So all of this is why someone like Pete Buttigieg, who today is writing baby diarrhea pablum tweets about the importance of black lives and white humility, was cowering in his PJ mask underoos letting racist police run rampant when he was a humble, pablum spewing small city mayor.

And this is why NYC mayor Bill Di Blasio was still giving the NYPD a rimjob and making excuses for an officer who drove a police car right into a group of protesters even after de blasio’s black daughter was arrested and doxxed by police in retaliation for being at a protest, possibly as a direct insult to her arse licking dad for not arse licking hard enough.

And on top of all this, police literally get away with murder because they have massive influence over the criminal justice courts. Prosecutors depend almost entirely on police for evidence to get convictions. If you’re a prosecutor and you decide to prosecute an officer who shot a homeless man in a wheelchair in the face with rubber bullets, the entire police force will have a man-baby tantrum and stop cooperating with you, and you won’t get convictions and you career will be ruined.

In Canada where I am, 75% of judges are former prosecutors who come up in this system. And in the US many politicians with big ambitions also start off as prosecutors and attorney generals. And it really shows.

And most likely this is why Amy Klobuchar’s team of prosecutor justice heroes declined to prosecute the cop who killed George Floyd back when he was involved in another pointless killing.

And over the years as this dynamic keeps getting worse, the only people who even want to run for office are people who are ok with presiding over declining cities and states, who are ok with or even enthusiastic about of control abusive racist and bloated police forces, to the point of total lunacy, like our beuaitful boy governor cuomo in New York who last hear proposed a bill to spend $250M per year on extra police to prevent $200M of fare evasion for the crumbling underfunded subway system that he never uses.

And on top of all this, american politicians need to spend about 4hrs a day begging for money – that’s the number for congress, though I assume it’s similar for mayors and governors – so for all of these reasons and more, a lot of people who get these jobs and rise up in the ranks are just the worst cowards and ass kissers, and total narcissists and psychopaths and two faced snivelling lizard people.

So you have people who are angry and want changes on one side, and you have this massively powerful, massively entitled armed of he-man baby roid rage police, and cop fearing, cop loving psychopath lizard people politicians on the other side.

And right now it’s the protestors who have the leverage because they have the votes and the enough public support from key constituencies and because they’re costing politicians money and because politicians are afraid of them.

Even republican politicians who don’t need Black voters and whose base tend not to sympathize with causes like police reform that are framed as Black causes are afraid of the protestors. And that’s because they recognize that there’s an economic dimension to the protests which spills over into key voters that they need to win elections – like white voters in economically destroyed rust belt states which elected Donald Trump in 2016.

So while republicans like Trump or senators Tom Cotton and William Gaetz are calling for the army to come in and start shooting people to death and locking them up for years and years, the Hill reports that a growing number of GOP senators want the government to extend and augment unemployment benefits that are set to run out on millions of people soon because they “fear that the wave of protests, riots and other forms of social unrest that has rocked major cities around the country is linked to the bleak economic picture and that their majority is on the line.” unquote

After all, the government ordered shutdowns of businesses that led to tens of millions of people losing their jobs, and countless small businesses closing permanently – more than 100,000 in new york alone as of June – and then they offered up a relief package that was mostly a scam which transferred enormous wartime level sums of money from ordinary people to giant corporations who will be well positioned to gobble up those shuttered small businesses and benefit from mass unemployment to keep their labour costs down, in a fast forward version of the process that I outlined in my short video about inequality. Meanwhile the government workers and tenants and small shops in the dust with half-assed swiss cheese full of holes assistance that doesn’t even pay the rent, and which is about to run out.

The history of uprising and revolts across the world shows that people rise up when they feel like they’ve been cheated out of something they’re entitled to, not when they’re being oppressed.

It’s really telling that in response to the corona shutdowns, people who can afford to brandish 10,000 machine guns and $80,000 cars were out protesting for their right to get haircuts and manicures by low wage labourers, but the people whose lives were being destroyed by unemployment with little help from the government stayed home and didn’t think to go out and protest to demand adequate aid.

50 years of propaganda dedicated to making middle and upper class people as selfish and entitled as possible has had its effect, as has 50 years of telling poor and working class people that your suffering is your fault and that no one will help you when you’re in need, including your government. You just go get evicted and starve and cry all alone.

But where the economic devastation of corona didn’t propel people into the streets, the utterly senseless death of George Floyd under the knee of an elementary school bully while three overgrown armed toddlers looked on like brain dead gorillas, did propel them into the streets. And if these protests are being fuelled by economic distress – they are not going away any time soon because the economic devastation caused by the US government’s decision to respond to the coronavirus by looting taxpayers to feed their biggest donors is not going away any time soon.

And now that protesters are out and angry flexing their bargaining power and have politicians afraid of them they need to capitalize on this and make specific targeted demands.

When you’re in the power position, and you don’t make demands the people in power will be the ones who decide what to give you. And usually that means they will give you as little as they think they can get away with. Usually that means the most superficial symbolic changes that don’t fix anything – firing a couple of cops, actually prosecuting arresting and prosecuting some obviously ones who got caught recently, taking down some KKK statues that should have been taken down in 1964, calling a street Black Lives Matter avenue and taking a knee in front of a camera. And they’ll hope that it placates you enough so that enough people go home that they can arrest the rest of the protestors without too much fallout.

Failed Riots

After the Watts riots which broke out in LA in 1965 and lasted for a few days after police injured a black pregnant woman, a commission produced a 100 page report that identified the root causes of the riots to be high unemployment, poor schools, and inferior living conditions that were endured by black americans.

Recommendations for addressing these problems included “emergency literacy and preschool programs, improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, more job-training projects, upgraded health-care services, more efficient public transportation, and many more.” unquote

But nothing was ever implemented because once the riots were over the pressure was gone, while the pressure to keep taxes low and not spend money on those types of programs never goes away.

After the Rodney King riots which erupted in Los Angels in 1992 when four police officers who were caught on camera beating rodney king unconscious were acquitted, a commission report was produced about how abusive and racist the LAPD were, and as a result the head of the LAPD resigned – but nothing else changed. There were no demands made by the protestors. Protest over, problem solved for the authorities who never stop being under pressure from donors and lobbyists and police.

Occupy Wall Street, which lasted for about two months in 2011 was a HUGE movement that started in NYC and spread across the world and which had enormous popular support. It raised consciousness about a whole range of issues and problems with our economic and political systems, and it changed our political vocabulary and opened the door for Bernie Sanders campaigns and a small revived socialist movement in the United States – but in practical terms nothing happened. It scared Obama away from presenting some wall street friendly legislation he was planning to introduce at the time but that happened silently without anyone noticing. No legislation was passed or changed or canned because no demands were made.

The occupiers were so insistent on circle jerking themselves according to a very peculiar and very americanized version of anarchism that insisted on being totally leaderless and doing everything by consensus that even though they were able to organize food kitchens, street medics, newspapers, and fundraising for various efforts, they couldn’t get their act together to issue any specific demands – no proposals, no demands, no ultimatums, no results. The only pressure they exerted was the pressure of just being there, which wore off after a few weeks as people got bored enough that the NY police could come in and arrest everyone in the park without a huge public outcry a month later.

Today

When it comes to today’s protests, the superficial empty gestures by authorities have already happened, charges eventually laid against various murder cops, streets renamed, knees taken, speeches given, but the protests still go on.

And now even without specific demands, authorities are starting to put out small substantive changes – for example there’s a bipartisan bill at the federal level to get rid of the insane post 911 practice of giving extra military equipment to police forces. The state of minnesota has filed human rights charges against the Minneapolis PD. City councillors in various cities are calling for different proposals to reform police.

Calls are starting to come for actual changes to the way policing works, which black organizations and police reform movements have been calling for for years, and ideas about ways to completely transform the nature of policing are coming together. For example, people are calling for defunding police, which means drastically reducing the role of police and limiting them to situations where we having an armed macho-man rush in is actually appropriate – while creating a new system of care professionals, social work and mental health first-responders to respond to emergencies where armed force is counterproductive.

If you want to capitalize on this magic moment and use it make the changes you want to see, ask local organizations that are focused on anti-police violence and related issues which legislation they want and which city councillors or state legislators to put pressure on. Find if there are any state or municipal representatives who are already on your side and find out if they have any legislation in the works.

i recently helped organize about 120 tenants to go down to the burrough council meeting in my city to demand specific legislation that we proposed to stop renovictions, and the burrough mayor was like – already on it my dudes – and new bylaws that met 90% of what we were demanding was out and in force within a few weeks. That stuff actually happens when you have sympathetic people in office, so make sure to get involved in local elections and fucking vote.

There are many black and socialist representatives in city and state governments who are already very open to radical proposals for transforming the police. Find them and see what they’re proposing and how you can help. Formulate specific demands and popularize them and push them.

In 1883 in germany, out of fear of a growing socialist movement and continual activism and organizing, conservative monarchist Otto von Bismark instituted the world’s first public health insurance system.

In 1964 after years of carefully organized protests that built awareness and sympathy and spontaneous riots that scared authorities, the Civil first Rights Act was passed, in part out of fear of more riots if it didn’t pass.

In 1968 after protests and riots erupted in Black neighbourhoods all across the US in response to Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Fair Housing part of the Civil Rights act which had been stalled and stuck in limbo for years, suddenly passed after 6 days.

The reasons those movements succeeded where others failed was that those protests and riots happened in a context of specific demands and even pre-written legislation.

As I’m writing this I just read that that a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department and replacing it with something along the lines that I just mentioned, and they signed a pledge to that effect.

When the mayor of minneapolis who got elected on promises to fix relations between the police and citizens, told a crowd he didn’t believe in disbanding the police he got booed into silence and told to go home, and threatened with getting voted out of office next year in what the New York Times described as “humiliation on a scale almost unimaginable outside of cinema or nightmare.”

Now I see that Bill Di Blasio, who a few days ago was pathetically defending police officers driving into crowds with their cars is now also promising to cut funding for police and spend more on social services.

All of this is happening before any concrete demands have materialized or any pressure campaigns have been mounted. This is just incredible and if there are other historical examples, I can’t think of them!

And there you go, now your work is cut out for you. That’s the demand – reduce police services to things that require force and replace the rest with social service response teams.

Make sure your city makes the same pledge as the Minneapolis councillors made. If you’re in New York don’t let Di Blasio get away with the superficial tinkering that he’s probably going to try to sneak by you, push him to do what Minneapolis is doing. Make his public life hell u til he complies. If you’re in Minneapolis make sure Minneapolis’ your council comes up with a good program, stay on them, work with them when they’re good, work against them when they’re bad.

Find the groups that work on these issues and ask them which proposals they’ve been pushing help spread the word and make the demands. Find out which politicians are in the way of progress and then go protest and boo them and threaten them with primaries and elections and Flood the them with emails and petitions protests and flood council meetings with people all making the same demands over and over and over. Shame anyone who gets in your way until they buckle.

Blast these proposals all over social media, make sure all your friends know what the demands are and which legislators and councillors need to be pressured and which legislators or on your side and keep protesting until real change happens.

And don’t be fooled or placated by supposed protest leaders or politicians who will rise up in this moment and pretend to be on our side for the glory, and who take a knee wearing african kente scarves but who offer only empty slogans and peace and love with no actual proposals or demands.

And make sure that everyone understands that the current situation is related to 40 years of tax cuts on the rich. If we don’t reverse that situation we can make some important improvements but won’t have adequate money to do things like replace police with care workers.

Taking on the wealthiest people and corporations will require a civil rights scale movement and beyond and will be a longer term struggle than these protests. When Martin Luther King started calling for economic redistribution, that’s when he got shot. No one is more entitled in the world than the ultra rich who own our coutnries and buy our governments and they will lash out when threatened, but ultimately you have the power if you are organized and adamant and keep protesting, so keep it up and get ready to start again once things die down if things aren’t don’t moving in the direction that we want and that we need.

And don’t forget to weak a mask when you’re out in crowds! Protect our elders and everyone who’s vulnerable to covid-19

Thank you for listening, please share this with your friends and social networks, and rate and review it on itunes because it helps more people find it, and I need to know that people are listening and watching to stay motivated to keep doing this!

And if you can afford to, please subscribe to the What is Politics Patreon so I fan keep this up after my covid Tru-Dough bux run out

And as always, if you have any questions, critiques, corrections or comments, send them to worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com or post them on the youtube videos

And until next time, seeya!

5. How Do We Know What Left and Right Mean? Who’s who on the left and right: 1789–1917

This episode is for everyone who keeps writing to me to insist that one or the other wrong, incoherent, popular definitions of Left and Right is actually the correct one.

How do we know the left and right refer to equality and hierarchy?

To answer this, we look at who was considered as being on the left and on the right in three different time periods:

The early French revolution in 1789, which is what the whole left-right political spectrum is an analogy to.
The 3^rd republic in France where seating in the National Assembly was first purposefully arranged on a left-right spectrum, analogous to the early French Revolution.
The different branches of late 19^th and early 20^th Century socialist movement: Anarchism, Revolutionary Party Socialism and Parliamentary Socialism.

And we apply all of the junk cold war definitions – the market vs. the state, the individual vs. the collective, big vs. small government, equality vs. liberty – and we watch them all crash and burn, leaving only the equality vs. hierarchy / class conflict paradigm left standing.

Apply this exercise on your own to any historical period from 1789 until the rise of the USSR and the cold war, and you get the same results.

Now can everyone accept it and move on?

Bonus episode to follow shortly to explain why Fascism is on the far right and Communism is on the far left when Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR are both archetypical “totalitarian” societies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3uevocEy3c

Script

Hello fellow kids,

Welcome back to what is politics.

So in episode 3 we saw that most human societies over the past 12,000 or so years have been organized into political hierarchies, where some people have more decision-making power, more wealth and more rights than other people. And we saw that hierarchies serve three related purposes: they facilitate efficient group cooperation, they reduce conflict by determining the winners and losers in advance, and they also facilitate the exploitation of less powerful members of the hierarchy by more powerful members of that hierarchy.

And then we saw that the left right political spectrum is all about where one stands in regards to these hierarchies. If you support the inequalities of a given hierarchy for whatever reason, then you’re on the right on that issue, and if you oppose those inequalities, then you’re on the left.

In other words the left right political spectrum is about class conflict – classes meaning different ranks in a hierarchy – and these classes and hierarchies can be political, economic, cultural and international. Owners on top, management in the middle, workers on the bottom. Government on top, citizens on the bottom. Or in a patriarchal culture you’ll have men on top, women at the bottom. The medieval King on top, nobles in the middle, serfs on the bottom.

However, there are also a bunch of other popular definitions of the left-right political spectrum floating around: the market vs. the state, big gurbmint vs. small gurmbint, the individual vs. the collective, equality vs. liberty.

In episode 4 we looked at how words and definitions are communication tools, and we saw how all of these definitions fail as communication tools two important ways:

#1. is that they’re historically inaccurate, so they cause confusion when reading history books or when making historical analogies – and the whole concept of left and right is an analogy itself to the early french revolution.

and more importantly #2. is that they make us focus on superficial aspects of politics like that don’t give us any insight into the actual divisions and political coalitions that exist in the real world.

Like in the real world we don’t see left wing or right wing groups forming coalitions against eachother based on the size of government or how much collectivism they want – we see that left wing coalitions want big government when that advances different types of equality, like more social programs, and they want small government when that advances equality, like looser immigration or less prisons. And right wing coalitions want big government to enforce hierarchies, like more police and stricter immigration rules, and they want small government when that advances hierarchies, like promoting so-called “economic freedom” which just meant economic hierarchy, where business owners do whatever they want without government interference, and workers only have the rights that their level of bargaining power confers on them.

Today

Today we’re going to look over different historical periods to see who was classified as being on which side of the political spectrum at different times, in order to show all the haters that keep writing to me arguing about how this or that wrong definition of left and right is actually the correct one, that on top of making us confused, those crappy popular definitions of left and are also historically incorrect, and that they only pop up around the time of the cold war for propaganda purposes.

And that will give us the tools that we need in order to answer the frequently asked question: why is it that Fascism is on the far right of the political spectrum, and communism is on the far left of the political, when hitler’s germany and stalin’s Soviet Union seemed to have many important similarities – they were both heavy handed dictatorships that enslaved a good chunk of their people, they both used nationalism to maintain the power of the ruling party, and they both engaged in imperialism and in some degree of wealth redistribution. But we’re going to do that in a bonus mini episode because this episode got too long!

History Intro

OK, so let’s get to it. How do we know that Hierarchy vs. Equality is the historically correct use of the terms left and right?

No one sat down and invented these terms and defined them for us in some book, and there aren’t any books that trace how people used the terms over time to help us figure it out – at least not that I know of, if you do know of any, please let me know!

The terms emerged as an analogy to the early part of the French revolution in 1789, where those delegates to the national assembly who supported the revolution stood and sat on the left side of the room, those who supported the monarchy and the status quo, occupied the the right side.

When you use an analogy like this, you’re inferring that there is some salient feature that links the people you’re referring to in your time with the right or left sides of the national assembly in 1789, and this is true even if you’re not really conscious of what that feature is, like even if you’re just sort of feeling it instinctually, which is what people are doing most of the time. So what is it about right wing populists vs. left wings populists, or socialists versus capitalists, or communists vs nazis or anarcho-communists vs anarcho-capitalists that links them to the left and right sides of the french national assembly of 1789?

Since there’s no particular book to tell us what that salient feature is, we need to read all the bo-oks. And since we don’t have time to go over all the bo-oks, we’ll take a look at who was considered to be left and right in three different historical periods:

First, the OG french revolution where the terms come from

Next, the 3^rd republic in france about 100 years later where the seating of the national assembly was consciously based on the left right analogy to the french revolution.

And finally we’ll look at who was considered to be on the left and right of the various branches of the socialist movement of the late 19^th century to the early 1920s or so.

And with each period we’ll test out whether or not the popular definitions of the market vs. the state, the individual vs. the collective, big vs. small government, or equality vs. liberty make any sense as definitions of left and right.

Traditional Europe

Let’s start with the French Revolution

If we want to understand the left and right sides of the national assembly in the French revolution, it helps us to understand what the revolutionaries on the left were trying to overthrow, and what they were trying to achieve, and what the monarchists on the right were trying to preserve.

The system that existed before French Revolution, which is referred to as the ancien régime, meaning the old system or old order, was the tail end of the feudal social order that had existed throughout much of europe since the 10^th Century.

Great Chain of Being

According to the dominant ideology in europe in the middle ages, which carries through the ancien régime period, the universe was one giant hierarchy – the great chain of being, with God on top, his angels below him, and then the pope and the worldly monarchs appointed by god below them, and then you had the three orders of human society – the clergy, the nobility and the common people below them. In terms of hierarchical order on earth, you had the King and Pope on top, the nobility and the high clergy below them, and then the common people and the lower clergy below them. And below them were the animals, then the plants and then the minerals.

And each one of those categories under God had it’s own hierarchy. The angels were divided into the seraphim who were ranked above the cherubim, and then there were different ranks of nobles and of clergy. Men were ranked above women, and adults above children, masters over apprentices, bigger animals over smaller animals, animals over insects, plants had their own hierarchy, as did minerals – gold above silver above bronze above other base metals, down to rocks and dirt at the bottom.

Any person who tried to usurp his or her place in this endless hierarchy was revolting against nature and against God Himself, putting the whole chain in jeopardy of collapsing, just like when the angel Lucifer tried to defy God, disrupting the perfect universe, and committing the first sin.

Now in the thick of the middle ages, this hierarchical ideology more or less matched reality in terms of who held political, economic and cultural power. A King normally had more power, more wealth and more status than a noble. A nobleman usually had more power, wealth and status than a commoner, a man usually had more power and wealth than a woman, etc. The political, cultural and economic hierarchies of the society all mutually reinforced one another – and since the laws of states tend to reflect the balance of power of the different actors in a given society, the laws of the medieval states reflected and reinforced these hierarchies.

But over the centuries, as europe slowly recovered from the fall of the Roman Empire, polities got bigger and more centralized, and roads became safer, all of which meant which that trade and knowledge could be shared across long distances again, as they had in Roman times. And as a result, the basis of power shifted away from controlling land and being able to squeeze grain out of peasants, to being able to accumulate cash from trade and taxes and fees. As a result, the mutually reinforcing aspect of the system’s hierarchies was slowly disrupted, and the actual balance of power no longer reflected official ideology, or the law.

Eventually, merchants, who were members of the order of common people and who derived their wealth from increasingly important commerce, often became more wealthy and more powerful than many nobles, who were getting squeezed into the middle class and even poverty, due to inheritance rules and the increasing need for money.

And as the nature of the economy changed, the King needed more cash to run his state and to fight his wars, and he began selling noble titles for cash to wealthy commoners, to impose more and more taxes that commoners had to pay and that nobility and clergy were exempt from. And while serfdom had largely been phased out in france by the time of the french revolution, the nobility and clergy still controlled many resources like mills and forests and lands that people depended on. And because they wanted cash above all, they imposed all sorts of fees and levies on the commoners for the right to use them, and other fees that the commoners had to pay practically every time they sneezed like the tithe which was and still is an annual tax that people had to pay to the catholic church just for being alive.

So by the time of the Revolution got started in 1789, as a response to a series of crises and famines and wars that the King bungled his response to, the ideology and worldview of the middle ages was still in place, but it no longer matched reality very closely, and it was also in competition with new ideas and ideologies of the enlightenment which had emerged out of the resumption of travel and trade and the invention of the printing press, all of which facilitated the exchange of ideas and knowledge across long distances and among greater numbers of people.

And it was this ancien régime, a degenerated and increasingly unstable feudal order, that the delegates on the right side of the national assembly wanted to preserve as much as possible when the revolution broke out, and that the delegates on the left wanted to replace with a society based on enlightenment principles.

The Demands of the Left in the French Revolution

So what sort of policies did the people on the right and left sides of the assembly want to enact?

The delegates on the right side of the National Assembly, who were mostly nobility and high clergy, originally just wanted to maintain the existing system as it was, so they could keep all of their traditional hierarchical privileges and advantages. The King has ultimate authority, the nobility and clergy have special status and privileges and are owed their tithes and other fees and dues, and the commoners pay all the taxes while the nobility and clergy are exempt.

As events progressed, they quickly made compromises so as not to be completely left out of the discussion – like accepting the idea of a constitutional monarchy, with elected representatives – but they were playing defense, trying to only accept the absolute minimum of change. So for example, their proposal for an elected body was one where the commoners and nobility and clergy each got ⅓ of the vote, even though the commoners made up 98.4% of the population. And they wanted the King to have veto power over the assembly so as to render it as powerless as possible.

In other words they wanted to maintain the political, economic and cultural hierarchies of the day as much as possible.

Meanwhile the delegates on the left side of the assembly were mostly commoners, but from the bourgeois class – meaning wealthy and middle class people from the urban business and property owning classes – and in the assembly they were mostly lawyers and wealthy merchants, along with some lower clergy and a few enlightenment influenced intellectuals from the nobility. And what they wanted at first was more political and cultural equality.

In terms of political institutions, they started off demanding things like equality before the law, in the form of a constitutional monarchy with freely elected representatives and equal representation for all without regards to status of nobility, clergy or commoner.

And they wanted cultural equality in terms of eliminating the legal distinctions between nobility, clergy and commoners altogether, and all of the economic privileges that came with clerical and noble status and all the onerous obligations that came with commoner status. And they wanted to reduce or remove the influence of the catholic church on society and have equality of religious expression for minority religions like protestants, and even jews and mohammedans.

In other words they wanted people to be treated as individuals before the law rather than as members of collective social orders.

And in terms of economics, they wanted the state to respect private property and other rights and freedoms of individuals versus the idea of the entire country belonging theoretically to the king who could confiscate property at will. They also wanted everyone to have an equal right to engage in trade, versus large scale trade being a privilege meted out by the King to his cronies, while local trades and crafts were controlled by guilds.

Meanwhile, outside the national assembly, the urban workers, artisans and shopkeepers, known as the sans-culottes, which today means people without underwear, but back then meant people without fancy breeches, were pushing the range of debate in the assembly towards more and more radical equality, which would later be described as further and further further to the left.

Although they weren’t delegates to the national assembly they played a leading role in driving the revolution by engaging all sorts of actions – rioting, storming the bastille, petitioning the national assembly, and generally putting pressure on the delegates on the left side of the assembly to adopt more and more egalitarian positions.

The sans-cullottes wanted things like direct democracy without representatives, like in ancient greece where every citizen participated in government – in other words, total political equality – and they wanted the abolition of all large estates and large businesses, and the redivision of land so that every citizen should have and equal plot. And they wanted price controls for basic staples instead of having their survival being subject to the caprices of the market. In other words they wanted extreme economic and political equality.

Within a couple of months, the whole ancien régime feudal legal order was abolished – noblility, clergy and commoner were equal individuals before the law – and the noble and clerical privileges and tithes and tributes and levies and fees were gone.

Now the debate inside the Assembly was about whether or not the king would be able to assert a veto over decisions made by the elected assembly, which was the position of the right. Or, would the elected legislature have the ultimate say, as demanded by the delegates on left side of the room.

And then eventually, encouraged by the sans-culottes in the streets, some of the delegates on the left of the assembly adopted the position of ending the monarchy entirely and establishing a republic – meaning a public body that at least symbolically represents the entire public, versus a monarchy that’s the personal domain of the divinely appointed monarch.

And eventually things really went off the rails and heads started rolling and you ended up with a new form of government every few years, a revolutionary dictatorship, a reactionary dictatorship, napoleon’s emperorship, restoration of the monarchy, another republic another dictatorship…

French Revolution

1789 Market vs. State

Anyhow, let’s test out our various defnitions on the early french revolution.

First the idea that the right represents pro-market forces and that the left represents pro-state forces. We already saw in episode 4 that this whole concept is incoherent and based on a false premise because the market and state are not inheremtly opposed to eachother – but – just because something doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t mean people weren’t using it that way, however if you look at the national assembly it’s almost exactly the opposite.

It was on the left side of the room which was full of bourgeois lawyers and businessmen where you had people interested in the right to trade freely without interference from the state. It was the left side of the assembly that issued the revolutionary declaration of the rights of man which guaranteed a right to private property in article 2 and article 17.

And it was the delegates on the right who were defending the ancien régime system where the King handed out trading privileges, and had the right to confiscate property and where guilds controlled prices and regulated supply and competition and controlled who was and wasn’t allowed to practice trades.

This makes zero sense with a right wing market vs left state paradigm, but it perfect sense if the division is between hierarchy versus equality. The right wing delegates wanted the state to reinforce economic hierarchies of the ancien régime. The left delegates wanted to eliminate those hierarchies in favour of equal treatment before the law.

And in terms of trade and markets, it’s important to understand that in this era, capitalism was barely in it’s infancy in France. Adam Smith’s wealth of nations had only come out 15 years earlier. Unlike today when people associate free trade and markets with massive inequality, many theorists, including Adam Smith, saw markets as something of an equalizing force – they believed that without the power of the state propping up certain privileged actors, that the market would generate more equality – which made sense in the context of a world where the King and his cronies maintained their riches by state monopoly and selective privileges.

1789 Individual vs. Collective

What about the idea that the right represents individualism and the left represents collectivism, which is a popular paradigm among so-called libertarian capitalists?

Well, again, if we look at the national assembly in the french revolution, it’s exactly the opposite.

The bourgeois left wing is the side that was influenced by the enlightenment and that cared about the rights and freedoms of the individual, and that enshrined them in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Meanwhile, it’s the noblemen and aristocratic the high clergy on the right side of the assembly who wanted to maintain a system where rights and privileges were based on collective identity castes – nobility, clergy and commoner.

The right also wanted everyone to continue to be subject to the authority of the catholic church, and there’s nothing more collectivist than a hierarchical, centralized, organized religion.

So here in the time if the original left and right # which our current left right snalogy is based on – the individual is firmly on the revolutionary left, and the collective is squarely on the traditional right.

1789 Big vs. Small Govt

What about the idea that the left represents big government and the right represents small government?

The Right in the french revolution was defending a system of absolutist monarchy that had spent the last 300 years trying to centralize power into the hands of the state and the monarch. The right wanted to use the power of the state to protect their power and privilege. It was the left that wanted to limit the government’s powers vis à vis the citizen, and you can see that all over the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drawn up by the left. See articles 2, 4, 9 and 10 limiting the state’s authority and enshrining the freedoms of individuals to assemble, worship or not worship, and to own property.

Again, big government is on the right, and small government is on the left.

1789 Equality vs. Liberty

And what about the idea of equality on the left versus liberty on the right? Well we know that can’t be correct because the famous slogan of the left in the revolution was liberty, equality and fraternity. The right wanted neither liberty nor equality.

And there were other slogans floating around among the revolutionaries at that time which are less famous today but which reflected the same idea – liberty, equality, security – liberty, equality, property – liberty, equality, strength – in all of these slogans, liberty and equality were always indispensable and inseparable.

Contrary to cold war propaganda, equality and liberty naturally go together. If everyone is politically equal then no one is in a position to dominate anyone else or to restrict their freedom.

And whereas the 1789 delegates on the left weren’t thinking much about economic equality, the poor and precarious living sans-cullotes outside of the assembly certainly were – and the same principle applies to wealth inequality as to political inequality – wealth inequality restricts political liberty – because economic power is political power. The more wealth you have, the more power you have to make people do things.

Wealth doesn’t just give you the power to buy all the he-man action figures you want – it’s the power to hire people and boss them around all day because they depend on your property to live. And it’s the power to make people pay to rent your property. The reason your boss tells you what to do all day long and not the other way around is because you depend on his property to live. And the more wealth inequality between you and the person who needs your property, the more power you have to tell that person what to do – to make them work in harsher conditions for less pay.

It’s actually inequality and liberty that are opposed to eachother! When you have political inequality, aka hierarchy, it means that you have some people controlling the behaviour of other people and thereby restricting their liberty.

And again, economic inequality is political inequality. Remember that what makes a tyrannical state government so powerful is that they control a huge amount of wealth which they use to pay armies and police to enforce their rule and to restrict everyone else’s liberty.

Economic Inequality between the state and its citizens is what allows the state to restrict the liberty of its citizens, in the same way that economic inequality between citizens is what allows the wealthy and powerful to restrict the liberty of the poor and powerless.

Third Republic

Ok, so now lets fast forward about 100 years to the 3^rd republic period which goes from 1870 to the start of WWII in 1940. In the 3^rd republic all political tendencies are allowed representation in government for the first time since the early years of the revolution.

By this time, France is once again a democratic republic with a national assembly, where representatives are elected by universal male vote, and are organized into political parties.

And in the spirit of the of the first national assembly, the 3^rd republic representatives were seated by party, from right to left on a spectrum, specifically according to their political ideology, with the members of the most right wing party sitting on the far right of the chamber, and the representatives from most left wing party on the far left side of the chamber. And this is still the tradition in the national assembly of France today.

So who sat where?

At first, on the far right, you had aristocratic parties who wanted france to throw away the french revolution, and go back to a traditional conservative monarchy. And later after the popular support for monarchy faded away, you had ultranationalist anti-semitic parties seated on the far right, who wanted only ethnic french people and catholics to have the rights and privileges of citizenship.

And a bit to the left of them, but still on the right side of the room you had more liberal constitutional monarchist parties who wanted a monarchy that ruled in the interests of the bourgeois, business class with voting restricted to big property owners. And you had Bonapartists, who wanted to bring back the nationalist, imperialist style dictatorships of Napoleon Bonaparte’s family. And on the center right, you had republican bourgeois parties who wanted the catholic church to have a strong influence in society. And then on the left, you had democratic republican bourgeois parties who wanted the catholic church to be completely removed from public affairs, And then once organized socialism became an important movement, the far left side of the room was dominated by various socialist parties and the secular republicans moved to the center left of the chamber.

So which definition of left and right makes sense given these seating arrangements?

Market vs State

In the Market versus the state paradigm the state is supposed to be on the left, and the market is on the right. But here you have big state monarchists and mega state imperialist bonapartist dictators on the right. And also on the right you also had the bourgeois monarchist parties that wanted to use the power of big government to enforce the power of the market.

On the far left you did have the socialists who want the state to interfere with the market, but it’s in the center not the right where you have the fans of the free market minimal state, in the form of the right and left republican parties.

So big fail for the market vs. state paradigm.

Big vs Small Gurbmint

Big vs. small government is a similar story. Big government parties on the far right, who support monarchy and dictatorship and using big goverment to enforce economic hierarchy, and ethnic and religious hierarchy. Big government also on the far left but to enforce economic and poltical equality.

It was was the center and center left who wanted the smallest government that would mostly enforce contracts, and stay out of your bedroom and your place of worship, and respect individual liberties.

Plus outside of the assembly you had a strong anarchist movement considered to be on the extreme left, that wanted no government, or at east no state government.

Individual vs Collective

When it comes to the idea that individualism is supposed to be on the right and collectivism on the left, once again, it’s a similar picture – you have the collectivist hypernationalist and religious parties on the right, the economic collectivist socialist parties on the left, and the individualist secular parties on the center and the center left.

Equality vs Liberty

And equality on the left vs liberty on the right is also a total fail. The right was full of parties that wanted neither equality nor liberty. The right was where the supporters of monarchy and bonapartist dictatorship sat. It was the bourgeois center had the liberal parties who believed in political liberty in the limited sense of the state being restricted in its powers vs the individual. And on the left you had the socialists, who by and large also believed in equality and liberty, but who thought that liberty is only possible once there is economic equality.

Again, the only paradigm that makes sense is hierarchy vs equality.

Early 20^th Century Socialists

And we see the same type of pattern if we shift our focus to look at the different branches of late 19^th and early 20^th century socialism.

At this time, there we can divide up most socialists into three main branches. Anarchists on the left, Revolutionary Party Socialists in the middle, and Parliamentary Socialists on the right.

And I’m not the one who making up those left right designations, if you read books and speeches by the important figures from these movements, socialists have always been really good at insulting eachother, and you can read polemics back and forth where the anarchists are childish ultraleftists and the revolutionary party socialists are secret right wing autocrats in disguise, and the parliamentary socialists are right wing social-fascist sellout renegades – but what matters for us is that the anarchists are always described as on the left, and the parliamentary socialists on the right and the revolutionary party socialists are in the middle insulting the other branches.

this is normally how the socialists of that time classified one another.

All of these socialists had more or less the same goal – socialism – but they differed on how to get there.

People today often define socialism as state or government control of the economy, but that’s largely a relic of the Soviet Union and cold war propaganda. Traditionally, the defining element of socialism is worker control of the economy and of society – and while the state might be one way that workers can exercise that control, a majority of socialists, and certainly some of the most historically important socialists like Marx and Engels and their followers and of course all of the anarchists, were against the state as an appropriate instrument for socialist government.

Instead, they expected that socialism would be a world of direct democracy, with autonomous communes and cooperatives coordinating with each-other voluntarily across the world without any state controlling things or getting in the way. This is why Marx often used the phrase “the free association of the producers” rather than the words socialism or communism to describe his ultimate aim.

Anarchists

So on the left you had the anarchists, people like Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman – who thought that the way you get to a society of autonomous communes and cooperatives controlled by workers is via a revolution which overthrows the state and capitalism at the same time.

For the anarchists, the state was simply an instrument of oppression used by the ruling class to subjugate oppressed classes. It was just a machine that the business owner and landlord classes used to make rules that kept them rich and kept workers and tenants poor – just like medieval states kept the serfs under control of the nobility, and how the ancient roman state kept the plebs under the rule of the senatorial families.

As the leftmost movement on the left, the anarchists were suspicious of all hierarchies, political, economic, cultural or international and there was no question of participating in electoral party politics or state government of any kind.

In Bakunin’s famous words, if a socialist tried to take power via the the state, they would end up “beating the people with the peoples stick” – meaning that they would become a new ruling class lording over the people but in the name of the people.

Party Socialists

At the center of the socialist movement, you had the revolutionary party socialists, whose leadings figures included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin.

These socialists had more or less the same ultimate goal as the anarchists, but they had a fundamental disagreement on how to get there. The revolutionary party socialists agreed with the anarchists that the the state was an instrument of oppression – the formulation that I gave earlier about the state being an instrument of class domination actually comes from Engels and Marx – but the revolutionary party socialists also believed that you couldn’t successfully complete a revolution without using the power of the state to prevent the upper classes from taking back power. However, after that task was complete, the state, would become obsolete now that there would be no more classes to dominate.

And whereas the anarchists to their left rejected any participation in state politics, the revolutionary party socialists believed that it was necessary to participate in electoral politics whenever possible, in order to improve the conditions of the working classes as well as to increase the popularity of socialism and to strengthen the movement in general.

Hostility towards the state diminished somewhat by the early 20^th century as these socialist parties started achieving some electoral success and also some success in pressuring non-socialists governments to pass socialist policies – for example conservative chancellor otto von bismark in germany implemented the word’s first public health insurance system in 1893 as part of a failed attempt to take the wind out of the sails the growing socialist movement of his day.

With these developments, some prominent revolutionary party socialists like Karl Kautsky decided that while revolution was still necessary, maybe some kind of permanent state would be an appropriate instrument to help coordinate all the workers cooperatives and communes in a socialist society.

Parliamentary Socialists

These developments also led some revolutionary socialists to give up on revolution altogether. The parliamentary socialist movement, originally founded by Ferdinand Lasalle around the time of Marx, took off in the early 1900s as Eduard Bernstein, a follower of Marx, broke from revolutionary party socialism, and theorized that you could just keep passing more and more socialist reforms in an elected parliament in a capitalist country without the need for a revolution – things like 8 hour work days, and minimum wages, and more rights for workers – and eventually you’ll get to socialism that way – or not – all that matters is that things continually get better for workers. This movement gave birth to many successful socialist parties around the world which still exist today – and which we call social-democratic parties though by now most of them have renounced socialism, even nominally.

Left and Right

So again, if we look at the late 19^th early 20^th century socialists, and try to apply the popular definitions of left and right, market vs state, individual vs collective, big government versus small government and equality vs. liberty to the left vs right wing socialists – they all fail miserably.

Market vs. The State

Let’s start with the market the versus the state? ENNNNNGGGG

I mentioned earlier that the market was seen as a potential equalizing force at the time of the french revolution. This was still true in the 19^th century when the socialist movement was taking off, and you had many socialists who thought that the market would eliminate the privileges and unfair advantages that the wealthy got from the state to keep them rich.

People like Thomas Hodskin, lysander spooner or pierrre joseph proudhon loved markets. And most of these pro-market socialists were anarchists of one sort or another on left wing of socialism. So long as human labour is not allowed to be rented on the market, and you don’t have individuals owning land or capital that other people depend on to live, they believed that allowing people to trade their possessions freely was the best way to allocate resources and that it would generate equality and prosperity.

Revolutionary party socialists in the tradition of Marx, believed that markets should be replaced with some form of voluntary democratic resource allocation which no one really seemed to ever define very clearly, but which would happen without any state or with a minimal state.

It was the right wing parliamentary socialists who wanted the state to interfere the most with the market, and to nationalize more and more industries over time though they tended to support small business and markets for consumer good.

So we have pro markets anti statists on the left and then small market big statists on the right, and neither markets not the state in the middle, and then you also had some anti-market anti-state anarcho-communists on the left as well.

Mishkebibble.

Big vs. Small Government

When it comes to the idea of left and right being about big government on the left vs. small government on the right, the socialist spectrum was the exact opposite.

On the left you had the anarchists who wanted no state government at all. In the middle you had the revolutionary party socialists who wanted big government for like five minutes or maybe a year or two, and then it should fade out into either no state government at all, or else maybe a minimal leftover state to help coordinate between communes and cooperatives – and on the right the parliamentary socialists were happy to keep increasing and increasing the size and power of the state over the economy, and maybe one day it might maybe become obsolete … or maybe not. It’s a sweet gig.

Individual vs. Collective

And of course the idea of Individualism on the right vs collectivism on the left also doesn’t work.

All socialists are economic collectivists, but it was on the anarchist left that you had the most concern for individual rights and freedoms, anarchism is very much about liberating the individual from all hierarchies, with famous individualist anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Emma Goldman.

In the centre, revolutionary party socialists like Lenin made fun of anarchists’ concern for what he mocked as petit bourgeois rights and freedoms, which he saw as excuses for capitalist domination. Even today, leninists call anarchist Noam Chomsky a liberal for defending classical individual rights like freedom of speech.

Meanwhile on the right, Parliamentary socialists in democratic capitalist countries also tended to respect popular constitutional protections for individual rights and wanted to expand them.

So you had economic collectivism all across the socialist right and left, but you had it coexisting with a high degree of individualism on the left and then a little less so on the right, and the least individualism in the middle.

Equality Versus Liberty

And the same goes for equality vs liberty. The anarchists, who were the most egalitarian socialists were also the most libertarian socialists – libertarian socialism is another term for anarchism, and like I keep saying, liberty and equality go hand in hand, and in fact require eachother.

The revolutionary party socialists in the middle were also very egalitarian, but they were less precious about liberty and other individual rights as we just saw, and when Lenin and the bolsheviks took power in Russia, they quickly threw liberty out the window the second things got difficult, and we’ll look at the circumstances surrounding that in another episode.

Meanwhile the parliamentarians on the right were the most tolerant of economic inequality, and also the most comfortable with the political hierarchy of the state (until the bolshevik revolution, but that’s another story for another episode) meanwhile, the parliamentary socialists also tended to place a high value on the constitutional liberties of the representative democracies that they served under.

So pre bolshevik revolution anyway, you have the most liberty and the most equality on the left and then the right and in the middle you have the least liberty, and the second most equality, and on the right you have the lease equality, and the second most liberty.

Hierarchy vs. Equality

One again, the only paradigm that makes sense for how 19^th and early 20^th century socialists classified themselves on a left right spectrum is hierarchy and equality. The anarchists were on the left because they wanted the most direct path to political, economic, cultural and international equality. The revolutionary party people were to the right of the anarchists because they believed that it was necessary to participate in hierarchical state government, and to seize the state, even if only temporarily to achieve that same end goal. And the parliamentarians were on the right of them, because they were willing to tolerate long term economic inequality and to engage in long term and maybe eternal participation in hierarchical state government. Also, when WWI broke out they sided with their respective nations in the war, abandoning the principal of international equality to the horror of all the other socialists.

What It’s About

So, to sum all of this up – and you can do this same exercise with any historical period until the cold war when everything becomes a mess for reasons we’ll get to in the follow up mini episode – left and right were are very clearly not about the size of the government, or whether you want more or less state control over the market or more or less individualism or collectivism. it’s about what do you want to do with the power of government? What do you want to accomplish by regulating the market or freeing up the market? To what end are you invoking the collective good or the rights of the individual?

Whether you favour the market, the regulatory state, collectivism, individualism, cosmojizmatism – If your goal is preserving or advancing the interests of the people at the top of the of the social pyramid, you’re on the right. If it’s to advance the interests of the people at the bottom, you’re on the left.

Conclusion

And voila, hopefully that’s enough to shut up all the haters. Ideally I like to recommend some books to read, but even though left and right are fundamental to our politics, shockingly, as far as I know there is no good book or article that really explains left or right or the history of the terms. Everything I could find is half assed half baked muddled doodoo crap! If you know of something let me know! I put this together by reading all the bo-oks over the years on all the subjects I’ve discussed. If you appreciate what I’m doing, please tell your friends and your social media friends and also your parasocial media friends about this podcast – like if you know someone with a popular podcast or a youtube show who has some reach who might give the show a signal boost, that seems to be the main way that people find out about podcasts and youtube shows nowadays, so please do that if you can!

And also rate and review it on itunes, like and subscribe with the bell on youtube, ask me any questions or corrections or criticisms in the youtube video comments, or by email at worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com and send me some of that patreon money so I can keep doing this.

Next we’ve got a little bonus episode for everyone who gets confused about why Fascism is on the far right and Communism is on the far left, when the USSR and Nazi Germany are supposed to be the prototypical totalitarian societies with many important similarities between them. And then after that we’re doing some political anthropology where we’ll look at things like why some societies are egalitarian while others are hierarchical, or why some societies have more freedom than others, or why some societies have more or less male domination than others, and how and why this changes over time.

Until then,

Seeya!

6. Political Anthropology: When Communism Works

Everywhere we look, past and present we see hierarchical societies where some people have more wealth, more power, and more rights than others. Was this always the state of the human world? Is hierarchy in our nature? Are egalitarian societies possible for human beings? If so, under what conditions? And is freedom compatible with equality?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJCUubQB8CE

Bibliography

“The causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial” by Doron Schulnitzer et al., 2010 in Biology and Philosophy N° 25

Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm, 1999

The Dobe Ju/’Hoansi, by Richard Lee 1984/2012

”Eating Christmas in the Kalahari”, by Richard Lee, 1969

The Forest People, by Colin Turnbull, 1961

Wayward Servants, by Colin Turnbull, 1965

“Taming Wild-Ass Colts” by Nancy Nienhuis, 2009 in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 25, No 1. pp. 43–64

Myths of Male Dominance, edited by Eleanor Leacock, 1981

Chimpanzee Politics, by Franz de Waal, 2007

The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers, by Frank Marlowe, 2010

The Foraging Spectrum, by Robert L. Kelly, 2013

”Farewell to the Childhood of Man”, by David Graeber & David Wengrow, 2015 (see episode 7 for why their thesis is wrong and their political project is misguided).

Script

Hello and welcome back to What is Politics,

For the past few episodes we’ve been talking about the political left and right, which refers to political equality vs political hierarchy – in other words class conflict, conflict between the different ranks of the various political, economic, cultural and international hierarchies that structure our social and political world.

Over the next couple of episodes, we’re going to do some political anthropology and look at where human hierarchy comes from. Why are there societies where some people have more resources, more rights and more decision-making power than others? Why are there societies where men dominate women? Have there ever been any societies where everyone was equal, and if so why?

Is the left wing dream of human political equality something that is possible, or is forever doomed to fail forever because hierarchy is so deep in our lobster chimpanzee monkey man DNA, or because conditions make it impossible?

As we’ll see, hierarchy and equality are all about bargaining power – who has it, who knows they have it, and who knows how to use it.

Humanity Today

If we look around us today, we find a world full of hierarchies.

We have political hierarchies where some people give orders and others take orders – owners over employees, government over citizens, masters over slave. We have economic hierarchies where some people have extraordinary wealth, and others are destitute and starving. We have cultural hierarchies where some culturally determined categories of people have more rights or power than other categories of people: men over women, white over black, brahmins over untouchables, citizens over immigrants, catholics over protestants, atheists over religious people. And we have international or interpolity hierarchies where some countries or tribes dominate others.

And all of these hierarchies intertwine with eachother and reinforce eachother in different ways. Having more wealth gives you more power to boss more people around. Being part of a privileged cultural category or an imperial nation gives you more access to wealth, and being a member of a subjugated one prevents you from accessing as much wealth or sometimes even prevents you from having any wealth at all.

When we look at history, we see the same state of affairs – an endless variety of hierarchies – kings over lords over serfs, patricians over plebs, masters over slaves, tribal chiefs and shamans over ordinary tribespeople, pharoahs, aztec emperor gods and the Fuhr over everyone else.

Even when we look at societies which were supposed to be founded on the basis of equality, like the former USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam and all of the defunct 20^th century communist countries, we just see variations the same political, economic, cultural and international hierarchies. Communist party secretary general over the nomenklatura over lower ranking party members over non-party members, with corresponding, hierarchies of income and pay, atheists over religious people, urban people over peasants, bosses over workers, etc.

Human Origins

Looking at all this we would get the impression that human beings are naturally hierarchical animals – that hierarchy is deep in our genes, like the lobsters like Doctor Professor Jordan Peterson likes to talk about.

Now lobsters aren’t a very useful comparison because they’re so distantly related to us, but if we look at our closest relatives, our closest great ape cousins – gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, we see that they’re also all organized into to hierarchies. Among chimpanzees and gorillas, strong aggressive males dominate the rest of the group, along with coalition allies, including importantly their moms. And all the members of a community can be all ranked in some way, which determines who gets access to various resources, including coercive sex.

Among bonobos, it’s coalitions of femaleswho dominate, and they use a combination of sex and violence to maintain their positions and to control access to resources. Given that all of our closest cousins are organized in this way, anthropologists assume that our earliest common ancestor must have also been organized into to some form of dominance hierarchy.

But something interesting happened between when we branched off from the common ancestor of our great ape cousins and when we became anatomically modern humans.

Because, when we look at societies of human beings around the globe today or in recorded history who practice the same type of hunting and gathering that most of our ancestors practised for most of our existence as a species, we see that every single one of these societies shares a distinct lack of social dominance hierarchies. In fact, they seem to lack almost any kind of social hierarchy at all.

There are no fixed authority positions, no kings or chiefs or high priests that anyone is forced to obey. Men don’t even dominate women, and parents exert only light authority over their children. These societies show an astonishing level of political, economic and gender equality, alongside a very high level of personal liberty – a combination that’s supposed to be impossible according to 20^th century political theorists steeped in cold war ideology.

In 1634 Father Paul Lejeune a jesuit missionary famously wrote about his encounters with the Montagnais people who who are now also known as the Innu, and who live in what is now Quebec and Labrador Canada.

On their political organization he noted

“…They have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him… All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages. Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.” UNQUOTE

Note that the term chief is Lejeune’s, Montagnais and Naskapi had no such rank.

Meanwhile on personal liberty Lejeune remarked with great irritation

“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of Wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like… Their life is passed in eating, laughing, and making sport of each other, and of all the people they know… if I questioned them about one thing, they told me about something else, only to get something to laugh and jest about; and consequently I could not know when they were speaking seriously, or when they were jesting.”

These descriptions, the lack of authority, the lack of interest in wealth accumulation, and the broad individual personal liberty, even the joking and teasing, taking the piss out of the stodgy missionary anthropologist can be found in ethnographies about hunter-gatherer societies of a particular type right up until today, who live in territories all across the world. And we also find other traits common to these societies, which LeJeune remarked on elsewhere in his account about the Montagnais and Naskapi, such as their creative intelligence and their restraint when it came to anger, which he very much admired, or else their sexual libertinism and lack of male domination which bothered him to no end.

300 + years later, and thousands of miles away, you can read ethnographies or articles about the Mbuti, who live in the Ituri rain forest in central africa, or the Ju Hoansi of the Kalahari desert in sourthern afraica, or the Hadza of the Tanzanian savannah, or the Batek who live in the Malaysian rainforest, or the Malapantāram and Paliyan who live in the forests of southern India and you’ll see the same sorts of stories reported over and over Extreme political and economic egalitarianism, lack of political authority, lots of humour, and lots of individual personal liberty.

Now what all of these cultures share in common on top these cultural traits is that they all practice the same kind of subsistence economy – a specific form of hunting and gathering that anthropologist James Woodburn called immediate return hunting and gathering, which means that people mostly consume what they hunt and gather within a couple of days without processing or storing it in some elaborate, like smoking or fermenting fish or drying fruits, and pickling vegetables to be eaten in the winter.

Immediate return foraging (and foraging is another word for hunting and gathering) is the simplest form of hunting and gathering – a more complicated variation of the foraging that our great ape cousins do – and as such it’s probably what most human beings practiced since before we were anatomically modern human being, up until the neolithic revolution which started about 12,000 years ago and totally changed humanity.

Materialism

So why is it that people who practice this type of economy all seem to share so many cultural traits, across great distances from eachother, in wildly different environments from the Congolese rainforest to the kalahari desert, to the boreal forests of quebec and Labrador?

If you think about it, it shouldn’t be too surprising that people who do similar things for a living would have share similar traits – this is something that we see all around us in our daily lives:

Most fine sculptors and surgeons have a lot of patience, steady hands and an eye for detail. Successful waiters and waitresses tend to be really friendly and have good memories. A lot lawyers and CEO’s are psychopaths. All of these phenomena occur for obvious material and practical reasons which are inherent to the nature of those occupations.

And in the same way that there’s something inherent to these professions that selects for certain traits and that incentivizes people who want to succeed in those professions to adopt those winning traits, there’s something inherent about different types of subsistence economies that select for and incentivize certain cultural and even physical traits.

After all, different subsistence economies are very much like different professions – anyone who engages in immediate return foraging for a living is engaging in the same general type of activity as someone else who’s doing it, even if certain details differ.

Think of office culture for example. There are kajillions of office jobs, with several zillion office workplaces, and each workplace has its own culture – but there are some general features that are found in the cultures of most office workplaces.

Whether it’s a hip and cool horizontal wanna be tech place with swings and pogos and meditation pods, or whether it’s a dystopian fluorescent light call center office purgatory, most people who work in offices, outside of high executive positions, tend to be very conflict averse and reticent to speak their minds, or to act out on their emotions – at least at work.

And that’s because if you’re the type of person who doesn’t watch what you say, then you have a tendency to get fired in these sorts of environments. You have a group of people trapped together like sardines all day, and tensions are often bubbling, but actual direct conflict will disrupt production and profit making which is the reason why everyone is there. Managers don’t want the headache of having to deal with everyones’ disruptive feelings or with conflicts, so if you can’t keep your feelings to yourself, it’s easier just to fire you unless you’re really important to the company. So if you’re an ebullient speak your mind type of person in an environment like that you’ll soon either get fired or learn how to shut up. As a result, offices are notorious for being cesspools of passive aggression, and we have many funny takes on this aspect of office culture in TV sitcoms and movies and newspaper comics strips.

Similarly, in societies where social harmony and cooperation are essential to survival, like in hunter gatherer bands where the wrong kind of conflict at the wrong time of year can potentially lead to the collapse of a band and starvation for everyone, you will usually see a huge emphasis on restraining anger, and on avoiding conflict.

Father Lejeune characterized the Montagnais-Naskapi attitude towards anger, by recounting how the local shaman once told him “nothing can disturb me; let hunger oppress me, let my nearest relation pass to the other life, let the Hiroquois, our enemies, massacre our people, I never get angry.” And LeJeune further noted that in all his time with the Montagnais-Naskapi he only ever once heard someone say the word for “i am angry” and after that the rest of the group kept their eyes on that person for some time for fear of a potential outburst.

And you can read similar accounts about restraint of anger in ethnographies of most immediate return foragers, and also in ethnographies about other types of societies where conflict is an existential threat. Jean Briggs’ book Never in Anger about an her time with the Inuit, who practice a different type of hunting and gathering, is a classic ethnography that deals with this theme.

So lesson one from all of this is that the practical material and social conditions that we find ourselves in, affect our behaviour and our values, in that they push us toward certain kinds of behaviours and away from others. And they also select for certain types of behaviours and values and against others – selection meaning people who have those values or behaviour do better than people who don’t. They survive longer, they have more kids, or they keep their jobs if we’re talking about a work environment – while those who don’t die off or get fired. Our environment doesn’t determine every choice that every person makes, but it pushes us in certain directions, making certain choices more likely than others, particularly over the the long term. If it’s -20 outside and you need to leave the house, you’re totally free to choose to wear anything that you own or nothing at all, but I can bet that you’re going to choose to put on your warmest coat and boots and not your bikini. Cannibalism is quite rare in europe but in times of famine, it predictably goes up.

So back to immediate return hunter-gatherers. We saw what incentivizes them to restrain their anger, but what is it about their economy that incentivizes people towards extreme egalitarianism, and towards a high degree of personal liberty?

If we take a quick look at the logistics of immediate return foraging the answers are pretty straightforward.

Immediate Return Foraging Realities

An Immediate return foraging economy involves small bands of about 10–100 people who make temporary camps for a few weeks, during which they build shelters, socialize, go off and pick berries and fruits and nuts and other wild edibles and small animals or fish that they either eat on the spot or bring back to share with their families. Hunting large animals is a major part of nomadic foraging life and the band’s nomadic migration patterns are usually based on following the migration patterns of favoured game animals.

The type of hunting that each culture engages in depends on their environment, so for example, among the hadza who hunt around the serengeti plains in east africa, or the kalihari desert bush people you have small groups of men under the age of 40 who hunt with bows and poisoned arrows and spears.

Among the Mbuti in the Ituri rainforest you have communal net hunting where men, women and sometimes even children participate all together.

Cooperation is key to survival in all sorts of ways, as people depend on eachother to help build their shelters, to watch their kids, and to hunt large game among other things.

And in all of these groups, the meat from large game animals is always shared among the entire band community no matter who does the hunting.

After a time, once most of the good food in the area has been eaten or game has moved out of hunting range, the group will decide to move on to a different location.

The decision of where to go is made more or less by consensus. People discuss it and make their case and argue, and then eventually the group makes a choice and goes. If there’s anyone who really refuses to go along, they can form a splinter band and go somewhere else if they have enough joiners to form a viable band, or else they can go join another existing group where they have friends or relatives. Splitting up is relatively easy in certain parts of the year when bands are bigger and closer together, but it can be much more dangerous during the time of year when bands are smaller and further apart, as you’re more likely to be a burden to a new band, and too many people leaving a band can end up make it too small to be viable.

The composition of each band may or may not have a core nucleus of people but in general it’s always in flux as people leave to join or visit bands with friends and family or to avoid conflicts with people they might dislike with, or else they come join for the same reasons. And these patterns of flux, and splitting and merging with other bands depending on the season or proclivities of individual members are called fission-fusion social grouping.

People will also engage in trade and exchange with neighbouring non-hunter gatherer cultures for things like agricultural foods and metal tools that they don’t produce themselves.

And although they may exchange for agricultural foods, and know how to produce agricultural foods, what defines them as hunter-gatherers is that they don’t engage in any agriculture themselves.

So Why Egalitarianism?

So based on this:

Why is there so much political equality and liberty in societies that practice this sort of economy? And note that like I mentioned in episode 4 and 5, contrary to cold war propaganda, liberty is not the opposite of equality – liberty and equality usually go hand in hand – because if everyone has an equal say no one is bossing anyone around, so there is more freedom – and if you don’t have liberty it means that someone is controlling what you are doing from above, which means you have some kind of hierarchy and not equality. That’s why democratic countries are more free than dictatorships are. That’s why the famous slogan of the French Revolution was Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.

Well, the reason that there’s so much political equality and so much liberty in these societies is that given the practical realities of the conditions that they live in, there’s simply no way for any person or coalition of people to really dominate anyone else even if they wanted to.

If one of your bandmates are getting annoying or domineering you can just leave and join another band most of the time. And since the band is always moving around, there’s no way to hoard or defend resources. And even if there were some way to hoard things, there’s really nothing much to store or to hoard in the first place as anything that people need can be found or made or acquired in exchange by more or less anyone, or with cooperation of some friends, with the exception of large game which usually only certain people are physically strong enough or skilled enough to acquire.

In other words there’s just no way to make anyone dependant on anyone else, which is what you need to have a proper hierarchy. Your boss tells you what to do at work all day and not the other way around because you depend on him for your salary. When you’re a kid your parents tell you what to do because you depend on them for food and shelter and love.

So then why don’t good hunters or coalitions of good hunters leverage the meat that they bring in to dominate other people into doing things for them? Why do hunters divide up their kills among the whole community according to careful culturally determined rules instead of exchanging it for favours and services and special treatment?

Well first of all people love big game meat but they aren’t totally dependent on it for survival most of the time, so people don’t have to tolerate that kind of behaviour. Plus, since even the best hunter requires the cooperation of others for all sorts of things like building shelter or helping with childcare or help with hunting and other things, his bandmates could retaliate by refusing to cooperate with him in all sorts of ways that would undermine his ability to function.

And then on top of these material reasons, there are social and cultural pressures that fill in the gaps and keep things on track. In order to avoid a situation where good hunters are constantly testing out the limits of how much they can dominate people which would result in having people constantly retaliating against them, which would disrupt group cooperation with potentially disastrous consequences, there are various cultural mechanisms to encourage sharing and cooperation and to discourage dominance behaviour.

Kalihari Meat Mess

Anthropologist Richard Lee famously discovered one of these mechanisms when he tried to impress the band of kalihari ju hoansi that he had been living with by buying them what he thought would be an amazing present: a seemingly enormous giant meat ox to be shared and eaten at an upcoming christmas feast.

But to his shock when he showed off the ox to his hosts, instead of them thanking him for it, everyone in the band took turns insulting it, making jokes about it and laughing at him and his failure of a gift. One woman exclaimed “do you expect us to eat that bag of bones? What did you expect us to eat off it, the horns?”.

Later on, a young man sat him down one on one and asked him “are you too blind to tell the difference between a proper cow and an old wreck?”. And another time an old man came up to him and asked him angrily “do you honestly think you can serve meat like that to people and avoid a fight? With such a small quantity of meat to distribute, how can you give everybody a fair share?”

Lee realized this could be a big problem as he’d seen very tense moments and occasional arguments break out over meat distribution before, especially when there wasn’t enough to go around to everyone’s satisfaction.

Over the course of the next few days Lee dealt with incessant interventions like this, people telling him he got ripped off, people complaining out loud that the feast was ruined because of him, that people will be fighting for the scraps, that no one will have enough energy to dance, and that everyone will go to bed hungry.

But Lee was confused – this was a really huge ass meat ox, how could everyone be so dissatisfied with it? One of his informants, an excellent hunter Tomazo explained to him that although the ox was big, what Bushmen really love is fat, and that most of the size of that ox was just giant bones, and that he should have bought a smaller fatter ox, but that now it was too late and they would just have to make due with ox soup.

All of this made Lee feel like he had screwed up so badly that it might be a good idea for him to just leave the camp permanently and start over somewhere else.

But then, when they finally slaughtered and started cutting the animal, Lee saw that contrary to what everyone had been telling him, the ox was actually full of layers and layers of fat.

When he frantically tried to point this out to one of the band, the man yelled back at him “you call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” after which he busted out laughing, as did everyone else, like literal rolling around on the ground laughing.

Lee stood there totally confused as the hunters whose faces seemed totally delighted and who were packing up huge pieces of meat with big satisfied smiles on their faces, were all the while were commenting about how scrawny and useless the meat was and how bad Lee’s judgment was.

A few days later he finally worked up the guts to ask some of his more trusted informants what the hell was going on, and he was told that the way that he had proudly announced his gift to everyone was considered to be an extremely arrogant faux pas, and they were responding in the appropriate manner by taking him down a few notches and putting him in his place.

He was then educated on the socially appropriate way that a good hunter is supposed to announce a big kill – basically by apologizing for having done a really bad job – and on how the ju hoansi constantly tease eachother and take eachother down in this way, in order to keep everyone level headed.

As Tomazo the skilled young hunter put it to him “when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

And when Lee irately asked him why he hadn’t told him this before, Tomazo man replied

“you never asked me!”

wah wah wah wah

The fact that these sorts of mechanisms exist in the first place suggests that dominance behaviour is a potential problem, that there is a human tendency to dominate which must be countered with culture. And that’s what much of culture is – finding ways to counter disruptive impulses, and to encourage ones that maintain the smooth continuity of the existing social order.

Capital Punishment

But – there’s one more important piece of the puzzle as to why big aggressive bully hunters don’t dominate, and why they don’t join in coalition with others like themselves to tyrannize their bandmates. After all, big chad silverback gorillas and alpha chimpanzees dominate their bandmates just by attacking them and terrorizing them until they accept their alpha status, and high ranking bonobo females rule by coalition – and if an annoyed chimpanzee or bonobo goes off to join another band, they’ll just find a different bully dominating them over there, and they’ll also find themselves at the bottom rung of a new hierarchy.

So why doesn’t this happen with human hunter-gatherer bands?

Part of the answer is the cultural levelling mechanisms that we looked at and other cultural practices and values, another part is that human forager groups have a greater need for smooth cooperation than most ape groups do where hierarchies are regularly tested and challenged – but another key part of the answer is just good old fashioned murder!

If someone really gets out of hand and starts doing things that disrupts the harmony of band life or just pisses anyone off beyond a certain point, the disruptive person can be relatively easily murdered thanks to the existence and ubiquity of lethal weapons and poisons available to men and women alike. Even the skinniest scrawniest person can kill the biggest most belligerent maniac from a safe distance with a spear, or an arrow or a poisoned dart.

According to anthropologists, once our homo ancestors developed some of these kinds of weapons starting with either homo erectus or homo habilis as far back as 2 million years ago, obnoxious alpha bullies would slowly get killed off on a regular basis, thereby weeding out aggressive physical and behavioural dominance traits that previously made alpha male chads the cock of the walk and which made social dominance hierarchy the order of the day.

So instead of getting you more sex, more food and more fun, being an aggressive bully just got you a spear in the head or a poison dart in your fool ass.

Evolution of Wimp-ass Pee-wee’s

And we can see the results of this in clearly in the archaeological record in the evolution of male bodies. You can think of evolution as an ongoing sculpture session with the grim reaper as the sculptor and his scythe of death as the chisel, and successive generations as his material.

Around the time that projectile weapons develop, all of the traits that make macho man chad alpha bullies successful in great apes and other animals – like giant canines to scare off or attack competitors, thick brow ridges to protect your face from blows from your competitors fists, large male body size vs the size of females to help you fight off male sex competitors – these traits start phasing out continually until we get to our modern form with our tiny weak girly canines, and wimpy pee wee-herman brow ridges and pathetic 15% larger males than females on average compared to over 50% larger male to female size of our real man chad gorilla and orangutan cousin kings.

Basically the alpha bullies repeatedly got killed off by their peers and those traits got progressively weeded out until we reached our current form 300,000 years ago or so.

Contemporary Forager Capital Punishment

And, when we look at immediate return hunter gatherers today, we still see this exact same dynamic at work. Men who are aggressive, domineering, and who repeatedly cause too many fights and too much disruption will sometimes get murdered by an enemy, or their relatives will passively fail to defend them when they’re ambushed by their enemies, or else in extreme cases they will suffer capital punishment at the hands of the entire community.

Richard Lee describes a rare occurrence where the entire community ambushed and killed a disruptive three-time murderer in broad daylight.

“As he lay dying, all the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until … he looked like a porcupine.” Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death. (Lee 1979)

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls these cultural levelling mechanisms plus the threat of retaliation or even capital punishment for dominance behaviour a reverse dominance hierarchy – meaning the community collectively dominates potential alpha men, preventing them from establishing any kind of hierarchy. So if you don’t like the idea of egalitarianism, you can call it reverse dominance hierarchy to feel more comfortable – same difference!

And that’s great news for communists and anarchists – not only are human beings capable of a high degree of egalitarianism, this egalitarianism was most likely the norm for much of the past 300,000 years of our existence as anatomically modern humans, and probably a lot longer than that, and it shaped our very nature a species.

And the reason for that egalitarianism, had everything to do with a relative equality of bargaining power inherent to the logistical realities of immediate return hunting.

But hold your horses anarchists and communists – we might be capable of equality, but we currently live in a world of endless hierarchy with only a few hundred thousand people left in egalitarian hunting and gathering societies, and zero egalitarian industrial civilizations. He did we get from there to here and is there any way to go back?

Hierarchy

Complex Foragers: Pacific Northwest Coast

To answer these questions, it’s useful to look at other subsistence societies. And we can start with delayed return hunter-gatherers, also called complex hunter-gatherers. Unlike immediate return foraging which is basically one type of economy, the term “complex foragers” includes a variety of different types of economies. What they share in common is that they don’t engage in agriculture, and that they do process and store food for later use.

The various native american tribes of Pacific North West Coast such as the Haida, the Kwakwakyawakw, the Tlingit others were traditionally complex hunter-gatherers whose type of economic activity differed greatly from the immediate return foraging that we described earlier.

So Instead of following big game animals around all year, the traditional Pacific North West Coast foraging economy was centred on control over salmon and other fixed fishing territories and the surrounding areas. As a result, the various the Pacific Northwest Coast tribes were largely sedentary, living in fixed villages with long term housing and other permanent structures, though they would go on long hunting and raiding expeditions for much of the year.

The salmon territories were in and of themselves great wealth, and great wealth means there’s something to steal which means defence, and something to store which means resource management. And sedentary living and permanent housing means that you can store and defend your wealth – preserved fish, copper, blankets, and incredible art.

And fixed settlements, with wealth to protect and own, also means that it’s more complicated to just up and leave if someone is dominating you. You can’t just start your own band, and if you leave your family, you’re leaving important property behind. Marriage and divorce become more complicated because marriage starts to involve the spouses family and their access to resources and territories, so arranged marriage is incentivized to keep precious territories in the right hands and maintain one’s family’s wealth and prestige.

And stored wealth and prized territories means war and raiding and defence which incentivizes the cooperation and tight coordination of larger groups of people to defend those resources or attack others and raid them for their resources.

And the result of all this is … hierarchy. Pacific North West Coast cultures had authoritative chiefs and delineated social ranks and social classes, chiefly nobility and commoners – with social power based on wealth inequality and slaves which were people captured in raids and brought far away from where they came from, to where they had no allies and were surrounded by enemy warriors and thus had to do what they were told if they wanted access to food.

As we talked about in episode 3, hierarchy is an effective way of efficiently coordinating group activities in tasks where discipline is required, like war, and it’s also a good way to prevent conflicts over resources. When there are resources to be divided, you basically have three options: you can have equal distribution, which is really difficult if not impossible to enforce when there isn’t relatively equal bargaining power plus a need to cooperate – you can have hierarchical distribution, which will tend towards matching existing bargaining power, or else you can have constant disputes and violence as people are constantly making justifications for why they deserve a bigger share than they’re getting – you’re a poo poo face and I’m an adonis, God loves me and got hates you, I have a college degree and you can’t read, etc.

Think of the fall of the roman empire – when you no longer had a big hierarchical structure dominating and unifying all of these territories, they broke up into smaller polities of relatively equal standing who fought eachother endlessly through the middle ages until they were amalgamated into bigger polities – and those bigger states also fought eachother, until capitalism ended up binding the elites of the different capitalist states into a web of hierarchy and cooperation.

Hierarchy avoids disputes by determining in advance who wins in a would-be battle, and who gets what, and a stable hierarchy will match the actual existing bargaining power of the various parties as people normally won’t bother getting into a battle that they know that they likely won’t win l unless they’re seriously provoked.

There are different ways to establish and maintain hierarchies, but if you want to manage intergenerational wealth that’s controlled by a family or a lineage – like a prized fishing territory – one common method is by appointing the the eldest person from that lineage as the top authority, who after all represents the earliest common link between everyone in the lineage. And then you have those lineages out of the group of relatwd lineages which control the most resources and which have the most bargaining power, to be recognized as noble lineages, and appoint the chief of the most powerful one of those as chief of the entire community.

And so, to avoid constant war within their own societies over fishing spots and other important fixed location resources, Pacific North West Coast cultures developed hierarchical social structures based on lineage and age and wealth where different families and clans and lineages got access to different territories. And they had great chiefs in charge of war planning and wealth distribution, which was done according to status and rank. And they had and still have great potlatches where the chief redistributes great wealth, according to social status, the higher your status the more you get, which maintains the chief’s legitimacy and keeps the system stable.

And of course I’m just giving the materialist perspective on culture – there is a whole complex system of ritual, belief and art that holds all of this together – a spirit hierarchy of secret ritual knowledge which bolsters and further shapes and conceptualizes the hierarchy of the material world, and gives these societies not only more stability, like the levelling mechanisms and egalitarian values do for immediate return hunters – but it also gives meaning and beauty to life. And the Pacific North West Coast people are famous for their incredible totem poles, paintings, masks, costumes, dances and songs which shape their spiritual and material worlds.

In short, the Pacific Northwest Coast hunter gatherers, developed a hierarchical social order because it was possible to do so and it was also beneficial to do so. By monopolizing and defending access to prime fishing spots, some groups of people had the means to dominate other people – and they also had political hierarchy because it made sense and creates stability – political and economic hierarchy stabilizes competition over fixed resources both within families and lineages and clans, and between them, and reduces conflict and chaos that harms everyone, particularly the people at the top of the various hierarchies, who will fight to maintain the existing system even when it’s harming other people as we’ll see in future episodes.

Seasonal Shifts

So, humans societies can be structured hierarchically where some people dominate others, or they can be structured according to the principle of equality where everyone has relatively the same political power and wealth. When bargaining power between people is relatively equal, and when cooperation is required for survival – which is the situation with immediate return foraging – you get political equality. And when circumstances give some people advantages over others as is the case for those clans among the various foragers of the Pacific North West Coast who control better and worse territories, you get various types of hierarchy.

Cultures can shift from hierarchy to equality or the other way around over time as circumstances change. The shift can be gradual – for example, archaeological evidence shows that pacific northwest coast hierarchy, seems to have emerged over a period of centuries after they had begun practicing a salmon storing economy, or the shift can be quick, happening in a generation or less as we’ll see next episode.

But sometimes the same culture will go from more hierarchy to more equality seasonally like every year, as they switch between different types of seasonal economic activity in ways that result in changes to relative bargaining power.

For example, the hierarchical structure of the Pacific North West Coast peoples is most rigid in their winter world when they gather together in large numbers in fixed settlements, and it relaxes into more relative egalitarianism during the part of the year when they break up into smaller bands to practice hunting and gathering and roam around their territories semi nomadically as various hierarchies become less relevant and harder to enforce. And this duality is reflected in their religious practices where people even have different names in the winter season vs the summer season.

Another example of this is the Nambikwara indigenous people of Brazil. When Claude Levi-Strauss went to live with them in the late 1930’s had authoritative chiefs in the rainy season when they practiced garden agriculture in fixed villages, and then during the rest of the year, when people would break off into nomadic hunting and gathering bands, those chiefs lost their authority and had to re-earn their following by being good leaders and gaining the respect of the band, because people who didn’t like a chief could just take just off and ditch them to join another groups where they had friends or family.

In other words, when they shifted to economic activity that resembled immediate return hunting and gathering, the logistical conditions and the balance of powers shifted as well, and their social structures reflected that shift.

World of Simple or Complex Foragers?

If we look at the archaeological record and apply insights from the ethnographic record of the cultures that we know about in order interpret it, we get a narrative of a hierarchical pre-human common ancestor to gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos 10 millions years ago, and then as we branch off into our respective lines, about two million years ago a homo ancestor, maybe homo erectus or homo habilis develops lethal projectile weapons whch triggers a shift away from dominance hierarchies as alpha males and belligerent male get progressively weeded out, until we get anatomically modern humans coming on the scene about 300,000 years ago as egalitarian immediate return hunter gatherers.

And then as the climate and geography start changing, starting at about 30–40,000 years ago we get some evidence of possible complex hunter-gatherers emerging in certain areas where population pressure and environmental conditions made that type of economy possible or advantageous. And the emergence of complex foragers with their semi sedentary lives and large concentrations of people relative to immediate return foragers, and their complex ritual and religious life coincides with the upper palaeolithic revolution where we start to find evidence of more complex symbolic life among humans.

And then, about 12,000 years ago something big happens, so that after millions of years of hunting and gathering, and 300,000 years of modern human beings likely living in relative equality, hierarchical societies start spreading like wildfire, along with male domination, organized violence, and chronic malnutrition, so that by about 5,000 years ago, the majority of humans were living in hierarchical societies of one sort or another, and by today more than 99.9% of human beings are organized hierarchically, with less than 150,000 people living in egalitarian hunter gatherer bands.

And we’ll discuss that world changing event, and a bunch of other fascinating things like male domination, matrilineal societies, the peasants revolt of 1381, the women’s suffrage movement, the anarchist revolution spain in the 1930s and whether egalitarian societies make any sense in the industrialized world in the next episode.

Check out the Bibliography

In the meantime, if you’re interested in what we talked about today, and I hope you are because I find it mind blowing and fundamental to understanding politics – then there are mountains and mountains of books and academic articles you might want read, and I’ll put a few of my favourites and maybe do a mini bonus episode on them, including some articles that dispute my main thesis – but before that: please tell your friends and your social media friends and your parasocial friends about this podcast – like if you know someone with a popular podcast or a youtube show who has some reach who might give the show a signal boost, that seems to be the main way that people find out about podcasts and youtube shows nowadays, so please do that if you can!

And rate and review it on itunes, like and subscribe with the bell on youtube, ask me any questions or corrections or criticisms in the youtube video comments, or by email at worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com and send me some of that patreon money so I can keep doing this.

And until next time,

Seeya

7. The Origin of Social Hierarchy and Male Dominance: why David Graeber and Jordan Peterson are Wrong

Why are hierarchy and male dominance so prevalent in human societies?

According to anthropologists David Graeber & David Wengrow, it’s because people were “self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities,” and then we somehow got stuck this way. Meanwhile according to Jordan Peterson, it’s just human nature.

Thankfully for humanity, both of these views are very, very wrong.

all music by *69

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOo-bS7OJI

Bibliography / Suggested Readings

Hierarchy vs. Equality in Pre-history

Christopher Boehm 1999 – Hierarchy in the Forest

Graeber & Wengrow 2015 – Farewell to the ‘childhood of man’: ritual, seasonality, and the origins of inequality, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol 21, N° 3

Graeber & Wengrow 2018 – How to change the course of human history, Eurozine

Shulnitzer et al 2009 – Causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial, Philosophy and Biology, Vol. 25 [on why egalitarianism was likely the norm in the Palaeolithic despite some archaeological finds of hierarchical societies in that period]

Camilla Power 2018 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow, libcom

Camilla Power 2018 – Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow (video lecture)

Camilla Power 2018 – ‘Communism in Living’; What can early human society teach us about the future?, libcom

Egalitarianism and Gender Relations

Jerome Lewis 2014 – Egalitarian Social Organization Among Hunter-Gatherers: The Case of the Mbendjele BaYaka, in Hewlett (ed) 2014 – Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin

Michelle Kisliuk 2006 – Seize the Dance! [see chapter 7, Women’s Dances, the Politics of Gender]

Morna Finnegan 2013 – The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 19, N° 4

Jerome Lewis 2007 – Ekila: blood, bodies, and egalitarian societies, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol 14.

Colin Turnbull 1961 – The Forest People [includes the gender tug of war story]

Barry Hewlett 1991 – Intimate Fathers

Cathryn Townsend 2019 – Emerging Patriarchy in the Mythology of a Previously Egalitarian Society (video)

Transition to Agriculture

Richerson et al 2001 – Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis, American Antiquity, Vol. 66, No. 3

Mark Nathan Cohen 1977 – The Food Crisis in Prehistory

Mark Nathan Cohen 1998 – Were Early Agriculturalists Less Healthy Than Food-Collectors? in Ember, Ember & Pellegrine (eds) 1998 – Research frontiers in anthropology. Volume I, Archaeology

Mark Nathan Cohen 2009 – Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture, Current Anthropology Vol. 50, No. 5 (university paywalled)

Valerie Ross 2011 – Early Farmers Were Sicker and Shorter Than Their Forager Ancestors, Discover, June 17 2011

Patrilocal Residence and Male Dominance

Ember & Ember 1971 – The Conditions Favoring Matrilocal Versus Patrilocal Residence, American Anthropologist, Vol. 73, N° 3

Pasternak 1997 – Family and Household: Who Lives Where, Why Does It Vary, and Why Is It Important? in Ember & Ember (eds.) 1995 – Cross-Cultural Research for Social Science

Mace & Holden 2003 – Spread of cattle led to the loss of matrilineal descent in Africa, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Vol. 270, N° 1532

Dyble et. al. 2015 – Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands, Science, May 2015

Other

Keely 1995/2014 – The Foraging Spectrum

Cathryn Townshend 2020 – Neither nasty nor brutish, Aeon [on the Ik social collapse]

Carl Philip Salzman 2008 – Crisis and Conflict in the Middle East [an example of right wing materialist analysis]

Mauss 1950 – Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo [cited by Graeber & Wengrow]

Levi-Strauss 1944 – The Social and Psychological Aspect of Nambikwara Chieftainship, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol 7 No. 1, Series II (university paywalled) [cited by Graeber & Wengrow]

Script

Hello fellow kids,

And welcome back to What is Politics?

For the past few episodes we’ve been looking at the political left and right. Politics is about who gets to make decisions. And our society is made up of various hierarchies where some people have more decision making power than others, based on political institutions, and differences in economic wealth, and cultural status. On the right you have those people who want to give more power to the people at the top of these hierarchies, and on the left you have those who want to give more power to the people at the bottom of these hierarchies, or who want to get rid of those hierarchies entirely. In other words the right represents hierarchy and left represents equality.

And if you’re new to this podcast and you think that left and right mean anything other than hierarchy vs equality, go listen to episode five and then episode four and then come back.

Anyhow, last episode we started doing some political anthropology to understand some of the nuts and bolts of left and right and of human politics. And we saw that even though the terms left and right only pop into our political vocabulary with the french revolution in 1789, the tension between hierarchy and equality has been at the heart of human politics since before we were even anatomically modern human beings.

And we saw that until about 12,000 ago, it was usually equality that came out on top. Before that time, we have every reason to believe that most humans were organized into nomadic hunter gatherer bands with political, economic and gender equality. And then after 12,000 years ago hierarchical societies start appearing everywhere and spreading like wildfire all across the world, until we get to today where almost everyone is part of a hierarchical society, and there are only about 100-200k people still left as egalitarian foragers – foraging being another word for hunting and gathering.

And then we looked at two different types of hunter-gatherer societies. First we looked at various societies around the world who practice a nomadic form of hunting gathering called immediate return foraging. And we saw that every known culture who practices this type of foraging is always extremely egalitarian. And then, we looked at the Pacific Northwest Coast cultures, who practiced a very different type of sedentary hunting and gathering economy based on fixed salmon fishing territories. And we saw that these hunter gatherers had developed elaborate political, economic and spiritual hierarchies with chiefs, nobility and slaves.

And we saw that what makes immediate return hunter gatherers so egalitarian, and what made pacific northwest coast societies so hierarchical has everything to do with the relative bargaining power of the various actors in these societies. And we saw that bargaining power is itself a result of the practical realities created by the different types of economies that each type of society practices. The practical realities of nomadic immediate return foraging are such that there’s just no way for anyone to dominate anyone else or to accumulate more wealth than anyone else – which isn’t true of the sedentary economies of the traditional Pacific Northwest Coast.

Today

On today’s episode we’re going to apply what we learned about hierarchy, equality and bargaining power to understand why there are so few egalitarian societies left in the world today, and why male dominance and patriarchy are so prevalent around the world.

Graeber

Before I begin, a few people wrote to me after the last episode to tell me that that I’ve been giving you outdated information, and that anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow recently disproved the whole idea that most humans were egalitarian hunter gatherers until 12,000 ago. I’m actually well aware of Graeber’s and Wengrow’s articles on this subject, and while I’m a big admirer of David Graeber I can tell you that even though I find these articles to be very stimulating, they’re main claims are not only wrong, but they’re rotting our brains.

Graeber and Wengrow make two main claims in these articles. First that people were going back and forth between hierarchy and equality in the palaeolithic era and second that the reason they were going back and forth is because they were just like trying out new things and experimenting with new social possibilities like wheeeeee.

The first argument is a matter of interpreting the archaeological and geological record, and the details aren’t really relevant to this podcast. Even if Graeber’s claim was correct it wouldn’t change anything I’m saying about how hierarchy and equality work – so I’ll address them in a QnA bonus episode. Basically the climate was fluctuating too wildly during the palaeolithic for hierarchy to be possible or functional outside of exceptional microclimates, though this was likely happening more frequently towards the end of the palaeolithic. I’ll post an article by Doron Shulnitzer in the shownotes on this. There’s also a really interesting and growing body of evidence from human physiology that strongly suggests that humans evolved in an egalitarian context. I’ll save that for its own episode, but I’ll put an article by Camilla Power in the shownotes that summarizes some of these arguments.

Anyhow, the really awful part of Graeber and Wengrow’s articles is their second argument, where they claim that the reason that people move from hierarchy to equality is because they’re just “experimenting”. This is the heart of their thesis and their political project. And it’s making everyone who reads it stupid, and taking away our ability to understand human politics.

The whole reason I started doing these political anthropology episodes is to counter nonsense like this. It’s really disappointing that Graeber was using his great talent to propagate this stuff, and more importantly it’s a testament to how low academia has sunk that Graeber didn’t know any better than to come up with nonsense like this. I was actually writing Graeber a friendly email about these articles when he suddenly died, so I don’t know what his reaction would have been to my critiques which I’ll now be making a part of this episode.

Materialism

Unlike Graeber and so many anthropologists and historians and political theorists, what we’re doing in this series, is that we’re looking at hierarchy and equality and other questions about culture, history and politics, through a materialist lens. In other words, were working on the assumption that people don’t just organize into hunter gatherer bands, or kingdoms, or republics because they have particular values, or because some particularly clever person decided to become a king or to invent democracy or because people did a bunch of ayahuasca and thought it would be trippy to do social experiments.

We’re working on the assumption that people organize into these different configurations because there are material and practical conditions that push us into making certain choices and into accepting compromises. And we’re also assuming that the values that that people have – that we have – are shaped by the same material circumstances that shape our social structures and our political institutions.

And we’re not just making these assumptions based on some gut feeling or ideology, we’re making these assumptions because we see it play out over and over in the anthropological record in so many ways, as we’ll see as we go along.

And the reason I’m focusing on the anthropological record and small scale societies like hunter gatherer bands instead of the historical record and big civilizations, is because the political and material dynamics are just so much easier to make out in smaller groups with a limited range of economic activities, vs in huge societies with zillions of people doing zillions of different kinds of activities.

It’s like how you want to learn how atoms and molecules and basic compounds and basic chemistry works before you can figure out what’s going on in a radioactive toxic waste dump full of different chemicals reacting together in all sorts of ways at the same time.

In Graeber & Wengrow’s articles, they look at how some societies from recent times like the Inuit, or the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples or the Nambikwara, shift from more hierarchy to more equality seasonally. And they compare these cultures to some archaeological finds which suggest that there were some societies with social hierarchy in the palaeolithic era. And they conclude that ancient hunter gatherers, and recent hunter gatherers and other societies are shifting between hierarchy and equality because they’re “self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.”

No. People shift from more hierarchy to more equality seasonally, because people are shifting to different economic activities seasonally. And these different activities create certain practical realities which change the level of relative bargaining power between different people and groups from season to season.

Nambikwara chiefs can boss people around in the gardening season when everyone’s stuck in one place, but they lose the coercive aspect of their authority in the nomadic hunting season because at that time, people can just move to a different band to avoid an annoying chief.

And Inuit men can dominate Inuit women in the summer season because in the summer, because the arctic animals that they hunt, disperse in such a way that people live in very small groups of one or two nuclear families, where a man can just overpower a woman with no interference. But Inuit men lose much of their patriarchal authority in the winter, which is the time of a massive concentrated seal hunt, because at that time they’re living in large multifamily dwellings with where women can get away from their husbands, and where they have male relatives around who can keep their husbands in check.

Note that Im using the exact same examples that Graeber and Wengrow cite in their articles, but to make the exact opposite argument. And I got this stuff from the exact same sources that they put in the bibliography of their articles.

People don’t just do mad bong rips and then say “dude, I have a cool experiment – I’ll be the pharaoh, and I’ll have all the power and wealth, and you’ll be the slaves and you can spend your whole life getting whipped and working yourself to death building pyramids that glorify me for all eternity!” and then the other guys who get to be the slaves are like “duuudde, yess!!!”

And no one ever ate a bunch of magic mushrooms and said “whoah, I had a great idea – how about if all the dudes get all the authority and power, and then all the chicks have to stay home and make us steaks and clean our underwears! And if you don’t like it we get to smack you around cause you’re our property!” and all the women are like “Awesome!!!! Wooooo!!! Lets experiment with that and see how it goes!” And it went so well that they stuck with it for the last 12,000 years!

People aren’t self consciously experimenting with hierarchy and equality, they’re experimenting with which kinds of economic activities and defence strategies and residence patterns work best in different contexts and in different seasons. And those activities and strategies have consequences on bargaining power, which gives some people the ability to dominate others against their will, or not.

Everyone wants to have freedom and comfort. And there are often people trying to get freedom and comfort at the expense of other peoples’ freedom and comfort . But, there are practical conditions that enable some people to get their way and not others, and that lead to certain compromises being reached as opposed to other compromises.

There are times and places where those people who want to dominate win out, and times and places where they can’t. Experimentation does happen, but it’s about the details of those compromises. It happens when the balance of power starts to shift and there are periods of instability and opportunity for people to obtain a more favourable compromise – when people with power are experimenting with ways to hold on to that power, and people without power are experimenting with how to grab more power.

And when the balance of forces shifts, norms and values and culture shift as well in order for people to come to terms with the existing order and to smooth over the tensions inherent in both hierarchy or equality.

You don’t accept to be a slave because you’re experimenting, you accept it because someone with much more power than you, gives you the option to be a slave or to die. You accept male domination because you’re in a situation where you either submit to male authority or get beaten or killed. You accept to work at a crappy job with miserable conditions because your alternatives are to get evicted, or else to take a worse job with crappier conditions. And maybe your culture is feeding you justifications for why you deserve to be a slave, or a submissive woman or a poor employee, and maybe you’re inventing your own rationalizations for it so that you can stay sane, but those justifications and those rationalizations emerge as an adaptation to material reality more than they create that material reality.

As people who want to make changes to our current political order, what we want to look at are the conditions that give the pharaoh the power to dominate the slave, or that give men the power to dominate women, or that give the boss the power to dominate his workers. And we also want to look at the conditions that allow for change to happen. So that’s what what we’re doing here.

Materialism and Marx

Now the idea that material and practical realities shape culture, social structure and ideology might sound like some high falutin’ fancy school learnin’ but it’s very basic, and we all know this from personal experience – last time I gave the example of office workers vs. artists, where office jobs generate culture where people repress their feelings, while arts encourage people to express their feelings openly.

This approach to understanding social phenomena has different names – I just call it materialism, or in our case where we’re looking at politics, political materialism – but you’ll often see terms like Historical Materialism, Cultural Materialism, Cultural Ecology, Behavioural Ecology or Marxism – and not Marxism as in socialism or communism, but Marxism as as in Marx’ way of analyzing social phenomena through the lens of material conditions and the different material interests of different classes of people.

Marx didn’t invent the materialist approach, every four year old uses it, and you can see it employed in ancient texts from around the world, right through to some of Marx’ contemporaries – but Marx articulated it and applied it in a uniquely systematic and forceful fashion to politics and to history. And materialist analysis was extremely influential not only in socialist politics, but among anthropology and sociology until the post-modernist devolution (DEVO MUSIC) from the 80’s onward made people in the humanities afraid to ask why anything happens and turned academia into a cult of abuse and learned helplessness.

Now although materialism is associated with Karl Marx, and many materialist scholars were explicitly marxist socialists, it doesn’t mean that materialist analysis is inherently left wing or socialist.

You can use a materialist analysis for right wing purposes or you can use it for left wing purposes. For example you can read a book called Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, by anthropologist Carl Philip Salzman, who was my professor at McGill and who is a specialist on nomadic pastoralist societies, meaning societies that live principally from animal herding. His book uses classic materialist explanations for various common to nomadic pastoralist cultures, which Arab civilization was originally based on. From this he derives an argument about conflicts in the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. And while most left wing materialist scholars would agree with the materialist explanations about pastoralism, the thesis that he derives from that materialist analysis would make any left winger’s head explode. He basically blames the whole conflict on backwardness of Arab culture and it’s pastoralist influences.

Graber’s Project

Now where someone like Salzman uses materialism to advance right wing ideas, what David Graeber was trying to do with his recent work is that he’s trying to do away with materialism in a misguided attempt to advance a particular left wing political project – a project that I agree with, even though I think he was going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Many people argue that egalitarian societies are only possible in small groups like a hunter gatherer band where everyone can police everyone else, or where you can reach consensus without destroying efficiency. These are materialist arguments. And the same people who make these arguments will go on to insist that you can’t have equality in larger societies without having some kind of tyrannical political hierarchy to enforce it. And that in turn means that real equality is impossible, because if you have an authority imposing equality from above – that’s a political hierarchy. So according to these arguments, the french revolutionary slogan of equality. fraternity and liberty is an oxymoron. You can have equality, or liberty but not both, or you can have political equality or economic equality, but not both. These are inherently right wing arguments. The right is by definition always arguing that you can’t have more equality, and the left is always arguing that you can.

Now Graeber is an anarchist socialist who wanted a much more egalitarian world and who was active in trying to make that happen in various ways – like he was important in the Occupy movement and has been a lifelong activist for all sorts of causes.

So in order to argue against the idea that humans are forever doomed to live in hierarchy by the material realities of civilization, Graeber wants to throw away the whole idea that material realities shape our lives. Instead he wants to advance the idea that we can just “experiment” our way out of hierarchical society if we want to, the same way that we supposedly experimented into it. (bong rip sounds).

What I’ll be telling you today is that even though I agree with Graeber that we’re not necessarily stuck with the existing state of affairs, if we actually want to change anything, we can’t do it by just dropping a bunch of acid into the water supply and start “experimenting” with having desert before supper and having janitors become senators. If we want to change things, we need to understand the realities that we live in, in order figure out how we can work within existing constraints to alter the balance of power of the various actors and classes and interest groups in our society.

End of Egalitarianism

So, the first question I want to address is why is the world today almost entirely hierarchical? Whether you believe Graber’s theory about people going back and forth from hierarchy to equality in the palaeolithic, or whether you believe the standard theory that people were mostly egalitarian, everyone agrees that there was a massive shift to hierarchy starting 12,000 ago.

At the end of one of Graeber’s pieces he asks this same question “If there is a riddle here it is why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy” why is it that “Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allowed permanent and intractable systems of inequality to first take root?”

Well, newsflash – we have had the answer to this question since at least the 1960s, if not the 1760s, when various enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized that hierarchy began when people switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, though they didn’t really have the correct reasons why. And then again in the 19^th century Louis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also arrived at the same conclusion, but also for the wrong reasons, though they were at least looking at material conditions. Today, we have an enough anthropological and archaeological information, to know that hierarchy does indeed start spreading around the world after the rise of agriculture, which is first practiced on a continual basis about 12,000 years ago.

We also know that the reason why agriculture starts at this time is related to changes in the global climate which made continuous agriculture possible for the first time around 12,000 ago. 12,000 years ago marks the beginning of the holocene era, which is our current geological era. Before that time, in the Pleistocene geological era, which is also the palaeolithic technological era for humans – before that time, we now know that dependence on agriculture was not a viable economic strategy. The climate fluctuated too frequently, and there was not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or in the soil for dependable, productive agriculture possible.

The consequences of this geological change is that after 12,000 years ago, if a hunter gatherer population goes through a major crisis, whether it’s because of resource depletion, overpopulation, climate change, or competition from other groups – instead collapsing and dying from starvation like they might have in the Pleistocene era, they now they have the option of using agriculture to either supplement their diets, or else as a basis for their entire economy.

And so, over the next couple of thousand years, you have people in different in different areas around the world being forced by their circumstances into agriculture for the first time.

Note that I say forced into agriculture. Most people who aren’t familiar with the relevant anthropology think that some genius invented agriculture because hunting and gathering was so precarious and unreliable, and that agriculture was a giant leap forward that everyone adopted as soon as they found out about it.

But in reality, it turns out that agricultural life is usually a big step downwards from hunting and gathering life in terms of standard of living. And we’ve known this since the mid 1960s. Most recent hunter gatherers, are familiar with agricultural techniques but choose not to engage in them unless they have to, because it’s wack.

While hunter-gatherers are eating a wide variety of meat, honey, fruits, nuts, & mushrooms, and enjoying lots of leisure time and travelling with their families and friends thanks to their 15–40 hour workweeks which includes fun hunting trips with their pals, agriculturalists are working from dawn til dusk stuck on a small plot of land, pounding grain into meal over and over for hours and hours, all so they can eat a diet consisting largely of tasteless glorp like miehlie meal, or else bread or jungle potatoes.

In terms of stability, food security and risk avoidance, agriculture and food storage are a magnet for vermin, raiders and conquerers, and farmers are subject to frequent droughts and famines. Meanwhile nomadic foragers usually have a lot of alternatives and options when their whether conditions mean that their preferred foods are not available. And in times of famine it’s usually the agricultural people who go to live with hunter gatherer neighbours and not the other way around.

And all of this is even more true of early agriculture where people hadn’t yet figured out how to get a balanced diet out of agricultural foods.

So when we look at the archaeological record we see that the people who switched from foraging to agriculture for the first time after the holocene starts, had clear signs of malnutrition and worse health than their foraging ancestors had.

In areas where there was land perfect for agriculture like in western north america, people continued to hunt and gather for 10,000 years before finally being pushed into farming.

And when polynesian sailors, who had been agriculturalists for thousands of years, discovered and settled in empty Hawai’i and New Zealand, both times they switched from their traditional horticulture, meaning garden agriculture, back to hunting and gathering. And they remained foragers for hundreds of years until the populations on those new islands got too high and they had to revert back to horticulture.

The biblical fall from the garden of eden story is thought to be a metaphor for how the ancestors of the ancient Israelites were forced out of their hunter gatherer life of relative ease and plenty and into a hard life of agricultural labour.

Even the way that adam and eve became ashamed of their bodies once they left the garden of Eden, reflects how immediate return forager cultures have a lot sexual freedom while sexual shame and repression is a regular feature of many agricultural and pastoral neighbours, for reasons that we’ll look at another time, relating to patriarchy and property.

If you know your old testament it’s great to re read it with anthropological and historical knowledge in mind – like if you track what type of economy the hebrews and israelites practiced in different biblical periods, going from foragers to pastoralists and agro-pastoralists to state societies, you can see how their values and practices resemble recent people from different parts of the world who practice those same types of economies today or in recent times.

Off to the Races

So anyhow, people are only switching from hunting and gathering to agriculture because they have to. And once you have a few cultures living primarily by intensive forms of agriculture like rice and grain cultivation, it’s off to the races.

Nomadic immediate return hunting and gathering supports a population of about 0.1 people per square kilometer. And so they reproduce slowly to stay in that range. They tend to breastfeed their kids to some extent until they’re 3.5 or 4, and the hormones produced by breastfeeding are a natural form of contraception on top of whatever other methods that they might use so they usually only one kid every 4 years or so, or more.

More intensive sedentary foraging economies like the Pacific Northwest Coast Indians, can support populations of about 1 person per square kilometer. But rice agriculture can support as many 1000 people per square kilometer. And rice farmers reproduce accordingly. it’s no coincidence that the two most populated civilizations in the world, India and China, have their roots in rice farming.

Individual farmers are more productive and successful if they have more kids to do more farm labour for them. And farmer women stop breastfeeding by 1 year old because of the availability of milk from domesticated herd animals, so they crank out babies sometimes almost every year. And this makes them more land hungry, and more powerful. So they easily take over hunter gatherer land.

And the more land they take over, the more existing hunter gatherers get squeezed into smaller territories and then they eventually get forced to do agriculture as there isn’t enough land to support foraging anymore.

So by about 5000 years ago, heading into biblical times, agriculturalists are the majority of the world.

Before the 19^th century European expansion, you still had 20% of the world left foraging, but by the middle of the 20^th century, agriculture and industrial civilization supported by agriculture is everywhere, except in the most marginal areas of the world where foragers sometimes still remain.

Agri Hierarchy

This explains why agriculture spread everywhere, but why does the spread of agriculture coincide with the spread of hierarchical society? The answer to that is because agriculture presents a lot of the same logistical realities that lead to hierarchy in the Pacific Northwest Coast hunting and gathering societies that we looked at last episode, except on steroids.

A sedentary economy based on agriculture means that you can store wealth in the form of preserved foods, tools and other items. And the land itself is also a form of stored wealth. The caprices of weather and geography mean that some people are more affected by droughts than others, some lands are more fertile than others, some farms get attacked by pests more than others, and some people have more children than others. And all this means that unless you have an enforceable redistribution system, which is logistically more difficult in a farming context, you will have wealth inequality.

And when the resources that you depend on to live come from fixed territories, that makes it difficult for people to just leave and go off and live somewhere else when someone is trying to dominate you like people in immediate return societies can, because it means abandoning your wealth and your livelihood.

All of this means that people with more wealth and power can leverage that power against people with less, and those with less can be dominated into generating more wealth and power for those who already have it.

But just because hierarchy becomes possible with agriculture or with certain types of hunting and gathering, it does’t mean that hierarchy will automatically just happen. At least not right away. As Graeber likes to point out, early agricultural settlements at the beginning of the holocene seem to have been egalitarian.

We see that the houses are all the same size in these settlements, and we see that the evidence for wealth inequality sometimes only shows up centuries later. This makes sense, because egalitarianism is a core value of immediate return forager cultures, and we see today, that when people are pushed out of hunting and gathering and into agriculture or wage labour that they hold on to those values as much as they can.

But we also see that those values and practices clash with the realities and incentives of the new economic activities and living arrangements that they have shifted to. And values shift along with reality over time as the balance of power changes and egalitarianism isn’t so easy to enforce anymore, or so easy to adhere to,

Equality, like hierarchy needs to be enforced in order to hold together, whether it’s by deliberate policy or by natural conditions. There are natural innate forces within all of us pulling towards hierarchy AND towards equality depending on our interests and needs and circumstances and our learned and innate proclivities. When equality isn’t working for you, you’ll tend to want more inequality in your favour. And when you’re at the short end of hierarchy, you’ll tend to want more equality.

When work is hard and stressful, and there aren’t enough resources to go around to make everyone happy, the social mechanisms that enforce egalitarianism start breaking down. Sharing is a lot less attractive when it means that everyone gets an equal, insufficient share, even to people who are brought up with a deep egalitarian ethic. We saw for example last episode that fiercely egalitarian Kalahari hunter gatherers sometimes break out into fights over the division of meat when there isn’t enough to go around. Or Colin Turnbull talks about how Mbuti will sometimes hide some of the food they’ve been gathering so that they don’t have to share it.

When times are harder it becomes much more interesting to make up a bunch of excuses for why you deserve more and someone else deserves less: you’re so awesome, you work so hard, God loves you, the other person is a poo poo face, they suck, they’re ugly, and God hates them, and God wants you to keep his share. Look at the biblical story of Jacob tricking Isaac into giving him Esav’s inheritence for example. In this way, egalitarian redistributive practices and ideology start to strain and eventually break down if a crisis lasts for a sustained period of time.

If you’re living in an immediate return hunter gatherer band, the result of this will be societal collapse because there are no practical means to enforce any any kind economic or political hierarchy. This is what happened to the Ik people in Uganda who were pushed off of their lands in the 1960s right after having survived a drought. Their egalitarian ethos turned into an every man and woman for themselves free for all, and their society under went a horrible collapse until they were able to recuperate and reconstitute as horticulturalists, where they revived some, but not all of their egalitarian practices and values.

But if you’re already living in an agricultural settlement, the result of a breakdown in egalitarian practices will be inequality and hierarchy, because in that context, the material reality allows for some people to have more than others without society collapsing. And as people refuse to comply with egalitarian sharing norms and they get away with it, new norms and practices start to emerge that will reflect this new balance of powers.

This is the mechanism for the experimentation that David Graeber is talking about.

And in a sedentary context, once you allow some inequality to exist for too long without reeling it in, it will tend to snowball and eventually it will be impossible to reverse without violence. Because in a sedentary economy, unequal wealth and power give you the power to gain more wealth and more power. If we’re not sharing anymore, and your farm has a bad harvest but mine does better, I’ll lend you money or food to survive. If you can’t pay back your debts, I’ll take your farm and you’ll become my labourer and you’ll give all of your surplus to me. Now I’m the wealthiest person in the formerly equal village. And since I have so much surplus, people come to me whenever they need to borrow, and over time I end up with more and more land and labourers and wealth this way until I’m a king and you’re all my slaves or until you all revolt and kill me. This is a story that’s almost as old as agriculture. It’s why you had regular debt jubilees in biblical times. David Graeber wrote a whole book about it! And it’s also why so-called libertarian capitalism is a recipe for feudalism as we’ll see in a future episode.

There’s a scary book from 2018 called The Great Leveller by Walter Scheidel where he compiles all the data available about inequality throughout human history and prehistory. And he realizes that since the advent of agriculture, inequality almost always balloons up to the point where you have a small elite living from a maximally exploited population who are living at bare subsistence. And the only way to get rid of that massive inequality is via a giant catastrophe like a great war, or disease, or famine, which causes a societal collapse which reduces everyone to the same level of poverty. Or else more recently, you’ve reduced inequality via big revolutions which often don’t end up with the intended results for various reasons that we’ll look at another time.

Anyhow, this is how equality becomes hierarchy. And it can happen quickly or in can take centuries. We saw last time, the PNWC people took 800 years to develop signs of economic hierarchy from when they began their sedentary salmon based economy. And we see similar periods for the transition to hierarchy in many early agricultural societies that settled down near the beginning of the holocene.

Male Domination

But even before the advent of economic inequality, you likely had another type of political hierarchy emerging in those early agricultural settlements, and that is gender hierarchy, i.e. patriarchy a.k.a. male domination, dudes rock. i.e. bros before hoes ideology and practise, where men have more decision-making power than women.

There are many agricultural, pastoral and some delayed return hunter gatherer societies where there are mechanisms for sharing and redistributing wealth and power between households, but where men dominate women and children within households. And this is called male egalitarianism.

There are different circumstances that can lead to gender hierarchy, but one of the main sources of gender hierarchy has been patrilocality: when women move to where the husband and his family live when they get married.

So lets look at how patrilocality plays out on gender relations and why people choose to adopt it in the first place.

Horticulture

In the last episode I talked a little about the Mbuti hunter gatherers who live in the Ituri rainforest in the Congo. The Mbuti have a close relationship with their Bantu speaking horticulturalist neighbours, the Lese.

The Lese practise slash and burn horticulture, which is still widely practiced around the world today. A horticultural society is one that is organized around cultivating domesticated plants, usually starchy roots like yams, manioc and taro – jungle potatoes. People in horticultural societies usually do some hunting and gathering as well, and they often keep some domesticated animals.

Now the Lese have a very different relationship to the rainforest than the Mbuti have. Where the Mbuti live in the rainforest, the Lese create villages by cutting down the rainforest in order plant their crops and to make their villages.

The different subsistence practices of the Mbuti and Lese result in extremely different social structures and worldviews. The Mbuti see themselves as part of nature, and see themselves as one of the many creatures of the forest. And they see the forest itself as their all providing mother and father, which is a common metaphor among foragers who live in forest environments around the world. In contrast, the Lese see the forest, and nature in general, as their enemy, a frightening wild beast full of evil magic that’s always threatening their gardens as well as their lives, and which must constantly be tamed by human civilization which is hierarchically ordered above nature and above lowly animals including the wild Mbuti.

And where the Mbuti are are one of the most gender egalitarian societies in the world, their Lese neighbours are one of the most patriarchal. Among central african foragers like the Mbuti, it’s not uncommon for a woman to go off and lead a net hunting expedition, while her husband stays home with the kids. Among the Lese, while the men hang out most of the day with their buddies in the village square, shooting the shit and drinking beer talking about dudes rock, the women are all at home doing most of the farming, raising the kids and cooking the food which they normally eat the leftovers of after the men have had their fill.

Lese men do some work – like hunting and slashing out rainforest in order to plant new gardens – basically they do any kind of work that’s fun, or that involves knives and weapons, which women are ritually forbidden from even touching – and which not coincidentally makes them less likely to murder their husbands or to overthrow the patriarchy.

Now the difference in worldviews between these two cultures is easy to understand in terms of their relationship to their environments. The Mbuti economy is based on getting whatever they need from nature, while Lese horticulture is a never-ending battle against nature.

But their different views on gender are based on something else. In terms of gender ideology, Mbuti men and women complain about eachother but also consider eachother to be equals if sometimes competing equals. Meanwhile in Lese culture, men are associated with civilization, and order and agriculture, and women are associated with nature and dark forces and chaos – kind of like a Jordan Peterson lecture.

And the Lese’s Jordan Peterson view of gender relations is typical of many agricultural peoples, like the ancient Israelites who were agro-pastoralists. Those “archetypes” of man = order & civilization vs woman = chaos & nature aren’t universal the way Peterson makes them out to be, but they are typical of cultures with an agricultural and patriarchal background, which is most industrialized societies, which makes them seem universal if you don’t know your anthropology.

Now you don’t have gender hierarchy doesn’t come into existence because people believe in Jordan Peterson archtypes – people believe in those archtypes because gender hierarchy exists. And gender hierarchy exists because the material conditions that people live in give men more power than women.

How so? Let’s check it out (CHECK IT OUT steve brule music)

Patrilocal Marriage

In any society, we usually want to avoid inbreeding. I say usually because there are exceptions, which of course have material origins, based on the need to hold on to property and power – but that’s for another episode. So to avoid inbreeding, someone usually needs to move away from their family to get married.

The new couple will have some options: they can move to the wife’s area which we call matrilocality, or to the husband’s area, which you call patrilocality, or to a new place altogether which you call neolocality, or they’ll stay with their respective families and only hook up for some sex and gifts which is called duolocality, or there’s avunculocality where they go live with the mother’s brother. And when there’s no rule, when couples can just go wherever they feel like you call that ambilocality.

And there are no other rules for post-marital residence practiced by any human society. Just these 6 options. Even though you can imagine a rule where people go live with mother’s sister or father’s brother or father’s sister, etc, no society has any such rule.

And different societies choose one or another of these 6 patterns and no others, for specific practical reasons. And then the choice that they make has huge unintended consequences for gender relations.

Patrilocality, where men stay with their birth families, and women leave theirs to go live with their husband’s family, is one solution which almost always results in male domination and patriarchy. Why? And why do most cultures choose patrilocality instead of one of the other options?

Strict patrilocality is generally favoured when your village or your herd or territory is likely to be raided or attacked on short notice, particularly by neighbouring communities. Women can be effective fighters and hunters in some societies, but in general Men are on average better or more reliable fighters, given that they’re 15% bigger than women, and they’re not likely to be out of fighting form for long periods due to being pregnant or having given birth recently. And if you have to fend off a lot of attacks, it makes sense to have many related males who grew up together and who know each-other well in your area, as they will tend to make a better snap fighting force than unrelated men who don’t know each-other well.

Bantu horticulturalists like the Lese, engaged in a lot of warfare over their their land and crops as well as in a lot of feuding before the 1940’s when the colonial Belgian government and later the Zairean and Congolese governments clamped down on non-state violence. So most likely, patrilocality was originally adopted by the Lese as a practical choice to deal with feuding and warfare.

The positive consequence of patrilocality is better defence which benefits everyone. But it also comes with an big unintended negative consequence for women: male domination.

Why? Well, you have these villages of about 100–250 people, and almost all of the men are related to each-other and grew up together and they know each-other. Meanwhile all the adult women in the village come from a bunch of other villages, and they usually don’t know each-other very well. If there is a conflict between a man and his wife, the man is likely to get support from his relatives and friends, while the woman won’t. Her friends and family live far away and even her fellow village women don’t really know her that well. And since they’re also isolated they don’t want to rock the boat and piss off the majority of the village by defending the other outsider. This creates a situation where in any conflict between a man and a woman, the man normally has the advantage. In other words, patrilocality generates a situation where men have much more bargaining power than women do.

Transition to Patriarchy

But why would an initially egalitarian community switch to patriarchy when they switch to patrilocal residence? Why don’t their egalitarian feminist values prevent patriarchy from arising?

Egalitarian societies actively value and assert their egalitarianism and their autonomy. Children learn at a very young age, that anything must be shared with people who want it or need it. When musicologist Michelle Kisliuk gave someone sitting next to her a slice of a tomato he immediately cut it into 16 tiny pieces and gave one to everyone around them, and left her feeling like a hog with the rest of the tomato.

And men and women actively value and assert their gender equality as well, making sure that no individual or no gender ever gets too big for their britches.

But gender tensions still exist in these societies just like in any society. And egalitarianism isn’t just a preference, it’s also necessary to survival. There is no alternative besides band collapse or switching to sedentary agricultural life. This is why egalitarianism is such an important value in the first place. So there are cultural institutions to smooth gender and other tensions inherent in egalitarian societies.

Among the Mbuti, there’s a tug of war of the sexes ritual that you can read about in Colin Turnbull’s books, which is a literal tug of war game, where all the men are on one side and all the women are on the other.

If the men’s side starts winning, a man will run off to the women’s side where he will then imitate women in a mocking way, raising the pitch of his voice and saying satirically female things. And then when the women start winning, a woman will run off the to men’s side and start mocking masculine speech and ideas. This continues until everyone has switched sides and the women are all acting like caricatures of men and the men are all acting like caricatures of women, and then they eventually all collapse into laughter and nobody wins.

And then there are men’s myths and women’s myths which are exclusive to each gender, where they make fun of the other gender and assert their own importance.

For example Mbuti women have a story which they share at exclusive female gatherings and events, and which was told to anthropologist Cathryn Townshend. In this story, chimpanzee, who’s a male, wants to marry tortoise who’s a female, but tortoise is not interested. Chimpanzee manages to convince tortoise to cuddle up and sleep next to him at night platonically to keep warm. But then in the middle of the night he whips out his Johnson to try have sex with her. Tortoise is prepared for this, and she has a sharp rock ready and she use it to slice his weiner right off and then he bleeds out until he dies.

Then, the next day, tortoise goes up to big strong male elephant and she tells him that she’s stronger than he is. Elephant laughs and then tortoise tells him that she can prove it – she’ll tie his leg to her leg with a rope, and who ever can pull the other one down wins. So elephant is like pff, dudes rock, and he ties his end of the rope around his leg and then tortoise who is standing on top of a giant rock in the water with her legs hidden beneath the water, ties her end to the big rock.

So elephant pulls and pulls but can’t get tortoise to budge until he eventually tries so hard that trips on himself and falls over and breaks his tusks. And then tortoise calls him a stupid moron and beats him up and stabs him to death.

So the point of that story is that while men might be physically stronger, their arrogance and their stupid libidos are their big weaknesses, and women are smarter and they can beat any man with their wits and with caution, and with a sharp rock.

And men have their own stories which they tell each-other, which denigrate women and flaunt male attributes. And men and women keep the gender balance via male and female organizations and secret societies which establish the coalitions that they need to assert their power and keep eachother in check. Jerome Lewis talks about how among the Mbendjele the women’s organization exiled an excellent hunter because he was too boastful which is considered a big nono as well as a dangerous threat in egalitarian societies.

Among the Aka foragers, who are closely related to the Mbuti, women sing songs that make fun of men in public in front of mixed audeince, with lyrics like:

The penis gives birth to nothing, only urine!

The penis can’t compete / vagina always wins!

And sometimes men have a sense of humour about this stuff, but other times they don’t. These performances are often a barometer of gender relations at any given time, depending on what’s going on. So for example when the Aka live deep in the forest, where they do their traditional nomadic hunting and gathering, gender tensions are usually lower. But when they spend time in the villages of their farmer neighbours gender tensions tend to be higher. Aka men do servile wage labour for the villagers, and sometimes they become resentful of women’s autonomy. So sometimes when women to their male-insulting dances and songs, men will try to interfere by kicking up dust at the performers or by mooning the audience. And you can read all about men and women using song and dance to negotiate and assert their egalitarianism in an article called The Politics of Eros by Morna Finnegan, or Michelle Kisliuk’s book Seize the Dance.

So you have gender equality and gender cooperation but you also have tension and competition. And where material conditions don’t provide any means for anyone to get a material advantage over anyone else, this competition is effective at keeping everyone in check and maintaining the balance.

Just like in the tug of war game where no one side can ever win, no one side can ever win the real life tug of war. It’s always a tie. And you have rituals and stories to help alleviate tensions, and to ensure stable, harmonious egalitarian relations instead of tense chaotic egalitarian relations that might lead to collapse.

But, once you’re in a situation where you have patrilocal residence, the material conditions are now such that men will almost always win the real life tug of war. And as people eventually become aware of this, it also informs their behaviour, Men won’t be so stoic about controlling themselves anymore and women will be afraid to fight back so boldly as before. And thus egalitarian norms break down, particularly in times of hardship and crisis.

Think about our own society – we know that when people go through periods of unemployment and other hard times, marriages breakdown, divorce rates skyrocket as do incidents of domestic abuse. In an agricultural setting, where divorce is difficult or impossible for various practical reasons, people are often stuck in these marriages, and resentments are seething and boiling beneath the surface for years.

And even in good times, a lot of agriculture is in and of itself a difficult and stressful condition. In immediate return foraging most of the work is somewhat enjoyable. But in agriculture, much of the work that needs to be done is boring and strenuous, and their diet often isn’t very rewarding, which was especially the case in early agriculture.

So people are not well nourished and they’re working hard and they’re stuck in the same place all the time. If you’ve ever had a shitty low wage job where you’re working 60 hours a week and barely able to pay for your dried ramen noodles or for your rent in a crappy run down rat trap apartment in the middle of nowhere, you have an idea of what this feels like.

So imagine that you have a gender egalitarian early agricultural society that has adopted a patrilocal residence pattern because they get keep getting raided by their neighbours.

At first, the men and women are sharing their work and other burdens equally. Or maybe the men are doing the harder work since they’re stronger. Men are pounding cassava leaves all day, and digging in gardens and some hunting, and women are doing the domestic work and childcare and a lot of the gathering as well as some hunting, and everyone is kind of stressed out and not super well nourished, and theyre frustrated.

And one day, during a particularly bad year where everyone is hungry, a husband and wife are bickering about something, and tensions that have been bubbling under the surface for months explode and the husband does something that would have been unthinkable before. He smacks his wife.

Now physical altercations between men and women are known to happen in egalitarian forager societies. Among the Aka, it’s almost always women who physically attack men and never the other way around. And in most egalitarian societies, if a man loses control and hits a woman, the woman will just hit back and then some, and the man will restrain his response, because if he doesn’t, his wife’s friends and relatives female and male, will run in to back her up and he will face other social consequences.

But in this case, nothing happens.

All of his childhood friends and relatives are around, but none of hers are. Plus all these men are having the same frustrations with their wives and the same arguments and disputes as he is. Aren’t women so annoying with their nagging and demands and needs when we men are working so hard and we’re not even getting enough to eat and not getting any credit or respect. As for support from other women, in egalitarian forager societies, women spend a lot of time together while gathering and they build solidarity this way, whether they’re related or not. But women in horticulture spend most of the day working alone. And all the isolated women from other villages don’t want to set off their husbands. The social networks that would spring into action to defend women’s interest don’t exist here.

The tug of war is in full force – men are more antagonistic to women than ever, and women are more antagonistic to men than ever – but because of the new residence situation, men now have all the power.

And over time, once the men start to realize that there’s no real consequence for hitting their wives, they don’t restrain themselves when their wives hit back. They do it again, and more often. And they realize that in any conflict with their wives they’re very likely to be the winner. And the wives realize this as well. And the men leverage this as a threat to win more concessions and more compromises from the women. You know what, I’m going to do all the fun work, like the hunting and I’m going to hang out with my buddies and you can pound cassava all day and dig in the garden. And don’t you dare talk back to me. And if a woman fights back with weapons or poison – all his brothers and childhood bros rush in to stop her and attack her or kill her.

And when there’s no one to keep you in check by singing insulting songs making fun of you, your worldview and the worldview of people in the same situation as you goes unchallenged and goes off the rails, and soon myths and ideology and ritual start to reflect this. THe male point of view dominates with no response from the women who just seethe in silence and fear.

Women’s outbursts are irrational. Men’s outbursts are justified. Women are chaotic and emotional and unreasonable, and they need to be tamed and controlled by men, just like man needs to control nature. And women are witches who want to poison us men and cast dark magic on us and must be banned from touching weapons or collecting potentially poisonous berries or mushrooms. And women who are isolated and oppressed with no effective means of asserting themselves often are interested in poisoning the men that rule them, and in casting dark magic on them, as it’s only way of escaping them or of retaliating.

And thus gender egalitarianism falls away and patriarchy becomes institutionalized. And men teach their daughters that they’re polluted and chaotic and that deserve to work in the gardens all day to make up for the sins of eve. And women come to believe it as well to some extent. And they lose the sense of entitlement to equality that you need to keep fighting for your rights, and they also get rewarded if they comply, which makes them invested in their own oppression.

Boom. Patriarchy.

David Graeber was right to say that people experiment with social forms and that they make conscious choices. But the choices and the experiments we make are severely constrained and informed by bargaining power, which is determined by the practical realities of our environment, our economy, as well as our history and our culture. People are constantly pulling and pushing in one direction or another – but bargaining power determines whose vision will win, whose experiments will yield results and who the inevitable compromise will favour.

And you can see this if you look around the world where you’ll see that people in very similar situations end up with very similar cultural institutions. We saw last time that immediate return hunter gatherers all over the word share many key cultural traits, and you can also see the same thing with other types of societies that live in very similar situations. For example nomadic pastoralists are always patrilocal and patriarchal because animal herds are always a prime target for raiding. So you’ll see all sorts of similarities between different nomadic pastoralist societies whether they’re African Maasai, Scandinavian Saami, Mongolians, Beduin or Ancient Israelites.

Conclusion

Some people, like David Graeber, seem see this whole line of materialist of thinking as extremely disempowering and deterministic, to the point where it’s practically become a taboo in cultural anthropology departments. Doesn’t it suggest that there’s nothing we can to do change our political situation? Doesn’t it take away our agency? If material conditions determine our social structures and political hierarchies, how can we ever improve our lives besides waiting for material realities to change?

The answer is that if we understand our material conditions, we can engage in informed, organized, concerted action to change those conditions, and to change the balance of power. This is why I started this podcast. Materialist analysis helps us figure out why things are the way they are, and it helps us identify what the obstacles are to the goals that we want to achieve, and what constraints there are on our capacity to change things. But it also helps us identify latent bargaining power and how to tap into it, in order to get rid of those obstacles, and to make political change happen.

And this is what we’ll be looking at next time when we look at matrilocal residence, at the english peasants revolt of 1381, at why women got the right to vote in europe in the 20^th century, at why the black civil rights movement emerged in the United States after WWII. And we’ll look at two situations where huge social changes happened over night – one by accident, and one by decades of deliberate organizing and taking advantage of the right conditions. So we’ll be looking at the anarchist revolution of spain in the 1930s where you had democratic hierarchy, and worker run socialism without a state, and of course the great baboon revolution of 1986 which is still going strong today.

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Make sure to check the shownotes for a bibliography of everything I talked about in this episode,

And until next time, seeya!

7.1. Material Conditions: Why You Can’t Eliminate Sexism Just by Eliminating Sexism

What would happen if you could end sexism overnight by giving everyone a magic pink pill?

Why we need to target material and practical conditions if we want to eliminate cultural hierarchies.

A thought experiment about political strategy which lays bare the whole class reductionism vs. race reductionism debate, and which is crucial for any kind of effective political strategy on any issue.

Backed up by a real “pink pill” example of how post-revolutionary rural China totally failed at fighting patriarchy and male baby preference via education and propaganda campaigns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7PU8XW7p0Y

Bibliography

Ember & Ember 1971 – The Conditions Favoring Matrilocal Versus Patrilocal Residence, American Anthropologist, Vol. 73, N° 3

Pasternak 1997 – Family and Household: Who Lives Where, Why Does It Vary, and Why Is It Important? in Ember & Ember (eds.) 1995 – Cross-Cultural Research for Social Science

Mace & Holden 2003 – Spread of cattle led to the loss of matrilineal descent in Africa, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Vol. 270, N° 1532

Norma Diamond 1975 – Collectivization, kinship, and the status of women in Rural China, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 7:1, 25–32

Rubie S. Watson 1991 – Afterword: Marriage and Gender Inequality in Marriage, Gender Inequality, and Patrilocal Residence

Debarun Bhattacharjya et al 2008 – How can economic schemes curtail the increasing sex ratio at birth in China?, Demographic Research 2008 Oct 14; 19(54): 1831–1850

Tania Branigan 2011 – China’s great gender crisis,The Guardian, 2011-11-02

The Economist 2017 – A distorted sex ratio is playing havoc with marriage in China, The Economist, 2017-11-23

Script

Hello fellow kids,

There’s a lot of debate today in leftist and left liberal echochamber nursery school spaces about class-reductionism vs race-reductionism, and whether it’s more important to focus on economic inequality vs identity politics struggles.

Over the next couple of episodes in this series, I’ll be arguing a few points – first that the whole reason that discriminatory cultural hierarchies like racism and patriarchy exist in human beings in the first place is specifically for the purposes of economic exploitation and resource competition – that’s what systems of discrimination and racism and patriarchy and xenophobia are always connected to – so talking about addressing cultural inequalities without addressing economic inequality barely even makes any sense.

But then, at the same time, I’ll also be arguing, that one of the biggest obstacles to addressing economic inequalities is the existence of those cultural hierarchies and the attitudes relating to them which divide us and prevent us from forming the coalitions we need to equalize either form of hierarchy.

So, at the end of the day you really have to tackle economic hierarchies and cultural hierarchies at the same time if you want to achieve lasting progress on either front because they are both part of one system of economic exploitation via cultural discrimination – even though that’s not always immediately obvious – and as usual we’ll be looking at contemporary, and historical and anthropological examples of this.

In a more broad sense, environment and material practical conditions determine culture, but culture ends up becoming part of the practical conditions in a sort of feedback loop. And keep in mind that the whole reason that human beings have culture in the first place is to help us adapt to different environments. It’s amazing to me how people have lost sight of this.

Also, in case the word hierarchy is too abstract for some people, it means that some people get to dominate others. And because this is a show about politics, and the word politics means decision-making in groups, we’re specifically interested in decision-making hierarchy, where one person gets to boss around another person, whether it’s a patriarch, a capitalist boss, a lord, or a slave owner.

Thort Experimunt

But first, what I want to do in this episode, is a little thought experiment to illustrate what I mean when I say that culture comes from material conditions, and cultural hierarchies exist for economic exploitation – and I thought I had just invented this thought experiment, but it turns out to have a real well known historical analogy that I’ll talk about at the end.

And this thought experiment is about what happens if you try to address a cultural hierarchy, like patriarchy or racism, without changing the practical conditions that generated that cultural hierarchy in the first place. And spoiler alert – what happens is that even if you manage to make enormous progress in eliminating the cultural hierarchy, that progress won’t last very long unless you address those material and practical conditions.

Patriarchy Recap

So, in episode 7, I talked about immediate return hunter gatherer societies which is a specific category of hunter gatherers, who are extremely egalitarian, including having gender egalitarianism – meaning men and women have relatively equal political power, meaning decision making power – and this translated into equal status, power, freedom and wealth.

And we saw that most of these societies have agriculturalist and pastoralist neighbours who have a strong degree of male domination and patriarchy, where men have more political authority prestige and economic power than women do.

And we saw the reason for this big difference in the power of women was the practical conditions that those particular hunter gatherers and farmers and pastoralist find themselves in.

Men who want to dominate women in an immediate return hunter gatherer society just don’t have any practical means to do so. Any woman being bullied can just pick up and go live somewhere else. And it’s easy for women to form large coalitions of all the women in a camp, which they can call on to defend their rights and ostracize any bully. And women can also rely on their male relatives to physically defend them if need be.

And all that freedom on power is the result of the immediate return hunting economy, where no one is tied to any particular property or piece of land.

Meanwhile in those patriarchal pastoralist and farming communities, women are much more restricted in how they can respond to bullying. Women don’t have any male relatives to defend them. And they are much more socially isolated and have a much harder time forming coalitions of women to defend and promote their interests.

And the reason for this is a combination of people being tied to a plot of land, or else a particular herd of animals for their survival, plus something called patrilocal post marital residence, where women go live with the husband’s family at marriage, which means that all the men in a village grew up together since birth, and all the adult women are strangers and outsiders from other villages.

And the reason those societies choose patrilocal post marital residence is because it’s a good way to organize your society for effective self defence if you are subject to frequent attacks or raids from neighbouring villages or pastoral bands. And we can see that in societies that live primarily from animal herding aka pastoralism as their main economy, they will almost always practice to patrilocal residence because animal herds are always subject to raids from other herders. And when you have matrilocal societies who switch to pastoralism, they also end up switching to patrilocal residence.

And as a result of this practical situation, being tied to specific property for subsistence, plus social isolation from patrilocal post marital residence where all the women come from outside villages and all the men grew up together, women have very low bargaining power relative to men. And the result of that is that in the more extreme versions, women do all of the hardest work, while the men hang out with their buddies all day, and only do the fun work, or the work that involves dangerous tools or weapons. And the women only eat the leftovers after the men and children have eaten, and they are forbidden to touch any weapons or sharp objects, and they are generally oppressed and economically exploited for the benefit of men, like household slaves. I.e. extreme patriarchy.

And in that episode, we also saw how those conditions don’t just shape power relations between men and women, but also the ideology of gender in those culture. Without coalitions of women to advance their point of view, men’s point of view goes unchallenged and that point of view becomes the dominant one for men and women alike. So ideas that men are rational and orderly, and women are chaotic and irrational – like straight out of a jordan peterson lecture – become the norm. And Peterson didn’t make this stuff up, these archetypes go back thousands of years to the first patriarchal societies, which is why you see them recurring so often in the myths and legends Peterson draws from.

Thought Experimunt

OK so now let’s get this thought experiment on the road.

Imagine you’re a woman in one of these patriarchal societies that does patrilocal residence. And you want to end this miserable patriarchy and you desperately and passionately want to enjoy equality with men. Imagine that you figure out a formula to make a magic potion make out of a special pink berry that will erase patriarchy from everyone’s hearts and minds. Men who take it suddenly realize that women are their equals, and are just as capable and rational as they are, and deserve all the same things they deserve. And women who take it realize that they’re being treated unfairly and they deserve everything that men deserve.

So you go make a bunch of this potion in secret and slip it into the water supply overnight when everyone is sleeping, and then the next day, after everyone’s had breakfast, the whole village is suddenly pink pilled.

All the men feel ashamed and embarassed that they’ve been treating their wives and sisters and mothers like garbage and they apologize and pledge to now and forever live as equals. And women lose their internal sexism that tells them that they deserve to be subservient. All the Jordan Peterson archetypes about men being rational and women being chaotic vanish from everyone’s minds. And from that day on men and women no share the burdens of labour equally, women can touch weapons, women eat at the same time as men and children. Patriarchy over!

Yaay!

And just to be clear – what I’m doing here is making an analogy to what happens in our society, or any society when you make a political movement that just focuses on changing ideas and that doesn’t think about changing the conditions that lead to those ideas – consciousness raising campaigns, white fragility trainings and anti racism ideology. So if this story was real it would involve awareness campaigns, protests, PR, education etc. But those campaigns are long slow processes, and not as effective as magic pink pills that cure patriarchy overnight – so this pink pill analogy is like if those consciousness raising campaigns were 100% effective in 5 seconds, right?

OK so back to our imaginary horticultural village. So patriarchy is over. Except, the practical conditions that led to women having low bargaining power – being tied to land or herds for subsistence, and patrilocal post marital residence stays the same.

So we still have a situation where you can’t just get up and leave if someone is bothering you or trying to oppress you, and you still have a situation, where all the men in a village grew up together and all the women are stragers from different villages with very few social connections in the village.

Well who cares about all that pesky material and economic stuff? Cause now all the men are pink pilled so what’s the problem? They’re all going to be perfect egalitarian men, right? Sexism was the problem and now it’s been eliminated, utopia is here!

Well, the problem is that you didn’t do anything about all the conditions that led to patriarchy in the first place, which means it will just come back over time.

So at first everything is equal, and sexism is gone.

But then, very soon, you start to have conflicts between husbands and wives, which you’ll have in any society, even in the most gender egalitarian immediate return hunting and gathering societies. Even in same sex couples where gender difference isn’t an issue. People have conflict.

In a horticultural society, where nuclear families are tending small plots of land to survive, you’ll tend to have a more conflict, because you’re stuck in the same place all day, and because the work is really strenuous and often boring. Imagine working with your spouse for 12 hrs a day, every day. And the propensity for conflict goes up when things get more difficult, like if there’s a bad harvest year, or if there’s a locust attack, and people aren’t getting enough food or enough leisure or social time to be happy. And we see in our own society how divorce rates skyrocket in economic downturns among people lose their jobs – except in many agricultural societies, divorce is almost impossible. It means leaving your livelihood your plot of land – and you have nowhere to go to. Your parents, or other relatives probably can’t afford to take you on. Leaving means starving to death or becoming a bandit.

So if things are hard, what humans beings do because we’re awful selfish gremlins – is that our minds start making up reasons for why we’re unfairly doing too much unpleasant work, and why the other person isn’t doing enough. So the woman will be thinking things like I have to work hard in the garden all day, and I’m tired because I gave birth a few weeks ago, and I’m breastfeeding and I need to eat more, and I’m doing the same amount of work as my husband, but he’s not breastfeeding, he should be doing more and I should be eating more than him.

And the husband will tend to think things like, I’m working so hard, and my wife keeps taking breaks using the baby and breastfeeding as an excuse. I see what she does, it’s not that hard at all, it’s just an excuse. And I have bigger muscles and I need more food to replenish myself, and my work contributes way more to our food than her work does. It’s not fair that she gets so many breaks, and we eat the same amount of food. I should be eating more than she is.

And he’s not being sexist, he’s not generalizing about women, it’s just two people, not getting what they need out of life, each thinking in good faith that they deserve more than what they’re getting, and rationalizing their desires. And their point of view is based not just in their own self interest but also based on their experiences, and not having the experience of knowing what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes.

And then, after a long hard day, the men who all grew up together and have known eacother since birth get together and start talking and they see that they all have similar gripes about their wives. Yes, my wife keeps saying she’s tired taking breaks also! But I’m dig up twice and many yams as she is, why is she so tired? It can’t be that hard to breastfeed, what are these women always whining about? Why is it that all of our wives are so selfish?

And what started out as an individual conflict becomes generalized to a whole gender. Because that’s what humans do. We discriminate against outgroups. We attribute negative characteristics to them, and attribute positive characteristics to our own group. And psychology experiments dating back since the 1960’s show that we’re really quick to discriminate against outgroups, but that those outgroups don’t have to be a race or gender – they can be absolutely anything. People with red hats vs blue hats. People labeled as group A vs group B. Opposing football teams. And this discrimination starts as soon as the groups are defined, and intensifies when competition and conflict get involved.

In this case the ingroup is men, but also men from the same lineage. And the outgroup is women, but also women from outsider lineages, so two orders of discrimination.

Meanwhile among the women you have the same complaints. They get together after work and complain about the men. They don’t have to breastfeed, they’t not depleting all of their energy producing milk, they don’t have to give birth, they’re selfish and don’t recognize that we need more breaks and we need to work less than they do so we can take care of our infants – which are their own children!

And gender identification intensifies and stereotypes proliferate, and tensions mount and one day a man and his wife are arguing and screaming at eachother and the woman hits the man over the head with a metal pot knocking him out. And all of his cousins and brothers and uncles and nephews hear this and rush in to defend him, and they see their relative on the floor and some of them retaliate with force.

All the women quickly understand that if they get into serious conflict with their husband that he will be backed up by all the men in the village.

Meanwhile, in another conflict, when the reverse happens, and a man hits his wife, some people might rush to her aid, but not as many – no one knows her that well, and the other women are afraid to rock the boat and take her side, thus incurring the wrath of their husband and all of his cousins and allies. They understand that they’re in a weaker bargaining position than the related men who form the core population of the village, and they won’t be as willing to take risks unless they’re directly involved.

And if women try to form broad coalitions to counterbalance the natural coaltion of all the related men, they’ll find that they’re having a hard time. A lot of women are afraid to join. Or some of the ones who do end joining are actually snitches who up betraying the coalition and reporting their activities to the men, because they know the men are the more powerful force and that it will be beneficial to them to be in the good graces of the men.

After a few of these conflicts, the men realize that they have the balance of power and that they can win more or less any conflict with their wives with the backing of their friends and relatives. And once they realize that they start imposing their view of what’s fair on the women.

I have more muscles and I need more food, so I’m going to eat more food, and that’s that, try to stop me.

And the women resent this enormously so there are more attacks on men. So then the men start restricting access to weapons and hunting tools and sharp objects, most of which are collectively owned by the men’s families to begin with, because it’s patrilineal. And they prevent women from gathering together because they know that women gathering together means more complaining about men, and more challenges to their authority.

And eventually, whether it’s a generation later, or 100 years later once the pink pilled generation dies out, or once there are enough droughts and periods of hardship to really trigger more intense ingroup outgroup discrimination and competition. you’re right back where you started from. The women are doing all the work and eating leftovers and are household slaves, while the men are hanging out with their buddies all day.

And that’s because material conditions generate ideas and ideology, and because culture is at it’s core a way that humans adapt to our environment.

Alternative Approach

So if you’re a woman in one of these societies, and you want to improve your life and achieve equality with men – you still might want to change hearts and minds – the metaphorical pink pills – which in real life would be protests, public relations, education – because that does have an effect – the pink pills did ameliorate sexism at least for a generation or so – but you also want to have a long game plan that addresses the material and practical conditions so you don’t end up right back where you started.

Is there a way that you can change patrilocal residence? If your village is regularly under attack, then probably not, but if it isn’t, then that should be your first goal, and you want to start campaigning and lobbying for that and targeting that first and foremost.

If your village is still under attack, then you’re going to have a harder time ending patrilocal residence because it’s the best way to defend against attacks. So you might not be in a position to eliminate patriarchy totally, but if you’re thinking about material and practical conditions, there might be some other leverage points that you can identify that could improve women’s bargaining power – like maybe you can arrange for women to do chores and work together in groups, which would make it easier to form female coalitions as a basis for some political resistance and advocacy.

The Failure of Real Life Pink Pills

So when I came up with this thought experiment I thought it was just a thought experiment. But then I did a little reading and realized that there’s a huge example of basically the same failed pink pill experiment happening in the real world today on a massive scale.

Rural China is notorious for having a strong preference for male babies. The birth of a son is seen as a gift and is celebrated. Meanwhile the birth of daughter is seen as a curse. Women are often treated like dirt by their birth families, and they don’t eat as well, aren’t given educational opportunities etc etc. The preference for male babies is so strong that rural families notoriously practiced female infanticide resulting in a skewed male to female ratio, and then starting in the 80’s as weiner revealing ultrascan sounds scans become more available, female abortion became extremely common causing the male to female ratio to expand even more.

As of 2019 you still had 114 females born for every 100 males in china and the numbers are much more skewed in rural areas.

Since the revolution in 1949, the communist party in China has been doing everything it can to combat this problem. First of all, gender equality is one of the staples of communist ideology, but also, having a huge population of young men destined to die unmarried can lead to all sorts of unrest and economic costs.

Now despite being marxist materialists, communist officials took a decidedly idealist approach to this problem and tried to mostly solve it with education. The patriarchal sexist attitudes were associated with rural people and seen as the result of backwardness and lack of education and knowledge, and the government didn’t pay attention to the material context.

Via their monopoly on education and journalism and communication, the government did the equivalent of the Pink Pill. Millions and millions of young children went to school and learned about male female equality, and how sexism is a backward relic of the barbaric past. The CP promoted women to all sorts of important positions to show by example that women are just as capable and powerful as men.

And these sorts of education campaigns succeeded and managed to change and form attitudes on all sorts of issues – medical practices, religion, class, ideology, communist party leadership – but when it came to male baby preference and degrading attitudes towards women, almost nothing changed at all. The problem eventually got much worse when ultrasounds became common in the 1980s and people could get abortions instead of having to resort to infanticide.

Finally in the late 70’s some anthropologists starting pointing the very clear, obvious and well known among peasants at least – reasons for why chinese farmers hate daughters so much. And like in the pink pill example, it’s all rooted in patrilocal post-marital residence, which most rural chinese practice.

We don’t know what the historical reason for why they initially adopted this practice – though it makes sense to assume that it was initially a means of organizing for self defense – but whatever the initial reason, it’s been the practice for probably thousands of years. And even though self defense is not an issue today, material conditions generate culture, and then culture often becomes part of the material conditions. So now that villages are all organized this way, it would take major disruption to change it, even though it has no particular advantage anymore over matrilocal or bilocal residence patterns.

Whatever the initial reason for it, patrilocal residence has huge effects on gender relations – and note that patrilocal residence almost always goes hand in hand with patrilinial descent and inheritence – Meaning that children born to a couple are considered to be part of their father’s descent group, not their mother’s – descent group meaning thinks like your clan or tribe or family line. That’s why for most people listening to this, you have your father’s last name and not your mother’s, it’s a relic of patrilocal patrilineal practices. And always keep in mind, that the main reason that descent groups like clans and tribes exist are as ways to collectively manage property. So immediate return hunter gathrers who don’t have property to manage, dont have clans or tribes, and they trace descent through both parents and married, and married couples go live wherever they want. Or today in most industrialized countries, now that family property is usually managed by nuclear families since it isn’t a fixed plot land that owners live on or herd of animals that has to be an one place or time, we no longer have clans or tribes, and children more and more take compound names or choose their father or mother’s name.

Why Rural Chinese Hate Daughers

So to explain why patrilocal residence and patrilineal inheritence makes parents hate having daughters so much, let me read from a few articles on the subject that I’ll put in the shownotes bibliography:

“In recent years patrilocal residence has been singled out as one of the major reasons for women’s continuing oppression in post-revolutionary China.

Families have often been loath to endow a daughter with property or skills because of the near certainty that these resources will be alienated from the family itself.” meaning that she’s going to be giving all her resources to her husband’s family and village that she’ll be joining at marriage.

“Women are still seen as passing in-marrying strangers who have yet to prove themselves, or are temporary residents who will soon be departing to get married. There is little incentive to recommend girls over boys for higher education or specialized training, or to prepare them for increasing degrees of responsibility and leadership.

The majority of Chinese brides enter their husbands’ families and communities as strangers. At marriage a young woman must establish her credentials in circumstances that may be far from welcoming. In contrast, most grooms continue to live and work in the environment they have always known. Writing of the plight of the rural daughter-in-law, Judith Stacey succinctly summarizes the conventional wisdom on this point. Patrilocal residence and patrilineal inheritance, she argues, create an environment in which there is a “significant advantage for sons over daughters” (1983:219). Villagers recognize, Stacey continues, that “the skills of local daughters will be lost to [her natal] community when the daughters marry” (ibid., 220). The peasant view of daughters as “excess baggage” has lost, it would appear, little of its relevance in contemporary China.”

And from another article

“Among this population, parents must depend for support on their sons, not their daughters. The children that women raise, the fields they tend, and the elderly they support belong, not to their natal families, but to the families they join as brides.”

And another article

In China, as in India [and that’s another country with a huge skewed baby gender ratio] there is little or no pension support for the elderly in rural areas and more than half of the rural elderly rely on transfers from children.

And another one:

For a long time, a son was your pension. Having a girl was wasteful. “Even though son-preference is not rational from the viewpoint of society as a whole, it is a rational choice for an individual”

So from the point of view of the parents, daughters are a huge cost with no benefit. You spend all these resources raising her and feeding her, and then she goes off and brings all of her labour and her children and their labour to her husband’s family for the rest of her life, and you get bubkis.

And the low status of women is compounded by the bargaining power situation for women who are in a lose lose situation throughout their lives. In their home village where they grow up, they’re resented because all the food and money you’re investing in them is just doing to vanish when they go off to get married, and then when they show up in their husband’s village where they will contribute economically and be a huge asset, they’re total strangers with have no allies, so they’re at a huge bargaining disadvantage and can be easily exploited.

And exploited they are, in her quest to be accepted by her new family and village, a daughter in law typically contributes more to her parents in law than their actual children do!

So women contribute the most but are still treated the worst. As always, patriarchy is a system of economic exploitation, and it’s still doing its job in rural china even after 50 years of gender egalitarian education by a one party government that controls every major ideological and cultural forming institution.

Where Gender Ratios Fall to Normal in China

And just like in my thought experiment, because the chinese government didn’t address the root of the problem their pink pill was a total failure.

But you do have areas of China where this problem of skewed gender ratios and extreme patriarchy has never existed, or else has significantly improved recently. What’s going on there as opposed to everywhere else?

First of all in the southwest of china at the foot of the Himalayas you have the Mosuo also known as the Na ethnic group who are matrilineal and where women have most of the positions of authority and marriage barely exists. That’s a whole other podcast episode, they’ve been matrilineal for hundreds of years and this was a result of some political maneovering among the noble class of the region and we don’t have time get in to that here, but with matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritence equal much more power for women, as we saw in epsiode 8 with the Haudenosaunee people in north america.

Meanwhile in the 1970s anthropologist Norma Diamond noticed that in those areas of China where you had frequent political upheavals and natural disasters resulting in frequent population movement, patrilocality was much less dominant. Many women remained in their home villages, and their husbands sometimes moved in the with their mother’s family, and therefore women were not at such a bargaining power disadvantage that they are in most of rural china where peopel stay on their family plots for centuries.

Now the areas where women’s rights actually improved significantly over recent years, and where the gender birth ratio has gone down to the natural rate are areas where traditional practices have been disrupted by rapid industrialization and wage labour.

For example in Shengzhou and the surrounding areas, once ultrasounds were available, the male to female birthrate exploded to 124 boys for every 100 girls in 1982, and then 129 by 1987.

Reading now from another article:

“Then something striking happened: the ratio dropped steeply. By 1996 it was 109.5. Soon after, according to statistics, it returned to the natural level.

You do not have to look far for part of the explanation. Shengzhou is, it boasts, International Necktie City of the 21^st Century, making 350m ties a year – or 40% of the world’s supply – as well as huge quantities of gas stoves and cone diaphragms for speakers.

Its factories offer plenty of jobs for daughters, allowing them to make a hefty economic contribution to the household. Across the country, manufacturers have frequently preferred female employees, regarding them as more careful and less troublesome.

Young couples are more likely to live apart from relatives. Few parents can now count on a dutiful daughter-in-law caring for them; and many are noticing that daughters are doing a better job.

Some even think that son preference may partially correct itself. The surplus of men has increased competition for brides, meaning families must buy ever more expensive housing to ensure their sons can marry – increasing the economic attractiveness of daughters.”

So ironically, because patriarchy is primarily about economic exploitation, women in patriarchal cultures are raised to be more obedient and meticulous, and less prone to complaining or standing up for themselves and to have more endurance for suffering – and this makes them amazing wage labourers for owners and bosses to exploit instead of just their husbands family! So when wage labour and capitalism come to town, women have an advantage vs men in the wage labour market where men are not so good at being exploited, since they’re used to being the exploiters! As a result of this, women are able to bring home money to support their birth parents, and they’re able to have more autonomy and independence from their husband’s family, and the incentives for their birth families hating women start to disappear, while their bargaining power vis-à-vis their husband’s families increases.

This was one of the things Karl Marx liked about Capitalism and why he thought it was a progressive force in various ways, it disrupted some oppressive institutions, even as it created new ones – so now chinese men and women are both exploited by bosses, instead of just women by their husband’s families…

And this disruption of patrilocatlity is the same reason why male birth preference has never been as big of an issue in the more industrialized parts of china – and it’s also the same reason South Korea’s problem of male birth preference which used to be bigger than China’s, has almost totally evaporated over the last few decades – it’s a much smaller country that industrialized more homogenously and rapidly.

So very often, cultural problems and cultural hierarchies, are all about the material conditions and incentives, which sometimes includes cultural and historical hangovers which have become entrenched over time into new conditions, which is why I like to refer to it as the practical conditions instead of just the material conditions which makes people think of only the physical environment, or which has some specific baggage relating to Marx’ use of that term which is a little different than the way it’s used by ordinary people or by me.

Solving the Problem

So, if you want to solve deeply entrenched cultural issues, like patriarchy and racism, you need to deal with the practical conditions that generate those issues or else you’re not going to get anywhere, like the chinese government has been not learning for the past 70 years…

And in order to solve this problem anthropologists have been proposing various material based solutions.

The biggest one is get rid of patrilocal residence, which is easier said than done as it would be a huge disruption to rural society. We saw earlier that it’s takes natural disasters and mass social conflict scale events to disrupt it enough to make a difference.

Other proposed solutions include implementing a social security system for rural chinese which would allow families with only daughters to be able to have support in old age so that they won’t have an incentive to abort them. So that’s also a really expensive solution with hundreds of millions of rural people to support.

So chances are the chinese government will still stick to ineffective education and propaganda campaigns, and things will only change as industrialization advances into rural areas.

In our society, understanding how material conditions affect cultural problems this has all sorts of parallels – not only for things like eliminating racism and sexism – and we’ll talk about the ways that racism and sexism in our society are and aren’t related to economic realities past and present – but thinking about material context is also crucial for things like designing legislation or planning strikes, and political protest and mass action.

Applying This at Home

For example, people design laws that are supposed to protect tenants or low wage workers, but if you aren’t taking into account the material context of landlord tenant and employer employee relations where employers and landlords have an enormous practical advantage over employees and tenants, then those laws end up being really ineffective fancy toilet paper because they’re not enforceable.

Even if workers and tenants have rights on paper, lower waged workers in countries without strong social safety nets are too scared to invoke their rights because they’ll just get fired on some pretext, and tenants will get evicted or their landlord will refuse to fix anything or make the tenants life hell in various ways.

So to make these laws enforceable you need extremely harsh punishments for landlords and bosses who violate those rules, or else ideally you need to change the context – a really strong social safety net, or even better, to reduce the enormous wealth inequality between workers and owners that makes it so easy for them to abuse tenants and employees in the first place.

The whole point I keep talking about material conditions, is just to highlight the importance of not looking at problems in isolation, but understanding the context and systemic factors that you need to address to actually change things. So, take a look at the problems around you that care about – whether it’s low wages, or racism, or lack of access to healthcare or exploding rents, or impending climate apocalypse – and think about the material conditions that generate these problems, and what kind of changes to those conditions would help solve them.

And as we’ll see in the next episode, which will be a line by line critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s articles on hierarchy and equality, ignoring material conditions leads to ineffective politics, and a right wing view of the world where hierarchy is naturalized and cultures are blamed for their .

End

In the meantime, while you’re working out how to fix the world, if you feel that this podcast is making new galaxy brained connections in your formerly smooth brain, and that others would benefit from hearing it – please, please tell your friends and your social media friends and your parasocial friends about this podcast, it is extremely hard to get an audience in this podcast supersaturated environment – if you’re watching the video versions, please, please post these videos on reddit, it’s how I get almost all my viewers and listeners, and most political reddit subs do not let you post your own material, plus I’m shadowbanned on breadtube for some inexplicable reason, so please post my stuff on there, and if you know have contact with a popular podcast or youtube person who might be interested in this show, like you’re on their discord or whatever, please spread the word! It seems like a signal boost from someone with an audience is the main way to get heard in this super saturated environemnt, so please do that if you can, and I’ll try to think of some crazy publicity stunt to do in the meantime.

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Note that because it usually takes me so long I’m currently charging per episode not per month, and that I don’t charge for every episode so that you won’t get charged more than 12x a year maximum.

And until next time, seeya!

8. How History is Made

Haudenosaunee Women / the Suffragettes / the Double V Campaign / the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 / the Anarchist Revolution in Spain 1936–39

Human beings have free will, but our actions are constrained by material realities. Understanding how material and practical conditions shape human behaviour can make all the difference between success and catastrophic failure when it comes to the whole spectrum of political action, from private sector negotiation, to crafting legislation, to making a revolution.

In this episode we look at:

The relationship between economic activity and the high status of women in traditional Haudenosaunee / Iroquois society

How World War I helped women win the right to vote in Europe and North America

How World War II catalyzed the Black civil rights movement in the United States.

The success, failure, and accidental success of the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381

The implications of the Anarchist Revolution in Spain in 1936–1939 for the future of industrial civilization.

Music in this episode is by Tony Ezzy and Cheap Wig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2LRn9LM4jY

Script

Hello again, and welcome back to What is Politics.

Over the last two episodes, we’ve been doing some political anthropology with the aim of understanding hierarchy and equality in human societies. And we’ve been trying to see why some societies have almost total equality where no one is in a position to dominate anyone else, and everyone has equal access to resources, and is even entitled to those resources, and why other societies – most societies today – have extreme dominance hierarchies where some people have almost all the decision making power and control over all of the resources, and other people have almost none.

And we saw that ultimately it boils down to bargaining power. Where conditions are such that some people are in a position to dominate others – which is the case with most human societies today – and these conditions last long enough, you end up with a society with dominance hierarchies, and political and cultural institutions and values that reinforce and stabilize those dominance hierarchies. And if conditions are such that no one is in a position to dominate anyone else, which was most likely the condition of the majority of humanity until the holocene era and the spread of agriculture, and which is still the condition among a few remaining immediate return, nomadic hunting and gathering societies today, you end up with an egalitarian society, and institutions that reinforce and stabilize equality and individual autonomy.

Now a materialist, behavioural ecology perspective like this can seem very deterministic, that people have no choice but to organize in certain ways in certain conditions, and people tend to think it leaves no room for human agency or values or ideas. It makes human beings seem like robots. This is the old idealism vs materialism debate. Idealism is the idea that our social structures and political institutions are the result of our ideas and values and culture, and Materialism is the idea that our social structures, our political institutions and our culture and values are the result of material, environmental and practical conditions. In 19^th century terms, does history make men or do men make history?

Now this is not just some esoteric philosophical debate and this podcast is not about being a wankfest. The point of this show is for us to figure out how to become effective political actors. And the reason we’re spending a lot of time talking about materialism is because it has such important real world applications and because there are such stark consequences for political actors who don’t have an understanding of things the material incentives built into their political systems, as we’ll see today, and as I’ll talk about more in the QnA episode.

The reason why it’s absolutely crucial to have a good understanding of how material conditions affects human behaviour is because it helps us predict human behaviour – and making change in politics is all about expanding your coalition and finding the right allies. So in particular, material perspectives help us predict and figure out things like who is likely to by a potential ally and who is likely to be a potential enemy, or more importantly who likely to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be an ally for nefarious reasons, which we’ll see in a few minutes when we talk about the English peasant’s revolt of 1381.

And equally important, it helps us become more intelligent about designing good policies, good institutions and political systems that will bring us the results we actually want. Versus laws that have unintended consequences, or that are ignored and unenforced, or political reforms that get reversed after a few decades, or else revolutions where the new system becomes as bad as the systems it replaced.

Human beings have agency – meaning we have the ability to act and make decisions on our own based on what’s in our heads and our hearts. But at the same time, different people often make similar decisions in similar situations. The less restrictive the situation is, the more room their is for free will, and individual or culture proclivities and values to express themselves. But the more restrictive and extreme conditions become, the our choices become more predictable. And this includes which values we choose to adhere to, adopt and pass on to our children, or which values we choose to inherit or reject from our parents. If those extreme conditions recur often enough over a long period or time, or if they stay extreme over time, you either adopt certain values and make certain choices or you and your culture die.

Again I’ll use the example of wealther because it’s so simple When the weather outside is room temperature, you have the choice of wearing almost whatever you want. A bikini, a 3 piece snuit, a baseball uniform. Your agency and proclivities have room to express themselves.

But if it’s -30 outside, you still theoretically have the choice of wearing whatever you want, but if you don’t wear the warmest things available, you will die. Your agency is limited to which colours you prefer, and whether you want to live or die of cold, and to experiment to try to find the warmest materials and clothes possible.

If your culture has values that are incompatible with these conditions – like if you move into a climate where it’s always -30 degrees outside, and your culture value nudity above all – so that we remain as close as possible to how God us to be seen for example – you will have change your values, and come up with some religious excuses for wearing full snowsuit gear – and ifyou dont everyone who insists on clinging to the old values will be wiped out.

In this episode we’re going to look at some of the different ways that social change happens – where material conditions leave room for reforming or casting off obsolete dominance hierarchies, but people haven’t realized it yet, so unnecessarily oppressive dominance institutions stay in place, until some event makes people conscious that they don’t need to accept the current order and then boom – if they know what theyre doing, and if theyre lucky, or both – they push for and achieve change.

And then we’ll see how not have a proper understanding of your political context, or the material and practical conditions that your struggle is taking place in, can lead to disaster, even when material conditions are on your side.

And conversely we’ll see how sometimes material conditions are so overwhelming that they can just push forward social change all by themselves even when revolutionaries bungle and fail.

So we’ll be looking at women in western countries fighting for the right to vote, black americans fighting for legal equality, the massive english peasants revolt of 1381, and the anarchist revolution in spain in the 1930s.

Matrilocal Residence

Last time, we talked about how patrilocal post marriage residence rules – where women who are getting married, leave their native area to go live with their husband’s people – give men a bargaining power advantage versus women, and how this leads to male dominated societies.

And we saw that Cultures tend to adopt this type of residence pattern when they are subject to frequent attacks, because having your village or your mobile lineage group be organized around closely related males who grew up together and who know eachother well, is good for snap defense.

And as a result of this, you end up with social groups, where all of the men know eachother since childhood, but all of the adult women, come from different villages or lineages and are therefore more socially isolated,and that gives men a bargaining power advantage inany conflict, which leads to male dominance. So if ever there’s a conflict between a man and a woman, the man has the whole village likely to take his side, and the woman hardly has anyone. And over time, this leads to patriarchal ideology, as we saw last time. And, if the economy doesn’t require women to work together in groups, where they can form bonds and coalitions with which they can defend their interests, it will lead to extreme patriarchy.

Now, there is also such thing as matrilocal post marriage residence, and it’s the second most common rule out of six existing rule types that we mentioned last time. About 13% of societies practice matrilocal residence, vs 69% who practice patrilocal residence. The type of marriage pattern we have in the industrialized west – where the couple goes to live wherevers, is practiced by only 8% of societies, which also includes the hyper egalitarian hunter gatherers we talked about last time.

Anyhow, cultures will adopt a matrilocal residence rule when the economy involves a lot of a long distance hunting, fishing, or warfare and raiding that involves men going off for long expeditions for long periods, months at a time. Because the men are away for prolonged periods, women are the ones who have to take care of things like land management, politics, agriculture and other village affairs. So it makes sense to have villages organize around women who grew up together and know eachother well. This way they’ll have less conflict and be better at resolving disagreements when it comes to decisions involving land management and village politics, vs if you had villages made up of women who don’t know eachother well and who come from different lineage which is the case in patrilocal societies.

But people don’t just do things because they make sense – there’s also the reality of bargaining power involved . whenever anyone says anything like “this society choose this or that” keep in mind that it’s extremely rare for a society as a whole to all choose something in unison. “society chooses” this or that means that some members of society managed to get their way vs other people who probably didn’t want that particular thing, because different people have different material and psychological interests, and different classes of people have different class interests.

In episode 3 we looked at hypothetical situation where you could have a magical free healthcare system for everyone with all the best doctors and best care possible just by saying mekalekahimekahiniho. and although this would be the best healthcare system imaginable in the universe, there would be a tiny class of people who own lots of medical insurance company stock would lose out – and would oppose it. And if that tiny class were powerful enough, they could maintain the existing garbage system, even though it’s terrible for 99.9% of the population.

So although it makes the best sense to adopt matrilocal residence when men are away for long periods, but at the same time, having villages based on related women takes some power away from men – and people don’t usually give up power when they don’t have to. so we would expect that men might resist.

But the fact that men are away so often for so long, gives women the increased bargaining power necessary to insist on and impose that kind of post marital residence rule on the men whether they want it or not.

So people make choices, and people actively engage in struggles but conditions will help decide who the winner of those struggles will be, and what the resulting social order will look like. And that’s more true the more restrictive conditions are.

And for a society to thrive, it needs stability, so culture and values come in to reflect and stabilize the long term balance of power of a society and maintain cohesion.

For example among the people of the Haudenesaunee confederacy in north america, aka the Iroquois, who are traditionally matrilocal and matrilineal, women are enormously respected.

And unlike in the west where surveys show that men of all ages find 22 year old women the most attractive, or in Japan where the ideal age of ohysical attractiveness forwomen has been going down over the years from early 20s to high school to middle school, women in Haudenasaunee cultures are considered to be the most attractive in their late 30s and their 40s, much like men that age are considered very attractive in western societies.

And this makes sense, because women of that age were at a high point in terms of their influence and political power, just like men of that age tend to be wealthier in our society, so by marrying someone in that position you’re getting a better set up for your kids and family life.

You’ll often hear people who come from the 6 nations say that there was no such thing as sexual assault or rape in traditional Haudenasaunee society, and whether that’s exactly right or not, it’s certainly very likely that it was extremely rare.

Not only because of their vslues, but also because of the practical reality that any man who did anything like that would be ostracized by the entire village and be left alone to die – a society where women lead family and political life, and where villages consist of related women who’ve known eachother since childhood does not take kindly to sexual assault. So it makes sense for any individual to adopt those values, so you cna enjoy your social life.

People who don’t like material explanations of culture and politics always argue that this idea of culture adapting to material reality is just mystical and that no one can explain it – people don’t just magically adapt to things, we make choices. And yes we do make choices, but again, regardless of our feelings and values, our choices becomes more and more predictable the more that restrictive conditions get. And one of these choices is whoch cultural values we choose to adopt.

In his very important book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn noticed that the theories and worldview older established scientists dominate in their fields. And even when new evidence shows that their favourite theories are wrong, they still hold on to them. And those disproven theories dominate until those older scientists retire, and younger scientists who came up while the old theories were beig disproven start take over.

And this is very much how culture works as well. Imagine you had a patriarchal culture where men tend to have very mysoginst attitudes towards women. And then they end up moving into a new environment where they now have to adopt an economy that involves long distance hunting and raiding, and women by necessity are in the village running political life. And a debate begins about switching to matrilocal vs patricolal residence, and the women win because they have the advantage.

Well the older men might still have mysoginist ideas, but now the women now have the power to make their life hell if they treat them with disrespect. So young men growing up, who can see that their fathers attitudes are out of step with reality, and they seem old and foolish. Plus their mothers, who are now in a strong position won’t continue to pass on patriarchal values to their kids anymore, so the kids growing up have competing values to choose from and they’ll tend to choose the ones that make the most sense – and I’ll give you a funny example of this from my family in the upcoming QnA episode.

Interestingly, matrilocal residence doesn’t seem to lead to the same degree of female dominance that men end up having over women in patriarchal societies – for example women usually won’t totally monopolize all the positions of authority, the way that men do in many patriarchal societies, and they don’t subjugate men into doing all the dirty work for them while they hang around with their pals which we see in extreme patriarchal cultures.

So for example among the people of the Haudenesaunee confederacy in north america, aka the Iroquois, you traditionally have a system where the eldest woman of each clan was the clan mother and the ultimate authority of that clan, but the clan mothers together elected the chief who was always man but he could be removed or vetoed by the united clan mothers.

My guess for why this is the case is that men usually dominate war and fighting so this tends to give them higher bargaining power than women usually have in patrilocal societies, where they can be physically overpowered by the coalition of men on top of being socially isolated by patrilocal residence.

In the future we’ll talk more about the haudenasaunee confederacy, which was a surprisingly egalitarian system for a large sedentary agricultural society.

Women’s Suffrage

The point of this is that matrilocal residence and increased women’s rights and power is another example of social structure being determined by material conditions. Men being away for long periods give women more bargaining power whihc leads to more rights for women,

So again, people have agency, but they also tend to make rational choices and somewhat predictable choices, over the long run.

Now in western industrialized societies we can see something that at first glance appears to be a similar dynamic at work when we look at how women got the right to vote. But when we look closer we see something very different happening.

If you just go on wikipedia and look up women’s suffrage, you’ll find a list of when women won the right to vote in different countries. And you’ll notice that for europe and north america, all the dates mostly hover around either the end of world war I or else World War II.

The story of how women got the right to vote is different in each country, but the fact that it happens for all these countries around the time of the big world wars is not coincidental.

Like with the Haudenasaunee, where women had increased bargaining power because men were away raiding or hunting, in world war I and WWII women got more bargaining power because the working age men were away for long stretches, and women were needed to replace them as labourers. But women in europe and north america got the right to vote after the war was over, when material conditions returned to normal. The men were back in the village permanently so to speak. So a change in material conditions doesn’t really explain what happened.

In this case, particularly in England, Canada and the United States, the change in women’s rights was largely a result of a change in consciousness among women, but also among men, that caught up with changes in conditions that had already happened before. It was the temporary charge in conditions, where women took over the labour force, that was the catalyst which changed their consciousness – like how people sometimes decided to quit their hated job or leave an abusive relationship after they’ve a vacation or time away from their spouse that makes them realize they don’t need to put up with this crap anymore.

In this case, the material conditions which gave women the bargaining power necessary for them to get the right to vote had already been there for some time but people didn’t realize it yet, so they weren’t willing to work for it. but consciousness was changed from the experience of the war, and that change turned latent bargaining power into activated bargaining power.

Women are more than 50% of the population. And unlike in other societies like the Lese we talking about last episode where women are physically isolated from eachother, women in north america had the ability to meet together, especially as urbanization increased.

So they inherently had a huge amount of bargaining power, and if they wanted to they could have mandated putting mandatory moxie cola in the waterfountains. unbeknowns to them, they had had this power in urban centers for decades, and in rural areas they were getting this power more and more as the telephone became more affordable and common.

But in order to activate that latent bargaining power, they needed to know that they had that power, they needed to have a common goal, they need to be able make alliances with other women and then they need to know how to effectively push for those goals.

In terms of a unified goal, the majority of women generally wanted the right to vote and had wanted it for decades. But although there were suffragette organizations since the 1870’s women weren’t joining them in great enough numbers. Many women did not feel like it was a realistic goal, or that ir wasn’t worth investing a lot of time and energy in. Others didn’t feel like they deserved it.

But once women entered the work force several things happened. One is that women began to feel more entitled to equal voting rights as they understood that the war couldn’t have been won without them. Another is that the mystique of men’s work was shattered. Now a husband would try to get his way on some disagreement or other by invoking the “i work hard all day and I wain wain wain,” argument the woman could now say – I did everything you do for four years, and I also came home and took care of the kids and our home so don’t think you’re some kind of martyr just for going to work.

Crucially. the fact of being out in the workforce brought women together in a way that wasn’t the case when they were more isolated at home taking care of children. So people got to speak to eachother and share their experiences with others in large numbers on lunch breaks, after work, whenever. And they shared their grievances and ideas, and they became aware that there was a whole nation of other women thinking the same things and having the same needs and wants, and in this way they became more aware of their bargaining power, and of being a political force. So they gained a sense of entitlement, and also a sense of their own power.

There was also the idea that if women had had the right to vote from the getgo, maybe the insanity of WWI could have been avoided altogether. So there was a fresh and tangible argument for why their voices were crucial.

Suddenly suffragette’s organizations started ballooning in number and membership, as women began mobilizing for the right to vote, and joining organizations and movements. And now experienced organizers had the numbers they needed to put effective pressure on politicians and other influential people, and more numbers meant more creative ideas on how to apply pressure and gain influence.

And they did this by the full spectrum of pressure and PR tactics, from traditional lobbying, to picketing, parades, mass meetings, posters, parties, advertizements, hunger strikes and civil disobedience, targeting everyone from their husbands, to individual members of congress or parliament, or generating publicity by getting arrested for picketing and following around the president or prime ministers. The american suffragettes also made a big issue of pointing out how the US was fighting for democracy abroad while keeping women disenfranchised at home.

And historically we see again and again that lower ranking classes in society rise up effectively when they have large networks and can form coalitions that can assert their will and defend their interests. Like slaves in the United States rarely managed to carry out successful slave rebellions – american slave revolt tended to be isolated to one owner or plantation and involve some vioence against the masters and then the slaves all get killed by authorites.

Meanwhile in Haiti which at the time was called Saint-Domingue, slaves managed to overthrow the entire government and take control of the island. The big difference was that slaves in the U.S. were much more isolated into small groups controlled by owners of single homes or plantations who controlled their social activities and comings and goings. Meanwhile in Saint Domingue, slaves were worked to death on giant plantations, but were able to meet together at night in ritual societies that had networks across the country. And it was via these networks that slaves were able to get an understanding of their opponents, of the system, of goings on in different parts of the country, and where they were able to form bonds and solidarity with eachother, all of which you need to effectively make change.

The suffragettes tended to be more affluent in terms of their income as people with less money generally aren’t as interested in elections in representative democracies if they aren’t invested in the system via social services, which mostly didn’t exist at that time. But as upper class women have more powerful social networks, their power was disproportionate to their numbers.

Another important factor that raised consciousness in Canada, the US and the UK was that women were getting the right to vote in new nations that were created in the aftermath of WWI, like austria and hungary. This gave women a sense that they deserved this, and also helped focus media attention on that particular issue.

The reason women in those newly formed countries got the right to vote was similar to what happened in the anglo countries, but there was an added bonus that made their job easier – when you’re starting from scratch it’s easier to have a say in how a new political system will work, versus when you already have an established political system with an entrenched hierarchy and a creaky difficult constitution to deal with like you notoriously have in the U.S. for example.

And in the anglo countries as everywhere, it wasn’t just women’s consciousness that was raised. An increasing number of men, and politicians who after all were the ones who had the power vote to enact women’s suffrage, recognized the contributions that women had made during the war, and they recognized that women could do all the same jobs that men could do and that they had all of the same abilities that men had. And these facts were brought to their attention by women’s organizing efforts and news of voting rights being won by women in newly formed nations.

Now most of the women who hadn’t yet gotten full voting rights after WWI got them in WWII for the same reasons we just talked about. In all the newly communist countries that didn’t already have the right to vote, women got them because communist leaders made inclusive voting part of their raison d’être – and ironically in one party states, where there are generally not giant stakes in elections, the inclusion of previously excluded marginalized or oppressed groups is a way to gain legitimacy from the maximum number of people, as opposed to in multiparty states where elite groups are often jealously trying to prevent people from voting in order to preserve their advantages.

Now if you look at that wikipedia page, you’ll note that while women got the right to vote everywhere else in europe in WWI and WWII, women in switzerland only got full voting rights in 1971! It’s no coincidence that switzerland did not fight in WWI or WWII. If you read academic articles about it, the late enfranchisement of swiss women is usually attributed to things like class divisions in the women’s movement and lack of support from political parties, but those same factors were overcome in other countries. The fact is thayt swiss women simply did not have the same experiences or expanded social networks the women in other countries had when they had to replace men in the workplace. so they just didn’t fight as hard for their rights. It wasn’t until the time of the sexual revolution which was catalyzed by the availability of birth control, and which was visible to everyone via mass media which was now in everyones homes, that enough Swiss women were finally motivated enough to win full voting rights.

In Scandinavian countries which were largely agricaultural economies, women’s work wasn’t so obviously segregated from men’s work, so the importance of their work and the equality of its importance to men’s work was more obvious to womem and to men alike. And you also had more of a socialist tradition which had been advocating gender equality since the mid 19^th century. So even though Sweden was neutral in WWI the success of suffrage movements in nearby countries that did fight in the war was enough to motivate swedish women to push for their right to vote, as they had already hada higher degree of self worth and bargaining power, to begin with.

Black Civil Rights

The story is similar for the Black Civil Rights movement in the United States, which not coincidentally emerged with much greater force after WWII. In WWI and earlier wars, black soldiers were mostly support troops doing menial labour jobs with a few exceptional black battalions. But in WWII, because of greater need for troops, black americans were drafted along with everyone else. 1.2 million black men went to europe as soldiers and specialists and sometimes officers, to fight and die in a war against racism and genocide, only to return to the same racism, discrimination and exploitation at home. The hypocrisy was stinkingly obvious and stark.

Meanwhile on the homefront, black men and black women, just like white women, entered new professions and labour markets as the war created enormous labour shortages. So now black men and women were working better jobs, joining unions, getting access to more advanced skills and training and working under better conditions then had previously been available to them.

Exposure to better conditions, higher bargaining power, and the hypocrisy of democratic rhetoric of the US government’s war effort vs the reality of 2^nd class citizenship at home, led to greater consciousness, confidence, entitlement, social networks, and unified purpose. And thus the Double V movement emerged, where black people fought for victory against fascism and racism abroad, and at home.

And like the suffrageytes, they employed all the tactics of pressure and PR available to them.

Energized mobilization and activism by black soldiers, veterans and their organization, led to President Truman passing ordinances to end discrimination in defense department jobs, but it took a much longer battles to get full legal civil rights in the rest of the economy and country, particularly in the southern states where racism was so deeply imbedded in cultural identity and the economy.

Another factor in why black legal equality was more of an uphill battle than female legal equality was the simple fact that most of the majoritarian white people were not exposed to the struggles of black people or subject to pressure from black people the way that men were exposed to the gripes and pressure tactics of women.

Like almost every man has had a close relationship with at least one or two different women as mothers, sisters and wives, far fewer white people had relationships with black people aside from some soldiers, and some recently and temporarily integrated wartime workplaces, so white consciousness was much slower to change then male consciousness was in regards to women’s rights. It’s not coincidental that support for black rights was higher among the military where black soldiers had gained reputations for being courageous and capable and had earned the respect their white brothers who sometimes joined them in their protest actions.

Regardless of these setbacks, it was WWII veterans who were at the heart of civil rights activism in the 1950s which was finally victorious in obtaining legal equality in the 1960s.

The Peasants Revolt

So the Black Civil Rights movement, and Women’s suffrage are examples where changes in consciousness, rather than changes in material conditions altered the balance of power and made it possible for people in subordinate positions, to successfully fight for more rights and more power.

In these cases, the Black Civil Rights movement, and Women’s suffrage a change of consciousness was enough to make a big difference, because the bargaining power of those groups was already there, they just weren’t using it, they hadn’t figured out that they had it or how to use it yet. And when material realities shift and open up opportunities for increased bargaining power of subordinate groups, Elites will hold on to power and form their own coalitions and do whatever they can to make sure that the people below them don’t start connecting with eachother to recognize and activate their bargaining power.

It’s like when your boss won’t let you find out what your coworkers are getting paid – or when a stupid landlord tries to order his tenants to stop talking to eachother when they get together to defend their rights, which I’ve seen a zillion times in my work!

A properly organized elite will do everything it can to make sure the population never has any sense of it’s own power, or a sense of entitlement. Keep them distracted, divided, etc in all sorts of ways, and there are liberal and conservative styles and ways of doing this, which we’ll look at in the future.

Unless changes in conditions are overwhelmingly in your favour and glaringly obvious, raising consciousness and having an awareness of conditions and of things like the material incentives inherent in your political system is key to making social change. You need to know these things in order to know who your potential allies are, who to trust, and who to be skeptical of, how to fight off opposition.

A spectacular example of how material conditions affect bargaining power and of why knowledge and political awareness are key to capitalizing on that bargaining power is the english peasants revolt of 1381.

When the western roman empire fell in the 5^th century, warlords emerged who would gain welath by pillaging local farmers who had no roman empire around to keep order. This gave warlords enormous bargaining power over farmers to whom they could offer “protection” from pillage by competing warlords – or from themselves, in exchange for ⅓ or more of their harvest – kind of like the mafia. Over time the warlords became just just plain lords, and the farmers became serfs.

Eventually Kings emerged who unified larger territories, imposing peace between competing lords. With monarchs having largely eliminated the risk of attacks between rival lords and the pillaging that goes with it, one would think that justification for peasants paying ⅓ or more of their output to lords was gone – but one would be wrong – one of the ways that the Kings consolidated their power, was by offering the nobility protection them from rebellion by their serfs.

So the states that these kings created had as a main function to keep themselevs and the noble elite in power, which meant keeping the serf grain flowing into the lords manors.

At the same time, kings also leveraged popular support to keep the nobility in check – because like anyone, nobility don’t like having someone ruling over them. So there was a carrot and stick approach – while monarchs gained support from the nobility by helping enforce their power over their serfs, they also gaining support from the population by protecting the serfs against the excesses and arbitrary rule of their lords, thus gaining them a measure of popular legitimacy.

So for example in england, the lords made the law and operated their own courts, which meant the serfs could never get any justice if they had a dispute vs their lords – heads I win tails you lose. But once kings were established, they operated coirts called the kings bench, which would travel around the country and hear appeals of cases decided by the lords courts – and thus serfs could sometimes get some justice.

Meanwhile the King was also propped up by religious indoctrination from church which in terms was propped up by the King. So People believed that the King was appointed by god and he cared about them, and if they got mad at authority, it was usually at the local authorities – the lord whose fist was readily visible vs the king’s hidden fist supporting the lord behind the scenes.

It’s a bit like today when you have a capitalist workplace, with an owner and managers. often the the managers do all of the abuse and have all of the coercive interactions with the workers, while the owner acts like a benevolent leader above the clouds, always having very friendly interaction with the workers those few times when he interacts with them. as a result, owners usually have a much better reputation among workers than their direct managers do., even though the owner is the one telling the managers to abuse the workers. and in american politics, republicans act like owners, and democrats act like managers.

And so serfdom trudges along for hundreds of years, and the trend was lords extracting more and more surplus from the serf class over time – but – then the black plague gets to england in 1348 and 49 and then again in 1362 and 1369 – and this kills of 40%-60% of the population, disproportionately serfs.

And this horrible nightmare, becomes a partial blessing for the surviving serfs as well as for urban labourers, as it radically changes the balance of power between serfs and nobility, the same way a labour shortage changes the balance of power between employees and employers.

Suddenly, many lords didn’t have enough serfs to keep them in the riches to which they were accustomed, and they would try to poach serfs from other lords by offering them better conditions, even though this was illegal and considered scandalous.

For the first time serfs were in a position to demand better conditions from their own lords – and they insisted on paying less of their harvests to their lords, demanding higher wages for side jobs, insisting on the right to do better paid skilled work that they were normally barred from doing. And they wanted to pay less in various fees that they were obligated to pay to various authority figured. just like in rare a capitalist labour shortage, if your lord wouldnt give you better terms and conditons, you could just pick up and leave and go work for a better employer.

By the 1380s the purchasing power of rural labourers increased by around 40 percent all at the expense of the nobility. And of course the nobility were losing their minds. They tried in vain to reassert their bargaining power by using the power of the state to impose laws which attempted to fix wages at pre-plague levels, making it a crime to refuse work or to break an existing contract, and imposing branding and imprisonment as penalties. Parliament enacted sumptuary laws to prevent serfs from buying and wearing expensive goods formerly only affordable by the nobility. And they made laws preventing serfs from sending their children to school.

But despite these efforts, the material conditions – i.e. the labour shortage – was such that the laws could only be enforced so far and the advancement of the serfs could only be slowed down so much. Lords needed workers, and feared them escaping, so they kept trying to entice them to stay.

The rising power of the serfs brought with it expectations and a sense that they deserved better, and mounting resentment that laws were being used to prevent from attainting their due. It was a bit like the opposite of today, where employers resent the fact that the state gives artificially gives workers more bargaining power than they would have, via some protections in the form of minimum wages and other worker rights – rights which employers could easily disregard based on their enormous private sphere bargaining power advantage. In the 14^th century the serfs resented the state artificially propping up the elite – which the state also does today, but people don’t realize it, so they don’t get as upset about it!

So the change in material conditions was clear, and it changed consciousness. Soon enough, new radical ideas started spreading about how the nobility were a useless and parasitical class.

“When adam delved and eve span, who was then a gentleman?” was the famous slogan of John Ball, who was the most prominent of a new generation of radical priests. And by this he meant there were no nobility in biblical times, God didn’t create them, so why should there be any now?

“From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.”

And like in so many revolts and revolutions, the idea of liberty was intimately tied up with the notion of equality, Because it’s only when people have material and political equality that no one is in any position to dominate anyone else, which is the necessary precondition for liberty.

‘My good friends,” began another of of balls famous sermons “matters cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until all things shall be held in common, when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.’

And for 30 years, priests like John Ball, and other radicals agitated and organized and made connections between serfs and townspeople, and they spread ideas about electing representatives and all of this resonated with the peasants who felt the waning power of the nobility – and the idea grew that if people took action, they could return to the classless world that God had created.

So changing conditions generated changes in consciousness which people used to organize and change consciousness furthet, with the aim of changing society and eliminating the noble class altogether and establishing england as a federation of independant communes.

You basicallly had a straight up christian libertarian-socialist movement brewing almost 500 years before karl marx or mikhail bakunin.

And finally after decades of being jailed and branded and burned and as further resentment grew after successive rounds of taxes were imposed by parliament to pay for the hundred years war with france, in 1381 england exploded in rebellion as peasants along with artisans and rural officials revolted against the nobility, and the government.

But unlike other peasants revolts that flared up around europe at different times, this one was organized. The rebels knew exactly what they wanted and how they wanted it- the end of serfdom, the end of priivileges for the nobility, to be free of onerous war taxes and foolish wars, the end of maximum wages and other laws artificially enforcing class distinctions, to depose the king’s senior officials and his courts and to set up a nation of independant communes. And so, They went from town to town attacking clearly pre-arranged targegts with the aim of achieving these goals.

They targeted the feared and hated manorial rolls which listed the crimes thatpeople had committed, and how much they owed in taxes, and they went from town to town, burning records, opening jails and killing hated figures, tax collectors, soecific government officials, clergy and nobles.

And eventually an army of 140,000 peasants marched up to london. And with the king’s armies mostly away fighting war in france, they were poised to easily take the tower of london and to depose king richard II who was only 14 years old at the time.

But as intelligent and organized as the rebellion was, the peasant rebels did not understand the nature and dynamics of the political system that kept them subjugated.

They naïvely believed that the King was their protector appointed by God, and that the noble class alone was the cause of their oppression, and they didn’t undertstand how the king worked with the nobility to keep serfs working under the dominance of the ruling class.

Their slogan was ‘For King Richard and the true commons.’ The King was appointed by God and they wanted a direct relationship to him withoutnthe corrupt nobilty and high clergy in the way. It was a bit how democrats in the US see Barack Obama or how republicans see Donald Trump. He’s the good guy, it’s all those corrupt people around him that ruin everything for us.

Luckily for the ruling class, the king’s advisors very much understood how their political system worked, and they realized that they could benefit from the peasants ignorance.

and So, they got the king to go out and pretend he was actually on the peasants side – kind of like when Trump gives a thumbs up to Q supporters at his rallies – and he made all their fantasies come true, telling them that he was going to implement all of their demands and even signing charters to that effect. The satisfied peasants went home with starts in their eyes, believing that a new era was about to begin.

Instead what began was a bloodbath, as the kings troops went after them a week later and slaughtered them in their beds in a massacre that lasted for several days.

And if you think today’s kids are bad get a load of mouth on 14 year old King Richard:

‘Serfs you have been and serfs you shall remain in bondage, not such as you

have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we

live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom we shall use our strength, sense and property to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity, and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you may always have before their eyes, as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.’

Now that is elite class consciousness.

So despite having a long term vision, having intelligent short term tacts, having tactical advantages and plans which were actually successful, the simple fact of not understanding the material interests of the King and knowing which side he would come down on, doomed the rebellion.

And this is one of the reasons I spent some time criticizing Graeber and Wengrow’s articles about hierarchy and equality last time, and the reason I’ll go into more detail criticizing that stuff in the upcoming QnA epsiode – because the underlying idealist thesis of the articles rob us of our ability to focus on the conditions and context that we struggle in. And this makes us more likely to make foolish mistakes like the peasants did, and like the occupy wall street people did in 2011, when they had all of this leverage, and public opinion on their side – and then they just blew it because they refused to make any demands based on some really silly theories rooted in a complete lack of understanding of how change is made and how politics works.

Aftermath: When Bargaining Power Works on Its Own

But there’s more to the story of the peasants. Despite being massacred, and despite the King’s promise to make life hell for them and their descendants for all eternity, life actually improved for the peasants over the next decades. Regardless of the hatred of the king and the nobility, the fact is that the material conditions that gave rise to the peasants increased power, the labour shortage, was still there, and thus the defeated peasants still had a natural bargaining advantage, even though they lost the extra advantage that they had gained by organizing and by their targeted attacks etc. So wages still went up, and grain dues and other onerous obligations kept going down.

And on top of that, by successfully organizing to the point of almost toppling the entire monarchy, the peasants put the fear of God in the elites that this could happen again if the peasants were provoked too hard.

So whereas one of the triggers of the rebellion was a poll tax, in 1382 a new poll tax was ordered by parliament, but this time for landowners only. In 1390 the attempts at maximum wage laws were abandoned.

And by 1430, villeinage which tied serfs to the lands of their particular lord was abolished.

So whereas the 1381 rebels screwed the pooch and let the king slaughter them, and their goal of a free republic of communes was crushed, they did nonetheless get a lot of what they wanted over time anyways.

Spanish Revolution

Now 550 years later ,another group of peasants together with urban workers had another uprising, with similar goals as the english peasants – overthrow the dominant elite, and establish an order of free communes with property held in common for the benefit of all.

In this case the dominant elites were urban business owners, rural landlords and the state whoch enforced their domination. And unlike the english peasants in 1381, these peasants and urban workers had a much better understanding of their political system – and as a result, their revolution was actually successful – at least for a time.

The anarchist revolution in spain which happened during the Spanish Civil War, from 1936–1939 was in my opinion one of the most important episodes in human history. Here, for the first time in the industrialized world, people successfully replaced the existing political, economic and cultural hierarchies of the day, with a system of radical democracy, economic equality, and even higgh degree of gender equality which is shocking given that spain in the 1930s was a traditional catholic patriarchial culture for elites and peasants and urban workers alike.

Whereas others has repeatedly failed, the spanish revolutionaries actually achieved the supposedly impossible dream of establishing a society run by its own people without capitalism, but also without an oppressive state power enforcing equality – in other words socialism without a state, i.e. libertarian socialism or libertarian communism.

And despite this, or rather because of it – it’s also one of the most neglected episodes of human history.

From the end of the war until the 1970s there was almost nothing published about it, in academia, popular journalism or popular literature. Even during the war, there wasn’t much discussion of it outside of Spain, though George Orwell who fought with one of the socialist militias wrote a book about it called Hommage to Catalonia.

Even today if you look up the Spanish Civil War you often won’t see the anarchist revolution mentioned at alp, or else it’s mentioned in passing. And unless you’re among the tiny percentage of people involved in anarachist or radical socialist politics, you probably don’t know anything about it.

In the cold war context you had capitalist political and economic inequality justified by the idea that the only alternative is soviet style dictatorship, and on the other side you had state socialist economies, justifying their dictatorships as the only was to avoid the economic, racial and gender and colonival inequalites of the capitalist world.

And so you didn’t have many people in the private for profit capitalist media or the communist party state controlled media eager to let people know that the foundational basis for their respective oppressive economic and political systems was simply not true – that it was actually possible to have freedom and euLity at the same time

Now, in spain, libertarian socialists, also known as anarchists, had been proselytizing and organizing workers and peasants since the 1870s. And unlike Marxist socialism, which mostly appealed to urban intellectuals and urban labourers rather than peasants, as marxists tended to see peasants as a backwards anti-revolutionary force, the libertarian wing of socialism had massive support among peasants and wage workers alike. And while there were urban intellectual in the anarchist movement, they didn’t dominate the it the way they tended to do in marxist parties.

One of the big material reasons for the popularity of anarchist socialism among spanish peasants, was that unlike in other countries, where peasants were small landholders, spanish agricultural land was still organized into latifundia, a holdover from ancient roman times where a powerful aristocrat owned huge swathes of land worked by tenant farmers.

So in marxist terms, spanish peasants were like a rural proletariat – meaning people who owned nothing but their labour and some personal possessions, and who would have the least to lose and the most to gain from a re-organization of society along socialist lines.

By the early 20^th Century, anarchists had become the leading force in the labour movement in many parts of the country, and had organized massive labour unions with millions of members, which not only organized urban workers, but also peasants.

Unlike the types of labour unions that we’re familliar with today, whose ambitions are limited to fighting for more workers rights and higher wages, these libertarian socialist or anarchist unions did that stuff, but they also had the long term goal of taking over industry and society entirely – to replace capitalist owners and the state at the same time, and have workers and farmers run society in a directly democratic fashion – a form of government called anarcho-syndicalism.

And ironically, even though your bolshevik leninist types love to criticize anarchism for not believing in organization, an anarcho-syndicalist union, is a bit like a leninist party, except that it’s run from the bottom up, not the top down, and it’s also an actual labour organization, not just a party aimed at seizing the state.

In 1931 the King of Spain authorized democratic elections to decide the next government , and voters overwhelmingly chose republican and moderate socialist parties that wanted to get rid of the monarchy and establish a republic. Then in 1936 a leftist coalition was elected to govt, and in response, right wing army officers led by Francisco Franco orchestrated a coup to restore power to traditional spanish elites, landlords, the church and large business owners.

The coup succeeded in the more conservative parts of Spain, but in the rest of the country, democratic capitalists, socialists and anarchists managed to stymie the conservative takeover. And they formed a coalition, usually referred to as the Republican side of the Spanish civil war. but calling it the republican side was a misnomer as the anarchists were not interested in establishing a republic. They wanted a federation of self governing communes, much like the peasants of 1381.

And just like the peasants in 1381 who took advantage of the fact that the english army was away in france, the spanish anarchist organizations, took advantage of the failed fascist coup, of the civil war and the loss of legitimacy and authority of the spanish state to launch their revolution.

Workers in cities launched strikes and seized factories of fascist supporting owners who fled, or who had been assassinated or exiled. In these newly worker controlled enterprises, workers elected their management, and had meetings to set their own hours and wages and prices. And because there wasn’t someone sucking out profit at the top, they were generally able to lower their work hours, raise their wages and lower prices all at the same time – and this is quite often the case when privately owned businesses become workers cooperatives – you can see a movie from 2004 called the Take where argentinian workers took over factories abandoned by their owners and had similar results.

Anyhow, spanish tenant farmers did the same in agricultural lands, confiscating and redistributing the land of aristocrats to all the landless farmers and collectivizing them into communes. Farmers who wanted to own their new land individually were allowed to, so long as they didn’t employ wage labour as abolishing any form of dependent labour is suppsoed to be the whole point of socialism. However very few people chose individual ownership as the coops and communes offered huge advantages of labour and resource sharing.

In this way workers and peasants managed to directly take control of about 50% of the lands inside the republican zone of spain, with 7 million people taking part in self government, going up to 75% in region of catalonia which includes the major city of barcelona where workrs ran most of industry, from unions of small barbershops and bakers to textiles factories, machinery factories, right up to the telecommunications system, trains and ambulances.

And whereas state socialist governments like the soviet union often had the cities practically declaring war on the peasants, in Spain cities and urban areas cooperated together via their unions and other anarchist organizations. These organizations also formed collectively owned and controlled banks where all these communes, cooperatives and collectives pooled their money and withdrew resources from eachother in the form of products and services or bought supplies from abroad with cash.

They implemented welfare benefits for the first time, like unemployment and sickness insurance, and they distributed goods and services to workers and families based on hours worked or according to need for those who couldn’t work, and in some agricultural areas, even just on demand.

At first production ran into some chaos as workers didn’t have experience managing themselves or doing their bookeeping. Meanwhile some wealthier collectivized workplaces were acting based on their individual interests, like for profit cooperatives do in capitalism – however, workers quickly learned how to manage themselves, and within a few weeks, industries were cooperating with eachother via the broader anarchist organizations and operating based on the needs of the whole society not just the individual communes in competition with eachother.

As time went on, more and more shops, factories and entire industries were collectivized with more experienced workers teaching the newly collectivized ones management and bookeeping. Workers and owners of small shops like bakeries and other small businesses often voluntarily dissolved their businesses into wider production facilities to increase production, revenue and working conditions. Within a few months industrial productivity had doubled almost everywhere that anarchists were in control, and agricultural production had increased by 30–50%.

And anarchist self government wasn’t just limited to the workplace or farm or economic sohere. Local, regional and federal deliberative bodies were formed where people could speak and vote and formulate general policy. Decision from lower bodies went up to an executive whose job was to put intomaction what the lower bodies wanted them to do. Kind of like occupy wall street, but actually making demands and doing things instead of just masturbating.

And to defend their revolution from the fascist forces trying to restore the traditional order, they formed armed miliatias, which were also run along socialist demorcatic principles. Soldiers elected their commanders who had authority, but were subject to recall by their subordinates Men and women fought together or in separate units. Women even commanded some units – again huge for a society like spain in the 1930s.

Despite lack of experience and a serious lack of resources – for example these militias initially lacked basics like functioning rifles – they turned out to be an effective fighting force, to the shock of their own allies on the republican side.

This revolutionary socialist state of affairs continued with increasing success in different parts of the country for about 9 months to 3 years.

Ultimately however, the republican side lost the civil war and Franco became dictator of Spain until he died 1975.

But it wasn’t Franco’s forces that ended the anarchist revolution – ironically it was the supposed communists on the republican side which who were controlled by the soviet union who squelched the revolution in exchange for soviet aid and weapons.

Why would they do this? In theory, the anarchists were accomplishing all the goals that the Soviet Union was aiming for. The theoretical justification for the dominance of the communist party of the USSR was that it was supposed to guide the country through industrialization to increase productive capacity enough so that there would be enough material plenty for communism to exist – and once that happens, the state is supposed to become obsolete and you just have a world of freely associating communes and cooperatives. And this is exactly what the anarchists were putting into practice directly, without having to go through any intermediary dictatorship phase.

But of course, the fact that the anarchists were putting worker controlled socialism directly into practice demorctically without any party or bureaucratic dictatorship was as an existential threat to the Soviet elite, and therefore the anarchists socialism could not be tolerated.

And because the anarchists and other anti fascit forces did not have the necessary resources to win the war alone, they had to accept to be in a coalition with the spanish communists, who more and more dominated the republican side which became increasingly dependent on soviet assistance to fight the war. Over time more and more anarchist zones had to give in to communist demands to dismantle the agricultural communes, to return control of workplaces to their former owners, or else to submit to government appointed bosses and managers and to subject formerly anarchist zones to top down government control.

And so the communists ironically dismantled the entire socialist project, in the same of socialism. Some anarchists wanted to fight the communists, but this would have led to the quick collapse of the republican alliance, and basically the anarchists just weren’t in a bargaining position to refuse.

As a result of their democracy being dismantled, the anarchist soldiers, workers and peasants lost their zeal, dedication and emotional investment in the war effort. despite being better equipped, production slowed and acts of military bravery were less forthcoming. some historians argue that this was a major cause of the republican loss.

Either way, for the soviets who controlled the republican coalition, it was better to lose spain than for the anarchism to become a potential successful model for socialism around the world.

Wrap Up

OK, so in the past few episodes, we’ve seen that the different situations that people find ourselves in – material, environmental, practical – result in different people having different levels of bargaining power, which results in hierarchical or egalitarian societies – and in this episode we saw what type of conditions are more conducive or less conducive for human agency and to large scale social change. When conditions change quickly or frequently the potential balance of power often shifts without people knowing it, and with knowledge and organizing people can join together to moderate or even eliminate existing hierarchies.

In the next episode we’re going to look at one of the main forces of dominance hierarchy in our world today, and that is the particular regime of property rights which is enforced to varying degrees by all states in the capitalist world – because it’s the simple fact that one person can own or control resources that other people depend on to live, that makes dominance hierarchy possible in the first place. So we’ll look at different concepts of property in different societies across the world and across history, and compare them to the regime of property rights that we live under today, which is like the moral foundation of our economic system, and which is so deeply ingrained in our culture and in our minds, that most of us can’t even imagine a different concept of property.

But before I do the What is Property episode, I’ll be doing a big long QnA episode to cover everything we’ve talked about up until now, plus I’ll be doing short TLDR versions of each episode so that you can refer to them as a refresher or for you to send to family or friends that you might be fruitlessly arguing with over the internet or to introduce busy people to the concepts we’ve been talking about.

And I think I’m going to start an anthropology reading series, and start doing some interviews and fun conversations as well.

And cool news – I will be doing an interview on one of my favourite political podcasts, From Alpha to Omega very soon, so if you want to hear me live unscripted and unhinged, do check that out, and check out the archives of that show because there’s so much good stuff in there, including a recent interview with anthropologist Christ Knight who was talking about some of the same hunter-gatherer stuff I’ve been discussing and making similar critiques of David Graeber’s work on equality.

And I’m also going to be doing co interviews with the Fight Like an Animal podcast in the not too distant future, who’s approaching some of the same problems and topics we’re talking about here, but from a different angle, and it’s really a wonderful podcast also in my top favourites so definitely check out the back catalogue of that – the first few episodes cover some similar anthropology ground, and the show is full of great stories and original perspectives.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, critiques, corrections or comments, send them to worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com or post them on the youtube videos and most likely I will answer you.

And if this podcast makes you feel your galaxy brain glowing and burning away all the gunk in your head, please, please, please share this with your friends and social networks, and if you know anyone who has a podcast and might give me a shout out, let them know about this show – and rate and review it on urple podcats because it helps more people find it, and if you can afford to, please subscribe to the What is Politics Patreon so I can be able to take the time to keep doing this.

Because it usually takes me so long to produce and epsisode I’m currently charging per episode not per month, and you won’t get charged more than 12x a year maximum.

And until next time, seeya!

9. The Real Cancel Culture is At-Will Employment

The foundation of “cancel culture” and “political correctness” is the wage labour employment contract.

Articles Quoted

Corey Robin, Chris Bertram and Alex Gourevitch 2012 – Life at Work, Crooked Timber

Amanda Hess 2013 – How Sexy Should A Worker Be? The Plight of the Babe in the American Workplace, Slate

Yvonne Abraham 2015 – Tom Brady has more rights than most American workers, Boston Globe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyAnOMTY2Lo

Transcript

So, earlier I defined cancel culture as appeal to authority, usually an employer or an administration to fire someone for saying things that we don’t like or that the employer doesn’t like

and I define political correctness as censoring oneself for fear of facing the punishments and firings of the authorities or of some other person who will appeal to the authorities and all of the rules around the things that we can or can’t say.

and I pointed out that these are right wing phenomenon in the sense that the right wing is about by definition political hierarchy, decision making, hierarchy and all of this stuff is about the hierarchy of the workplace, the owner firing you for doing or saying things that they don’t like.

and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using a right wing excuse or a left wing excuse, this cancel culture is a right wing phenomenon, just like in the Soviet Union, you had people running around rape, waving red flags and touting Karl Marx’s beards and using all these socialist terms. But they were using all of these symbols and ideas and words to prop up a hierarchical elite. The ruling class, which by definition is a right wing political order.

Now I want to get at the heart of cancel. Culture, what is the root cause what is the origin... the foundation of Cancel Culture and in our society, the root of cancel culture is the employment contract.

Now, in every historical era, in every political system. All political systems basically do the same thing. Whether they’re slavery, ancient despotisms, the Soviet Union, or feudalism, or capitalism, all these political systems are about minority of people owning and controlling resources that other people depend on to live, and because of that dependency relationship. The owner gets to tell the dependent people what to do.

Now, in ancient times, let’s say in feudalism, the justification for that would have been some religious justification, and today the justification is supposedly voluntary contracts. But contracts are only as voluntary as the parties are powerful. The more powerful you are, the more rights a contract will give you, and the more things you will get out of that contract and the less powerful you are, the more obligations you are going to render and the the more things you’re going to give away that you don’t want to give away. That is a dependency relationship, and that’s what an employment contract is.

Just think of the word employment to employ something is to use it. I employ a shovel to dig Earth. Just like an employer. A user uses an employee, a use-y, shovel profits. Think of your employer using you as a shovel to dig in the ground with your face to dig. Gold coins into their pocket.

What the powers are so good at doing is taking left wing sentiment. Egalitarian sentiment and poison-pilling it with ideas that turn into those sentiments into hierarchical practice. So, whereas employees should be joining together with each other against the authority. Of the boss. Instead, they are being divided up against each other, whether it’s with fake left wing messages about, oh, you said the wrong word, you need to be fired when it’s really about. I want your job. So I’m going to get. You fired, so I’m going to take your job. Where I just want to be terrorizing people because it’s fun and I like power.

And then on the right, you have well, we’re upset at George Soros and Bill Gates and Google because they have too much power. But instead of that sentiment equaling, well, let’s reduce their power. Let’s eliminate hierarchies of power. It just becomes about George Soros is putting Black Lives Matter or putting trans people in our bathrooms or blah blah blah, whatever, all this nonsense that is dividing us up against each other, these fake left wing messages and these right wing messages are dividing us up against each other instead of having us join together in solidarity against the powers that be.

So I want to focus our attention on the right place on the powers that be and whether we think we’re on the left or on the right. We don’t like cancel culture and I want to show you what the root. The foundation of cancer cultures and in our society, that is the employment contract.

So I’m going to read you this article from 2012 by Cory Robin, which is all about cancel culture.

On pain of being fired, workers in most parts of the United States can be commanded to pee or forbidden to pee. They can be watched on camera by their boss while they pee. They can be forbidden to wear what they want, say what they want (and at what decibel), and associate with whom they want. They can be punished for doing or not doing any of these things‘punished legally or illegally (as many as 1 in 17 workers who try to join a union is illegally fired or suspended). But what’s remarkable is just how many of these punishments are legal, and even when they’re illegal, how toothless the law can be. Outside the usual protections (against race and gender discrimination, for example), employees can be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. They can be fired for donating a kidney to their boss (fired by the same boss, that is), refusing to have their person and effects searched, calling the boss a “cheapskate” in a personal letter, and more. They have few rights on the job’certainly none of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendment liberties that constitute the bare minimum of a free society; thus, no free speech or assembly, no due process, no right to a fair hearing before a panel of their peers’and what rights they do have employers will fight tooth and nail to make sure aren’t made known to them or will simply require them to waive as a condition of employment. Outside the prison or the military’which actually provide, at least on paper, some guarantee of due process’it’s difficult to conceive of a less free institution for adults than the average workplace. …
In addition to abridging freedoms on the job, employers abridge their employees’ freedoms off the job. Employers invade employees’ privacy, demanding that they hand over passwords to their Facebook accounts, and fire them for resisting such invasions. Employers secretly film their employees at home. Workers are fired for supporting the wrong political candidates (“work for John Kerry or work for me”), failing to donate to employer-approved candidates, challenging government officials, writing critiques of religion on their personal blogs (IBM instructs employees to “show proper considerationâ€¦for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory’such as politics and religion”), carrying on extramarital affairs, participating in group sex at home, cross-dressing, and more. Workers are punished for smoking or drinking in the privacy of their own homes. (How many nanny states have tried that?)

So think about that for all the dictatorial power of Stalin in the Soviet Union. And they enslaved lots of people and murder. Lots of people. Nobody was forbidden to drink or smoke in the privacy of their own home. But if you’re desperate enough and you sign a contract to the effect, you can effectively be forbidden to drink or smoke in your own home, under pain, under threat of being fired.

They can be fired for merely thinking about having an abortion, for reporting information that might have averted the Challenger disaster, for being raped by an estranged husband. Again, this is all legal in many states, and in the states where it is illegal, the laws are often weak....While employers often abridge workers’ liberty off the job, at certain moments, those abridgments assume a larger function for the state. Particularly in a liberal state constrained by constitutional protections such as the First Amendment, the instruments of coercion can be outsourced to’or shared with’the private sector. During the McCarthy period, for example ...

And if you think about it, that was the OG cancel culture era. Right at that time, as people who are saying or thinking left wing things were under threat and constant fear of being fired. So political correctness and cancel culture were reigning supreme in the McCarthy era, much more so than today. And at that time it was explicitly a right wing affair, whereas today it’s a right wing affair, but disguised as a left wing affair. You can also see explicitly right wing cancel culture. Remember, in the lead up to the Iraq War, Phil Donahue literally got cancelled even though his was the most popular show in its timeslot because he kept bringing on too many anti Iraq war people and the Dixie Chicks band got cancelled, they couldn’t perform anywhere because they came out as against the war.

In the McCarthy period, for example, fewer than 200 men and women went to jail for their political beliefs, but as many as 40% of American workers’ in both the public and private sectors’ were investigated (and a smaller percentage punished) for their beliefs.

In his magisterial history of Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois noted that “the decisive influence” in suppressing the political agency of ex-slaves after the Civil War “was the systematic and overwhelming economic pressure” to which they were subjected. Though mindful of the tremendous violence, public and private, visited upon African Americans, DuBois also saw that much of the repression occurred in and through the workplace.

Negroes who wanted work must not dabble in politics. Negroes who wanted to increase their income must not agitate the Negro problem. Positions of influence were only open to those Negroes who were certified as being “safe and sane,” and their careers were closely scrutinized and passed upon. From 1880 onward, in order to earn a living, the American Negro was compelled to give up his political power.

Now, that’s not just in the 1880s. That’s today. Anyone who has worked as a server or in a restaurant knows that if you sue your boss for anything. You will go on an unofficial blacklist that employers in this industry pass on to each other, and you will have a hard time ever getting hired again. That’s why employment law is often just fancy toilet paper. The same thing for tenants. If you’re in a tight market, landlords get really picky and they will often look. At the case law and see if you ever sued your landlord for anything, even if you’re completely in the right and the court awarded you whatever they awarded you. A lot of landlords like, oh, I don’t want of these troublemakers. This is why it’s so important to think about the definitions, the way that I’ve been giving them. That’s why in my definition. Is any person or body of people who make and enforce rules because there’s the public government, the state. But there’s also the private government, your boss, your landlord. It’s private because those rules only apply to you if you’ve entered into some kind of contractual relationship with them. But they exercise all the functions. And more of government. And there aren’t the same constitutional constraints on these governments that there are on the public government, even though they often can decide whether we eat or. Starve, so cancel culture is not about whether you’re saying right wing or left wing stuff. It’s about whether you are crossing the boss. The person with the illegitimate power, what makes the private sector, especially the workplace, such an attractive instrument of repression is precisely that it can administer punishments without being subject to the constraints of the bill. Of rights, it is an archipelago of private governments in which employers are free to do precisely what the state is forbidden to do, punish without process the owner of property is the dictator over that property according to the rules of contract of capitalism. Far from providing a check against the state, the private sector can easily become an adjutant of the state adjutant. That sounds anti-Semitic if you ask me. Not through some process of liberal corporatism, but simply because employers often share the goals of state officials and are better positioned to act upon them. So there’s no conspiracy. It’s just that people in power. Tend to have the same. Interests. But people in positions of private power are free to act on those interests, while the state is constrained because the state has some democratic input. Your employment contract, which is the Constitution and the laws that govern your private relationship with your power structure, reflects only. The bargaining power between you and your employer now, this is another article,

an Iowa court found that a dentist was within his rights to fire a longtime dental assistant he deemed sexually “irresistible,” because her existence in his office constituted a threat to his marriage.

So. You look a certain way. You’ve been working at a place 1015 years and your boss is having trouble in his marriage and he’s too childish to just go jerk off in the the bathroom. That’s not his problem. That’s your problem. You’re now fired and you have to figure out how you’re gonna pay the rent and where you’re gonna work. And you have to explain this story somehow to your prospective employers who are gonna be suspicious about why you are out of a job. And in the ideology of capitalism, it’s all about the supposedly voluntary. Contract, but any of us who have worked in low wage work knows that there isn’t very much that’s voluntary about this. But you see that this ideology reigns supreme in the people with the power, because when they sign contracts, usually it is. Voluntary when 2. Equal people people have equal power sign a contract. Usually both of them are getting something that they want. So they like contracts. So here’s an article from Slate

In at Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, cocktail waitresses are not just drink servers. They are, in the opinion of New Jersey judge Nelson Johnson, “sex objects.” The casino calls its waitresses the “Borgata Babes.” ... 22 of these babes lost a lawsuit against the casino. They had alleged that the Borgata discriminated against them based on both weight and sex.

So if you when you signed a contract to work at this place, you signed a clause that said if you gain more than 7% of your original body weight like they weigh you in like a cattle, and if you gain more than 7% of your body weight. You’ll be suspended without pay until you lose the weight, and in one case there was a woman who had some kind of medical condition and she had to take. Some drugs and as a result, she gained some weight and then she got suspended without pay, which means she couldn’t afford her insurance or her healthcare. So these women were suing and

Male servers at the Borgata, they said, are not judged on their babeliness, or their poundage. But Judge Johnson found that the Borgata’s requirements were legal because the babe label was applied to a waitress with “that person’s participation.” He wrote, “Plaintiffs cannot shed the label ‘babe’; they embraced it when they went to work for the Borgata.”

Now that is some dumb-ass capitalist ideology right there, and that is class right? Judges in Canada where I am, 70% of judges come from either corporate law or the prosecutor’s office. So these people are people who have been making. 50 Sixty $70,000 a year and up since they were 22. Years old. So these people know nothing of what it’s like to be a server or sign a contract. Out of desperation, these people always are looking forward to whatever job they have. And if they don’t like it, it’s just a stepping stone. You know, if you’re made to do some grunt work, well, that’s just my stepping stone to future status. And everything is always a step up for them.

So this judge, when he ever, whenever he. Went to go get a job somewhere. He wanted that status of working at this law firm, so he should be expected to accept the bad with the. Good. So he. Thinks that these women somehow wanted that the wonderful status of humiliating themselves and being a Borgata babe because he has never worked at a shit job in his life and that is class, rich people, upper middle class people think that poor people are just rich in upper middle class people without fancy stuff. They do not have the experience to know the life that you lead and the difficulties that you have. They just don’t have that experience. So when you face the system, when you see the judges, when you see the employers, when you see the police, the people in authority, these are people who are making decisions about and for people they have no knowledge about and situations that they know nothing about. They have learned the theory in books and they apply that theory even though it flies in the face of reality and anyone who hears this who has worked a server job would laugh and cry and throw up at hearing this, but to Mr. Weiner Johnson, that just makes perfect sense, they wanted to be Borgata babes.

Now here’s one more article about Corey Robin or using the work of Corey Robin from the Boston Globe.

Here’s a short list of reasons you can be fired, put together by Brooklyn College Professor Corey Robin: “not smiling at work, smiling too much; not being friendly to my coworkers, being too friendly; demonstrating insufficient initiative, not being a team player; kowtowing to management, being insubordinate; being a leader, being a follower; braiding my hair in corn rows, wearing it straight; wearing long pants, wearing short pants; sporting an earring, refusing to do so; having a beard, shaving it off; fingernails too long, fingernails too short.”

Basically, the boss has too much power. It’s illegitimate power. Now we’re going to get into these. The morality, or lack thereof. In the contract relationship in capitalism in. The future but. If you don’t like cancel culture and you want it to stop, you should focus your attention on the employer employee relationship, the right of the employer to decide whether you get to eat or not, whether you can pay your rent or not based on whatever stupid idiotic thing comes into their head.

9.1. Cancel Culture is Corporate Management Culture

The terms “cancel culture” and “political correctness” are used to delegitimize ideas like gender equality and racial equality by conflating them with toxic dominance behaviour practiced by up-and-coming elites who disguise their power plays in egalitarian social justice language.

In this segment, by seeking to properly define these terms, we look at:

The Class Filter: How Ideas That Are a Threat to Power Historically Get Mutated Into Tools of Power Once They Pass Through Elite Institutions, in This Case Ivy League Universities, and Corporate Hr Departments.
The Interloper Left: How Elites and Aspiring Elites (Who by Definition Are Right-wing Actors) Will Disguise Dominance Behaviour in Egalitarian Language in Order to Gain Legitimacy and Prestige in Democratic Societies.
Poison/sugar Pilling: How Elites Will De-legitimize Popular Ideas Which Are a Threat to Power by Conflating Them With Unpopular Ideas, and How They Will Convince People to Accept Things They Don’t Like by Associating Them With Popular Terms.

How egalitarian language and ill conceived “anti-racism” trainings like “White Fragility” are being used in the corporate world to divide workers and prevent them from banding together in defence of their rights.

How to spot some of the red flags that distinguish movements rooted in equality and solidarity from toxic “cancel culture” and “political correctness” power plays.

archive.org/download/SPITBALL02/02%20-%20CANCEL%20CULTURE%20IS%20YOUR%20MANAGER.mp3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuqmM0wpANs

Script

Ey-o river! welcome to another episode of What is Politics.

Recently I did a segment, where I talked a bit about the relationship between cancel culture and at-will employment, and how what makes cancel culture something that actually matters at least in the United States – is that in 49 of those states, employers are allowed to fire anyone for almost any reason, including for no reason at all – having the wrong political opinion, having the wrong kind of sex at home, being too attractive, not being attractive enough, all these things get a pass in the american legal system.

And on top of this, in an economy where the ultimate purpose of an enterprise is to benefit the employer, there’s every reason for an employer to fire an employee who is being unfairly targeted by false rumours or by a defamation campaign, even when the employer knows that the employee didn’t do anything wrong, even when the employer agrees with the employee – even when the employee is the employer’s daughter. And always keep in mind that word employee literally means human tool.

And actually a couple of weeks after my video came out, Jacobin put out an article called “at will employment is the real cancel culture” which is a great article – so you’re welcome jacobin.

Anyhow in that segment I defined cancel culture as the the habit of appealing to authorities, usually employers, to get people fired for saying things that some people don’t like.

Now several people pointed out that this definition is too narrow – getting people fired or banned from performing is an important aspect of cancel culture, but there’s a whole other aspect that doesn’t involve employers or authorities at all – where the punishment is limited to social ostracism and defamation, which happens more in peer groups and social media.

So cancel culture is distinct from at will employment and from the owner centred economy but those are the extremely powerful tools that people are using more and more in order to enact the punishments of so-called cancel culture.

Now there have been some debates among people who think they’re on the political left about whether cancel culture is real, or if it’s just a right wing smear used to discredit ideas like anti-racism, or if it’s a minor phenomenon being exaggerated for political purposes.

But now that the social justice language associated with cancel culture is becoming a standard feature of corporate HR culture, with prominent companies like Disney and Google using social justice reasons as excuses to fire people, that means that it’s going to start affecting tens of millions of workers, which to me means that it is something worth talking about.

Now the whole debate about whether cancel culture is real or if it’s just a smear is a matter of definition. It’s both real and an invented boogeyman smear. And in figuring out how to properly define cancel culture, and the related concept of political correctness, we can separate what’s real from what isn’t and get a whole lot of political insights in the process, that apply way beyond the idea of cancel culture.

So in this series of spitball segments, what I want to do is throw around some ideas about how cancel culture should be defined, about whose interests it serves and how it fits into a historical context of similar phenomena, so that we can derive some political principles that you can use to analyze all sorts of political and historical situations, past, present and future.

You’re going to hear me criticize academia a lot in these segments, but, one thing I learned in academia which was really great is that when presenting a paper or a thesis, you want to give away your punchline first, that way the reader or listener doesn’t get lost if they drift off for a moment, which is also great advice for podcasters.

So, in what follows I’m going to be arguing that Cancel Culture and Political Correctness are right wing political tools in a left wing disguise, meaning that they are tools for reinforcing hierarchy and domination, but using the language and pretence of seeking equality. Remember from episodes 3 4 and 5 that left and right refer to equality and hierarchy and go check those episodes out if you want to understand what I mean, because you might get confusing if that isn’t clear in your head.

And I’m going to try to put this in a historical context – how since the dawn of the era of representative democracy, people in power have been using egalitarian left wing language to bolster hierarchical regimes, and you can see that in the justifications for colonialism in the 19^th century, and you see it in the 20^th century with the rise of the supposedly communist regimes – and you even have a sort of version of it in the roman republic.

And I call this whole phenomenon the fake left.

And I’m going to argue that Cancel Culture and Political Correctness are toxic bizarro mirror universe versions of good ideas like racial equality, and gender equality, and that these toxic phenomena are an example of what happens when you have ideas that are a threat to power which then they get filtered through the institutions of power – in this case elite academia, which is basically a training ground for the next generation of elite managers, professionals and journalists – where ideas that threaten power then get mutated into ideas that serve the needs and aspirations of people in power.

And I call this phenomenon class selection, and the class filter.

And I’m going to argue that these toxic ideas and practices are not just misguided tools for fighting racism or sexism, which they are in part – but they’re also management tools, tools which are useful to dominate and discipline workers and also to discipline the elite professionals and managers who wield these tools, while enhancing their power and prestige of these managers. And while the term cancel culture is new, there’s nothing new about these techniques – they’re the same one that hierarchical institutions have used for thousands of years, whether it’s the medieval catholic church, modern day cults or 20^th century ruling communist parties.

Further, I’ll be arguing that these are also tools that are being increasingly used in recent years to fight off any drives for economic or political equality, and that these tools are ultimately perpetuating the things they claim to fight – racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia etc.

So this is a lot to get into it and see what happens … let the cartoon begin:

Defining Cancel Culture

So if we want to talk intelligently about something, first we need to define what it is we’re talking about. So we need to figure out how to define Cancel Culture and Political Correctness.

And as you can already see from how I’ve been talking, I’ve been implicitly defining these terms in entirely negative ways. And I’m doing this for two reasons.

First, those terms already have very negative connotations for most people – like nobody actually says that they practice cancel culture or political correctness.

And the other reason is that these terms deliberately conflate two different ideas that are mirror universe versions of eachother and which do not belong together in the same term.

So I want to use the terms cancel culture and political correctness to describe the negative evil mirror universe ideas, and I want to use different terms for the positive versions so that we can keep them separated in our minds and undo the ideological garbage that is done by conflating them together.

Sugar Coated Poison Pills

Historically a trick of people in power who want to maintain and enhance their power – is to take positive ideas that are very popular but that are a threat to power, and then to lump them together with ideas that nobody likes. That way, the popular idea gets delegitimized and destroyed by being associated with the negative idea. I call this poison pilling.

And conversely they also take a word that has positive connotations, and then they slip in a poison idea into it order to trick you into swallowing the poison idea in a nice candy coating, in order to give it legitimacy, which I call sugar pilling

A historical example of both poison pilling and sugar pilling can be found in the use and abuse of the word socialism by capitalist regimes and communist regimes in the 20^th century. Socialism means different things at different times and places, but at one point the word socialism was very much associated with the idea of worker control of workplaces, of the economy and of political life. Marx called it “the free association of the producers.” And in general the idea of workers controlling their workplaces was and still is pretty popular.

But after the bolshevik revolution ended up turning in a dictatorship, you had two things happening at once. In the capitalist countries, they poison pilled the word socialism by associating it with the idea of dictatorship and total government control of the workplace and of the economy and politics – which is an idea that most people hate – in order to kill off the idea of workers directly controlling their workplaces and the economy – which is an idea that most people like but that the business owners who run western economies hate.

Meanwhile in the soviet union and in europe, where the word socialism had built up enormous prestige, and where there was a ruling communist party in the USSR and there were many socialist politicians in parliaments in europe, socialist intellectuals began to use the word socialism to mean a transitionary stage between capitalism and actual worker control (which was now called communism). And in this transitional stage, “all citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state” which is how Lenin describes it in his book state and revolution just before his party takes power – and which is the first time we find this new definition of the word socialist, and we’ll talk about this in the future.

Now the entire population becoming employees of the state is idea that most people don’t like, but you can get people to swallow that if you put it in a sugar pill and call it socialism and say that it’s just a transition towards worker control.

Similarly in the west we sugar pill the institution of labour contracts, where one person gets to be a dictator over another all day, but coating it in terms like freedom of contract or the notion that contracts are inherently voluntary which you will learn in every law school and economics class, even though in reality most people hate their jobs and are just forced to do them so that they dont die.

Political Correctness

So back to political correctness, there are two ideas lumped up in that term which really don’t belong together.

On one hand you have the idea of using respectful language in the spirit of empathy and solidarity because you want to treat your fellow human beings with dignity and respect.

And on the other hand, you have the phenomenon of obnoxious language policing in the spirit of controlling and dominating people, and the practice censoring yourself because you’re terrified that a language police type person will humiliate you in public, or get you in trouble or fired – even though you don’t necessarily understand which things you’re supposed to say or not say or why.

In other words you have one phenomenon that’s about empathy, solidarity and equality, and is therefore a left wing phenomenon, and another phenomenon that’s about domination and control, and is therefore a right wing phenomenon, even though in the recent iteration of political correctness at least – egalitarian ideals are the excuse to exert that control.

And keep in mind that political correctness is historically most often a straight up right wing affair, with no left wing pretense – like in the 1950s for example, the things you’d get in trouble for was criticizing capitalism and sympathizing with socialism, or in the early 2000s people like Donahue or the Dixie Chicks were getting literally cancelled and banned for criticizing the Iraq War, and today you get professors fired or denied tenure for their positions on Israel Palestine politics, or you have Colin Kaepernick blacklisted for criticizing the police.

So we want different terms for these different concepts, respectful language vs imposing political conformity by fear. Since political correctness already has bad connotations for most people, let’s keep that term to describe imposing political conformity by fear and let’s use the term “respectful language” for … using respectful language.

Not only does this separate opposing ideas, but it’s is a political winner for respectful language. Like imagine someone going on an angry tirade against “respectful language”! You’d have to be a complete asshole.

Cancel Culture

When it comes to the definition of cancel culture, just like with Political Correctness we want to separate the toxic dominance ideas from the positive egalitarian ideas.

So on the one hand you have the idea of public backlash and public critiques when someone in a position of power or influence says or does something that a lot of people don’t like. Maybe people are booing them or boycotting their show or their speech, or writing critical or snarky comments on the tweeters.

And on the other hand, there’s the practice of purposefully disinterpreting and misrepresenting what someone did or said, purposefully exaggerating the damage or “harm” caused by the thing they did or said, or implying conscious intent to something someone said by accident or by ignorance, in order to humiliate them, or to get them fired, or to destroy them for whatever the reason – like taking out your rivals in your social group or at work, or increasing your own status, or just for the sad thrill of exercising power over others.

And on the one hand there’s publicly berating a wealthy and powerful, financially secure public figure who has a huge platform when they said or did something awful, or because they make a living saying and doing awful things, and on the other hand there’s publicly humiliating a regular person who may or may not have done or said something bad, and whose actions have almost no impact on the world, getting them fired and destroying their ability to get another job, like what happened to the janitor at Smith College.

Or on the one hand there’s exposing and shunning someone who actively and knowingly does horrible things like Bill Cosby, or like Richard Spencer, or someone who’s a local serial date rapist in your community, and you’re doing this because you want to prevent these people from doing more harm – or because they did something really horrible in the past and show no remorse for it.

And then on the other hand there’s digging up tweets or photos or video of someone who said or did something shitty or stupid 10 years ago, and wildly exaggerating the harm this this caused, and ignoring the fact that you’re now the one publicizing these long forgotten things to the world thereby spreading supposed harm like wild fire – and you’re actually trying to destroy that because you’re taking out a political rival, or a business competitor, or someone at your job that you don’t like or whose position you want, like what happened to that editor at Teen Vogue when someone dug up racist tweets that the new editor in chief made when she was 16 years old because they didn’t want to work with her, and workers in our society don’t get to choose who they work with.

So, we want to reserve one term, cancel culture for all of the behaviour that’s ultimately about enforcing power relations – whether it’s disproportionate punishment, defamation, terrorizing people without power for what they think, inventing or wildly exaggerating harm as an excuse to exact punishment, and whether you’re using egaltiarian pretenses, or just straight up saying don’t criticize the queen or burn the flag – and then we want different terms for public criticism, booing, defending ourselves from dangerous people.

Definitions

So with all this stuff in mind, I think we can give another shot at a definition to cancel culture as being:

The culture of exacting extreme punishments like firing, doxxing, public humiliation and social ostracism for violations of social and political norms that may or may not have been committed, and which have the primary effect of enforcing or establishing relations of power and dominance over the people under threat of cancellation, and this includes enhancing the status and prestige of the people exacting the punishment.

And Political Correctness is the set of rules that you’re not supposed to trasngress intentonally or unintentionally, and the self-censorship that people exercise for fear of being punished for those transgressions.

Now when the transgressions are transgressions of right wing norms, like firing supposed communist sympathizers in the mcarthy era, or cancelling Phil Donahue and the Dixie Chicks for not supporting war, or the blacklisting colin kaepernick for criticizing the police, it’s already inherent that the effect of punishment is to maintain relations of dominance of the powers that be – but when the transgressions are for violating left wing social norms which is what we’re most often talking about today, we can see that there is a fundamental hypocrisy there – where the justification or pretense is egalitarian, but the actual aim is dominance.

Red Flags

And if you’re wondering how we can tell the difference between real egalitarian behaviour and dominance behaviour in disguise, there are lots of red flags and clues.

Like is the action being taken going to improve the world in any way?

When you see things like immediate calls for firing and extreme punishment and excommunication for small and moderate offences, with a total absence of any constructive intervention aimed at teaching anyone anything, whether it’s teaching the person who supposedly said or did something bad why what they did is bad, or teaching the general public who might be inclined to agree with the person who’s being targeted, and there’s just no attempt at anything that might improve the supposed harm that the target of the punishment caused now or in the future, only punishment – that’s a big red flag that the goal is just terror and control and not gender or racial equality and solidarity.

When you out a local date rapist, or call for a professor who sexually harasses students to be fired, then you can claim you’re preventing more people from being raped and harassed. But if you’re calling for the firing of someone who made racist tweets when they were 15 years old, or an actress who said something stupid that 50% of americans believe without explaining what’s wrong with what she said, or a janitor whose actions were misinterpreted as racism by a student – who are you helping?

When someone who is supposedly against the prison incarceration system and for restorative justice practices when it comes to crimes – but then suddenly that same person believes in total spanish inquisition salem witch hunt practices when it comes to someone who said the wrong word or who has an ignorant opinion about something, that is a big red flag.

When a professor who says the n-word out loud while reading from a James Baldwin text or a Malcolm X essay because they want to teach the ideas of James Baldwin and Malcolm X as they were intended to be read – and those authors used that specific word and not another work for a reason – and then that person gets fired more quickly than a professor who sexually harasses their students because claims of sexual harassment at least get an investigation first – that is a big red flag that “preventing harm” is not the operating principle at work, that something else is going on.

When you’re trying to exact the same punishment and treatment on someone who made racist tweets in high school 10 or 15 years ago, as you do to a person who’s a serial date rapist, that is a huge red flag that what you’re doing isn’t about preventing harm – it’s about redefining everything as extreme harm so that you can justify having the power to exact punishment and destruction on anyone that you don’t like at any moment.

When extreme punishments like firing are enacted for transgressions of rules that most people don’t even understand without any in depth explanation or any “restorative justice” type of learning process, what you are doing is teaching the general public that if you have the wrong opinions you will be destroyed, and the result is the opposite of solidarity and fighting racism or sexism or transphobia – you’re just associating any talk of gender and racial equality and being respectful to our fellow human beings with fear. And that’s sure to generate more prejudice and bigotry, and of course it will be exploited to the hilt by politicians who are against things like racial and gender equality to foster as much resentment as possible.

As humans beings we know that there are rules in our society and in the various groups that we’re a part of, work school, religious places, friends. And we expect to know what the rules are and the reasons for them. And then we choose to obey them or not based on whether or not we agree and whether or not we want to deal with the consequences of not obeying.

And we need to be able to voice opinions that may sometimes be wrong or bad if we’re ever going to have the discussions necessary for us to be exposed to the counterarguments that might make us realize why those things are wrong and bad. And we all say and do stupid things at some point or another, or on a regular basis without realizing it.

We obviously want to live in a world where we can expect that when we say something stupid, someone will explain to us why that was stupid, and where we can have the chance to argue it thought and think it out, and also to just disagree. And if we decide to conform to some rule, then we should at least understand why that rule exists, whether we agree with it or not.

But if you only care about these issues as a means to power and control, then you don’t want any of this understanding or convincing – you just want obedience. Even better if people don’t understand the the rules – because they aren’t your equals, they don’t have a right to think or disagree, they’re your objects of control. That’s why the catholic church prevented translating the liturgy and bible into the local languages, you’re just supposed to obey, not understand!

And, if people don’t understands the rules then they will be censoring and policing everything they do or say 24–7 in case it might somehow violate one of these rules, and they’ll be keeping their heads down and in a constant state of stress.

You want smallest transgression to be equivalent to the biggest crime so that you can decide to punish to whatever degree you want for whatever your reasons are. You want everyone to be labled immediately as an active racist or sexist or transphobe rather than a person who thinks or says stupid things out of ignorance or who is just wrong on this or that issue. Just like in the right wing versions you want someone to fear immediately being labeled as a traitor to the nation or a communist, or a sinner or a witch.

You want everyone to be so busy being afraid of being the next target, and so narcissistically obsessed with how they appear in public, and being a bad person and afraid of being accused of sympathizing with the bad person that their critical judgment is just shut off and that they don’t notice how disproportionate and counterproductive everything you’re doing is.

And all this means that people will be afraid of eachother – afraid of getting cancelled, or targeted, or they’ll just be so afraid every time they meet a person from a different culture that they’re going to say something that will inadvertently get them in trouble, and the more afraid people are, the more divided they are, which means they won’t unite together against power, and that’s something that every power wants.

That’s why among all the different anti racist trainings out there, White Fragility is the most popular one with corporate managers, because it makes workers uncomfortable and afraid of eachother and it puts them in a state of constant self policing. That’s a comfortable state for management to have your employees in. If the employees do one of the anti racist trainings that builds solidarity and empathy, the employees might start uniting against the employer, and maybe they’ll start a union!

When we do an episode on animal politics we’ll see that alpha chimpanzees will sometimes just randomly lash out and attack another chimpanzee for no reason. And what this does is keeps everyone in a constant state of anxiety when they’re around, and it helps the alpha maintain his power and prevents other chimps from forming alliances against him. You have similar mechanisms in dictatorships where everyone is afraid of being denounced as a traitor to the regime.

And if the effect of your punishments are scaring people and sending them off to join some right wing or alt right circle, because people just naturally tend get the hell away from mobs who mindlessly destroy their lives and they tend to go towards those people who are criticizing the mobs who are trying to destroy their lives – then so much the better, you can claim that it proves that they were evil the whole time and that you were right to excommunicate them. Once a witch, always a witch! Wheee!

These are the mentalities and tools of maintaining dominance hierarchy – that’s why you see the exact same techniques used in dictatorships, religious cults, theocracies and in corporate management.

Which bring us to the idea of class selection and why good ideas like gender equality and race equality get morphed into bad ideas and why the bad version is so popular in a particular section of the upper middle class where they originate which we’ll talk about in the next segment of this cancel culture series.

In the meantime, let me know what you think of those definitions or of my reasoning here, you can write me at worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com or on the youtube comments, and I’ll usually write you bacl. Like, subscribe, gimme money on patreon – coming up soon I’m doing a line by line critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent articles on Hierarchy and Equality which are a prelude to their upcoming book The Dawn of Everything, but just before that I have an interview with Arnold Schroeder from Fight Like an Animal which was a lot of fun that I’ll be putting out next and Fight Like an Animal is a podcast you’ll want to check out, it has a lot of themes in common with this show – and then I have an episode which I think I’m gonna call “why you can’t eliminate patriarchy by just eliminating patriarchy” which on the one hand is a thought experiment about how even if you gave everyone pink pills and eliminated sexism and patriarchy from everyone’s hearts, you’d still end up with sexism and patriarchy after a generation or two unless you change the material conditions, but then I have a real historical example from that I just discovered which illustrates this nicely, and then we have What Is Property, which I’m really excited about because it’s so important! And I also recorded TLDR summary episodes of every episode if you want to share with your friends and family who don’t have time for long episodes, or for yourself, but I haven’t had time to edit them…

Oh after the next segment in this cancel culture series, I’ll looking a bit at the history of right wing ideologies of hierarchy and dominance, disguised in the language of left wing egalitarianism and freedom.

and Until then, seeya

9.2 – Equity, Equality and Lizard People

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 those hierarchies, but disguised in the language and symbols of rebellion 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 institutions to transform historical movements for racial and gender equality, which had previously been a threat to economic inequality — into movements that promote economic inequality disguised as social justice.

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 looking at them in the context of economic exploitation and economic competition for which the human propensity to discriminate evolved for in the first place.

Script

Hello fellow kids, and welcome back to What is Politics!

Today I want to do a little old school OG what is politics and talk about how political worbs – words with no proper consensus definitions, make us all stupid and easy to manipulate.

And a recent example of this is the worb “equity” which has almost entirely replaced the word “equality” in academia, and NGOs and activist organizations, as well as in corporate HR departments.

And in this episode, I’m going to argue that replacing the word “equality” with the much more vague concept of “equity” is largely a way of taking ideas that promote economic inequality and disguising them in the language and style of social justice – and that it’s also a way of keeping people of all races, genders and ethnicities divided in conflict and competition with one another, so that we can’t pose an effective challenge to the people in power.

In other words it is right wing politics disguised as left wing politics.

And what I want to do here is for people watching this, if you see yourself as being on the right, I want you to see that you probably have a lot of beliefs and ideas that are actually on the left. And if you’re on the left, I want to give you some tools to be able to recognize when right wing politics are masquerading as left wing politics, in the present, but also in the past, and in the future.

The Left

Now, since the before the political left had a name, it had always been pre-occupied with notions of equality. In fact that’s literally the defining characteristic of the left. From the emergence of the terms left and right in the wake of the French Revolution, up until the Cold War, the term “left” in politics represented those who strove for more equality, and the term “right” referred to those who believed in maintaining or expanding hierarchy.

And when we’re talking about politics, when we’re talking about left and right, we’re talking about hierarchy and equality of decision making power. In other words democracy on the left – where people in a group have an equal say in the decisions that affect the group – whether that group is the citizens of your state, or the workers in your workplace, vs autocracy on the right, where decision making power is determined by rank. King over nobility over serfs, General over captain over private, Boss over worker,.

The left in the french revolution of 1789 supported democracy, and the abolition of special ranks and the right supported the monarchy, and the preservation of special privileges for the nobility and the clergy.

And the slogan of the left in the french revolution was Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood – a slogan which was inspired in part by the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau.

Today, people often think that liberty and equality are antithetical – that they’re tradeoffs. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. But that’s a legacy of the cold war. Before that, those concepts were seen as a package that can only come together.

A few decades before the French revolution, Rousseau had pointed out that you can’t have liberty without equality. Liberty means being free to act without someone dominating you, and political equality means there are no ranks – everyone makes the decisions alone when those decisions affect you alone, and we make decisions together where those decisions affect us as a group, and we each have an equal voice in those group decisions.

Political hierarchy on the other hand is ranked decision making, where one person decides for the others without their consent. One person bosses another around, and you have to obey, or else you face dire consequences. Master over slaves. Captain over privates. Owner over employees. That is the opposite of liberty. You can only have liberty if you have political equality – equality of decisionmaking.

And Rousseau also noted that some degree of relative economic equality was necessary in order for liberty to exist. In Rousseau’s words, if we care about liberty, the we should “make the wealth-spread [meaning economic inequality] as small as you can; don’t allow rich men or beggars … no citizen should be so rich as to buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself”

Because if people are buying and selling eachother, or in our day and age renting eachother’s labour, then you will have one person bossing another person around all day – and that is the exact opposite of liberty and equality – and that’s true whether it’s slavery or serfdom or employment. And that’s why the early socialist movement was in part pre-occupied with abolishing the employer employee relationship. It was seen as a relationship of domination and exploitation – on the same spectrum as slavery and serfdom, but adapted to the era of contracts and capitalism.

So until the rise of the soviet union, and the supposedly “communist” states, freedom and political equality and economic equality were ideas that were inseparable on the left. And they still are today if the words right and left are to have any coherent meaning – except that for the most part, they don’t – because no one knows what they mean anymore.

After the russian revolution turned into an authoritarian political structure, the soviet union , needed to keep on claiming to represent the global left, in order to maintain its legitimacy – even though it had in reality abandoned both political equality and liberty.

And so, in order to justify its existence and to hold on to some pretence of socialism – which was very much a left wing ideology – the communist party in power had to shift the focus away from ideas of equality of power – and towards ideas of economic equality and equality between nations. And it justified the lack of political equality and liberty domestically by pointing to the fact that they were offering a degree of economic equality and security to their citizens, as well as national independence from the rich western countries. And 20^th century communism was basically an anti colonial movement before anything else.

And because of this shift, the idea of what the left and right meant became confused. And the elites in the capitalist west who were afraid of the appeal of socialism were very happy to participate in this confusion.

In particular, they loved the idea of liberty being completely divorced from equality. And in the new formulation, equality was depicted as the antithesis of liberty.

So the elites of the US and the USSR both sort of colluded to present us with this fake choice, and this re-defined fake political spectrum, where you could have supposedly “left wing” economic security imposed by an authoritarian state, at the price of liberty and democracy – or else you could have supposedly “right wing” freedom in a democratic society, but at the price of economic equality.

And you can see that freedom and democracy, which were staples of left wing ideology since the beginning, somehow ended up in the right wing camp in this garbledegook! And this is the false choice that we’re still presented with today – if anyone even bothers to pretend to talk about economic equality anymore.

But even with these garbled definitions, for more than 200 years, the left was always associated with equality of one sort or another – at first with political and economic equality, and then later, after the rise of the communist states, with equality of wealth.

Out With Equality, in With Equity

But now, over the last 10 years or so, we’ve seen important institutions, which are associated the with the left in the popular imagination – like non-profit NGOs and activist groups, and universities – these institutions have been phasing out the use of the term “equality” entirely and replacing it with the word “equity”.

Meanwhile the corporate world – which has always been the enemy of the left and of any sort of equality – has also taken a very keen and sudden interest in “equity,” particularly in their aptly named Human Resources departments – as if people are piles of coal to be shoveled into a giant steam engine.

Now because of all this equity talk, which is always invoked in terms of concern for social justice, you have this really weird political gobbledygook situation today where big mega corporations like disney and amazon – which are everything the traditional left has always hated – are somehow being associated with the “left”.

And this is a real gift to the right – because a lot of ordinary people hate those institutions, and they are actually right wing institutions par excellence – top down union busting hierarchical institutions, in terms of power and pay structure – and that’s true whether we’re talking about bible quoting chick fil-et or rainbow flag waving starbucks.

This nonsense has led to a situation where the terms left and right are now just completely meaningless, which robs us of an extremely important tool that we need to be able to analyze who’s on the side of equality of power, and who’s on the side of hierarchy of power.

Most media pundits and journalists today, use the terms left and right to just mean “woke” and “anti-woke” – and these are camps which pretend to be mortal enemies – when they’re actually two sides of the same coin. They both take legitimate ideas and concerns shared by many people, and then they turn them into idiotic nonsense which divides people up against each other by various cultural categories, in order to perpetuate economic inequality, thereby strengthening the various powers that be.

And I’ll explain what I mean by this in a second – but for now let’s get back to equity vs equality on the supposed left.

According to people who see themselves as concerned with social justice, equity is in and equality is out because equality is supposedly a failed and outdated ideal.

So where outdated, failed figures like Martin Luther King or Gandhi or the slavery abolitionists, or the Suffragettes talked about equality – all of the great political geniuses of today like Ronald McDonald, and Kamala Harris, and Ibram X Kendi, are talking about Equity.

And the reason that equality is supposed to be so passé is because equity is supposed to be much more fair than equality. And that’s literally what equity means. Fairness. Fairness and equity are synonyms.

And the reason equity is supposed to be so much more fair than equality, is that equity supposedly focuses on the results of a policy, while equality focuses more on the process.

And you have this famous meme that’s used everywhere to illustrate this for a mass audience – and in this meme you have three kids trying to watch a baseball game. And the kids are outside of the stadium behind a fence, so there’s the implication that they couldn’t afford to buy the tickets.

And the meme is two panels, and on the left panel it says “equality” and you see that each of the thee kids is standing on an equal sized crate to try to see the game over the fence. But the kids are all different heights so the shortest kid can’t see anything, even when he’s standing on the crate.

And then on the right, the caption says “equity” and the tall kid has no crate, the middle kid has one crate and the short kid has two crates, and now their heads are all at the same level so they can allv see the game … equally – with equality … which is funny because equality is supposed to be a bad thing according to this stuff – but equality is actually what the equity caption of the meme is showing – just a different kind of equality – but we’ll get back to that in a minute.

So, promoters of this concept of “equity” good “equality” bad, will explain their position by pointing to the fact that black people in the united states got legal equality by the mid 1960’s, but today, 60 yars later, black americans are still on the average poorer, in jail a lot more, they’re underrepresented in fancy universities, they get arrested more, they get longer sentences when they’re convicted for the same crimes with the same record as a white person – in other words, you still have a lot of inequality, and in particular economic inequality. Again equity seems to always be about equality – just a specific kind of equality.

And according to Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-racist, equity is when the results of a policy are equal in terms of racial proportions. If 15% of the united states is black people, then you have equity when 15% of CEOs are black, and 15% of the kids that get into Harvard are black, and 15% of the people in prison are black, and 15% of homeless people are black.

So that’s fairness according to Kendi and equity types, and that’s the liberal institutional view of equality vs. equity.

Now on the conservative side of things, conservatives tend not to like the words equality or equity, and people like Jordan Peterson make the exact opposite argument than the liberal equity types do – Peterson and others tell us that we should only care about the process being fair, not the results. What makes something fair is that the rules are fair, and that the best person comes out on top, and race and gender are irrelevant to this

Like if you’re running in a race, it defeats the entire purpose of a race to have everyone finish at the same time, the whole point of a race is that the best person should win, and that’s what a race is for: to see who’s the best.

And the real world analogy to that, is always ivy league college admissions or corporate hiring – where equity is now a giant buzzord.

And the idea on what’s now called the “right” is that so long as the rules for things like college admissions are fair, meaning that the same rules apply to everyone equally, then you’re getting the best, most talented, hardworking and qualified people to fill the leadership positions of tomorrow – and this benefits everyone.

After all – the whole point of the competition for admissions and hiring is to end up with the best doctors and lawyers, not for everyone to get a trophy so that we end up with mediocre doctors and lawyers to screw up everyone’s lives and tie your guttyworks all in a knot on accident.

So in the conservative view, what makes something fair / i.e.equitable – is precisely the process and not the outcome.

And conservatives like to talk about this in terms of equality – and it’s the only kind equality that they’re interested in – and it’s what they call “equality of opportunity”.

And equality of opportunity is an extremely misleading way of putting it, because even if the process itself is perfectly fair, the reality is that working class and poor people and even many middle class people have so many obstacles to being able to even think of competing to get into these schools, that it’s more like equality of opportunity for rich people – and we’ll look at some of those details of that in a bit.

It’s interesting to note though, that the conservatives who are against equity, are invoking fairness – i.e. equity, when it comes to process and results, while the people who are supposedly against equality and for equity, the liberals – are invoking equality of results as their definition of what equity is…

And this mishkebibble is a big red flag which tells us that these worbs are hiding what’s actually going on underneath the surface.

Argument

And what’s actually going on, is that we have two different methods for perpetuating economic inequality, targeted at two different types of people – people with liberal dispositions and people with conservative dispositions.

You have conservative messages which justify economic inequality by telling us that a fair process gives us fair results, while completely ignoring the fact that in a society like hours, the competition is rigged from the start in terms of who even gets a chance to compete at all.

And on the other side, the liberal messages perpetuate inequality by pretending that what makes the world unfair is not economic inequality – but having the wrong percentages of particular racial or gender groups at the top and bottom of the inequality pyamid. And what is fair is a world with the same economic inequality and homelessness, and skyrocketing rents, and disappearing middle class that we have now, but where the proportion of colours and genders and religions among the people in the ruling class and in the homeless population and all the ranks in between, are equal to their proportions in the population as a whole.

It’s Rainbow lipstick on a capitalist pig so to speak.

In other words, equity vs equality of opportunity isn’t a right vs left argument – it’s an argument between two types of right wingers – liberal right wingers vs conservative right wingers – who are arguing about how best to maintain the unfair and unequal hierarchies that we find in our society today.

And both these arguments, but especially the liberal arguments, are what I like to call “lizard people arguments.” And by that I don’t mean literal lizard people, but metaphorical lizard people. Persons of lizard. Like in those movies from the 80s V and They live. Lizard people are people pretending to be advocating for equality of power – meaning left wing ideas, the little guy – but they’re actually advocating for dominance hierarchies – for the boss, for the state, the king the landlord, the rich. They’re trying to get you to support things that you don’t want, by disguising them as something you do want.

Like chocolate covered cyanide pills. Or like an authoritarian one party state disguised as socialism, or like crusades and gold encrusted popes disguised as the teachings of Jesus.

Class Filter

There’s an age old phenomenon that’s that I call “the Class Filter” or “Lizardification” – Whenever you have ideas that are a threat to established power – things like Socialism, Christianity, and the various movements for equality between various gender, ethnic and racial groups of the 20^th and 21^st centuries – if these movements and ideas avoid getting crushed by the powers that be, they’ll often end up getting absorbed and re-interpreted by the institutions of established power, and then they come out the other end [plop] as something completely different – something that the elite classes are much more comfortable with.

Christianity starts out as the religion of communal poverty, turn the other cheek and throw the moneylenders out of the temple – but then, as it gets adopted by the Roman elite, and eventually the Roman Emperor Constantine and becomes the offical religion of the Empire, it turns into the religion of gold encrusted popes and military conquest, and crushing the serfs and of crusades.

Mid-19^th century socialism was all about abolishing the employee employer relationship, and giving workers control over government and industry, and of direct democracy – but then, as it passed through the parliaments of europe and then through the ruling bureaucratic elite of the soviet union and the other marxist leninist states – it quickly morphed into a bunch of shameful excuses for state control over workers.

And more recently, we had civil rights and black equality movements, and women’s liberation and gay liberation, trans rights – and these movements have had enormous successes in breaking down social hierarchies and making our society a much more equitable and human place to live than it had been before.

And in every case, the shift can be hard to notice at first, because the elite-friendly versions are still disguised in the language and symbols of the original movements that threatened power.

It’s like how the socialist slogan, “worker control of the means of production”, originally meant literal worker control over their workplaces and over government – but once it got through the halls of power, it ended up meaning “communist party control” over the means of production and of the workers.

Or how your nonbinary intersectional feminist boyfriend is actually just a manipulative abuse artist, who uses intersectional language and ideas so he can better manipulate women.

Now about the more recent movements for racial and gender equality – the ideas behind these movements very often came from ordinary people, from bottom-up social movements, and a lot of the queer and trans stuff in particular came from very poor, marginal people.

But once they went through the ivy league universities, which are full of rich kids and upper middle class professors – who have very different life experiences and concerns and interests than other people do – they’ve started to get transformed into a very different set of ideas – ideas that appeal to rich kids and upper middle class professors.

So we see that focus on economic inequality and class has been pushed more and more in to the background and replaced with an emphasis on the types of pre-occupations that rich people have – micro-agressions and obstacles to becoming a corporate VPs or CEO (lean in). The original optimistic emphasis on solidarity, and common humanity – which were central to all of these movements, turn into eternal divisions by race and gender and sexuality which can never and must never be bridged. Ideas about giving more voice to people who aren’t often heard, get transformed into everyone has to always stay in their lane and know their place, and everyone has to follow rigid rules about what you can say or how you can dress or what music you can play – as determined by… rich college kids. The idea of making spaces where everyone is comfortable, turns into spaces where no one is comfortable.

And when poor or working class people are discussed, they’re presented in the way that do-gooder rich people see them – as props to enhance the power of do gooder rich kids. They’re helpless innocent victims, who need do gooder rich people as allies and representatives, to protect the total victim who is too feeble to be asked to do any of the emotional labour of articulating their own ideas or opinions. And these great allies and representatives would shit their pants if they had to have any social interaction with any of the people they’re supposed to represent, outside of a patron client relationship.

And the aim is no longer a solidaristic world of equal people working and cooperationg together – it’s a world forever divided by impenetrable barriers that can never be bridged, they that can only be policed and managed – by the ivy league manager class.

And the replacement of the word Equality by the word Equity is part of this process of transformation from movements that threaten to change the system, into movements that entrench the existing system.

Etymology

So let’s look at the words equity and equality. Just by looking at them, you can see that they have the same root word. They both come from the ancient Latin word aequus [eykwus], meaning “even, plain, or just.” So even in ancient rome 2000 years ago, the concept of justice and fairness were linked with the concept of being even – i.e. equality – level playing field. And the concept of equality and fairness are deeply linked in our psyches probably since our origins as a species for reasons that we’ve explored a little bit in other episodes.

So equity inherently has within it this sort of implication of equality.

But equality of what? Because the thing is that equity and equality are both vague words, but equity is much more vague because at least equality makes you ask “equality of what?” which can give you a very precise answer that you can decide to agree or disagree with.

So for the kids in the meme with the boxes and the baseball game – both captions in that meme demonstrate equality – but it’s just equality of different things. On one caption you have equality of the size of the box – and on the other you have equality of ability to see the game.

So if the authorities in charge of access to baseball games tell you that their goal is “equality of box size”, most people would say “well that’s stupid, what’s the point of that, isn’t the point that everyone should be able to see the game?”. But if they say they’re aiming for “equal ability to see the game” then most people would say great, that’s fair, we support that. So equality is good or bad, depending on equality of what. But the benefit of the word is that it makes you ask “equality of what”.

On the other hand, if the authorities instead tell us that their goal is “equity in terms ability to see the game” – then that just means “fairness” – and that’s a great lizard person word because any normal person hearing that will just assume that it means everyone gets to see the game, whereas the actual decision-making authority might have a very different idea of what constitutes fairness.

Now think of the types of authorities that invoke equity and who actually control access to baseball games in real life: big corporations.

It’s actually very likely that the Department of Equitable Baseball Game Watching thinks that true fairness – true equity – is when if you can’t afford to go see the baseball game, then you shouldn’t be able to see the baseball game at all, and nobody gets any crates, and they build a higher fence so that no one can see anything no matter how many crates you stack! It’s fair so long as everyone has an equal opportunity to pay full price for a ticket without being discriminated against by race.

And that’s the lizard person beauty of a completely vague and ambiguous word like “equity”.

And the more you identify with the authorities invoking equity – like if you’re a liberal cosmopolitan type and so are they, or if you’re a southern conservative type and so are they – or if you’re black and so are they – the more you’ll trust them and you’ll assume that they mean the same thing that you’re imagining, and the more they can screw you over.

Legal Standards

The more vague a word is, the more power that the person using is grabbing for themselves.

And you can see examples of this principle wherever there is power.

In law for example – I’m a practicing lawyer, and I specialize in defending tenants against landlords. And in every legal system, you have some laws and particularly regulations that are very precise – and other laws that are a lot more ambiguous. And the more ambiguous a law is, the more there’s room for judges to fill in the blanks according to their own values or prejudices and ideas and life experiences. And since judges tend to overwhelmingly come from corporate or prosecutorial backgrounds, and where I live, they’re chosen by the governing political parties – they tend to think like people who work in corporations and as prosecutors and in governing political parties – i.e like the ruling class.

So for example there are speeding laws that say that if you go faster than 60 miles per hour in a 60 miles per hour zone, then you have to pay a fine and get some demerit points. So if you contest your ticket and there’s a trial – there isn’t much room for the judge to impose her values on the situation – like even if she thinks the speed limit should be 200mph, and you went 61, she has to give you the fine if there’s clear evidence that you went 61. And I’m saying “she” for the judge here not because I’m trying to be mr feminist wanna be, but because most of the judges where I work are women, so I tend to think of judges as women.

Now where I practice, there’s a law that says that you can’t get evicted from your apartment until your rent is 21 days late. That’s also very precise. But, there’s an exception – you can still get evicted if your rent is less than 21 days late, if you pay your rent late frequently, but only if these frequent late payment cause your landlord “serious injury”: – un préjudice sérieux in french is how the law is worded.

The lessor may obtain the resiliation of the lease if the lessee is over three weeks late in paying the rent or, if he suffers serious injury as a result, where the lessee is frequently late in paying it.

So the word “frequently” and “serious injury” are subject to interpretation by the housing tribunals.

Now any normal person reads “serious injury” and thinks “that must mean something big, like the landlord needs the rent on time to pay his mortgage or other important expenses he’s getting in trouble with the bank or suffering some other serious inconveniences. And that’s certainly what I thought it meant when I read that law for the first time as a student working at a legal clinic. And I remember thinking “oh i see, this is an exception that protects small landlords who own like a duplex that they live in – but when it comes to a big landlord with lots of properties, you can basically pay up to 20 days late every month and you’re ok.

But in law, you never ever assume anything is logical or works according to your intuition or common sense – so before giving the tenants advice on this, I researched the case history to make sure that judges interpret the law in the way that I interpreted it.

And what I found really surprised me.

When they first started to have specialized housing courts here in the1970s, the judges did apply the law in the common sense way that I had interpreted it. Serious injury meant having trouble with mortgage payments or other important time-sensitive expenses.

This was there era when things like socialized healthcare, and consumer protection laws, and labour tribunals were introduced in Quebec and Canada, and when they were building subway systems and other public infrastructure projects. It was a time when wealthy countries around the world were able to tax corporations and the wealthy at high enough rates so that they could afford to pay for all the nice things that make civilization worth living in.

And in that era, government and the bureaucracy often saw themselves as the defenders and protectors of the public.

But over the years as the era of big government got sucked down the toilet and replaced by the business friendly neoliberal era when the state is afraid to tax the rich, and public services and health care systems are falling apart the politicians let the wolves run loose to eat all of the sheep, the government is no longer sexy, and the judges and bureaucrats think of themselves less as protectors of the people, and more as regular white collar middle class people, investors, homeowners and landlords. So when you read recent cases about the 21 day rule, it’s now considered “serious injury” if the building custodian goes and rings your door a couple of times during the month to ask for the money – even though he gets a salary this doesn’t cost the landlord any more money.

And it’s funny to see the reasoning of the judges in advancing this completely ridiculous interpretation of the term “serious injury”.

When you read the cases where the judges start turning towards more landlord friendly interpretations of this law, you read judgments saying things like: “well some judges say that serious injury means getting in trouble with the bank or not being able to pay expenses – but that can’t be what the legislators meant when they wrote this law, because that would mean that the law would only protect small landlords.

But tenants who have big corporate landlords could just pay their rent on the 20^th every month – so the legislators must have meant that serious injury is when the landlord is mildly annoyed because he had to email you three times to get the rent, or when the superintendent had to knock on your door one time – after all, you can’t have laws that apply differently to different groups of people – ben non ça se peut pas là!”

And that interpretation is absolutely ridiculous on so many levels – it’s just not true at all that laws affect everyone equally – laws against being allowed to sleep on a park bench don’t affect billionaires and homeless people equally – they’re entirely targeted at homeless people. Or progressive income taxes treat poor people differently than rich people, that’s the whole point.

And it’s totally plausible that the people who wrote that legislation did think that big landlords should be treated differently than small ones, because the mentality of government at the time was to see itself as a protector of tenants and consumers and workers against bosses and corporations and landlords.

Back to Equity

So laws originally written to protect tenants, get filtered through the class of judges, and by means of the ambiguous words in the law, the judges turn tenant protections into to laws that facilitate evictions and gentrification – because now the landlord can pretend that you paid late a few times and then he kicks you out so he can jack up the rent.

Now vague language is often just necessary because you just can’t predict every situation that’s going to come up, so there’s always going to be room for the judge’s discretion – but making precise language more vague when there’s no reason for it, is basically just a power grab and a manipulation technique. And that’s exactly what “equity” is.

Be Excellent to Each Other

Like imagine that you have a political candidate who runs on the platform of simplifying our complicated legal system – which is actually a great idea – and his proposal is – instead of having our confusing system with 5 zillion laws and regulations at multiple levels of government to cover every sort of situation imaginable, instead we’ll just get rid of all the laws, and have one perfect law that everyone can understand – a constitution that just says that says “Everyone must be excellent to eachother, and all things must be cool and good”. Like the combined wisdom of Bill and Ted movies and Orang Man Memes.

And that is the perfect law – if you’re a total dictator – because it means that the person who gets to make decisions – whether it’s a judge or head of state or equity and inclusion officer, gets to decide whatever they want in any given situation without any constraints.

A man shoots a homeless guy because the homeless guy smiled at his wife – the judge gives him a pass because the judge thinks that homeless people are scary, and it’s their own fault for being homeless, and that’s not excellent, so the guy was just being excellent by defending his wife’s honour.

The president decides that police can come search everyone’s houses and execute everyone who’s addicted to painkillers – because being an addict isn’t cool and making everyone safe from icky addicts is excellent!

Vague rules mean “whatever the person in charge says goes” and in our society, people in charge who make decisions in most circumstances tend to be rich people like business owners and investors – or else upper middle class people – like judges, politicians, managers and administrators – the skilled intellectual workers that rich people hire in order to make sure that their money keeps rolling in smoothly.

Equity IRL

So back to equity and how it’s applied today:

We live in a time when the middle class is getting more and more hollowed out each year, while the rich get richer, and life is getting harder and harder for a lot of people. So there’s a big market for lizard people politicians who can pretend to care about what people are going through, and who will pretend to want to deliver change, but who in the end just be delivering the same old bullshit as always, to keep the donors and powerful people happy.

So you get your Barack Obama running on hope and change, which everyone thought meant hope for fundamental changes to the economy and politics, but he actually just meant change your underwear every day and keep hoping for a better life that’s never going to happen unless you win the lottery – or Donald Trump who promises that everyone will get health care and that he’ll protect american jobs, and he’ll stop the opioid crisis and he’ll shake up the whole system – and then he just delivers the same giant tax cuts for rich people that every president delivers with the only change being that he ratcheted up ethnic conflict and made it ok to say things that had been considered beyond the pale in national politics for decades.

And note that when Trump is promising everyone gets health care – that’s left wing politics. In democracies, right wing politicians basically only gain popularity by invoking tribal instincts, or else by promising left wing policies which they never deliver, or both.

So you have lizard Obama, and Lizard Trump, both making left wing promises, and delivering right wing results, and then you get all of these little lizard wanna be’s like peetie buttigieg and ron desantises who are trying to be imitaton Obamas and Trumps but who don’t have any of that same lizard person charisma of being able to hypnotize people while you suck out their blood for your donors.

So, today, one big way that you can look like you’re doing social change, but without threatening the power of rich people in any way, is instead of being a champion of the people as a whole – which makes elites super uncomfortable – think of bernie sander – you become a champion of some of the people – of historically disadvantaged people – but you don’t champion them in a way that actually helps them – you do it in a way in a way that looks like you’re helping them, but you’re mostly just helping rich people who donate to your university or your political campaign.

And how do you do that? What’s the bizarro rich people version of helping minorities?

It’s called “anti-racism” and “equity”. You look at all the difficulties faced by members of identity groups who are disproportionately poor, and blame these difficulties entirely on discrimination, without looking at the context of economic exploitation and competition which cause most of these problems, including generating and activating discrimination in the first place. And then you promise to promote “equity”- an ambiguous worb which secretly means economic inequality disguised a social justice.

So – if you look at history and anthropology, and you look at negative outgroup discrimination – things like racism and sexism – like why do these things exist in human beings all over the world? We’re going to do an episode specifically on this, but in short, we evolved the tendencies to discriminate against people outside of our group, in order to facilitate the economic exploitation of outside groups, and to facilitatie the exclusion of those groups from the competition for access to resources. One tribe makes a bunch of excuses to hate the other tribe so we can take their resources or kill them or enslave them.

Like the reason that anti black racism came to become this giant system of oppression in the United States, wasn’t just because white people have evil racism in their hearts – it was in order to morally justify the economic exploitation of slaves. And diving slavery from freedom by skin colour was not just because of mysterious evil, but because it helped prevent broader opposition to slavery. And then, in the reconstruction era, after slavery – racism was consciously and explicitly used as a tool by the rich plantation owners and other business owners, in order to stop the white and black workers from joining together to fight for better wages and working conditions – which is what was happening at that time as the populist movement started becoming multiracial and expanding it’s popularity and power.

Or if you look at anthropology and you look at societies that are have extremely patriarchal where women are second class citizens who make all the food, but then only eat leftovers after the men and children have eaten – you see that the ideas and attitudes of sexism and patriarchy serve the same purpose. It’s a set of justifications to keep women as domestic servants, to reserve the best food for men, and all of the important positions of political decision-making etc.

Studies going back to the 1970s show that if you take a bunch of strangers in a room, and then you call half the people group A and the other half group B, members of each group immediately begin to discriminate against eachother and to infer bad motives into the behaviour of the outgroup and good motives into the behaviour of members of their own group – and the most likely reason that this tendency evolved in human beings, is to facilitate the exclusion and exploitation, or sometimes even the genocide of other people in the competition for resources – or else conversely, to defend ourselves from other groups who are trying to do those things to us.

Dying of Whiteness

There’s a book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl. Metzl is a liberal type who went and did research on this idea that lower class republicans vote against their own economic interests because of racism. In particular he was interested in people with serious health problems, who were voting for state level republican candidates who were promising to reject expansions of the healthcare system that would save their lives. And the idea was supposed to be that these people are so racist and stupid that they’d rather die than give something to black people. Hence the title of the book.

But if you look at the language of the people he’s talking to, the racism that the author focuses on is real – but it’s almost entirely pre-occupied with economic concerns. The illegal immigrants are taking their jobs, the welfare cheats are taking their resources and bankrupting the country so that there’s nothing left for honest taxpayers. It was so consistently about resource competition that in an interview with Coleman Hughes, Metzl defined racial resentment as “in a nutshell, the fear that people are going to come take your stuff – that people are going to come cut in line in the push for resources.”

So what at first glance looks like knowingly voting against your economic interests because of racism, is actually voting for what you think are your economic interests – you’re defending yourself from immigrants taking your jobs, or from welfare cheaters wasting your taxes – or else you’re sacrificing yourself for your group’s economic interests – like you might lose out and even die from lack of healthcare, but you’re punishing cheaters, and line skippers, and that’s going to help your children and your tribe in the long term.

So we just can not understand racism without the context of economic competition. Forms of outgroup discrimination, like racism – are messy proxies for economic competition which make you see your economic interests along racial lines instead of class lines – and that’s why it’s such an effective tool to be used by elites – both conservative and liberal elites. In tribal times, identity probably was an effective match with economic interests – but in complex civilizations, poor white people have more in common in terms of their economic interests with with poor black people, than they do with rich white people.

Now imagine what racism would look like without conflict over resources or economic competition. Like if we lived in a Star Trek world where no one was poor and everyone had fulfilling jobs that paid decently, and was entitled to a nice stable place to live and there was no economic inequality because replicators make everything everyone needs. In a world like that, racism would just mean that some people wouldn’t be invited to the fun house parties of certain shitty other people who discriminate against them. And it would be extremely obnoxious, but it wouldn’t be a huge political issue – it would just be like the equivalent of some people being a jerks or a meanie weanies. And there are always jerks and meanie weenies in the world. It’s when being a jerk or meanie weenie systematically makes it harder for you to get a job or proper health care or a decent place to live or a cab, or to participate in democracy, or it gets you harassed by police, and sentenced more harshly by judges, or it gets your health concerns dimissed by doctors – that’s when it becomes an economic issue – that’s when it becomes important.

And today, in the real world, if you’re a wealthy member of a non-dominant group in a country with equal legal rights for everyone – the wealthier you get, the more the discrimination that you suffer from resembles people being meanie weanies and it’s less it resembles a series of giant structural obstacles to living a decent and dignified life.

For working class and poor people, not getting a good education is a problem because it means that your ability to make money will be hampered. Discrimination by bosses and landlords means it’s harder to get a job and you’re that much closer to homelessness because poor people can’t wait 3 months to get a job like middle class people can. And it means it’s that much harder to find a decent place to live even when you have the skills or can afford the rent. And when you buy a home the banks target you with things like really shitty exploding mortgages, like they did in the lead up to the 2008 housing crash, which means you lose your home. Economic problems.

And if you’re a woman doing waitressing, you need to put up with sexual harassment all night because if you quit you’ll get evicted, lose your medical insurance, not be able to afford child care – and you have no safety cushion to keep you alive while you find a place to work where you get harassed less. Economic problems.

Chris Rock vs Crack Rocks

Now if want a really clear illustration of the connection between economic inequality and racism, imagine a rich black person – like Chris Rock – he parks his nice car in front of his big house in his rich neighbourhood – and as he’s going from his car to his front door, a police officer stops him and asks him what he’s doing there.

And Chris Rock is annoyed, and tells him that this is his house, but the officer keeps grilling him and giving him a hard time and he treats him with disrespect and hostility before he finally is convinced that Chris actually lives there and isn’t a drug dealer or a burglar.

And then he apologizes because maybe he feels bad, or maybe because he realizes that if Chris complains to the chief of police or the mayor, he might get in trouble because Chris is rich and famous.

Most of us would say that assuming that a black person is a drug dealer or a burglar is pretty racist. And it is – but why do people make racist assumptions?

Imagine that a week later, in the same neighbourhood, a rich white person parks in front of his big rich house right next to Chris Rock’s big rich house – but this rich white guy is dressed like a crusty punk. And the reason that he’s rich is because of he’s from a famous crusty punk band, Anus Pus. And his name is Crack Rock.

The same police officer who also stopped Chris Rock, stops Crack Rocks and asks him the same questions and gives him the same hard time until he realizes that like black Chris Rock, white Crack Rock is just going home to his legitimate big rich guy house. It might take this officer even longer to back off of Crack Rock than it did with Chris Rock because Chris Rock is dressed like a GAP ad, and this guy is dressed like a heroin addicted crusty punk, and he kind of stinks – and it’s easier to imagine a rich black person than a rich crusty punk.

The police guy assumes that the crusty punk guy is poor – because his clothes are a cultural shortcut for a poor person.

Now not every person who dresses like a crusty punk is poor, but most are, and despite being rich, Crack Rocks, got discriminated against because his appearance is associated with poverty and danger – i.e. threat to property of the rich people in the rich neighbourhood. In rich neighbourhoods, poor people are usually gardeners or nannies or servants of some kind, ore else they’re there to do burglary.

And in a society where black people are disproportionately poor – black skin is also a shortcut for poverty and danger, especially to police who deal with violent crime mostly in poor neighbourhoods. And the perception of danger, like competition, triggers the human innate tendency to discriminate, and to become tribal. Police officer sees a lot of dangerous criminals with black faces, and then he starts to see black faces as dangerous as his outgroups discrimination instinct gets activated.

It’s like in appalachian towns where there are very few minorities, you go to the trailer park, and the police will treat the poor white people there much like they treat the poor brown people in new york or atlanta. You get the same contempt, and perception of threat – the same set of emotional responses and intuitions that are operating as when racism is at play – just different epithets – tweaker trailer trash instead of thug and n-word. One is called racism and one is called classism, but they’re both the same human outgroup discrimination response and they’re both based on the perception of poverty and danger and hatred of weakness.

Chris Rock looks like a gap ad. But the police stop him because black skin triggers a discrimination impulse that goes beyond economical inequality, but that is basically a spillover effect of economic inequality. Chris Rock is paying the price for the fact that black people are disproportionately poor for historical reasons. But it’s the poverty that is causing that response, and the association of black skin with poverty – not some mysterious inherent feature of black skin or of white people’s inner evil.

And of course there’s a huge amount of racism that people grow up with as a legacy of the slavery and jim crow systems that’s part of the culture, and that has huge effects on how we treat each other. But imagine that you could make all of that go away by giving everyone magic brown pills. No more stereotypes, no more racism in peoples’ hearts and minds, no more discrimination in courts, or by police, or doctors or landlords or employers.

All that racial discrimination would just come back in a generation.

Because, unless you do something to stop poverty, black and brown people would still be disproportionately poor for historical reasons – slavery, jim crowe, deindustrialization. And that means that over time, police and judges, and landlords and employers – who already routinely discriminate against poor people for economic reasons – will start discriminating all over again as they start associating poverty and the crime and dysfunction that’s associated with it, with brown faces, which is a shortcut that we’re evolved to take.

Racism is a weed that has its own life beyond poverty and economic inequality, but poverty, economic inequality, exploitation and resource competition are the soil from which racism and other forms of discrimination sprout. There really isn’t much need for it otherwise.

Rich People Love Poverty

Now most people understand that poverty is a bad thing that ideally should not exist. Like a common sense idea that I bet most people have, is that in a society that is getting richer and richer on average, everyone should be benefitting from that, and poverty should be on its way out the door.

But that’s not the world that we live in, and those aren’t the values of our ruling business and government elites. People in ruling class bizarro land, might not like poverty in theory – but they actually need poverty in reality.

Not all rich people – doctors and basketball players don’t need poverty to be rich – but people who get their wealth from businesses that depend on low wage employees for their profits, do.

If you didn’t have poor people in the world, then no one would work at amazon warehouses for minimum wage where you get fired for having poo poos that take too long to come out, and no one would work at life threatening cobalt mines in Congo for pennies a day to make your iphones – these companies would have to pay serious wages to get people to do this work, and the wages would have reflect how onerous the work is, instead of just reflecting the bargaining power of the employee. In other words, a world without poverty would evaporate almost all of the profits of the owners and shareholders of these companies.

So if you’re someone whose wealth comes from a business that benefits from low wages, either as an owner, investor or high level executive – you want there to be enough people that have enough money to buy your products and services, but you also want a sizeable amount of poverty and inequality so you can get your labour for cheap, and also to scare your middle class and upper middle class skilled employees out of getting too uppity and asking for too much in terms of their wages and benefits.

So the entire corporate class and investor class, who are the same people who donate to politicians and universities – this is direction that their instincts lie in.

Bizarro Social Justice

So – what’s a bizarro, wealth-friendly way of doing social justice for minorities that doesnt bother the donor class?

You make it your paid life’s work to ensure that poverty and wealth are racially proportionate to society as a whole, without changing the actual amount of poverty and wealth in society.

Again, Ibram X. Kendi, tells that something is racist if it doesn’t result in all the different levels of hierarchy in society having the exact same racial proportions as in the general public – and if something is not perfectly proportional, then you need to take concrete action to make it proportional. And you can’t be passive – you’re either racist or anti-racist, working towards racial equality / proportionality.

That sounds radical and bad-ass, but what it actually means is that the problem with billionaires and CEOs and giant corporations isn’t that they make so much money that it allows them to completely dominate the government and rewrite all the laws to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else – the problem is that not enough of the people who completely dominate our government and write the laws to make themselves richer at the expense of everyone else are female or black.

And the problem with poverty isn’t that it exists – the problem is that black people make up about 25% of the poor people instead of 15%. So the solution to that is we need more white poor people and more asian poor people and more jewish poor people to make it all correctly proportional…

Now that’s utopia! (great job!)

Like imagine if in slavery times, the abolitionists, instead of making all of those powerful calls for human equality against the moral abomination of slavery which must be abolished – imagine if instead they were arguing that slavery is unfair because it’s racially unequal – we need white slaves, and chinese slaves, and jewish slaves, and we need black slave owners – and once 15% of slave owners are black, and 50% are female, and 60% of slaves are white – then slavery will be equitable and we can all go home.

This is what all of these equity people are advocating for when it comes to poverty and extreme wealth in our society.

And this ridiculous approach to social justice has multiple benefits for the donor class and the upper middle classes.

First, even though you’re actually just reinforcing economic inequality, you feel like you’re doing something good for society.

Second, it’s good PR for rich powerful corporations and institutions to show their customers and the frustrated masses that they’re doing something good for society. So Nike is enlsaving poor workers in asia to make their stupid overpriced sneakers for poor people in the US to buy, but then they put put black lives matter flags and rainbow trans flags and they support Colin Kaepernick protesting against police racism, and now they’re the good guys.

Third, focusing entirely on racial proportions and ignoring economic exploitation, triggers that tribal impulse in our brains, which keeps people divided by race and by every other zillion identity tribes – and this prevents us from forming the larger coalitions that we need in order to fight for things like universal healthcare or free education. It makes us identify with the rich people in our own tribe instead of with the poor people in the other tribes.

In the Jim Crow era, the division was extreme – there was a legal system in place that explicitly maintained an apartheid type system of two classes of citizens – and racism and racial animosity were promoted in order to keep that system stable and to justify it. And all of that prevented working class whites and blacks from joining together to fight for better conditions for everyone.

But you can get similar, though much less extreme effects, by giving some small advantages to historically oppressed people in a way that makes other struggling working class people feel like they’re being disadvantaged. And then you let the right wing political parties and media fan the flames of resentment that their resources are being taken away and given to minorities, and then the you can call them racist, thereby furthering divisions and tribalism – and all the while, the elements of economic competition underlying all of this, and the commonalities of struggle that unite everyone get forgotten – and it’s not Jim Crow, but it is good for business and bad for unionizing.

And that’s actually one of the classic tactics of colonialism, in particular French colonialism – they would go into a country, find an oppressed minority group, and give them legal equality and full rights, give them education – and then give them all the positions of power and administration in the colonial government – often under the guise of righting past wrongs. Like when we go into afghanistan it’s not to control oil pipelines, it’s to save the women, right?

And then the majority who was already racist against this minority, would become 10x more racist, which makes that minority completely dependent on France for safety so they’d never betray their masters, and boom divide and rule. Again, colonialism is much more extreme than White Fragility and stupid memos about how being on time is white supremacy culture, but it is on the very mild side of the same spectrum of tactics for divide and rule.

Stephan Hammel pointed out on the This is Revolution podcast, that one of the ways that anti union consultants teach business owners to break strikes and labour organizing drives is by advising them to institute some anti-racist policy on the shop floor, or to give some privilege or advantage to some workers but not others. And this breaks the solidarity of the workers as it triggers their tribal instincts and resentments, and they start fighting among themselves about whether these special advantages or policies are fair or not, and they redivide on racial lines instead of on class lines.

And if you look at the sort of anti-racist trainings that are popular today – especially the Robin DiAngilo White Fragility stuff – you can see that while it presents itself as helping us become more sensitive to eachother – what it actually does is it just trains employees to be terrified of eachother. Instead of focusing on empathy, consideration for others, cameradery, common goals and common humanity, it focuses on guilt and shame for the original sin of whiteness, and it has you narcissistically constantly focusing on yourself and your own endless incurable evil.

And it should come as no surprise, that they’ve done studies that found that employees tend to become more racist after these stupid trainings.

First of all, the more you remind people that they’re white – the more they start to think of “white” as their ingroup, and everyone else as the outgroup. And as I talked about, people naturally discriminate against outgroups, however arbitrarily they’re defined. And especially if your message is “your group is bad, your group is bad, your group is evil” – unless you have no self-respect, you’re going to end up rejecting the whole framework, and you’re probably going to start rallying to your white tribe to defend yourself from the other tribes attacking you. That’s how our shitty instincts work. And it’s not a coincidence that white nationalism has been on the rise in the US and europe at the same time as all this garbage has been popular in mainstream liberal culture.

Now a lot of educated liberal types love punishment and guilt and self deprivation, so they like being told their bad, it’s like BDSM for them – but even then, these trainings are basically conditioning you so that if you’re white, and a brown person walks in the room your cortisol shoots up and you immediately feel stressed out and scared that you’re going to do something wrong. So you’re conditioned to have negative reactions to brown people! And if you’re brown and you’re watching white people have a heart attack each time you go near them, that’s not exactly an environment where you’re going to feel at home.

But while all of this is a disaster in terms of fighting racism, it’s not so bad from the point of view of big corporate employers, because if employees are uncomfortable around eachother, and they’re divided along racial or gender lines, then they’re a lot less likely to band together to demand better wages and working conditions.

Divide and conquer is a natural instinct for people in power.

It reminds me of a case I had where the landlord was trying to get all of her tenants out of the building so she could sell it at a higher price, and she kept meeting with the tenants individually to tell them lies and pressure them to sign contracts to leave – but then when I got the tenants to start talking to eachother and when she found out about it, she flipped out and started yelling at them “you’re not allowed to talk to your neighbours!” as if she owned them and not just the building…

People who are trying to exploit you, always want to keep you divided, and they get nervous when you get too friendly with eachother, it’s a deep instinct.

Another advantage of the rainbow of inequality strategy is that by focusing on the symptoms – discrimination – instead of the main cause – economic inequality and exploitation – you have a disease that has no cure – so that there’s always a need for your heroic efforts. You can never stop “doing the work”. You need to keep hiring Robin DiAngelo over and over again to berate you and make you feel guilty for being alive.

Ibram Kendi proposes a United States government federal department of anti-racism – which would evaluate every single policy to see if it advances what he calls “anti-racism” which for him just means racial proportionality. And you can imagine this army of upper middle class ivy league college graduates, making sure every single aspect of society has the exact numbers of every single race, religion, gender, disability – making sure your crusty punk show isn’t just white crusty punks, you have to go and kidnap some black kids and raise them in your crusty punk commune to make sure you have the right race metrics. And this is awesome from the point of view of the harvard crowd, because that strategy will never ameliorate racism in any meaningful way and it will therefore keep them in jobs forever.

And when you read liberal theorists who write about race – even thoughtful interesting writers who make valuable contributions, like Ta-Nahisi-Coates or people involved with the 1619 project – you can see that they think that racism is just a mysterious force that has no cause and no solution and that will never be resolved in any significant way – and that’s what you get when you don’t racism to the economic factors that generate it, and you have no theory of evolution of various human tendencies.

A fifth reason why having a proportional rainbow ruling class is appealing to ivy universities and corporations is that it provides legitimacy to a ruling class that has been pulling the rug out from under the middle and working classes of all races and genders for decades now.

Again think of colonialism. After Julius Caesar took over big chunks of western europe where Asterix lives and started taking tribute from those regions – he scandalized the traditional Roman elite by letting the elites of the Gauls and Kelts and various other western tribes into the senate, in order to gain their loyalty. And the Tucker carslon’s of his day, like Cicero and Cato ranted and raged about it.

It’s just easier to control a society when people feel represented. If poor brown people see rich brown faces in important positions of power and influence, they feel represented, even when those elites are screwing them over left and right. Barack Obama set back black homeownership and wealth by a whole generation in the aftermath of the housing crash in 2008. Even black upper middle class black people tend to not own homes because most people nowadays have to inherit their homes and downpayments from their parents, and black people’s grandparents were living in Jim Crow. They never got to accumulate that capital in the first place, And leading up to the crash, banks targeted black people for all of these crazy mortgages because they knew that black americans tend not to have experience buying homes, even when they made solid incomes – and then the housing crash came – and then Obama bailed out the banks instead of the people, setting back black wealth in america by yet another generation. First slavery, then jim crow, then deindustrialization, then Obama lets the people lose all their homes.

But Obama is still adored by and large by black americans because he’s a good communicator, he looks like one of them, and because they understood that republicans were fanning racist flames in opposition to him, which made them targets as well, so they rallied to his side.

The Soviet Union also was very invested in trying to have lots of national and ethnic representation in important positions in the communist party. If you’re not actually going to give the bulk of the population any real influence over anything you can still placate them by making them feel represented and emotionally identified with your enterprise. China today has 9 political parties, but none of them have any real power besides the communist party – the idea is to get various constituencies invested in the system and to take their temperature in various ways, like the estates general in monarchical france.

And right wing dictatorships do the same thing but without the multiculturalism, they get you emotionally invested in the ruling power, the idea of the nation. The idea behind fascism was that hitler and mussolini were supposed to be the ultimate representation of the german or italian people in some magical symbolic way. It’s the same strategy but relying on the support of the cultural majority support instead of multicultural coalition. And corporations also have a lot of propaganda and activities for their employees to get you to feel identified with them in various ways.

College Admissions

OK, so let’s see some examples of how this actually plays out.

One of the big areas where this concept of equity has become reality is in college admissons, where there are now entire Diversity Equity and Inclusion departments whose responsibilities include diversifying the student body to make admissions are more “equitable” meaning more fair.

Well what does fairness in university admissions looking like to the people who administer them?

A normal person would think well, poor people have a lot of obstacles to getting in to top schools like this – so maybe they should get preferential admissions?

For example in the US poor neighbourhoods tend to have bad schools, because schools are funded by municipal taxes. And it’s harder for parents who’ve never been to university to know how to prepare you for it. And life tend to be a lot more chaotic in poverty and not conducive to learning in the first place.

Robin J. Hayes, a black filmmaker and assistant professor at various universities, who grew up poor and graduated from Yale points out that

“By the time I applied to Yale, I had been groomed as a scholarship student in majority-affluent feeder schools to succeed in conditions that guaranteed healthy GPAs. My attentive teachers in small classes delivered a curriculum that emphasized critical thinking skills, leadership capacity, and participation in mainstream institutions.

Athletics and creative activities, studying in well-resourced libraries, and sessions with a seasoned well-connected college counselor were all required of me. Unsurprisingly, these nurturing environments allowed me to gain the credentials elite universities require. By society and the job market, I continue to be seen as a “high-achiever” in essence because I was never set up to fail.

No other kid from my block in East Flatbush was so lucky. At their truly public schools (not charters, not magnets, but common schools available to every family in the neighborhood), they routinely faced atrocious conditions including gun violence, overcrowding, and a curriculum that emphasized obedience over innovation. As outsiders to the college-prep “feeder system,” which includes a small number of competitive high schools … the students who persevere despite these formidable demands and manage to graduate, are rarely seen as “high-achieving” by schools like Yale. From the perspective of prep schoolers who have no grasp of the challenges presented by economic scarcity, the Collegiate Honor Roll Lacrosse captain easily surpasses the Benjamin Banneker High B+ student who lives in a shelter and works at Target after school to help out her single mother and younger siblings. The fantasy that all young people are running the same race blinds many university trustees, administrators, and admissions committees to the reality that they undervalue students who always have to run uphill”

So wealth brings and enormous advantage – and one of the main determinants of your wealth is whether or not you inherited it from your parents. Like the wealthiest people in england today are still descendants of the original norman invaders who were the ruling class in 1066! a thousand fucking years ago.

Once you have a certain amount of money, you have to be not only a complete idiot but also a complete maniac with a gambling addiction to lose it. You hire people to invest it for you and it just keeps attracting more and more money like a black hole.

All of this gets passed down from generation to generation, especially as homes like we just talked about.

But some people’s ancestors didn’t have anything to pass down to them.

Black americans for example, weren’t even allowed to own property until 1860 – and then they had a zillion legal obstacles in their way until the 1960s. And then when they gained their full rights, and began climbing up the ladder into the middle class via unionized manufacturing jobs – zoosh, those jobs started getting shipped off to mexico and chiner only 10–15 years later because of policies agreed on by liberal and conservative parties alike.

So the rug was pulled out from black americans just when they started being able to accumulate wealth. The expression Brother can’t catch a break is not a joke. See Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped America.

And of course this affected all working class americans – like look at the epidemic of opioid addiction and plummeting life expectancy for white men in the rust belt gummo apocalypse.

But Black people as a whole are worse off, because they were exluded as a whole, and because the obstacles to their accumulating wealth were lifted so recently. The wealth of most middle class people is just their homes – and that’s what gets passed down from generation to generation. So Black families headed by a person that graduated from college today have less wealth than white families headed by someone who dropped out of high school because they tend not to have inherited property.

So first slavery, then jim crow, then corporate globalization which shipped all the jobs out of the country, then the housing crisis which wiped out black homeownership – these factors all stacked the odds against Black Americans building up the capital and skills that give people the advantages that they need to compete in today’s college rat race.

And that’s not just because poor neighbourhoods have badly funded schools – but also because fancy schools today have completely insane admissions criteria that almost require you to be rich to get in. Not only do you need stellar grades, but you also need to have started an NGO to save the Chinese whales when you were 3 years old, and you have to have invented a new source of clean nuclear energy for sub saharan african orphans when you were 9. And half the time these are achievements that the parents of rich kids hire someone to set up for their kid, specifically so they can get into college 15 years later.

And every person who’s poor, got to their poverty by a different route, but black people were excluded as a group, and as a result, they’re way behind – on average, even professionals are really behind on the accumulation game.

So, to make competition for university admissions truly “equitable” and fair which liberals say they want – and to create true equality of opportunity that conservatives say their want, you’d need massive wealth redistribution, and massive investments in education, getting rid of or equalizing inheritances, and getting rid of school funding according to zip code.

Well these are things that are beyond the powers of universities to do.

So what can they do? Well, you’d would think maybe they would favour american descendents of slaves, especially from poor backgrounds. Or maybe just poor people of all colours, who have almost all of the same obstacles as descendants of slaves do, but who just got to their poverty via a variety of different routes.

Or maybe they can stop requiring that you have to have invented microsoft windows while you were wearing diapers to qualify.

Or maybe they can get rid of legacy admissions – where they let in all of these unqualified booger eating Billy Madisons like George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, or Donald Trump, and Donald Trump Junior, because their dads were big donors or graduates.

But of course they don’t do any of that. Instead what they do is they give preference to rich and upper middle class Black students, who already have a lot of the advantages that rich and upper middle class white people have. Not only are the black kids admitted to Harvard overwhelmingly upper middle class and wealthy, just like all the other students at Harvard, but a huge chunk of them aren’t even descended from slaves at all.

So by 2018 Harvard was proud to have finally achieved racial proportionality when it came to black students – 15% of Harvard freshmen are now black, just like general population.

Except 41% of these black freshmen are african and carribean immigrants! People from Nigeria and Ghana who are not descendents of slaves, or people from Jamaica and the carribean, whose ancestors were slaves, but who didn’t have the same subsequent 100 years of post-emancipation obstacles as in the united states. And most of these immigrants who end up at Harvard were already wealthy or middle class when they got to the US in the first place, getting here on special visas for skilled workers.

So black freshmen tend to be from the same economical class as all the other kids – and Harvard has had as many students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution as the bottom 60 percent. More come from the top 10 percent by income than the bottom 90 percent

Walter Benn Michaels points out that, “When students and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids have.”

And Pascal Robert from the This is Revolution podcast, scoffs that a typical example of the ivy league mentality towards solving problems of racial inequality in the US is a discussion sponsored by the African-American Alumni Association of the Harvard Business School, which was non-ironically titled “Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap by Serving on Federal Reserve Boards.”

Now, at the same time as harvard’s admissions people are trying really hard to have more black faces on campus, they’re also putting in a lot of effort to have less Chinese and Indian and Pakistani faces!

People from Asia make up 6% of the US population, and are 19% of the student body of harvard – but they’d be 43% if admissions were just based on grades and extracurricular activities alone, including inventing warp drives for animal shelters.

So Harvard invented these vague “personality score” criteria for their admissions process so that they could make excuses to stop the asiatic hordes that no one can scrutinize, while letting in more rich nigerians and rich white kids – because Nigerians and white kids have really awesome personalities but chinese and indian kids – bo-ring, amirite? And this “personality” score is more heavily weighted than any other criteria including academic perfromance –

It’s a lot like the anti-jewish quotas that these places had in place until into the 1960s – which incidentally rejected working class and poor jews and selected mostly wealthy and upper middle class jewish students who would “fit in” better with the ivy league elite culture.

Now, to a normal person, whether you think that top universities should be producing the best scholars and doctors and lawyers for the benefit of society – or if you think that these schools have a responsibility to make society a more fair place insofar as they can – all of this is completely ridiculous.

Instead of making society more fair, it just completely paints over the fact that you need all of these special advantages that come with social class to get into these schools. It’s not fair according to conservative performance criteria, and it’s not fair in the sense of correcting unfair advantages – it’s just creating a proportional rainbow of rich kids.

Naturally these admissions policies fuel ethnic conflict all along identity politics lines, American black students at harvard demand that immigrant blacks and asian and white women be excluded from privileged admissions criteria – asian students sue the schools for discriminating against them, and a supreme court case is pending on this – meanwhile rants aimed at downwardly mobile white people about how deserving white students are being denied the opportunity to climb the social ladder in favour of non-deserving black brown and beige students has been a staple of right wing demagogues for decades now.

Now on the the left – people concerned with equality of power – critics have argued that the way that you help disadvantaged people and the way that you end racial inequalities is to target economic inequalities, which will disproportionately help black people and other historically oppressed minorities, without inciting a race war.

And the reaction of these elite schools to those critiques is quite telling:

In 2018, Richard Kahlenberg from the Progressive Policy Institute submitted a set proposals in for class-based admissions criteria that would increase the amount of black and disadvantaged minority students, but without having any racial criteria at all, nor any racist “personality” criteria. It would scrap Billy Madison legacy admissions, and it would scrap the show pony achievements that only rich kids can accomplish when their parents pay Bill Gates to invent a cure for cat AIDS. And instead, the proposed criteria would focus on grades and academic achievements, while favouring people from working class backgrounds. And because the useless Billy Madison kids would be gone and quotas against asians would be gone, it would balance out the lower performance of the poorer kids, and the academic scores of the student body as a whole would only go down by 0.8%.

Of course Harvard rejected all of these proposals – on the grounds that 0.8 would dilute Harvard’s reputation for academic excellence!

But Harvard already lowers it’s averages more than that by preventing all those asian students from getting in, and by letting in Donald Trump Jrs. and Hunter Bidens and Billy Madisons.

Heather MacDonald writing for the right wing New Critereon tells us that in its defence against the lawsuit by Asian students,

“Harvard invoked a parade of horribles that would ensue if racial preferences were ever held illegal. “If that day ever comes,” the university warned ominously … the court would “send the message—and create the reality—that America’s universities are no longer its cradles of opportunity and its beacons of social mobility.”

So according to Harvard, social mobility is when Hunter Biden and George W. Bush and Billy Madison get in despite being cokeheads, because their dad’s are rich and powerful, but poor kids who work against huge obstacles don’t get in because they’re poor.

And if you pay attention to what they do vs what they say – which is a great way to detect lizard people – the real goal is clearly not academic excellence or social justice or fairness or righting past wrongs – it’s just having a ruling class that’s a racially proportional rainbow of rich kids.

And the ivy leagues truly do produce the ruling class of the United States and the world.

Not only does a place like Harvard often produce all of the judges on the supreme court, and most of the presidents, and a huge proportion of the CEOs and directors of big companies – but it also produces so many of the people at the head of everything everywhere – for example my friend works as a teacher and sometimes administrator in the NYC school system, and he tells me that whenever there are important administrative positions open, if someone like him, with 25 years of experience is ever competing for a job with a 23 year old harvard grad with no experience, they automatically give it to the harvard kid.

So, to recap – you have two different strategies that use our innate tribal collective identity descrimination responses in order to divide us so that we never join up on common economic interests.

You have one strategy which targets people who have conservative dispositions, which focuses on outside groups as threats to the resources of the inside group. Immigrants taking jobs, welfare cheats draining out taxes, woke elites sending jobs to mexico and china, etc.

And this prevents people from identifying common struggles – like how deindustrialization in the U.S. wiped out working class black wealth and white wealth, and how this was the result of policies of liberal and conservative parties working together for the donor class. Or how all corporations send jobs to china whether they fly american flags or rainbow flags. Or how immigrants flood into the country because the same free trade policies that deindustrialized the United States, also threw millions of people off of their farms in Mexico and latin america and Haiti – so they come to the US in droves to survive.

And then you have a strategy which targets people with liberal dispositions, which turns all of the economic injustices of the world into racial and gender injustices divorced from the economic context which generates those injustices.

So instead of saying that our economic system increasingly puts a million obstacles in the way of people of all races to get education and capital, and that black people on average are poorer on average because they’re behind in the accumulation game for historical reasons – we say that black people are poorer on average because of evil mysterious racism, which generates unequitable outcomes, and we blame all the obstacls on racism and ignore the fact that most of those same obstacles affect poor people of all ethnic groups. And the solution to that problem is that you give more power to the powerful – you add on a whole bureaucracy of ivy league educated race managers in government and universities and corporations, whose impossible task it will be to make sure that the unfair outcomes that our economic system generates, will be redistributed according to racial and gender proportions, which will somehow make poverty and homelessness and death by lack of health insurance fair.

And when the liberals try to fix racism with guilt trip trainings, and cancel mobs and language policing and harebrained redistribution schemes and personality tests – this activates white identity as a threat response – and then the right wing media and politician ecosystem starts jizzing on overdrive and turns around and says “look at how these liberal elites, and minorites are threatening your resources, your jobs, your access to education!”

And by pointing at minorities they can conveniently ignores all of the corporations and right wing legislators who are stealing all of their resources and sending their jobs to china and every other low wage country, and who have been allowing the cost of education to explode for decades now.

And when the right wing gets more racist, and white nationalist, the liberals start joining in th jizz festival – because not they can point to all the racist and sexist messaging, which means they can ignore the economic concerns underlying the fears of a lot of the people who respond to those messages – and then they can dismiss anyone who responds to these messages as bigots and deplorables that you must never find any common economic interests with unless you too are a racist bigot. And then they get to present themselves as protectors of the vulnerable minorities in an increasingly hostile environment that is very real.

It’s the perfect two step boogaloo bounce ruling class shuffle jambaroo that keeps everyone obsessed with instinctively divisive cultural messaging and keeps their eyes off of our common economic problems and our shared goals and humanity.

Great job liberal and conservative elites!

But we don’t have to fall for this b.s. anymore. If we know how discrimination works and what it’s for, and what know what lizard people look like and we can identify these liberal and conservative methods to divide and conquer us, we can be immune to all of this stupid hysterical messaging and start to connect with eachother and find out common economic interests – and in doing so we will find our common humanity, and all of the discrimination and that’s how you fight discrimination in all of its forms.

Bibliography

Economics and Race/gender

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Adolph Reed 2023 - Jim Crow and its Afterlives

Kennan Malik 2023 — Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics, The Observer

Kennan Malik 2023 — Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics

Norman Finkelstein 2023 - I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

Heather McGhee 2021 - The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone

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This is Revolution, September 13, 2022 — Marxism and Critical Race Theory (interview with Stephan Hammel)

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@barbiesavior

Interview: Fight Like an Animal / Arnold Schroeder

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

All music is by me.

www.againsttheinternet.com

Fight Like an Animal Patreon

Interview Fight Like an Animal part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzMCZkaDrSU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWcbDulXFOs

Daniel: Ayyyyyy! That is a quote from Italian American Arthur Fonzarelli circa 1957.

I have something new for you today, and that is an interview show where I’m interviewing Arnold Schroeder from the fight like an animal podcast. And if you don’t know, fight like an animal, maybe go and listen to it first before hearing this interview. It is such a great show. Unlike many people in the Left Wing podcast world who live in New York and have Harvard upper middle class backgrounds, Arnold is a guy who grew up in a cult, lived on the streets, was addicted to hard drugs, was in and out of psychiatric institutions. So he has a rich history and life experience that informs his politics and his perceptions. Of the world, and unlike many people who are really into reading and talking about politics, but who don’t know what to do about it or afraid to do anything about it, Arnold has a background of 20 years of activism under his belt before starting this podcast and coming from his life background, he had a very different assessment of risk and danger, so he’s very much involved in ********. Activism. Risky activism. From that experience, he eventually realized that a lot of the messaging that people use in activist groups and the presuppositions that people have, and the different things about the culture of these activist groups, they’re just a giant failure at reaching people. And at getting the mass participation and engagement that we need to make big changes in our society. So he started this podcast in order to reflect on all this stuff and all with the aim of understanding why our political movements are so weak, so marginalized, so divided, and so unappealing to so many people, and how we can actually reach out to everyone who’s out there who wants a lot of the same. Changes that we want and his show is just really marvelous. He gobbles up articles and books and all sorts of topics. Architrave political psychology studies, animal behavior, anthropology, and then he synthesizes it all through his life experience and his perspective, all with political goals in mind. Yeah, enough. Blah, blah blah. Check out fight like an animal and I’ll be interviewed on that show as well. Right around the same time that this episode comes out. So check that out and. Let the cartoon be here.

So we’re starting off with some pre interview banter and what we’re talking about is. Arnold has some severe kidney disease and a couple of days before this interview he interviewed me, and while I was talking, he was throwing up into a cup and then just kept on interviewing me like nothing happened. For those of you watching on video, the video of the interview starts after the pre show banter.

Arnold: Just got my coffee.

Daniel: Alright, you got your barfing cup for the new year.

Arnold: Yeah, and I’ll, I’ll empty it so I can throw up into the coffee cup in case I have to. That’s what I did last time, like, right into the coffee cup. Set it down on the desk. You know, just keep on going.

Daniel: That was some professional stuff that’s like. Top grade. That’s like some kind of, you know, news anchor. Like, if Dan Rather was like, a lifelong alcoholic, that’s some **** that he, that’s some **** that he could pull.

Arnold: Yeah, exactly. No, that’s exactly. It’s like, weird. Like memoir ****. Like I was at the point where I was throwing up during interviews and concealing it from the interviewee or whatever. It’s all...

Daniel: Well, you know the 1^st Prime Minister of Canada. His name is John A MacDonald. Apparently he was like a raging alcoholic and he used to go do debates like so they run across this huge *** country, right. And he’d go to debates and he’d be so ******* drunk that he’d stand up on the podium and. Just be like, just like be puking. Then he’d be like my opponent. Makes me sick to my stomach, and then he’d be like I would be like cheering him on. So, that’s Canada anyways.

Arnold: That was a that was a style of a of like direct action or whatever in the 90s was to, like, take that **** epic hack that makes you throw up and then go into some like, corporate office and be tike what you people are doing makes me. Sick and like throw up and the one. The time that I was around people who did it, they all took epic hack like a bunch of people took epic hack and they went to these corporate offices that were closed and so. They came back to like we were all like blockading this logging road and they came back and just threw up all over the logging. Road all night. And I was like, I was just like, trying so hard not to laugh at my friends all night. I was like, I was, like, sleeping all the road, like, laughing into my like jacket or whatever I was. Using it as a pillow.

Daniel: Well, no reason not to laugh at that, but **** you didn’t. You weren’t doing that.

Arnold: No, I was like, I’m gonna keep blockading the road. You guys like that? Feels more important than throwing up on somebody’s offices.

Daniel: Yes. Division of Labor. Ohh marginally related. I used to listen to for entertainment like before there was podcast podcasts. You had some Neo Nazi proto podcasts, you know, like David Duke and there was this William Pierce. You know the.

Arnold: Uh. Ohh yeah.

Daniel: The guy who did the Turner Diaries like that inspired the Oklahoma bombing.

Arnold: Right, right. Yeah.

Daniel: So he he’s some weird *** Southern professor of physics, and for some reason he was just some crazy big neo-Nazi dude and he had like, some radio show that I guess was shortwave radio, but they also put it on the Internet. It was like 10–15 years ago. Like in the late 90s, early 2000s or 2020 years ago. Holy **** dude. It was on the Internet as a podcast and you could listen to this and download it and for some reason I found this stuff and I was like, this is ******* hilarious. And if you’re Jewish, especially neo-Nazi stuff is awesome because they’re. Just talking about you all day and.

Arnold: Are you are you Jewish?

Daniel: You’re ohh, man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m like, **** yeah, run the banks. And I’m doing this and I’m doing that, yeah.

Daniel: You know, so, so he he he has one thing and you could. Well, they took it all down offline, which sucks. I think I have it recorded some anyways he had one. Episode. He’s like racial. Differences. And he was like we think that where you know, Jews are like white people. But I discovered at a young age that they’re quite different. And one example of this, he talked about this MTV show called Dude, this sucks and then he. Said in the it’s like a prank show, right? So in the first in one episode of the pilot episode, there are these girls who were told that they want some kind of. Lottery. And then they go to the show and at the show there’s a performance by this group called the Shower Rangers, and it’s a bunch of dudes who took a bunch of, like diarrhea, like slacks or whatever. And then they just chat all over the girl, like, from they sprayed diarrhea on to the girls from the stage. And he’s, like, giving an example that they producer was Jewish.

Unknown Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Daniel: This is this.

Unknown Speaker: Is Jewish humor. This is, I noticed, as a young student in college that the Jews had an unusual taste for scatological.

Arnold: And this is a Jewish thing.

Daniel: Humor and then then he’s like, and this is what’s infecting MTV. I looked it up and it was real. These ******* they did that, and they shat on these girls and they they sued MTV and it it never aired or whatever. But that’s some real **** anyways, that just reminded me that when you talk about your buddies puking all. Over the place.

Unknown Speaker: Winner winners winners winner.

Daniel: So what are these differences? These differences in in proclivities that match with left and right? These psychological differences, and why does?

Arnold: It matter in the Big 5 personality inventory which. You know, so everybody who’s ever taken a like witch Harry Potter character, are you quiz online or whatever like, you know, has employed some like elements of the Big 5 and introversion, extroversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness, neuroticism. Actually forget what? But it’s, you know, it’s it’s just like a a basic metric of some aspects of people’s personalities that have been. You know, it’s like an inventory of five different dimensions that have been found to be cross culturally durable, you know, so you can, you can go different places and you’ll find these same traits distributed in the population in about the same proportions. They’re all actually normally distributed. So.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Say openness to new experience, the most important for political.

Daniel: MMM.

Arnold: Purposes of the Big 5 in any given population, it’s not only the case that you can that it’s it’s meaningful that the construct has some validity, but you’ll find a normal distribution of the degree to which people are, you know, exhibit openness to new experience. So most people will cluster somewhere around the center, somewhere around the median. Of the mean of you know. The human experience and then there will be, you know, progressively fewer and fewer people towards either extreme, yeah.

Daniel: The extremes of like Super Super open to experience and super super births.

Arnold: We’re super close. Yeah. Yeah. So you know, OK, so it’s a mound shaped distribution, you know? So it’s like and you’ll find.

Daniel: So normal distribution is like your your. Regular bell curve.

Arnold: Exactly. It’s a bell curve. It’s a bell curve. Yeah, and. And so you’ll find this in the United States and France and Belgium, but also in, like, you know, North Africa or the Middle East or China, you know, it’s a, it’s a cross, culturally valid.

Daniel: Thing. OK. OK. Yeah.

Arnold: Construct with a normal distribution everywhere it’s found, and then openness to new experience is most predictive of political orientation, whether that is measured in terms of how somebody identifies like on a questionnaire. If you ask them how left or right. They are or in terms of actual political behavior, how they vote, what party they belong to, what they you know. And so it is of any psychological trait ever measured, openness to new experiences is most predictive. But to give an example of how useful it is.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: It’s also more predictive than, say, income, gender, race. You know, like all all of these other. They’re. Very. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s it’s more predictive than income in actual voting behavior. And like, I think the studies that I read looked at like 3 successive United States presidential elections, but the trend hasn’t gone anywhere. Like a lot of poor people voted for Trump in 2020, you know, like.

Daniel: Even class. Mm-hmm. So you’re saying that no matter, you know, in any country in the world? World that you can predict how people are going to vote yes. More like not. Maybe not perfectly, but no much much more closely based on how they score on this openness to experience characteristic, whether it’s just them self reporting how open they are or them being measured by various tests. Then you can by any other metric. That we have, yeah. Including saying that, does that include someone saying that? Ohh, I’m on the left and someone saying that? Oh, I’m on the right or no?

Arnold: Or do you know no? I mean like self reported self reported political orientation is is pretty reliable. But but no, just in terms of. Just in terms of, uh, yeah, like any of the big variables that people would tend to use in political analysis would be like your ethnicity, your class, your gender. And those are not nearly as predictive, not nearly as predictive. Those are actually often statistically insignificant and openness to new experience is highly statistically significant. Predicting political behavior.

Daniel: So then how? Or maybe it’s too early to ask this question, but then how would you account for, you know, vote swings in elections, right? It’s not those those same people who voted for Trump in 2016 voted for Obama in 2012. How does that?

Arnold: Work well first. I mean, so first of. Ball because of the nature of a normal distribution. Right, because of those mound shaped distributions, you’re going to find the most people kind of somewhere, right in the middle, which is also. I actually think why so much of how politics works, like why it works the way it does, why there is like kind of this like. Ostensible centrism that pervades all of you know, like a lot of people really don’t tend towards extremes and and will tend to see, you know.

Daniel: OK.

Arnold: Like. Well, I don’t know. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll just like, tend to be right there in the middle and and it would actually therefore be pretty reasonable to toggle between to.

Daniel: So. So so like you’re Ken bone guy. You know Ken bone.

Arnold: No, I don’t know who.

Daniel: That is OK. He was some dude in 2016 who like, you know, it was super polarized. Like everyone’s like Hillary Clinton’s the devil or we have to vote for Hillary Clinton. And Trump’s the devil or, you know, like, that was the polarization and. And then you had this dude Ken. And he was like, I’m not sure who I’m voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. I need to think about, you have to weigh their policy, to listen to. They made this big hoopla about him and they interviewed about. They didn’t interviewed him about it. So you’re saying that that guy, that type of person is would score in the middle of that distribution of openness versus close to experience? They’d be somewhere in the middle. And so then they they are the sort of deciding voters who.

Unknown Speaker: Fred.

Daniel: Like the rest of us, think of like, who is that idiot who is like flipping back and forth? That’s that media. In. Person of in terms of openness to experience.

Arnold: Yeah, which is exactly how I mean. And obviously like just to reiterate, these are all statistical constructs. So yes, like I’m saying that that person would be statistically way more likely to score somewhere in the middle of the openness to new experience scale. Right. But of course, in none of these cases.

Daniel: Right.

Arnold: Am I saying that person definite? That single individual definitely does, and that’s important because when we have these discussions, people will always say like, well, but wait, what about my super right wing uncle, who’s also super adventurous? And I’m like, these are statistical arguments. I’m not saying your uncle is not both right wing and adventurous or whatever, right? But but yeah. That is like and that’s exactly how the **** politics usually feels like electoral politics in the United States. Has this very distinct quality where there’s all these people who really give a **** and are sure they’re right and are like fervently convinced, but then elections always come down to like these 12 voters in a suburb in Iowa and these other like 6 people in Mississippi or whatever. And there’s always this distinct and it’s like, and who knows how they’ll vote.

Daniel: M.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: And they’re and it. There’s a distinct like. Yeah. And they’re kind of indifferent. Like, they’re not those voters who actually decide elections are not passionately convicted one way or the other often, right.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. OK. But tell me more of some of the implications of this because you were talking about how to message things in the US, for example, I the way I see it is you don’t have any left wing party. You have two right wing parties, right? They they just have different styles of right wing. 1 is a more hypocritical right wing. That sort of dresses itself up.

Arnold: Absolutely.

Daniel: In left wing language and talks about anti racism and talks sometimes about class and talks. These things, but kind of still does most of the same things that the other party does, and the other one just has nakedly right wing messages. Anti immigrant anti, you know, trans bathrooms, all this stuff like that and they’re but they kind of have the same policy agenda, more or less with some important differences. But, you know, compared to like in Europe where you actually would have like a real left wing party and a real right wing party, the US doesn’t have that. So how does this fit? Into the United States or other countries where you don’t have a real left wing party, you just have left wing schtick.

Arnold: So I think it’s actually I think it’s like truly essential for understanding that fact, because it’s exactly like you said and and I think that your podcast does an amazing job of reframing it in a particular way and you know and there are like a bunch of other commentators who make this general point that. There’s not really substantial left right policy distinctions between the major parties in the United States. They’re both just right wing parties and and that there. Like that, the way that they maintain the appearance of distinction or conflict is by invoking what’s often called in the podcast landscape, like a culture war, sort of like, you know, dialogue that is like described as distinct from the actual. And it is distinct from the actual like policies of these two entities.

Daniel: Hmm. MHM.

Arnold: And so I think that to understand that like a way to understand that is to say that these two, the two right wing parties that control the United States of America. Boy, the psychology of left, right difference to create all of these conflicts that have nothing to do with their policy agendas whatsoever and right.

Daniel: Slam. Yeah, that’s that’s a huge, big thing. I want everyone to just sort of absorb that and. I. Yeah. Timpani. Yeah. Yeah, I want. I’ll. I’ll reframe it, too, because I’m gonna definitely be talking about this. But this is a huge important. Concept. So let me know if I’m wrong in my rephrasing of this by paraphrasing of it, but basically what you’re saying is you have two parties, you know, because you’ll say, well, yeah, but in the US, there’s no real left wing party, but you still have this polarization. You still have people who always vote Democrat. People always vote Republican. There’s people in the middle. And you’re saying that what these parties, the politics in the US, is not about. Actual left and right, it’s just about. The parties have figured out how, like the psychologists and the the PR people who work for these parties and the the advertising people have figured out how to press the buttons of those people who are receptive to right wing language. And those people who are receptive to left wing language. And they sort of jump on those people and and message those messages to them. The Democrats message to those. Open to experience type people the Republicans message to those close to experienced people and that’s why you have the voting distribution. You have that matches the same thing. It will have in Europe when you actually might in a country where you actually might have a left and right wing party. Even though there’s no content to the difference, although there is some cultural content, but there’s no economic content as that makes sense.

Arnold: Hey. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Yeah, and. And so so understanding the psychology of left, right difference I think is good for I think is essential for figuring out how to deal with the machinations of these two parties. Right, you know, to understand how we’re being manipulated.

Daniel: So I would say that you and I have a common project that that sort of. This relates to in that we both want to figure out how to message to a broad group of people like I constantly, and the reason I started my podcast is because I would meet people who have left wing policy goals. Ohh, we need to put more money and more rich people need to pay more taxes. We need to put more money into our healthcare system that’s falling. A part education should be free, you know, can even be cultural stuff like they’re very anti racist, but then they’re going to turn. Sound and vote for the right wing party and I’m like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? So what you’re saying? And I think you know, it makes sense, is that these parties have figured out how to message that to that person. Has certain proclivities that might make them more susceptible to, like, racist messaging to anti trans messaging. To certain kinds of freedom messaging, certain kinds of messages that resonate on what we know as the right, even though it’s just not exactly the right and other people will resonate with the messages that that are affected with the left. And So what we can do is figure. Out ways to communicate with those people that matches their proclivities. But that still has, like a policy goal that we’re interested in, like saving the environment. There’s. So you’re saying there’s a it’s funny, I shouldn’t call it left wing, right? But there’s an open to experience way of messaging anti racism. And there’s a close to experience, a way of messaging anti racism. There’s an open experience way of messaging. Pro environment and there’s a closed method and this makes sense because if we look at politics 100 years ago this same. Those same people who today are voting for Donald Trump all the time, and these right wing politicians were socialists or proto socialists like they were. They were, you know, Thomas Frank always talks about these, you know, in Kansas, all these populists. And now that state is a super Republican state, but it’s the same people. It’s not like there was a giant exodus and everybody moved out of Kansas. And and, you know, moved to. California. Yeah, it’s versa. It’s that’s the same people. So it’s just in the mean time, these PR specialists have figured out how to prey on those different subsets of people. So what we what we both sort of want to do is figure out how to get past all this garbage and all this, you know, in in social media era, we’re we’re in this, like, serotonin button pressing receptor, you know, you know. Geniuses like these people are 24/7 are just working on. How do I get your serotonin? Receptor to to. Respond to this and we want to sort of bypass that and get actual policy messages across to people so. How? How do we do that? How do we fix? How do we fix the world? How like get talk some more. I mean, cause you have a lot to say about this. Talk some more. Just about the implications of this, how it plays out and also on your experience because I want to rewind a bit and talk about most of us who are doing podcasting and who are listening to podcast. Using these political podcasts are really interested in changing the world, changing at least certain things about the world about our society. But we don’t know how. We have no experience doing anything. We’re just these. We’re trained to be passive consumers. We don’t know how to go raid a, you know, lobby, a politician we don’t know. We have many friends who do it. We don’t have the experience. No one taught us that. To us in school. So we’re just sitting around and we might be yelling at each other on social media or just listening to podcasts. You come from the world of activism. You spent much of your life running around doing things, and now you’ve turned around, and now you’re doing a podcast. How did that happen, and how does this stuff, what you’re talking about, relate to that? And to your experiences?

Arnold: Yeah, I mean. I think that. I really I really came from this place for so many years where I I I you know, I just kind of thought like I don’t think that our core theoretical assumptions matter all that much. I think what really matters is that we find, you know is like I is that people go out in the world. Find points of convergence in the perspective with other people that form the basis for shared projects, right, you know, and I was like, I don’t. I I don’t have a theory or a political platform that’s like really broad that I need to share with anybody. Just need to figure out what we agree on in this moment to go do a thing and and.

Daniel: So, like we may disagree on environment, but we agree on healthcare. So let’s just work on that or we might disagree on immigration. But we agree on environment. So let’s just work on that.

Arnold: That you know. Yeah. And certainly, you know, I think that like in practical terms, what I encountered was like we may really disagree about whether human nature exists or not. We may disagree about whether evolution plays a role in our behavior, you know. But I was kind of like, but who cares, right, you know, like, let’s just, let’s just go blockade the logging room. Right. And at a certain point of watching. The the kind of like core assumptions that people had about the world, how that actually played out in our political decision making processes, how like various constructs that people were inhabiting really, really influenced and impeded our ability to just do things. To to win to, you know, to achieve victory.

Daniel: You mean in your activist groups?

Arnold: In my activist groups, yeah, I got to a place where I was really like, I actually do think that theory matters. I think it’s actually really important to have, at least in some cases, like I’m all. I’m a radical pluralist. I wanna work with people who have very different perceptions. But I think that there are some core assumptions and narrow. Negatives that are really present within the the like organizing world that I was inhabiting that are destroying our ability to achieve anything and that they actually really do largely come out of this like discomfort that people have with the idea of human nature and innate variation between people and.

Daniel: So give me some examples. Well, finish what you’re saying and then think about giving some examples of how that played out that really made you start thinking this way.

Arnold: Well, I mean, yeah, I’m gonna. I’ll dive into that, which is, I mean, I think that a a central thing is that. Everything that we’re doing when we’re when we’re doing politics, when we’re trying to achieve some political end is very like very centrally wrapped up and asking ourselves the question, what do we have in common with who right and like what? What are our share, what are our points of convergent interest and perception. That would form the basis for some kind of unified program of action and.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Narratives about so, a narrative that encompasses innate variation, that that encompasses biology, can do a thing where we look at different groups of people, say, say they’re, you know, they’re separated by some really vast, like differences and experiences. Black people and white people. Native people and black people, you know, trans people and CIS people or whatever. And we can see how in any given group there are some of the same types of personality traits that we can. We can see the same types of people in any given group. Now, in a typical left social constructivist narrative that is not permissible, you cannot. You cannot see.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Like you cannot see the white person who has the the really like prominent place in the hierarchy collaborating with the black person who also has the really hierarchical tendencies to suppress the other black people who are sick of getting beaten up and caged by the police. Right. That’s like that’s not allowed. But but it’s real. Like, that’s what’s actually real is that there are the same types and it’s weird. Interestingly, the global right is actually getting much better about this, about acknowledging like that, like there’s a lot of nationalists who weirdly understand how similar they are to other nationalists who have, like, totally, you know, who come from somewhere totally different. But, you know, they see how they’re like basically the same type of people. In different cultural contexts with very similar objectives and perceptions, right.

Daniel: Would would you mean like some kind of Islamic fundamentalist person with like a Christian conservative person sort of thing? Yeah.

Arnold: Exactly, exactly. They’re the same ************, right? They just came. They’re just from different places. You. You know and and weirdly like some of those people are really starting to understand that and make alliances. But in my experience of, like, the type of politics that I. Do. That’s taboo and the lack of that understanding has really impeded, you know, in in moments of, like, particularly in the big conflict. Moments. It’s like the uprising. It’s up against the wall. It’s time to decide. Are we taking this to the next level? Ohh, we could all go to prison or die. There is always somebody. Who finds a person within an oppressed demographic and says this person represents the perspective of people who are like, oppressed or disadvantaged in this way. And they’re saying that we shouldn’t go fight the police, so we shouldn’t, right? And.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Daniel: Whoa, yeah.

Arnold: But like if you have a biological and if you if your understanding of the world encompasses the fact that there’s the same type of people in every population, you know you can say like well. Well, all of us from all these different populations who share this set of perceptions, this set of basic tendencies in these common interests, we’re going to do what we’re going to do. And y’all who don’t can do what you’re going to do, right.

Unknown Speaker: Right.

Arnold: But what I’ve actually practically seen in organizing is that social constructivist leftism just can’t do that, and that’s a real problem.

Daniel: So. This has a parallel to something that will. Recording stuff about really soon, which is that. You have members of different upper class communities, like whether they’re black, white, trans. Yeah. And they all think that ohh, I represent black people. I represent CIS people and but they they all just represent upper middle class people and their managerial prerogatives and their managerial culture. And you know, they all sort of come from the same place in terms of their being groomed to be the next generation of owners and managers and professionals. But they think that they represent this rainbow coalition.

Arnold: Exactly.

Daniel: But it’s just kind of one tiny sliver. Of class and the culture. So you’re saying that stuff, but it’s. But this is actually about ingrained in inborn personality types. That’s really interesting. It’s something you said also reminded when you talk about different nationalists sort of coming together. We were talking earlier about Proto neo-Nazi podcast. And David Duke had this. Proto podcast like before, podcasts were a thing he would put on his his radio show on the Internet, and he was always going off on how he loves and respects not loves. But he wanted to emulate the right wing of Israel. Like the way that the right wing of Israel sees their demographic war against the Arabs and the way they see, you know, identity and Jewish people versus non Jewish people and stuff like he’s like, This is why we have to, as white people, we have to do this like this is you know and he’s a ******* Nazi. If you listen to that show everything and it was a very creepy.

Arnold: Yeah.

Daniel: Joe, because and this is like 10–12 years ago. Everything he would bring everything back to the Jews. Well, if you think that there’s too much crime and black people, if you hate black people, you actually hate Jews because Jews are the ones that are allowing all the black people to do this, because somehow they’re affecting the laws. If you think there’s too many Mexicans and and immigrants, well, it’s the Jews who lobbied to let in all these Mexicans and immigrants. If you think there’s too many black people, it’s because the Jews were the slave traders that blocked, like everything was about Jews. He ******* hates Jews. He blames Jews for everything but. He loves the right wing Jews and he he he wants to be them, right. It’s this wacky convergence. So so it it so totally ties into what you just said. Can you give me some examples of, you know, like the hierarchical person from one group and a hierarchical person from another group, sort of like converging to **** over. Everybody else or something like that. You’ve seen, you know, with your own eyes.

Arnold: Yeah. I mean, I think that a time that it really hit me in a really. Profound emotional way was at Standing Rock during the the pipeline resistance there in 2016. I I think that I you know, I started resisting resource extraction when I was 16 years old and I literally had been waiting. My entire life for Standing Rock to happen. It meant so much to me, and when I went there I worked so hard to make it the most effective thing it could be, and I. Saw a truly revolutionary potential and I know there is, like there’s a little bit of a subjective element to this kind of thing when you’re really in the midst of an uprising, it feels like truly anything is possible. And then if you walk, you know, like if you walk away from it, you’re like, oh, maybe the world is actually kind of mostly staying the same or whatever. But like. I really, I really do feel like almost anything could have happened as a result of that process and what is so. But what is so noteworthy about what actually did happen? Is that the exact same political disputes and dynamics played out there among native people that play out when black people are resisting police violence and when white people are trying to like the same the same types of people were present, making the same arguments and. Having the same debates and So what ultimately happened at Standing Rock was that people associated with the tribal governments and the other kind of like really, you know, like the people was something to lose. Let’s say, let’s just call it the people. Like you’re saying, like, the people who are. The middle class, the upper middle class people who just kind of do have the same tendencies. Wherever you find them. Those people actively worked to suppress the more militant tendencies that were present in, like the rest of that encampment, and they they worked very hard to press a narrative. That they represented some kind of like definitive, that they represented native people per se, you know, and that that their desire to deescalate that resistance. Should be thought of as a moral imperative to like respect, native identity and and you know into into like honestly like embrace like native wisdom or something like that. Even though there were literally all these other native people and, you know, and you’ll also get this if it’s like a a black LED uprising against the police. There’ll be some like, quote UN quote.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Black leader who’s like? Listen, everybody go home. I’m the black leader and I say it’s time to stop and they’ll literally just be other kids. Like other black people who are like, no, let’s, let’s burn it the **** down right now, you know? And that exact same thing. Happened and and you know. It’s like. Native governments just are the same power structures that you find anywhere you know, like there was an inventory. There is an inventory of the amounts of logging done on different land ownerships in the United States at one point and native land ownerships had the highest rate of deforestation of. Any land ownership you know it’s like it’s. Not it’s not the case that that identity is a total, you know, like thwarts all of the destructive tendencies that you find in other power structures. Power structures function very similarly wherever they’re found, and so that that was one case where, like seeing the like, the Liberal basically seeing like liberalism. Destroy. A radical movement within, you know, within a group of like indigenous people at Standing Rock, was one of the things that really made me feel like these dynamics are universal. You find you find these.

Daniel: Everywhere. But do you see that more as a class thing or as a personality thing? Because I’m guessing that it’s like what you’re saying, like the, the, the Native American land owner. Well, he’s a landowner. He thinks like a landowner and he wants to make money. And and and the Native American activist who’s the upper middle class doesn’t want too much shake up, doesn’t want too much chaos, whereas the poor person who has nothing to lose thinks that way. Do you think that that matches more to class in? In this particular case, then matches to proclivities like in, in born proclivities.

Arnold: Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sure that I’ve ever thought too much about. Which is like the greater contributor. I think that definitely like I said like this is the politics of people with something to lose, like definitely the the class aspect of it is huge, maybe it’s even primary in that case. But I think the point that I would make, I mean I think that there is definitely also like.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm. Hmm.

Arnold: In innate component there and I think the point that I would make is that the left social constructivist. Way of looking at the world where supposedly different identity groups all like share perceptions in this weird like it, it actually tends to really erase differences between people in this weird way and or make the differences.

Daniel: Like you mean within identity groups, they all share some perception, like when you’re saying an academic thing, just explain to the audience like.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Daniel: The trend in in academia, especially in anthropology today, it’s like, oh, well, you’ll never understand as a white person, you’ll never understand the experience of the black person. Ohh, and you’ll never don’t even try to understand the the hunter gatherer this tribe. And that tribe will never understand the other tribe like no one ever understands each other. We’re all just a giant tower of Babel. We’re like different alien species. Every culture has its own.

Arnold: You’ll never.

Daniel: Extraterrestrial species, right?

Arnold: That’s exactly right. And so like, but what is so weird? What is so weird all of these anti human nature constructs ultimately end up contradicting themselves at some point. Because what’s so ******* weird about that is that it starts out from this place of epistemological humility. Like, don’t assume you know what other people are experiencing.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: But then so quickly. Really, in order to do that, to be like you’ll never understand the experience of a black person. What you end up doing is making groups of people monolithic. You end up requires that they have more cohesive perceptions that different sociological categories share more of a perceptual overlap than they actually do. So you end up negating the real.

Daniel: MMMM.

Arnold: Interesting meaningful differences between people in the course of supposedly embracing a framework of, like real humility about, you know, understanding how different everybody is or whatever.

Daniel: Hmm. And you’re also it. Also, you’re also kind of generating racism in the sense that you’re making cultural categories into income incomprehensible others. So then instead of thinking well as humans, we have more in common with each other than our cultural categories as man, woman, black whites, as we’re like, no SIS.

Arnold: So yeah.

Daniel: There’s one category that is like set in stone and in rock and black is a category. This is that. That’s racism at the end of the day. Isn’t it like?

Arnold: I mean, I mean that is my that is my very, very fervent contention is that the power structure can only exist by dividing us. And it used to do it by saying all these different groups are just different and we shouldn’t try to understand each other or try to get along.

Unknown Speaker: MHM.

Arnold: And then at some point. Critical theory and academic leftism came along and did that job for them, they said, like, you know, like we should all feel really bad about racism. And by the way, we could never understand each other and we don’t have anything in common and it’s the.

Daniel: And went back to the racism, the 19^th century racism, yeah.

Arnold: Exact same thing.

Daniel: And it comes. And it’s funny because this is what I’ll be talking about is it comes from a great place, right? It’s like you’re saying it’s important to have that humility of, like, I don’t, you know, cause anthropologists used to run around and look at other people and say, ohh, just at first glance, see them doing something that we don’t do. And you’re like, oh, that’s stupid. That’s they’re a bunch of idiots. Like, they’re hunting, gathering. They’re dumb and.

Arnold: Exactly it’s important.

Daniel: Don’t have all the great technology that they have or they do this practice because. Dum Dums and we’re so great. And that was just this horrible racist impulse. So those, you know, like Boaz and those type of anthropologists realize, like, no, we don’t know what we’re even seeing. We need to be humble. We need to sit there. We need to do participant observation and live with these people for two years before we can even have a thought about how they work. But underlying all that is that we are all human at the end of the day. There are things that we don’t understand, but there’s so much that we do understand and and that’s what after a certain point, then you can make those judgments. But what we’re saying today is like, no, you can never make those judgments. This is incomprehensible. It’s like this religious kind of thing. Like this is this unknowable and what what I’m getting? That is the and like you said, the ruling class needs to divide us when anything. Any good idea like this? Humility for example, or anti racism? Or the idea that people should control the industries that they work in, like or the idea of democracy? All these great ideas go into the Academy, get filtered through these. Upper middle class people. And then come out as a bunch of ****, right? So the idea of the free Association of producers and worker controlled industry turns into the party and the politicians control everything, right. Once, once it goes to that intellectual class and then all this anti racism, which is just so important, goes into the Academy and it just becomes racism in another name. With left wing language like this upper middle class just really eats, absorbs things and then shifts it out. In this like disgusting poisonous form. And it’s really important for us to distinguish between like for example, respectful language. We don’t want the people around us to feel bad, we don’t want to say things that perpetuates. That ideas and and versus political correctness where we’re just terrified of saying things because someone is going to rat on us and someone is going to punish us and someone’s gonna report us to the authorities, you know, or or. Anyways, yeah, so yeah.

Arnold: I mean I I think that’s exactly like hierarchies. Always assimilate anti hierarchical narratives and use them for their own maintenance, right? Like at one point.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Being a Christian was a radical statement of challenge to the Roman Empire, and then at another point the Roman Empire itself enforced Christianity, right? You know, and it did. It only took a couple centuries, and likewise, all of this stuff.

Daniel: Hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Daniel: Yes.

Unknown Speaker: Yes. Oh.

Daniel: Yes, that’s right.

Arnold: That is now being used to totally destroy movements and negate their ability to achieve anything came out of a really. Good place in terms of intentions, at least in like early 20^th century academia like it all, it’s all perfectly valid in its core motivations of like you know of, like always being willing to question how much you really know about any other person who has had a different set of experiences. That is obviously just a manifestly.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. Hmm.

Arnold: Good thing and we should all try to do that all the time, right? You know, but they somehow managed and. And so, like, my point about that is that those academic constructs that started out with really good motive.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Nations and are now so central in our culture, like so many people who are like arguing about like identity and oppression and whatnot on social media are using what are were originally academic constructs, even if they’re not familiar with that. You know, like they don’t know that line of dissent at all. But like those things evolved.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: The way they did, because early 20^th century social scientists were unwilling to deal with human nature and and, you know. And so like, there was these big theoretical debates.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: And there was a lot of, like, the people who were arguing for human nature would tend to look at universals. They would tend to look at things that people had in common between groups, right. And so this other camp would tend to, would tend to like.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Emphasize exactly this point, you know, like. But how can you really know anything about anybody else? Are you really sure you know anything about this other group? Do you know, since we’ve had different experiences, maybe you can never know anything about these people and it it it was motivated by, it was motivated by, really.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Like solid, like egalitarian principles and a sort of general humility. But it has been used to essentially, like, keep us divided.

Daniel: So you’re saying that like if Boas, Franz Boaz, for example, had realized, well the reason that I believe in a universal human nature is because we have some fundamental biological universal human nature, it might have avoided sort of that pitfall. He kind of left it open cause he didn’t want to talk about biology because biology is so associated. It really is. I mean, there’s good reason why. Were skeptical about biological explanation cause the Nazis cause colonialism, cause imperialism right. All that stuff was based on on biology, and that’s where all that language comes from. And even in the 70s when when sociobiology came. Out what’s what’s his name? EO Wilson. It was all about. Basically, women belong in the kitchen. You know, that was where all this stuff came from. So we have a we have to be skeptical about that stuff. But by just leaving that wide open, we’re just letting all the right wing take run away with it. And we’re ending up with stuff that’s incomprehensible. And it makes no sense. And that lets the fake left, which is the right in disguise. The the the ruling. Class, The Liberal ruling class, steal all of our ideas and turn them into garbage. And one one thing I noticed though, to bring it back to Class A little bit is I’ve noticed in circles of activists and and PC type people is that those people who are really into that stuff, but they are lower, they’re they’re poor, they’re way less ******. About it, they’re just, you know, they speak those words, they learn cause they learn that stuff young, but they integrated into a healthy way that they’re just like, they’re not gonna **** on you for having saying the wrong thing or having the wrong haircut or whatever. In public they might take you aside and talk to you and they’re really good about it. But then you see those real ******* lunatics who are.

Arnold: Yeah.

Daniel: You know the the vampire castle people, right? Like those people who are just want to terrorize everyone. Those people are always upper middle class. There are some people who are like, poorer, who, like, really glom onto that cause they have that lust for power and control. And they’re just kind of evil people, but just the poorer people, people for more humble backgrounds have such a healthier sense. Of PC and they exercise it in a way that’s much more constructive than the upper middle class, who tend to be more of the terrorist types. Although I do see there’s also that personality type that exists, you know, in in the different classes as well. I wanted to go back a bit. And when you talked about the revolution, revolutionary potential of Standing rock, can you talk about that a little bit because that’s that’s pretty interesting. What do you mean by that?

Arnold: What do I mean by that? I think that. I saw, I mean some of it is simple like. I saw a sufficient mass of people with a sufficient level of motivation. To confront the power structure that. It was. It’s usually very clear to me in in context of resistance, that ultimately the there’s a lot of like power on the other side that we just don’t have. And in that case, that wasn’t clear to me like to early on in the resistance in.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: In August, before it even really kind. I’ve got, you know, like before it was even really in the news or like had a high profile for most people. I would say there was a conversation that my friend overheard between two police where one of them said, I don’t think there’s enough police in Morton County to deal with this. And the other, that’s the county we were in and the other guy.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Said there aren’t enough police in North Dakota to deal with this, right, you know? And he was right. Like, you know, the ultimately police came from many, many places.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: But that’s interesting because you know, then they weren’t all those other places, and there was this real sense. You know, it’s like it’s like maybe you guys have the resources to guard this one pipeline. I wrote a I wrote a piece, you know, I wrote my like, post standing rock piece, like six months later. And one of my one of my, like, pithy.

Daniel: Oh.

Arnold: Phrases was. They had enough police to guard a pipeline, but not the United States of America. And there was this real, real sense that there were thousands of us there and they concentrated literally all the like resources that they could muster from many states into this one tiny area. And that was what was necessary to keep us out of that one tiny area.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Literally like the path of the pipeline construction. But my point was that with that level of momentum and tactical energy and that many people and that much of A I I think the most important thing is there is. Just like place, we just like reached a place of resolve where people were really, truly willing to fight. We had such a legitimate potential to kind of spread out from where we were all camped and to begin like. A massive sort of just like fight with, you know with. Fossil fuel infrastructure and with the infrastructure of this entire society and with the power structure that it serves, and you know so like for instance, I had been when I came to Standing Rock, I had been travelling around organizing train blockades like oil train and Coltrane blockades for a long time. And there was a sense that we could start leaving camp is like, sure, the 400 police that they gathered from, you know, everywhere from, like, Minneapolis to South Dakota. Could guard the path of pipeline construction, but we could have started shutting down the train system, shutting down the highways, shutting down the cities, you know, and it really, it really felt like such a legitimate possibility in a way that I had never experienced before. And yeah, so I guess like, I guess that’s really what I mean when I say I feel like there was revolutionary potential, there was a phase. In kind of like late November, as things got really intense where people started talking about. Kind of like what the limits to the conflict were for them. Like what they were personally willing, like what consequences they were personally willing to endure. And it turned out that a lot of people were totally willing to go to prison or to die. You know, it was like it was like a real moment of very unusual. Potential it just really was.

Daniel: And who were the kind of people getting involved in this? Like, were they from all over the place, from different backgrounds, like where they come from, who was? You know, there’s a big movement. Where did everybody come from? What kind of people were there?

Arnold: UM. I would say that. I worked with a lot of I worked, so I worked with a lot of native land defenders who, you know, had some background in a local struggle like wherever they came from, you know, somebody was trying to build a lithium mine or dump some ******* nuclear waste or whatever. And they had some. Background in that struggle. So like definitely militant native land defenders. Also a lot of native youth who just didn’t have that kind of struggle background, but who were kind of. Like. You know, I don’t know how to put. It but like. Like they were. They’re the same kind of like troubled youth that you do sort of find everywhere, you know, like they’re just like and then and then, like, a lot of, like, just sort of really grassroots people who were like, you know, I was working a job and like, living with my wife and my kid. And I saw this happening, and I just figured I’d come. And then there was definitely, like, people.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Hmm.

Arnold: Like me, you know, people who like tended to be really who weren’t native but tended to be really mobile. There were definitely like a lot of like, Earth first type people or, you know, just like that people who, like, were familiar with that style of resistance. Uh. But yeah, like I really what I really found cause I would hitchhike. When I was around there like to go like send off stuff to the Internet or whatever. So I would like I’d end up in a lot of people’s cars who were camped at Standing Rock, who had just shown up from wherever and what I really found is that it was literally only the people in the power structure. It was only the people in, like the tribal governments and stuff like that, who had any kind of problem.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: With with really serious acts of resistance, and that almost every person there, almost certainly every native person there, who was just kind of.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Like. You know, just sort of like in a like didn’t have like a big like political background per se, was totally, totally OK with people like burning cop cars and whatever else, you know, like they were, they were all about it and that it took a long time for the kind of like liberal power structure.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Narratives. To really like take hold and suppress our resistance. But when they did, it was the exact same liberal narratives that suppress resistance.

Daniel: Everywhere. How do you think that happened? Because obviously, you know, if you’re looking at any given native population, those those upper middle class people are going to be a small sliver of the, you know, small chunk. So how how did they manage to? Dominate everybody else in that way.

Arnold: I I really wish that I had a better answer to that question than I do. I’ve I’ve thought about it just like a whole, whole lot. And. And yeah, I really.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: I don’t know. I don’t know why those narratives have this enduring psychological appeal that they have everywhere. Why? I why when somebody in a position of a certain kind of prominence says that we should deescalate that so many people are willing to listen?

Daniel: Is it because that person is respected in the community for other reasons, like oh, they did this good thing and they did that good thing. So I trust that person. Is it that they look like they know what they’re talking about is that their age or the way they stand? I don’t know, I’m just spitballing.

Arnold: Ohh yeah, no, it it absolutely does come out of like a it comes out of their social status. It comes out of the perception that people have that they are a leader or like a prominent figure of some kind and that they should.

Unknown Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Should.

Arnold: Be you know that the it’s like intrinsically valid for them to be like determining what a big group of people does.

Daniel: They know better. Mm-hmm. Hmm. And do you find that the people who ended up obeying and backing off, did they and the other of the day feel like, well, yeah, we did the right thing. Like, yeah, I obeyed that person and that ended up having the right result even. Though you know it wasn’t exactly right or. Do they regret it? And they’re like, oh, ****. You know, why did I do that?

Arnold: I think there’s a range of perceptions, but. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people do feel I think a lot of people felt like they had their hands tied, especially I would say white people who came to show support right for. So for instance, there was that really, I think crucial moment. I think when we basically lost that Standing rock was in December.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: And the veterans showed up that, you know, like this very large contingent of veterans showed up. And at first it was like they were like, we’re gonna battle the police. You know, they were like.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Like they were like we are here like this is unacceptable and we are here to help and and we. Yeah. Exactly. And we know how to do that and and then.

Daniel: And we have military skills, yeah.

Arnold: As much as I think some of them understood, some of them would have felt exactly the way that I’m describing that, you know, they would have felt like this is the same kind of like. This is the power structure doing the same thing that it always does. I think that because the power structure the native government was able to say, like as white people, you need to listen to what I as the native leader, I’m saying I think they felt like their hands were tied. You know, I think that that’s it’s really hard because it’s like.

Daniel: Yeah.

Unknown Speaker: Makes sense?

Arnold: If if, like literally like the the. If the President of the you know, like the Native Council, the elected Native Council is on TV saying these white people are not listening to US native people, it kind of doesn’t matter if the like 25 year old native kid in the camo is saying, well, I’m native too and they’re doing what?

Daniel: MHM. Mm-hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: I want, you know, like the, then the, then the power differential is real. Really, like people know that they’re going to experience more consequences from being disagreed with by like, you know, the tribal chairman than by the scrappy native land.

Daniel: Right. Effect. So you think it might also have something to do with? Well, if I persist with this despite what the person, you know with a respected figure in my society is saying that I could have some social repercussions. Later. You don’t know.

Arnold: You’ll get cancelled. Yeah, totally.

Daniel: Yeah, you get cancelled in that non, you know, without like. Yeah. And also military people I guess are used to listening to authority and listening to commands from the top. Right. So.

Arnold: Yeah, I mean that’s true, but it’s also true that a lot of people exit the military deeply skeptical of the power structure that they serve. That’s the that’s a real thing.

Unknown Speaker: True.

Daniel: Yeah, OK. Oh, this is super interesting stuff. OK. Can you talk a bit more or is there anything more to say that’s just about the groups that you participated in and some of the the types of cultures? Of the groups that you participated in and some more successful or less successful like you have experiences with what really was working and what wasn’t working and why.

Arnold: A. A point that I’d like to hit on because it relates to so strongly to like what I’m trying to do with the podcast and everything is just that. Yeah, there is like I I do have these decades of experience and movements. And so when that starts in the in the mid 90s I encountered. Sort of like activist landscape that I would say was way, way, way less encumbered by some of these dynamics that we’ve been talking about. Some of the like cancel culture, safety culture kind of stuff and just this whole, like, social constructivist like left framework. There is way less of. So like well, since this person had a different experience, how could you possibly say anything about them? Or like, how could you ever know the same truth? And so I think that I saw.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. MHM.

Arnold: It’s not like it’s not like in the 90s. I was like, whoa. Looks like victory is imminent or anything. You know, it was like. We are clearly on a very depressing trajectory and and the odds didn’t look great, but there was a culture of resistance like there was a culture constituted around trying as hard as it could to shift our trajectory. That actually felt more viable than resistance culture feels now. In a lot of cases, in many respects, and so you know, there’s this whole.

Unknown Speaker: Like.

Arnold: It’s like we go through like, you know, like the dialectical process, like thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And like, you know, I mean, like, I feel like. We we at resistance culture kind of like went to these places that have these very extreme tendencies that aren’t really productive. But I hope that. In doing the podcast and like other, you know, just like other kinds of projects that are similar to this that people are doing that we can kind of create a resistance culture that has healthier assumption, like more valid reasonable assumptions about what people are and what our bases for understanding one another and collaborating are.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: UM. But yeah, you know, and like another thing that I experienced back then. That is less common now I think was like I I think like a tighter a more like cohesive. Synthesis of. The more militant tendencies with the more like institutional approaches to political change, you know environmentalism. Was very much like this weird these weird kind of parallel tracks of like, let’s go to the forest and masks and like with pickaxes and like, destroy this road and but like simultaneously, let’s do administrative law and like, you know, like, let’s write an administrative appeal of the timber sale that we’re blockading. And try to stop it that way and there be, you know, like this very like tight, like sort of like synthesis there where you know, it’s like literally the same people were doing these these things like I I wrote administrative appeals of timber sales and destroyed logging, you know and like and that.

Daniel: So you’re saying this was happening before and but it’s not now.

Arnold: Yeah, and for some reason like that is way less I see way more of a fragmentation. There’s like there’s like the people who hit the streets and the people who, you know, work through institutional channels. And while I have a really revolutionary, I have very revolutionary objectives. I see how working within institutions. As long as it’s in combination. Like. Movements can actually be really useful, and I don’t see as much of that now as I used to. That’s.

Daniel: So you see, people are just more are like, no, we don’t want to participate in the system, we just want to do outside of the system like a bit like Occupy Wall Street type of thing.

Arnold: A big difference. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: Where do you think that came from? Because obviously the power structure is where things happen, so you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Why did all? Why did people abandon working through formal channels?

Arnold: I so I don’t really know, but I I think that I would invoke this notion of the like. The post materialist shift and this like this idea that in like post World War 2, material abundance, our societies became increasingly about like niche self-expression and self realization. And and that politics increasingly became about expressing your unique identity more than it became about affecting external outcomes, you know. And so yeah, like, I’ve talked for hours about that at a time in my podcast. And that’s like there’s some great books, like the Silent Revolution.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: By Ronald Engelhardt, that that predicted way back in like the the 70s. So much of how our politics has gotten, how it has gotten like, way, way less. Like I don’t know like way less disciplined and way less like clearly about achieving objectives and way more of this kind of like crazy circus of self-expression.

Daniel: And expressing yourself, which episode was that? I remember that being one of the particularly excellent episode.

Arnold: It’s called. The world is a lot like the Internet and I don’t remember which number it is.

Daniel: OK, but just as long as they could. Yeah, people could find that cause that’s one of the top ones. I I can. Recommend. How so? You you seem to be saying like the sort of the quality of people that is that are getting involved in these groups seem to be deteriorating in certain ways and seem to have sort of more narcissistic concerns. What’s the way? Because there’s so many, like, if you just if you survey people right, the amount of people who want big changes, whether it’s environmental changes. Healthcare. Change of the economic system, like all kinds of stuff, there’s huge numbers across demographics and even, you know, like in Canada, the amount of conservative voters who want to tax rich people more to put more money in the healthcare system is huge. How do you and these things don’t just happen? You have to be active. To push for them to happen, even if you’re just focusing on legislation, never mind like revolutionary change and changing major fundamentals of our. How do you get all the people who are listening to these podcasts and care deeply about politics, but don’t do anything? Why are why are we all so silent and and and not being active? And what do you think? There are some ways of getting people to be the ones that are active versus these kind of toxic people who often are the ones running around. Doing stuff.

Arnold: Yeah, I mean, so that is like. It’s it’s the real big question and I I think that that is that exactly that perception motivates me personally to fight the culture war that I’m kind of fighting, you know, like I say a. Lot. Of stuff that is really taboo in a way that that like. Really gets you in trouble with a lot of these kinds of people who everybody sort of associates with movements and politics and stuff like that. And I just really. The. I really think that the the kind of power that they weirdly have is so ephemeral and illusory in a way I’m like, really, what power do these people actually have?

Daniel: Nobody cares. It’s like such a small amount of people that care about those rules. They’re just influential people. But but when you say you say taboo stuff, you’re not running around saying the N word or anything like that.

Arnold: Like like this.

Daniel: You mean you’re not saying like bad words? Like, what do you say or sexist things? What are you saying?

Unknown Speaker: Ohh.

Arnold: No, but but like literally. Like, literally like what I’ve said to you in this podcast, that like that, like, different groups of people that, you know, like black people and white people have have are, like populations that have the same types of people within them, you know, and that they’re like, right, that like. I grew up getting stopped by the police and arrested every couple of days. You know, like my father spent like, 15 years in prison. By the time he was 30 or some crazy thing like that. Right. And so, you know, and like my brother will say, like, I I feel like you and I have more in common with a black person.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: Who comes from a place where people get stopped by the police a lot and whose fathers are in prison?

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Then we do either with white people, for whom that’s not the case, or that black people you know he like. He’ll be like poor white people and poor black people have more in common than either do with rich black people or rich white people. And I’m like, yeah, absolutely. That is so taboo that is literally described as racist to say. And and I’m.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Absolutely.

Daniel: Yes.

Arnold: Like, I’m like, wait, but what we’re saying is that people. People are like people’s behavior and perceptions is largely the results of the conditions they’re subject to, and that race isn’t a magic essence that determines who we are. How the **** is that racist, right? You know, like, like what y’all are saying is racist, but exactly.

Daniel: Exactly. It’s that. Exactly, exactly. And everyone who has life experience understands this, right? And it’s only. People who have.

Arnold: No clue. It’s only people from the middle class cause and who went to too much college too soon.

Daniel: Experience and who’s? Yes, you have to get a PhD to be that ******* stupid like you have to have spent and and what is called. Right. You spend your life, you’re in school, you’re in grade school. You’re in high school, middle school. I guess in the states you have. Then you go to college and then you go to grad and then you go to PhD and then you go to postgrad and you’re *******, like 70 years old. Like, whatever, like, you know, you’re like in your late 20s, early 30s and you haven’t done anything outside of these institutions. Of conformity and of education and of brain, like learning, learning, or brainwashing, depending on what’s happening, right? So. How you have all these theories and no experience to know that these theories are ******* idiotic, or to evaluate those theories as intelligent or stupid as some of the theories are really great, there’s there’s good stuff in academia, but so much of it is garbage. And what I noticed is the students who had more life experience were able to evaluate and distinguish the poopoo from.

Unknown Speaker: It’s.

Daniel: The diamonds. You know, whereas the other people were just like eating the diamonds and the poo poo in one big shovel and couldn’t ******* tell the difference, right? And it’s like the strength and power of a poor black person going to a a poor white person in Kentucky whose teeth, you know, are falling out because he can’t afford a dentist. And his son overdosed from fentanyl. And who’s like, you are my brother. We have the same situation. We are struggling in the same situation, except I have some extra struggles that I want you to empathize with. Like I have to deal with some extra things that you. Have to deal with let’s fight together and that is like, that is heartwarming, that is solidarity building versus some little middle class ***** ** **** going to that same guy saying you.

Unknown Speaker: Have white privilege.

Daniel: Like you’re like you know, that’s anti solidaristic, right? You hear the word privilege and you’re like privilege means something that you don’t deserve, that you have something that you don’t deserve. It doesn’t mean, you know, it’s just the wrong word for that important concept that. Someone you know the intersectional concept that someone, let’s say, who’s black versus someone who’s white, who’s who’s all things equal, has some extra disadvantages. That’s disadvantages a word that makes sense or not, as many rights versus the idea of privilege, which makes when a normal person who didn’t get ******* 12 years of ******* beat, brainwashing and abuse at school. Here’s the word privilege. They think you’re saying that I’m a rich piece of like Sissy? Like what? What do you think? What are you saying? You know and no one listens to any of this ****. And this small group of people is running and only 30% of people even have a college degree. Never mind a grad school. And I there’s a huge gap, too, between bachelors and masters in the level of indoctrination of stupidity that you are assaulted with. I recommend everyone read the book Disciplined Minds, which I’ll talk about in the future. Anyway, sorry I’m I’m going off on on all these tangents but yeah basically I agree with what you’re saying. But while we’re at it, what was your? You didn’t go on to do a grad degree, you just went to college. What was your and that was recently. A few years ago. So what’s there anything interesting to say about that? Why did you go to college? Why did you not continue? Did you graduate? Yeah.

Arnold: I think the. No, no, I am not. I am. I am not a college graduate and and sometimes I really wish that I had never gone to Community College because while it was pretty useful to, I went through like the calculus and stats series and I feel like that was incredibly useful and fun. It was fun.

Daniel: Just for for people who haven’t listened to Arnold’s podcast like you have a huge level of knowledge. About a whole bunch of subjects that a lot of people that I know who are in academia don’t have that same level of knowledge. Like there’s definitely benefits to going to school and learn some things, but I don’t think that everyone people should be discriminating just because someone doesn’t have a credential like people are asking me, like, what’s your credentials? And I haven’t talked about myself at all. Right on my show. And it’s it’s. I will just because I think it’s.

Arnold: Right.

Daniel: Cells. I think it’s like a way of just like getting, you know, selling out and like.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Daniel: Being parasocial but. It doesn’t like. Don’t be. So clinging to that. There are people who understand things and who have access to knowledge nowadays in the Internet who have a huge amount of knowledge with 0 credentials. So sorry. So go, go on. Talk about your experience.

Arnold: Yeah, I mean like no, but I just kind of regret it for exactly because like I’ve I’ve spent starting when I was 17, you know, I started reading scientific papers when I was 17, and I’ve never stopped. So I’ve accumulated like a decent breadth and depth of knowledge. And I used to take such inordinate pleasure in having really academic. Conversations and then at some point dropping in with the. Jake, I dropped out of 9^th grade and never went back, you know, and like and like, I kind of wish that I could still say that. And it’s not like it’s not like the time I spent in Community College makes any different. Like my podcast would be no different if I, you know, if I hadn’t done that.

Unknown Speaker: Ohh no.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Unknown Speaker: But you.

Arnold: Sold out, but I sold out. I mean it. So the experience was I, you know, like I said, I dropped out of high school and. The activist milieu that I entered as a teenager, the the like Earth, First forest defense thing at that time really did have this emphasis. That was like, you know, about challenging resource extraction on federal public lands through the, you know, through the institutional. Channels, which required knowing a lot of science and like reading up on a lot of law. In science and there was very much a like anybody can do this. Everybody should do this move to some place by a National Forest and start challenging them and shutting **** down. And so that’s what I did. You know, when I was like 19, I went back to the central Sierra foothills where I had, like, spent some of my teenage years and. And just started reading science about the in the species that were in decline because of logging around there. And you know, and then I started, like, writing these challenges. And so I think that from a very early age, you know, I mean. And maybe from the time that I started sneaking into the University library at a university in New Mexico, when I was 17 and like, just, like, literally sleeping on the street, I just really felt like, like anybody can do this. And the idea that the idea that there should be some, like, limited.

Unknown Speaker: We can’t.

Arnold: A subset of the population that employs scientific reasoning or feels qualified to engage in any of this stuff. I just I felt like a profound intuitive.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Hostility towards that notion in in a kind of like, I guess, like kind of like a defiant like, no, you know, like I’ll learn this stuff if I ******* want to. You can’t tell me not to, you know, and and and like literally had to like, you know, like I was kicked out of a lot of libraries when I was a street kid because I was so obviously.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: Homeless and, you know, and I was like, really had this feeling like, no, this is mine. And if it’s anybody’s and I’m you’re not going to keep me away from it.

Daniel: Yeah. Absolutely. Like who the **** belongs like that’s it’s for. It’s for everybody. You’re a ******* citizen. That’s knowledge is there for you. And probably I’ve noticed when I go to libraries in the US. It’s very much poor people and homeless people that are there. Like that’s who’s there nowadays. Everyone else has the Internet at home, right? And all the poor kids are showing up the library to do their homework, to go on the Internet because they might not have it at home or their cell phone or whatever. And then they’re also just some people are learning, right. Because there’s stuff, you know, you find these treasures right in the library. There’s so much stuff to learn.

Arnold: Yeah, yeah.

Daniel: Did you have any success with you talk about you’re doing these like ******* legal challenges without a lot of degree without that. So did you have any success with that did? That go anywhere. Was that worth? Pursuing.

Arnold: I stopped a lot of timber sales. Yeah, I actually.

Daniel: Wow.

Arnold: I won more than I lost at the administrative level and then some of what I did formed the bases for lawsuits that were also successful, you know, so if you couldn’t get, if you couldn’t get into a favorable administrative decision.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: The administrative process was necessary for the litigative process to occur as like a requirement to sue, and so you know, so sometimes what I did was just necessary for a lawyer to shut something down later on in the process.

Daniel: Right. You have to go through it first. To do the next that, did you ever collaborate with the lawyer? Saying, OK, you do this, and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll step in with any of that.

Arnold: Ohh yeah yeah and I and I would like write affidavits for cases and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah.

Daniel: MHM.

Arnold: Yeah, and but like but. Like what that actually achieved is. So environmental law is such an amorphous realm and like with Forest Service, timber sales. It’s like you can stop some project, but they can literally just conceive of some project to log the same place right the the like the day after you’re in court. You know, you know? And so.

Daniel: Right, right. And they have. Yeah, that’s the problem. Is in the people that were against have so many resources to, and they have teams of people whose job is just 24/7, finding ways around all the rules. Like that’s one of the reasons I emphasize the need for economic equality, or at least some kind of relative economic equality, because there’s only so much law. Like even if you make like $500,000 a year, there’s only so much lobbying of your. Your you know representatives that you can do, but if you make a zillion dollars a year, you can hire an army of people whose 24/7 job is just to lobby those people. Like there’s no, you know, there’s no contest. There’s just, like, some freak out in the woods who is doing administrative challenges like you. You know, whereas the other team has, like, a ******* army of full time, literally. That’s all they do, right? Yeah.

Arnold: No, totally. And I mean, I think that ultimately in my life, experience has I think I think that I was honestly more willing to entertain liberal notions of social change when I was like a 19 year old forest anarchist than I am now just because of the experiences like that that I had, you know where I was like, OK, like we can use this combination of legal processes and direct action to, like affect these outcomes and then over and over. Again, I saw that the my opponents were just utilizing different forms of power that were much... and I, you know, became much more of a fundamentalist where I was like, we have to challenge these people in really core ways because they will always do this dark shit that we’re not doing to win.

Daniel: So when you talked about Standing Rock and the fact that you have thousands of people in one place just blocking a road and then it required the police forces of like, you know, a giant area surrounding to, like, suck up all their police and put them all there. So basically what you’re saying, the implications of that. Is, you know, because there’s millions of people around who believe in stuff. So if we manage to get. Like thousands of. People in 10 different places at once, right? Who care if to care about stuff? Then you could successfully, despite the insane, insane military and police power of this. State and of the wealthy, we could still conceivably amass in certain ways that would render that force kind of useless, is that does that make sense, do you think?

Arnold: I mean, that’s exactly what I’m saying and that that reality shows its face in moments like that. So clearly one of the ways to relate this to like kind of a biological framework, you know, like, there’s this insight. I think Conrad learns is the first, like, behavioral scientist that I read talking about this, there’s this reality.

Daniel: MHM. MMM.

Arnold: Be that dominance hierarchies within a given species are typically not maintained by actual aggression, but mostly by aggressive displays, right?

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: And that that’s actually a sort of logical inevitability, because if you go look at a chimpanzee group or whatever, it’s not like the alpha chimpanzee could win a fight with every other chimp simultaneously, right? They destroy him.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Yeah. And so like that is also true of our species. Like the the mostly we are controlled not by like you know, it’s not like we’re actually fighting all the time. It’s mostly by the the implied threat or the explicit threat of violence. But that when these moments of uprising occur.

Daniel: Hmm. Hmm.

Arnold: It becomes really clear that they don’t have the resources to actually physically coerce us. Everybody that they’re coercing through threat. That, you know, like they can’t actually jail us all or beat us all.

Unknown Speaker: Right.

Daniel: So it’s a matter of getting enough people involved at the same time, because really even giant protests can get crushed easily. But if you have enough big protests.

Arnold: Up and kill us.

Daniel: Places at the same time, then you actually. You know, never mind. There, there’s a political cost to just like mowing down a bunch of protesters, which you know, even if you have 1 little protest, you can’t just mow everybody down. But you can kettle them and arrest them and make their life miserable in a bunch of ways. But because when we think about, you know, politics 100 years ago, and you had this revolution in that revolution and, you know, even though they went badly. You realize that like ohh, the state was so much weaker back then, you could storm the Bastille. You could do this. You could do that. But now we just have this massive, ridiculous state that could just nuke us all to hell and there’s we can’t even do anything. There’s no point. But basically, not only is it not true because of the political cost of just mowing down a bunch of people in the democracy, there’s. Like, but there’s also just the the structural the power is not necessarily as strong as it seems to be. In the face of enough people mobilizing in the right way, does that make?

Arnold: You know exactly. And I do. I want to say like I think that. I think that summer of 2020 was a time when I saw things get diffuse enough that those realities started to actually become really apparent, you know? So it’s like, sure, there’s the big March in Oakland and, you know, and then, like, the experience of that is going to be that it’s not just the Oakland police, but it’s also the police from all the sub.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm. Hmm.

Arnold: It’s police from all around there. It’s police from, you know, like the Walnut Creek, CA police are there and then you think, huh?

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Wonder what it’d be like if some of us were raging in the streets in Walnut Creek, right? Now you know. And then, but in in summer of 2020, that actually kind of did happen. So there were like, really significant concentrations of police that would descend on some like main phase of social unrest happening somewhere. But then there actually were.

Daniel: Hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Like factions who were all over the place where the police weren’t, and it really did illustrate that reality. They they truly do not have the capacity for physical coercion for all of us. At the same time, they really don’t.

Daniel: Hmm. Right. So it’s just interesting. So a movement like that was pretty spontaneous and didn’t have any. Specific goals exactly, besides some like generalized stuff. So if you think if they had more specific demands, again it could sort of comes back to occupy. Wall. Street a lot could have been achieved with that particular, you know, like if you have a repeat of that like in another year or two years or whenever. But people have figured out like, oh, we need to press for ABC specific demands. That you could just get a lot of **** done. Do what do you think of that?

Arnold: Yeah, I mean that level of momentum, yeah, definitely if people if if that was happening among I guess kind of like a more strategically oriented cadra that had like, yeah, I mean I I think that. The. The potential is is really vast.

Daniel: Super interesting. You did some episodes on group mind and trauma. What? How do those play into all of this? Some really interesting the group myself, like the dancing epidemics, there was a lot of you talked about cults. You grew up in a cult. There’s a lot of things to talk about in this, these issues. Why? How do they weave into this whole project?

Arnold: Yeah, I mean, you know, so one really well. Maybe maybe the most fundamental thing that I could say is that I think that any meaningful process of social transformation, anything that we’d describe as a revolution or anything like that involves, like we say, people finding points of commonality. And like it’s like it’s basically like a process. Of people asking like. Who is in my group? Who do I stand with? Who do I share some? You know, who do I have something in common with? And. And so much of human dynamics are about people perceiving themselves as part of one group and not a part of another. And there being a conflict between the two.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: And so some of what I was getting, what I’m getting out in the the group psychology series is just the simple fact that there are powerful evolved psychological mechanisms. For group identity and group participation that that those are always going to be really salient features of like the human mind, but that the actual but what actually constitutes a group like what? What defines a group has no evolved psychological content whatsoever. And so, you know, like obviously like.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: There are. There are a bunch of ones that like there are a bunch of group identities that people see as really psychologically salient that like. Create the conflicts and the dynamics that they currently do in our societies, but that I truly believe. I truly believe that we could replace a lot of the group identity criteria that people are currently employing with other group identity criteria, and that it would create a revolution. I really believe that.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Daniel: M. Select. You talked about some really interesting studies and I’m going to be referring to this as well. But you mean like categories like race and stuff like you could transcend those sort of categories? And make different categories that bring people together to achieve common goals, right? Like that. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so into really focusing on what left and right means because there’s a lot of people who think that they’re on the right who actually share so many of the goals that that are left wing goals. And there are a lot of people that think that they’re on the left that are actually little hierarchical dictators who who belong. On the on the other side, and we shouldn’t be aligning with those. We need to know what those words mean before we form our coalitions. And politics is all about forming coalitions, right? Like if you’re in a minority group, whether you’re trans, whether you’re black, you need to expand your. Coalition to win right to to get there. There’s winning hearts and minds, but to win hearts and minds that the best the road to winning and heart and mind is self-interest is like self-interest like ohh I have these same I’m trans I’m a small group but I have these same self-interest you know this this affects you in in this way ABC so you should actually. See me as on your side and I’m a valuable member of your coalition and you’re valuable member of my coalition. Race is huge gender. That stuff. But sorry. Yeah. So you talked about when you talk about in groups and that there’s no, we have a a deeply evolved mechanism for separating in Group from out group. But there’s no content to that mechanism. So you’re saying that to discriminate is something that’s very human but to be specifically let’s say racist or or gender discrimination like that’s not. Specifically, humans, so talk about some of those studies and some of that research.

Arnold: Yeah, I mean the the classic thing to to sight in this line of discussion is the are minimal group paradigm experiments and those are, I mean I it kind of almost seems as I read through this literature, I got this very distinct impression that the scientists involved.

Daniel: OK.

Arnold: Kind of liked coming up with the most absurd, meaningless markers of group identity that they could, you know. Because it like it really makes the point better or whatever. So it’s literally **** like, you know, like they divide groups up based on a coin toss or like they give them, like, different colored headbands. Or, like, you know, I mean, like, this, these findings have been replicated a number of times.

Unknown Speaker: Right.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: And the delight cause you basically get the same result every time. The delight in reading the studies is just finding all the absurd things so that science has divided people up by.

Daniel: What’s what’s the results? What’s so? So what happens when you give Group A purple headbands and group CB green headbands like? What’s the result? What do you mean?

Arnold: The results are profound, so behaviorally, like, say, say the experiment involves people dividing up a real like cash incentive for participating in the experiment. People will actually favor their group over other groups, even if the groups.

Daniel: The headband group.

Arnold: Are the results of a coin toss or a colored headband or or we can do this at the neurophysiological level? If we look at brain imaging studies, you know, like people who are in one group will feel more empathy at expressions of pain. In in their group than they will for people of the other group, even though these groups were invented in experimental context like 10 minutes before, you know like and this goes on and on and on like at any level looking at any. If you just like on a questionnaire basis you know like how much do you agree with people like people or whatever like they will rate.

Daniel: Wow. Right.

Arnold: People in their group better than people outside their group, you know, I mean, it just goes on and on it it and and so yeah.

Daniel: They haven’t even had group forming experiences like the the green headband. People didn’t go through any trial. By fire together nothing.

Arnold: That’s what I’m saying, right? Yeah. It’s not even like you have to, like, put them in some situation where they, like, work together or, like, demonstrate some shared competence or anything like that. It’s literally just assigning them to the group. It’s like, totally sufficient to generate all these really rich convergent differences in how people treat people.

Daniel: Wow.

Arnold: And and so you know, like I I think I mean this kind of goes back to.

Unknown Speaker: See.

Arnold: This kind of goes back to the question you were asking about, like getting people to participate in the the the barrier of, like the awful person who just wants to point out how, like terrible everybody is or whatever, like growing up in a cult and seeing how willing people were to submit to that horrible. Authoritarianism, and to let terrible things happen to themselves and their child. And in order to belong to a group right out of that motivation to belong to a group and and knowing how study after study shows like people sense of isolation is so profound right now, like people more than anything need to belong to something. And this kind of like rapidly accelerating, like rapidly changing.

Unknown Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Technological milieu that we inhabit, one of its big, inadvertent consequences has been. And to, like, atomize people and to take them out of being, like embedded in any group that feels meaningful and feels like a foundation for an identity that, you know, they have an evolved psychological need to experience. And I think that our mandate, like what we are trying to do in creating movements. And one of the reasons.

Daniel: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Arnold: That I’m willing to fight a culture war against those people, you know? So.

Unknown Speaker: MMM.

Arnold: So, so bitterly and fervently is because, like, I think what we’re really doing is giving people something to belong to, but that when people think about political participation, like when, like person on the street thinks about it literally, their first thought is I don’t want to get yelled at by, you know. Like the grad school, the grad school dropout who has, like the heavy academic framework who’s like you, monster. You oppressive monster, right? And so, like, I think it’s our job to make people feel like if they were politically participating, then they could.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. MHM.

Arnold: Make some friends basically, that they could be part of something that they know they desperately need in their lives and that they can’t really find a way to get you know it has to be fun, yeah.

Daniel: Yeah. It has to be a fun social club aspect to it, right? Cause no one. Why would anyone waste their spare time doing something if it’s not fun and all the so many of the activist movements, successful movements in the past, whether it’s civil rights, women’s suffrage, whatever it is, the labor struggles had so much to do with your local groups, whether it’s your church. Group your your Bundt Jewish group your mosque group you know in the Arab world. Your your Elks, your you know those weird social clubs that we don’t have anymore, right? The Greek Association, the meatballs, Old Men Association that you see now, all that stuff those were like because you’d be hanging out with your buddies and you’re like, oh, there’s a political issue we care about. Let’s all go, buddies, because we don’t have Internet to waste our time. We don’t have you **** to be jacking off. So let’s go do this. You know, thing that we all care about and we we’re talking about it like in every movement that you see that’s successful, you have people getting together and talking about something and realizing that they have all these things in common and that activates them through their social networks to. So and do stuff. What do you? Yeah. And also just we’re talking the in Group output thing. It really makes me think of sports. Right. You have like 2 opposing teams, which are just like the Bears versus the Cubs or whatever. The Steelers versus it’s not even a thing. The Steelers, right. You just have these two teams and everyone is just hooting and hollering and so ramped up that you have to crush the other team.

Arnold: Yeah.

Daniel: But there’s for no, you know, it’s fun. Like sports is fun, but it’s just based on nothing. It’s just they just invented an in Group and out group and you gotta crush the other team and you gotta win. And it’s like, so it’s really it makes us hopeful for defeating things like racism. Right. And. And I think it explains a lot. Too, because like if you have a town where there’s a large, you know minority population and because of history especially, you know black people that they never got to amass any amount of capital like the way white people have cause they came here as slaves because then there was all this Jim Crow. And then once they finally had equal civil rights and and there were still a welfare state and they were able to start. Climbing into the middle classes via unions and via industrial occupations, that’s just when the big globalization happened and and the carpet got yanked out from under them and and so they’re just always ended up being a poor population. If you’re a cop and you’re going into a neighborhood. It’s what’s associated with crime is generally poverty, right? So when you are facing crime and danger, you are seeing Brown faces and that is going to help activate your racism, plus the stuff that you learned as a kid, plus the stuff that you hear on your right wing radio crap. All that stuff is like making black and white the in Group out. But if you go to Kentucky or West Virginia or in Quebec and Montreal, like in the east Of Montreal, where there’s not a lot of black and brown people. There’s just poor white. People, skid punks, different kinds of like. You will have different visual markers besides brown and white that you’re going to divide people by and the cop is going to go treat that skid white punk the same. And I see this. You treat the skid white punk with that same disdain, that same disgust. You’re not going to call him the N word. You’re going to call him some other word, but it’s the same mechanics. Right. I think as racism, but it’s just based on some other in Group out group. I am the normal, I’m middle class, I’m a mainstream person. You are a skid punk. You have tattoos on your face you you know you have a dog, you have earrings in your nose like whatever it is, right or you’re just some poor white trash person. You have a mullet. You’re a **** like in in Britain. It’s just activating the in Group out group and if you understand that racism, I think maybe, uh, sexual minorities has maybe of a different psychological mechanism, but a lot of race stuff is specially. Obviously it’s a little bit different, but it really melts in the same with class discrimination. It’s very, very related and it even comes. So like when Chris Rock is walking down the street and the. Peace is racist against him and harasses him for no reason. Well, he’s kind of like a spillover from the class conflict that’s existing right between the poor class, which tends to be black and brown, which activates that racism. And then that goes and spills off against the rich black guy. What? It’s actually about those material conditions cause in West Virginia. That skid punk. There’s no black person or no Latino person in that ******* town, but you have the same relationship between the police and those people, and you know, those are the people getting shot by the police, not the, you know, the black person. Cause there is no black person. But it’s that same. Class of people. Anyway, sorry, I just went off on a on a rant, but do you feel any? That you have insights into the worst aspects of cancel culture type stuff. You know the worst vampire castle type people and the cults because there’s ice. The cult like that. You grew up in because I see a lot of in those activist groups. There’s definitely wanting to belong. To a group by having your own language that gives you that kind of group cohesion as well, by having certain rules that everyone adheres to, that’s all like group forming stuff. And then you often have in those groups. Obviously not every. I’m not sitting on every activist group, but you often get these like crazy vampire Castle, Lunatic cult leaders who sort of take advantage of that stuff. And start, you know, exercising their power through those rules, you have a bunch of people who aren’t psychological. Really prone to dominating other people and to controlling people, but then you have the person who is and who takes advantage of all that stuff, is that do you see a relationship between that and cults?

Arnold: Ohh, totally. I mean, yeah, I would. I would even like broaden it a little bit and just say that like Colts activist groups, whatever. But like it, it is actually just remarkable the extent to which human groups in general which are constituted for very different purposes and have very different professed. Like not only like worldviews, but even like cosmologies. You know, like, just like in the most fundamental sense, like, have very different stories about what’s true.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: And what they are ultimately behave in very, very similar ways like very similar dynamics play out in, in human group settings. Very often there’s a a fascinating book that Ezri in the Emancipation Podcast network sent me.

Daniel: Swamp site checks, yeah.

Arnold: Swamp side chats? Yeah. Called bounded Choice, which was written by a woman who was in, like, a hyper dogmatic Marxist click in I think like the 70s and 80s in the on the West Coast of the United.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: States and she is comparing the parallels between her experience and the heavens gate cult, which like kind of like ended around at the same time that her involved that that Marxist click she was in. You know like they had like a similar temporal history like they were both like offshoots of like 60s counterculture.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: Right. And they both like, you know, like, kind of like lasted into the 90s and awfully similar things happened in both settings, right. And I think in particular there is.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: Prevalent in activist groups and cults, this thing that I don’t know seems like it should be so innocent. At the outset or like like kind of like intrinsically on its own terms doesn’t sound like that bad of an idea, but for whatever reason is not something that humans do very well, which is like the the process. Of of critique where we, you know, we as a group, we’re going to critique an individual who participates in the group to be a better participant in the group. And that doesn’t. I don’t know. That doesn’t sound that insidious to me, but this is something that tends to almost never go very well. We like.

Daniel: Hmm. Yeah. No.

Arnold: For, for whatever reason, the human, like human psychology, is really not like equipped to handle these dynamics very well. And so that was. It’s like the culture that I grew up in, centrally featured this as a means of behavioral control, right? So that we would have these processes where literally like a couple 100 people were all telling one person.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: What they what was wrong with them? How? Like how their behavior and their perceptions were insidious and so, like, even as a child, I would have to like.

Unknown Speaker: Oh wow.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: You know, get up in front of hundreds of people and have the mall tell me what was wrong with me and it was so disorienting and so psychologically, you know, like disorganizing. And that is a that mode. Of critique. When I have seen it play out an activist groups, I feel like it has felt incredibly similar like it just like feels the same way and the effects on the critiqued individual are remarkably similar. You know, like there, there is a point where there’s a point at which people just kind of give up.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Daniel: Which are. Mm-hmm.

Arnold: And are totally willing to do almost anything to stop the critique like the like. It is not something that people are not.

Unknown Speaker: Wow.

Arnold: Equipped to handle those kind of group critiques very well at all, and at a certain point, like absolute conformity ensues, is my observation.

Daniel: Wow. I mean that was a tool of in a lot of communist countries as well, like the almost that exact same type of process, right? That I think Milan Kundera wrote a book about it, but it’s just like, you know, notorious stuff. Wow. I just want to rewind something. And it’s just about how.

Arnold: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: Good ideas go from like ordinary people into the PMC class in terms of garbage. When we talked about Christianity going from this sort of revolutionary group into this dominant group, that’s the process like in between in those 300 years. What happened is I forget why, but there was at some point Christianity became very popular with the upper classes at first with upper class.

Arnold: Yeah.

Daniel: Women and then somehow spread out and then somehow it got to Constantine and he realized like ohh I could really use this ****. Right. Like it just became this weapon. And, you know, it went from doing this really egalitarian revolutionary coming from the poorest. You know, the rejects, the freaks of society. And then went up into the upper echelons and just got perverted into something. Else which is. Why you see such totally different practices of Christianity, right? You have that weird, insane cult of wealth, or like Jesus with a machine gun mowing people down versus turn the other cheek. Jesus, trauma. You have a few episodes on trauma. How does that? To what we’re talking about.

Arnold: Pretty deeply. And on a bunch of different levels like, I think maybe the place to start is just, I believe that our social structure is pretty inherently traumatic. And I believe that one can invoke many forms of evidence for this. But the the easiest 1 is just that rates of substance use.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: And abuse and psychiatric disorder. Others are like are rapidly, rapidly increasing, right. And so I’m actually doing more episodes about this. Like I spent. I spent the beginning of the day reading papers about, like, the correlation coefficients that exists for different psychiatric diagnoses with.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Scores on the adverse childhood experience scale, which is just like a measure of, you know.

Daniel: OK.

Arnold: How terrible your childhood was and and the correlations are very strong. You know that they’re very convincing.

Daniel: Like what? What’s an example?

Arnold: So disorders that we normally that I think a lot of us have this amorphous like like the way that psychiatry presents these is these are just like misconfigurations of our brain that we’re born with and they never want to specify what’s actually wrong with our brain. Like psychiatry is actually militantly.

Daniel: Right.

Arnold: Opposed to looking at the brain for, you know, yeah, you know, like in 2020 the the APA actually wrote a position paper that brain imaging should never be used to validate diagnosis of psychiatric conditions. Not joking.

Daniel: Structure OK. What? Why? Wow.

Arnold: Because and this is. This is why because brain imaging studies don’t match. Their diagnostic categories very well because they’re diagnostic categories aren’t valid. But instead of saying, looks like our diagnostic categories aren’t that great. They’re just saying don’t look at their brain. And so, yeah, I’m, I’m covering that in the next episode, but it’s like they’re their contention is that we’re born. They’re like, we don’t want to specify what is wrong with your brain.

Daniel: Hmm. I’m not very good. You’re all just garbage. You’re born to funked up everyone’s, yeah.

Arnold: But there’s. Yeah, but, but you’re you were. You were born ******, you know, like there’s some misconfiguration of your serotonin or something. And so you’re just crazy. But so even like the.

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah.

Arnold: Disorders like schizophrenia, ADHD and major depression that we don’t typically associate with trauma have incredibly strong correlations with traumatic experience. There’s also tons of overlap between all of these diagnostic categories like.

Daniel: MMM.

Unknown Speaker: Really.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: You know, like so having one is highly predictive of having another. And then if you ignore what the APA says and you actually do, just look at patterns of brain activity.

Daniel: Right.

Arnold: The and try to relate them to different disorders. What you’ll find is that people who are in one diagnostic category often have very different patterns of brain activity and that so that.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: But also that similar patterns of brain activity transcends diagnostic categories. So it’s like their their schema is very incorrect and very incoherent.

Daniel: It’s a bit. It reminds me of beat borderline personality disorder like I know a lot of women who are in some kind of borderline personality disorder therapy. Because that is a thing that will get you public funding to get free therapy in in, in Canada or Quebec at least. But it’s so clear and they know they don’t have BPD and it’s so obvious that they don’t fit into that category, but they’re just like any, oh, you’re a woman. You, you yell sometimes. OK, you got BPD. Ohh you you tried to commit suicide once you got.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah.

Daniel: PD ohh you you you you have trouble with relationships. You got BPD. You know. It’s like hysteria. You know? It’s like some weird category that. Clearly it matches a certain group of people that you can see OK, that category makes sense for this narrow group of people, but then it’s now just been spread out into all these other people for because it has some functional purpose, which is just get people therapy or or whatever or or. But what’s fascinating to me though, is how psychology. Is so disconnected. It’s also different between left and right wing thinking because left wing thinking you’re always trying to look at the structure. Where does this come from? Why is this happening right? Why are people getting depressed whereas the right wing thing to do is like you’re depressed cause you’re stupid and you’re your your brain is is broken, you know, or you’re just a wish, A wish or whatever it is. It’s always just you. And there’s no external reason. It’s just you’re dumb. Your brain isn’t working, and you need some pills, right? And it’s this is just obvious stuff. But it’s. It’s very interesting how that discipline has gone in that direction. Right.

Arnold: Yeah, exactly. And and then like it finds itself. I mean like. We it’s all it all exists on a continuum. So like I. Was locked up in the psych ward for the first time when I was 17 years old and over the course of those next couple of years was dragged to the psych ward by the police. Like, I don’t know, you know.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: 678 times, probably cumulatively spent like six months locked up.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: And I have been diagnosed with if you are a lay person, I have been diagnosed with every psychiatric disorder you have ever heard of in the entire time. And you know it like after, like after, like, literally 5 minutes of discussion with a psychiatrist. Right. And and and given medication for all of it.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: And every time I’d be like, hey, look, I grew up under some really appalling circumstances. And like, yes, I am a little bit crazy for sure, but I’m just trying to walk off what happened to me, you know? And they’d be like, no, that’s definitely not.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. Right. Let’s look at the connection.

Arnold: That it it’s definitely some horrible misconfiguration of your brain that you were born with. Here’s some weird **** that’ll make you stare at the wall all day and make your tongue swell up or whatever, and and you know, but like. But those people with their paradigm are are like having to face this.

Unknown Speaker: Alright.

Arnold: Challenge that the things they’re claiming that we’re born with are happening more and more often. More and more people, right and.

Daniel: Right.

Arnold: So like my claim. My claim is that everybody exists like on a continuum with me, and maybe they didn’t grow up getting abused in a religious cult, and maybe they’re not getting dragged by the police to the psych ward, but that people everywhere are really, really suffering some very profound psychological distress and and, you know, and we can, like, measure.

Daniel: Hmm. Absolutely.

Arnold: This in all kinds of different. Ways and that that comes out of our social structure and that one of the core sort of like precepts of the revolution that I would like to achieve is to convince people who are suffering in all these different ways, like, you know, whether they’re taking heroin or whether they’re just kind of like.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: Disassociating in their beds to sitcoms right, you know, is like like. To convince them that what they’re experiencing is not entirely their fault, and that the thing to do about it is to change the society that they live in. You know, I think that that also ties back into the like, one of the biggest things that people are suffering psychological distress from is loneliness.

Daniel: MMM. MMM.

Arnold: And so you know, again, it’s this whole thing where we need to create. Movements that are also participatory social structures that meet basic needs for connection.

Daniel: M. I mean, you can see there’s. I just saw something on this yesterday. Just how the numbers of depressed depression just doubled and even 150% up on teenage girls just since 2010. Right. And it matches like when social media. Came up, you know that you can’t. Plus all the stuff you know, talking bowling alone. Like the amount of friends that people have today versus 10 years ago versus 20 years ago, the amount of interactions that people have. You know my friends son is 14, he’s depressed but he literally is just on his, you know on his cell phone or his computer all day. And he doesn’t even see his friends except by his cell phone except by computer.

Arnold: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: There’s no exercise. It’s just like such obvious things. Or I look at my life and I was. A psychological wreck for many, many years, and you could, you know, the catatonic like, you know, looked like something’s wrong. Circumstances change a little bit of time. Change you go from being a complete miserable wreck who can’t tolerate the slightest things because everything throws you into depression or into the rage. And then things change and you’re just like, oh, I’m just like this really happy person. And it took these are the ingredients, right? This is what it takes to live a happy life. And you can look around you and you see, oh, 90% of people just don’t have these ingredients. It’s not that ******* complicated, right, like. And. And that’s what, you know, you look at some of.

Arnold: Don’t have it? Yeah.

Daniel: Those hunter gatherer societies, and they have all kinds of problems, but what they don’t have is anorexia. They don’t have depression, they don’t have, like, you know, a lot of these illnesses that we think are just ohh you need medication cause your brain is broken. Well, how come there’s people all over the world who don’t have any of those illnesses even though they have all kinds of adversity and all kinds of other problems that we share. But these specific problems are specific to our specific conditions. What are your hopes? Sort of for the future of humanity. Or maybe before that. What are some of? Where do you want to take this podcast project? Cause I I feel like your days of activism are not finished. It’s like you’re on some kind of break and you’re doing something. But I feel like it’s a step towards doing something else. You know, in the future. What’s what’s what are your where do you see yourself? Going with this.

Arnold: Where I want to take this podcast. So like you just mentioned, the book bowling alone, which describes like decline in the sort of. The institutions that political organizing used to like use as a substrate. You know, it used to be like if you were organizing, you went to a church or a Grange or a community group or wherever. But you found an existing you didn’t try to just like aggregate people, you found aggregations of people you found.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. You were somewhere already.

Arnold: People. Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: You already had a social network that existed before anything got activated to politics.

Unknown Speaker: Exactly.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah. And you found people who had, like, a potent influence in those groups and you got them to, you know, like, and that’s that’s how the whole thing worked. And all of those kinds of, like, broad based, sort of, like civic entities are in rapid decline. That’s not like you can’t really, like, find people that way anymore.

Daniel: And that book is from 2001 or something, right? Like it’s so much worse since then.

Arnold: The trends have gotten so much more intense. Yeah. Yeah, totally. But so like the.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: The question then becomes like how you know, like just literally how to organize people like where to find people like what is the basis? And I think that the the answer that keeps, like, really clearly presenting itself is like people are organizing more and more. According to like niche identities on the Internet and stuff like that, there’s just, like way more. And so like, I think that one of the things that I’m really trying to do is create a coherent sort of like science or body of theory for.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Uh, like for justice, actually, gathering people for organizing people by finding ways to communicate with them in the sort of like niche realms that they’ve self selected to in different like in the digital landscape. But to do that really does require understanding.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: The kind of the like psychological predispositions that put one person on, like watching diaper **** on each channel and another person. Discussing like minimal drone music, you know, wherever that happens and another person like is like, you really have to like, try to actually understand those people and where they’re coming from and then try to like craft. So I guess like, that’s my hope for the podcast is that it evolves, you know, obviously in collaboration with. Lots of other people who are doing lots of other great work, but it evolves into something that can provide kind of a foundation for understanding how to communicate with all the different lost tribes on all their different little corners of the Internet and bring people together into some sort of cohesive sense.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Of of group identity.

Daniel: So it’s like so instead of the Elk Lodge which no longer exists and the Knights of color, what I I forget maybe that’s a gnats and racist organization, but those different labs, Knights of Labor and all those different organizations that we used to be part of and that our parents or grandparents are more like our grandparents were part of. We have these weird Internet you know. Tribes and social networks. So yeah, I think that. OK, let’s turn that into the locus for some kind of organizing. Is that what you’re?

Arnold: Talking about, yeah, however imperfect it may be, I think that’s the only that’s the only way to. Do it. Yeah, yeah.

Daniel: And I think it is one of the things about today that’s, you know if you. Look. At any successful political movement, it always grows out of a social network, and it often comes at a time when a a social network rapidly expands, or a social network is created that didn’t exist before, like after World war, like during. World War 2. All the women went from the home to the workplace and got to know each other and speak to each other, and then formed all these social networks that they didn’t have when they were at home. And that activated, you know, and then even though when they went back home, the material conditions hadn’t changed in the sense that society was still as it was, technology was still more or less in the same place as it was. But women had just gone out, met each other, realized made friends, realized that they have common interests. And then came home and then pushed successfully for. There in World War One, sorry, the right to vote World War 2 was more black Americans, that sort of triggered off the civil rights movement, you know? So in our and, you know and.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Daniel: There’s. No, and in our. Time. The Internet is just one of those tools that should be if you look back at history, one of those moments where, oh, now everyone can connect via the Internet, there should be giant, big, huge, successful movements all over the place. But somehow it’s like turned into this weird tool of like, loneliness and isolation, but at the same time it has that potential for. Social connectedness in ways that were just unheard of before. It’s so much easier to organize something if you can connect in real time to all your people, right? Like think about like, you know, in the Haitian Rev. Solution. The reason that was successful is because there was this whole network of night time dancing that the slaves used to do the masters didn’t control what they did after work, so they would go and then form these. These like ritual associations and these dances that would go across the entire island and that formed a communication network by which they could plan and and. Pass on information. You know, there was no telephone. There was no anything, right. But today they managed to change their society. Of course it didn’t work out well, but whatever to help. That’s another story. We have such easy communication. It’s kind of like it seems like it’s just a matter of time before we realize how to use it in a healthy, constructive way. Nope. Anyways, maybe podcasts like this are hopefully some early manifestation of that. I can see that discourse, the types of things that people are saying, the analyses that people are having today are much sharper than they were 20 years ago. Like I think we talked about this when I was, when I was talking to you. Your podcast like you know, like 20 years ago, you had Noam Chomsky and he was like your sharp, sharp, sharp mind. And he was running around saying all this stuff and and you had some other people here and there, but now you have, like, every bozo you got all these podcasts with all these, you know, bozos basically, but who are sharp geniuses and political theory. And, you know, you have people. The quality of analysis that people have is much higher and I think that has everything to do with. Amount of available information and there’s going to got to be ways to connect to all the people who aren’t necessarily interested in that stuff. They’re not lunatics like we are who are obsessed with politics but who care about the same things that we care about, who have the same needs that we have and that we can communicate with them in ways that reach them and makes them want to. You know, join together and have a good time and change things at the same time. Well, what is your ideal world look like? Like you, you have a name for your. You have a political philosophy that has a name. You know, there’s this whole thing. Like, do we still need these names for political philosophies from 100 years ago? Do we need new names? Do you fit in any of these boxes and and what? Whether or not that’s you do have a box that you fit in. What does, what does it look like to you think the way things should be is there is there do you have any idea of that?

Arnold: Yeah, I mean, I don’t have. I don’t have like a a box that I’m particularly fervent about. I think that. In some sense, I mean, if we’re really and truly just talking about. The like the biggest picture possible I am like.

Unknown Speaker: M.

Arnold: Like what I really serve, what I feel the most sort of like the most. Like. Loyal. Like the idea I feel the most loyalty to or whatever is just that. You know, there’s this amazing reality that 4 billion years ago our planet formed 14 billion years ago our universe formed 4 billion years ago. Our planet. Formed in that subsequently there. Have been a number of statistically incredibly improbable processes highly embedded in this whole massive web of like mind blowing contingencies that has produced ever more complex configurations with ever greater awareness. Right. Like we, you know, like brains have been growing the the world has been getting more complex and more aware of itself. And ultimately what I’m clear on, whatever particular form society. 6 is that I want that path to continue that I want. I want our tendencies towards greater and greater interconnection complexity greater and greater scale and greater and greater sentience to continue. And that is my that is what I am the most willing to die.

Unknown Speaker: Hmm.

Arnold: In this life, right, you know.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: And what that actually means could be so many things it could be, but it it requires that we constitute our lives around maximizing our potential instead of, you know, on like blindly ignorant, destructive tendencies and like. Petty acquisitiveness and all the other all the other things that currently totally govern our. Well. What does it look like? I know that I want to. I know that I want to shut down fossil fuel infrastructure and that I want to take carbon dioxide out of the sky. I think that a world that I would like to live in has decision making structures that are very bottom up has. Like locally constituted assemblies all over the place, that every. Nobody has some sort of involvement in some group that meets and sends a representative to a bigger group that also meets that sends a representative to it. You know that that sort of like basic structure that pervades, I guess, more like anarchistic kind of thinking, but it is also actually true that I would like to see.

Daniel: Hmm.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: A world in which there are also decision making bodies of experts who interact with those like bottom up assemblies who are just people who’ve specialized in fields like, I think that.

Daniel: MHM.

Arnold: One of the ways in which the like the political structure of a place like Canada or the United States, like one of the ways in which it’s hopelessly archaic, is that all of these, like technology, has facilitated the the the emergence of all of these questions and issues. That requires some degree of specialization, but.

Daniel: MHM.

Arnold: Political decision making structures are exactly as they were before. Any of that was true. Right? So we have like, like, I’ve worked on climate policy for so long here in the US, but ultimately, if I made any effort, like, if I actually ever won and made any kind of significant policy gain, there are nine people. Who would come out in ritual robes and consult parchment with calligraphy on it? Literally right, you know, like the Supreme Court. And they would and they.

Daniel: Ohh I was like what? What are you talking about? Yeah.

Arnold: Literally. These people in these frilly robes would be like, well, the sacred calligraphy says that you can’t make climate policy, you know, and and they those nine people literally don’t know anything about climate like they’re they’re not. They’re they’re not.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: Like the kinds of people who you want making those decisions right, and neither necessarily is like my neighbors like my neighbors also don’t necessarily know about that stuff. And so.

Daniel: Absolutely.

Arnold: I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I would like to see a world in which bottom up collective decision making could actually coherently interact with like specialized understandings like with deliberative processes that require some degree of like technical knowledge or whatever, because I don’t think we can navigate.

Daniel: Well, isn’t it? Yeah.

Arnold: Technological change without some degree of that.

Daniel: Is that ultimately about there being public intellectuals or public experts who are out there articulating things for the rest of us so that we can make ideas and we can form rational opinions on stuff? Like if you’re interested in this poll? See and then you’ll get someone to explain it to you, and then you can. Because ultimately, democracy, you want to have a say on it. Like the problem with democracy as it’s constituted, as people are making decisions based on things they know zero about and they’ve never read anything about or they read something stupid about. So are you just talking about a world where people are just getting better information from people or that they just don’t have the decision making power and it’s just people who know stuff are the ones. Making the decisions.

Arnold: Well, yeah, no, I mean, I think that you’re right. I think that. That’s ultimately kind of like one of my big picture objectives is like what I would just describe as the popularization of scientific reasoning. And I think that that’s that actually exists in very, like, militant opposition to the liberal narrative that’s so prominent. Like, you can read a million pieces.

Daniel: Right.

Arnold: Like the Atlantic or whatever, where these liberals are like, Oh no, it’s an epistemological crisis. People have decided to not trust experts, and now they believe all kinds of crazy ****. How do we get them to trust the experts again? And I and I.

Daniel: Yeah. Right.

Arnold: Like **** you, right? Like that’s a that’s a that’s just straight up authoritarianism, like believe the experts and do what they say is not. And people distrust people who claim expertise for very good reason like I just described my experience with psychiatry. Right. Like those people are the experts.

Daniel: Translate.

Unknown Speaker: Alright. MHM.

Arnold: And and what they did to me was monstrous, you know? And so it’s like.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. Or Tuskegee experiments. Like, there’s so many things. There’s so many examples of.

Unknown Speaker: I think.

Arnold: There’s so many things, and so people are people are choosing to distrust, like institutional, like experts or whatever. And they’re kind of like veering off into, you know, there’s a profusion of mythologies that are that’s occurring in our culture right now. And but.

Daniel: Straight up domino ideas, yeah.

Arnold: Yeah, exactly. But like, I really like, I really want to fight back against the notion that science is some highly specialized thing. Thing that only some people should be doing and that whatever they decide is true. Everybody else should just kind of submit to and I would like to popularize the notion that at its core, science is just about a basic reasoning process and a basic cultural framework that allows us when anybody says this is true.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: To.

Unknown Speaker: OK.

Arnold: Is it really, you know what? What?

Daniel: Let’s look into it like that. It’s the tools that you need to to understand whether that’s true or where that statement is correct or not, yeah.

Arnold: Yeah. And and I’d like to popularize the notion that you actually can’t reject science that anybody who is making any kind of argument where they say, you know, like where they’re using any kind of the.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Basic reasoning process that are just like literally essential to like the human cognitive apparatus is using some version of what science is, yeah.

Daniel: Hmm. Scientific reasoning. Right, right, right, excellent. OK. Is there anything else you want to talk about that we missed that you feel? Giving some information about our opinion.

Arnold: No, I think, I guess I’d just say the last thing, the thing that I’m trying to do with my project is like I have very much been making podcasts for other people who. Share some kind of political identity or some set of like assumptions or experiences and so. I’m I think that if anybody who’s listening is like familiar with my work and thinks they have a grasp on it, like my hope is that at some point I enter a phase where I’m communicating. Like we’ve been talking about with all kinds of people and I think that that is just kind of like generally the work that, I mean, I very much think that’s also like what your podcast is getting at. I think that’s like generally the work that a bunch of us have to do. I think it’s a really interesting project. And so even if.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: You’re like. Centers heard this and disagreed with some or a lot or all of what I was saying like, you know, like, I’d invite them to accept that challenge, though. Like, I feel like what we have to do as a species is figure out how to talk with people who perceive things differently. And so I’d invite people who disagree with me to figure out.

Daniel: Hmm. 100%.

Arnold: How to do that with me?

Daniel: Do you find that cause we both I think have this issue? Is that we don’t have us because we’re not part of some specific niche, right? We’re not like, oh, I’m an insurrectionist anarchist or I am, you know, ecological anarchist. I’m a Marxist Leninist or I’m a Maoist. Like, we don’t have that ready made niche of people who are just ready to glom on to especially like young, young people who are just like, oh, that’s my identity. Now I’m going to be an amazing fan of this, and I’m gonna love everything they do because they reaffirm my political identity. You know, we are talking about, like, generalized stuff that can appeal to more. People, but that doesn’t specifically press anybody serotonin receptors like. But. Yeah, you’re awesome. Your group’s awesome. Our group is great. The other groups suck. Do you find that that’s a challenge? A bit in what you’re doing or no?

Arnold: It’s a it’s a challenge purely in terms of. Just gaining like a widespread audience. Yeah, it would be. It would be much easier. Here if I could just go on like every anarchist podcast or every Marxist podcast or like, yeah, but I. But I can’t because what I’m doing is actually too idiosyncratic. But at the same time, it’s honestly been amazing to get.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: You know, like responses from people who are coming from such different.

Unknown Speaker: 1.

Arnold: Like backgrounds and justice, sort of like realms and to see the ways in which, even though I’m not, I’m not crafting what I consider at all to be like general audience messages or I’m not even sure there’s such a thing anymore, you know? But I’m like, I’m crafting communication for people who I’m like.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: You must share some experience or background or like set of like beliefs, but at the same time, like the people who get in touch with me are from all over the place, culturally, politically economic. Like it’s really interesting and it makes me feel.

Daniel: Yeah.

Arnold: Like there’s actually. I just feel like there’s a lot of power there. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. And so I’d I’d rather have 300 really different people listen to my podcast within the first couple of days than 3000. People who all identify as like earth firsters, you know.

Daniel: Mm-hmm. Hmm. Yeah. No, that’s really powerful. So you get a lot of engagement in the on a deep level from people’s.

Arnold: Right to you, I I feel like I do. I mean, it’s clear to me that there’s it’s clear to me that there’s some people who. Have been kind of wanting something roughly generally like what I’m doing for a long time. I hear a lot of people who just feel like.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Like I said, like I do feel like I just kind of violated a bunch of taboos and there’s a lot of people who feel really grateful that somebody is willing to do that. And there there’s a lot of people who.

Daniel: Hmm.

Arnold: Write to me. Who have backgrounds in academia, who are really grateful that I’m challenging some of the. Academic constructs that are really prevalent in our culture in the way that I am, so it’s worth it. You know, it just takes longer to to reach to get a lot of people involved, but I think it’s I think it’s worth it to like just truly do your own thing.

Daniel: Build a solid foundation. Yeah. And do you get, like, weird attack? Like I found? Yeah, there was a point. I was getting a lot of libertarians mad at me. Then I was getting a lot of Marxists mad at me and getting a lot of anarchists mad at me. Do you? Do you get that? Do you get people like mad at you?

Arnold: I literally so my like promotion strategy was like, oh, I’ll just, I’ll just make some, like, leftists really mad, and then they’ll talk about how evil I am, and that’ll draw people. To it, you know and. I I was like like you do that. I mean, I’ll like, teach, I’ll. Like teach media. Workshops to groups where I’ll be like. Just do something like write a press release that gets the right wing to react and that’s how you become serious and get taken seriously and get reach, you know, and I was basically doing that. I was like, I’m just doing that, but I’m just gonna anger leftist and.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: Hasn’t happened. Once I have. I have literally not gotten a single communication from somebody. Yeah, no, totally. I was like, I’m making myself a pariah, and I haven’t gotten any real push back at all. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’ll come sooner or later, I guess. Or. Or maybe I’m just going to win. I don’t know.

Unknown Speaker: Sorry. Interesting.

Daniel: You probably haven’t reached maybe an academic audience, because the stuff that you’re talking about. It’s very accessible to normal people like who are interested in those sorts of things, and no one in the no one’s going to be offended by this unless you’ve been through some kind of academic elite experience. And yeah. And I guess those people haven’t gotten around like, you’re not popular enough yet that those people have heard at you that they can get mad about you or something.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah, I need. To interview somebody who’s actually in academia, which which I’m trying to do, I’m trying to cast that net because then I feel like.

Daniel: Mm-hmm.

Arnold: That I want to. I want to force people in various disciplines to respond to some of what I’m saying.

Daniel: Maybe you know, let’s see that David Graver is dead. But you had Catherine Liu do. You know her?

Arnold: She knows.

Daniel: She’s she’s. She writes a lot of anti PMC stuff. It’s weird because she definitely has absorbed a lot of that sort of language, but she hates academia. You could see the passion that she hates it with and and and you know, it’s personal. You know, it’s kind of fun in that way. I’m sure, you know, I don’t know if you reach out to her, maybe you get something interesting. Going on there, OK, if there’s anything else, let me know.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah.

Daniel: Speak now or whoever will hold forever. Hold your peace until next time at least. And it’s been a great talk. I’m looking forward to talking to you again in the future and hopefully working on some projects and looking forward to what you come up with next and I hope that my audience is really into what you’re doing and you check out the fight like an animal.

Arnold: I think that’s it. Until next time.

Daniel: On all podcast delivery apparatuses near you and yeah, you learn something. Look at this. What, like, too, is that you have? Every episode has like a beautiful bibliography. You kind of like, put me to shame. I feel like oh **** man. I only, you know, pulled out two or three books for this one. And I’m doing a lot of stuff from memory. A lot of the stuff I talk about is stuff I read years ago and I I can’t even find. Where did I read that? I don’t know. And you’re just like cranking out like. Ohh ****. This dude just really read these twenty articles recently and he’s like quoting them and citing them. And there’s beautiful bibliographies of fat like and I kind of hate sometimes listening to your podcast. It’s like, ohh no. Now I gotta read this. Ohh ****. I gotta read that. I gotta read this and then I’m like, you know, getting all these articles. And I’m like, oh, God.

Arnold: I know.

Daniel: I’m not gonna read all this stuff, but you know you have to cause it’s so interesting. It’s so relevant. So yeah, anyhow. Alright, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this talk. And until next time. See ya.

10. David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The “Dawn of Everything”: The Wisdom of Kandiaronk

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…]

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

Script

Hello fellow kids,

And welcome back to what it politics.

The late David Graeber, who was a wonderful anthropologist, writer and political activist, is going to be publishing a post-humous book co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

And based on the preview chapters and essays that they’ve been publishing over the past few years, this book is sure to be an a great read, really stimulating, extremely popular, asking all the right questions – and then coming up with a lot of right answers, but then also a lot of wrong answers, and some right answers but for all the wrong reasons – and those wrong answers and wrong reasons are going to be a really harmful influence on our political movements and our political intelligence in a bunch of ways.

So In this episode, and the next episode, I’m going to reading from and criticizing those preview chapters and essays that Graeber and Wengrow have been putting out from Dawn of Everything. And I’m going to highlight the good stuff, and the bad stuff, so that we can learn to avoid all sorts of common mistakes and traps that people often fall into, and so that we can learn all the right answers to the extremely important questions that they’re asking: Where does human dominance hierarchy come from? And what can we do today to reduce or eliminate it?

And I want to give a lot of credit to Graeber and Wengrow for asking these questions. Very few anthropologists or political activists do this nowadays and very few have ever done it in such a straighforwardly political way.

But I also want to really highlight how messed up the answers they’re giving us, and how bad for our political brains they are and use this as a springboard for my mission of reconstructing the basics of political theory, of which anthropological theory is a huge component.

In part Graeber and Wengrow are making these mistakes, because everyone makes these mistakes because the state of political and athropological theory are deficient like I’ve been talking about. But on top of that David Graeber had a real bug up his butt about the concept of equality and he spent his career ignoring the anthropology of very egalitarian societies – those societies who live according to the principles of libertarian communism – where the individual is free, yet wealth and power are shared equally – which is extremely weird for a left wing anarchist anthropologist like him to be ingnoring – and it really affected his work in a bad ways as we’ll see and we’ll make some guesses about why he was doing that.

So next episode, I’m going to be doing a line by line critique of Graeber and Wengrow’s very popular article from 2018 called How to Change the Course of Human History, and at I’ll be citing a few passages from Farewell to the Childhood of Man from 2015 which is basically an earlier version of that article.

But first, in this episode, I’ll be discussing and reading excerpts from an actual chapter of Dawn of Everything which was published in 2019, but only in french under the title of La Sagesse de Kondiaronk, la critique indigène, le mythe du progrès et la naissance de la Gauche and which in English translates to The Wisdom of Kondiaronk, the Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left. I read it in french which I’m fluent in, but you can get a pretty good english translation on gargl translate or deepl translate – though the full english book will be out a couple of weeks after this video comes out.

Graeber and Wengrow’s also published another piece from Dawn of Everything in 2020 before Graeber died called Hidden in Plain Sight, Democracy’s Indigenous Origins in the Americas. Unlike the other articles, I don’t have much to critique about it, it’s quite exciting – it’s about how the city state of Tlaxcala in central Mexico at the time of the encounter with Cortez was actually democratic, and how historians never mentioned or noticed it’s democratic nature because they couldn’t imagine that such a thing was possible, even though people at the time reported it clearly. And I think this will be an introduction to their discussion of various potentially eglitarian city states and civilizations like the Indus Valley civilization, and this is the work of David Wengrow, who’s work I’ve just started to get to know a little. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it one way or another, but I certainly hope it’s true, and if so, it has really important implications for the future. I might do a separate episode on Wengrows stuff on egalitarian cities after I do this series. Interestingly Wengrow is not in denial about egalitarian hunter gatherers the way Graeber is!

La Sagesse De Kondiarok – Graeber’s Thesis

OK so let’s get into The Wisdom of Kondiaronk, the Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left and you can find the original french version of this linked in the show notes, and let the cartoon, begin!

In this chapter – and I don’t know which chapter it is, just that it’s not the first chapter because in the article at some point it says “in the last chapter” – but anyways – in this chapter Graeber points out that many of they key insights and concepts associated with the European enlightenment – ideas of individual liberty and equality, and the rejection of religious dogma and established social hierarchy based on ascribed status – that these ideas were heavily influenced by europeans’ encounters with Native Americans. This influence came both from observing the American way of life, which flew in the face of the social order which europeans had been taught to believe was natural and ordained by god for hundreds of years – and the influence also came from specific critiques of European society, religion, economy and values made by the Americans.

Merchants, Jesuit missionaries, soldiers, militarymen and various kinds of settlers, went across the atlantic occean to the new world taking for granted a whole array of rigid social dominance hierarchies, between rich and poor, kings and subjects, lords and serfs, masters and servants, men and women, massive wealth inequalities, and property relationships that kept some people in servile and dependant relationships to others.

But North America truly was a new world in more ways than one. The european immigrants and colonists were shocked to discover that the so called savages that they encountered, lived in societies where these hierarchies either didn’t exist at all, or else they existed in relatively mild forms compared to what they had taken for granted all of their lives.

And it was a further shock in their encounters, to hear the Americans excoriating and making fun of those hierarchies, ridiculing the europeans mistreatment of eachother, their shameful rules of private property, and money exchange and calling them slaves.

What is Hierarchy

So before we go any further I want to clarify what hierarchy is in a political context. A hierarchy is a system where people or things are ranked according to some value. You can rank fruits according to which one tastes better, models according to who you think is more attractive, runners accordings to who is faster, or chess players according to who is the most skilled – hierarchies of competence like Jordan Peenerson talks about.

But when we’re talking about politics we don’t care about any of that stuff. The word politics, refers to decision making in groups. So when we’re talking about hierarchy or equality in the context of politics, what we’re talking about is hieararchy or equality of decision making power – i.e. dominance hierarchies, where one person or group or class of people dominates another, in the sense of they get to tell them what to do.

And we’re only interested in other kinds of hierarchies, like hierarchies of competence or of wealth, if and when those hierarchies translate into dominance hierarchy – hierarchy of decision making power.

So for example we often talk about economic inequality when it comes to politics. Why? We don’t care that one person gets to have a lot of toys and rollercoasters and another person has less toys. The main reason it’s a political issue is because economic inequality translates into decision making inequality.

The lord tells the serf what to do because the lord owns the land the serf depends on to live. Your boss tells you what to do and not the other way around because youre boss has money to start a workplace and you need the salary the he has to give you and you don’t have those things. Your landlord tells you what you can and can’t do in your own home because your landlord inherited a downpayment from his parents and you didn’t. You and Jeff Bezos both have one vote, but Jeff Bezos can hire an army of lobbyists who work 24–7 to influence how politicians think and what they know, and you can write an email once in awhile and get ignored.

The other reason economic inequality is a political issue is that in a democratic society – meaning a society where people have a meaningful say in the decisions that affect them, if a majority of people don’t have enough resources to live well, they will likely decide to transfer wealth away from a minority of people who have an emormous amount of resources.

So – decision making hierarchies serve three main purposes:

they allow for more efficient group cooperation – for example you can’t produce a movie if everyone is just doing whatever they want and making their own calls at every given moment.
they reduce conflict and arguments – because if there’s a disagreement, the person on top wins in advance – the lighting director wants to use bright blasted lighting, but the director says, no, we want dark grainy lighting – well the director automatically wins – which is one reason hierarchies allow for large group cooperation
and finally hierarchies allow people on the top of the hierarchy to exploit the people on the bottom, to extract more than their proportional share of the benefits of their labour. The investors in a film sit on their butts and do nothing except for having money, but they get all the profits from the film and the crew gets nothing.

And we can distinguish between two types of decision-making hierarchies. organizational, or democratic hierarchies, and dominance hierarchies. A democratic or organizational hierarchy is where people voluntarily organize into a hierarchy and choose their superiors in order to achieve certain goals, and ultimately the purpose of the hierarchy is to serve all of its members. Large cooperatives usually have democratic hierarchies. But a dominance hierarchy is one where the purpose of the hierarchy is to serve the people on top and there is an element of coercion to the hierarchy. And there’s a spectrum in between.

And always keep in mind, that whether a hierarchy is necessary for survival, or whether it exists mostly for exploitation, dominance, there is always some kind of justification or at least an excuse.

In europe at the time of the colonization of North America, the justification was religious. It’s not that the king was the biggest thug who could conquer the most people. It’s that he was appointed by God. There was the great chain of being where every creature from the angels to animals to plants to minerals and dirt were all orginized into a hierarchy. To defy this hierarchy was like Satan defying God and falling from heaven.

And today, if we look at workplace hierarchy, it’s not that your boss inherited money from their parents and you didn’t and you’re forced to sign away your free will for 60 hours a week because if you don’t you’ll die – it’s because your boss is a job creator and innovator and deserves his power, and you’re too lazy or stupid to start your own business, so you “voluntarily” signed a labour contract, so it’s not actually a hierachy at all because you chose to have a job where you have to shit in diapers because you’ll get fired if you take a bathroom breaks!

And when we talk about class in politics, we’re essentially talking about ranks of a political hierarchy, even if though that’s not how people traditionally describe it. The owner class on top, management in the middle workers on the bottom. Lords on top, serfs on the bottom. Officer class on top, enlisted on the bottom.

And finally, when we are talking about hierarchy vs equality we are talking about the political right vs the political left. Because that’s what left and right refer to. The right represents the forces in favour of a dominance hierarchy and the left represents the forces in favour of equalizing or eliminating the ranks of a hierarchy. And that’s ultimately a spectrum between authority on the right and democracy on the left.

And I know that there are a lot of other definitions floating around, and I know that lots of people who think that they are on the right are pro democracy and some people who think they are on the left are pro dictatorship – but too bad for you, you’re in the wrong camp! Those are the historical definitions, and they are also the only definitions that make any sense and you can go see episodes 5 4 and 3 if you want to understand why.

Europeans React to America

So – when people, like the 16^th and 17^th century europeans immigrants to the americas, who are entrenched in a dominance hierarchy system, and a system of beliefs and values that justifies those hierarchies – when people like that encounter other people who aren’t stuck in that kind of system, like the native americans they were encountering, there are two basic ways of reacting to this.

The first is to realize – holy shit, I’ve been putting up with this crap all of my life for no reason – fuck this! And then you rebel in some way against the hierarchy in your society, or you go live with the natives which many people did.

And we have another example of this in American history – the early suffragettes. I actually made an episode, number 8 where I talked about how women in north america and europe got the right to vote, and I talked about the status women in Haudenosaunee society where women help most of the important positions of political power, but I only learned the connection between suffragettes and the Haudenosaunee after I recorded the episode. Many of the early suffragettes were moved to fight for equal rights based on their encounters with Haudenosaunee and Huron women would laugh at them for being subject to their husbands’ authority and who needed permission to do things like buy or sell property or horses.

So one reaction to encounters like this is to reject the legitimacy of the hierarchy, and the other is to be horrified by the fact that people don’t conform to that hierarchy – and to feel these people who don’t recognize the legitimacy of that hierarchy is a threat to your whole identity and sense of self worth. And in hierarchical societies, self worth is generally tied in to accepting one’s place in a hierarchy – that’s literally what separate adults from children. And then you try to crush those people who you see as savages who need correction – much like you as a child needed to be crushed into accepting hierarchy, which then conferred on you the status of an adult and serious person. Think of the expression, if you’re a socialist after a certain age you have no brain.

Anyhow, the reaction that you’ll will have will depend on various things like how psychologically and materially invested you are in the hierarchical system you’re a part of. If you’re at the top of a hierarchy and enjoying all the benefits, you probably will sense the other culture without hiearchy as an existential threat. You need to crush it, or else your servants or your wife will get ideas about equality. And you can also be near the bottom of your hierarchy, but still be really psychologically invested in it. Your whole sense of being a good person is based on all the sacrifices you make on a daily basis, not having sex, obeying your asshole husband or your stupid boss or your master – and then these hippies and savages think they’re entitled to just do what they want and not listen to anyone? Who do they think they are? They need to be punished and made to obey!

Like imagine someone who’s gay in a very religious anti gay area – and they gain their sense of being a good person by suppressing their desires. When someone like that encounters a radical queer freakshow party, they either realize – gee, why am I doing this? Or they go crazy and want to destroy them, like a lot of weird closeted right wing politicians we read about.

And to me when you want other people to suffer the oppression you suffer in order to validate your own self oppression – that’s the definition of evil.

Jesuit Relations

So the europeans encoutering the native americans of course had both of these reactions.

For some people the encounters contributed to the growing enlightenment ideas about how much of the hierarchy that europeans were subject to were not necessary and not just, and that they should be overthrown. But to other people, the Native American ways of life were perceived of as a threat to the social order that needed to be crushed.

So Graeber and Wengrow quote some of the reactions of Jesuit missionaries to the people they encountered which are telling. Graeber points out that the Jesuits saw liberty as a low, animal quality.

First there’s Pere Lejeune who did his missionary work among the Montagnais Naskapi people in what’s now Quebec who were an extremely egalitarian hunting and gathering people, who I’ve talked about before – and I might have even given this same quote in one of my epsiodes, it’s often cited, from 1642:

And then he cites a famous quote by Pere Lejeune who did his missionary work among the Montagnais Naskapi people in what’s now Quebec who at the time were extremely egalitarian hunter gatherers:

They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages…

LeJeune continues beyond the passage the Graeber and Wengrow quote:

“Our Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests, I mean ambition and avarice. They have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him… Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.”

LeJeune goes on to talk disapprovinly about how they have sexual freedom, women don’t obey men, and how the indians love to laugh and make fun, particularly of LeJeune!

And here’s another quote from Pere Lallemant who missioned among the Wendat people, from 1644:

I could hardly believe that there is any place in the world more difficult to subject to the Laws of JESUS CHRIST. Not only because they have no knowledge of letters, no Historical monuments, and no idea of a Divinity who has created the world and who governs it; but, above all, because I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever, so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them.

And I’m quoting a bit more than Graeber and Wengrow quote because they tend to leave out the parts where people have no political authorities or authoritarian Gods to obey, which we’ll discuss next episode because Graeber wants us to believe that even the most egalitarian cultures have hierarchical religions.

Now these quotes come from the various volumes of the Jesuit Relations books, which were accounts by Jesuit missionaries which were extremely popular in europe at the time – like imagine if people from earth landed on another planet and we got reports from how the people from those planets lived, how popular those reports would be!

And then Graeber and Wengrow continue about the native reaction to the Europeans.

In the view of the Montagnais-Neskapi, by contrast, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant fear of getting into trouble with their superiors. Such criticisms appeared regularly in the Jesuit accounts, not only from those who lived in nomadic hunter gatherer bands, but also from settled town dwellers like the Wendat.

And what’s really fascinating and I think a great insight is that Graeber points out that people today who would be reading these reports in western democratic countries would have a lot more in common in terms of world view and attitudes with the native american hunter gatherers and tribal horticulturalists than they would with their own european ancestors. And this is exactly right. Over the past 500 years, and particularly in the past 100 years, various social movements have been fighting to eliminate most of those social hierarchies that the Americans ridiculed the Europeans for, and as we’ve reduced those hierarchies, we’ve become more like them as a result.

And actually it reminds me of something my friend Josh said years ago when we were watching the documentary Mingus from the 1950s about Jazz Bassist and composer Charles Mingus. From the beginning of the movie until about 20–30 minutes in, during which all the people on film are black people you don’t really think about what year it is. You just see people talking music and joking with eachother. But then suddenly when the first white person walks in the room it slaps you in the face that you’re in the 1950s – the way they hold themselves, the way they speak, the affect – so much more uptight and stuck up than the norm today – basically the cultural changes we’ve had since the 1950s inspired in part by black liberation and rights movements have shed a lot of internalized social hierarchy – and mainstream white culture resembles black culture more than it does the white culture of the 50s. Charles Murray might thing this is awful, and the cause of all of our economic problems today, but Charles Murray has no materialist analysis – most of us would probably see this as a good thing.

Anyhow, learning about the the way of life of the native americans, and their critiques of European life contributed to the discussions and debates and cultural changes and challenges that were already happening in Europe at the time. And these challenges had been set off by other factors – like increasing wealth across europe with the re-establishment of long trading and travel routes which had fallen apart with the fall of the roman empire, and which put europe back into contact with influences and ideas from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

And most importantly, there was the shift away from a local land based economy which put lords at the centers of power, to a in international and global trading economy which was putting merchants and bourgeois owners at the center of power.

The wealthy and middle class urban dwellers who saw themselves correctly as increasingly becoming the economic engine of society, had not much use for the rules and religous and social conventions that had existed in the middle ages which had served to maintain the stability of power for the rural nobility, and which kept the merchants relegated to the bottom ranks of society. Again this is me not Graeber and Wengrow, but this is all well known stuff.

On top of these Jesuit books, eager european readers were also gobbling up other books about the New World, like Baron Lahontan’s collection, New Voyages to North America, 1666–1716. Of particular interest is a section called Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled which was first published in serial form in 1703.

In these dialogues, Lanontan reports debates between himself and Adario, a fictionalized version of the real Chief Kondiaronk – a Native American of the Wendat nation of great renown who Lanhontan had made friends with and who had engaged in many debates and discussions with in the IRL, in Montreal, where I’m recording this video from. Maybe in this very apartment?

And in these debates, Adario many detailed critiques of European society – religion, patriarchy, social castes, wealth inequality, ownership of private property, the existence of a punitive legal system – much of which Kondiaronk had likely expressed to Lahontan, but some of which was also likely Lahontan’s own point of view as he was himself a forward thinking critique of traditional europe. And these same arguments were soon echoed and sometimes wholesale adopted by enlightenment philosophers in their debates and treatises, in particular the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Kondiaronks Words

So let’s look at some of Kondiaronk’s critiques as recorded by Lahontan in his book where the author debates with Adario i.e. Kondiaronk, as cited by Graeber and Wengrow:

… I find it hard to see how you Europeans could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human being, what kind of creature must Europeans be to be forced to do good and refrain from evil only for fear of punishment? …

You have noted that we lack judges. What is the reason for this? It’s because we never bring charges against each other. And why do we never sue eachother? Because we have made a decision not to accept or use money. Why? Because we are determined not to have laws. Since the world was a world, our ancestors were able to live happily without them.

Kandaronk then goes on eviscerate the French legal system point by point, [this is graeber and wengrow talking] focusing particularly on judicial persecution, perjury, torture, accusations of witchcraft, and differential justice for rich and poor. And in the end, he returns to his original observation: the whole punitive apparatus of trying to force people to behave properly would be useless if France did not also maintain contrary institutions that incentivized people to behave badly. These institutions consisted of money, property rights, and the resulting pursuit of material self-interest.

Kandiaronk continues:

I’ve spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single one of your ways that isn’t inhumane, and I sincerely believe that it can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evil; the scourge of souls and the slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine that one can live in the land of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining that one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigue, deceit, lies, betrayal, insincerity, all the worst behaviors in the world. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all for money. In light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right to refuse to touch or even look at money?

Lahontan then tries to counter-argue that without money, europe would collapse.

Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and many others who do not have the strength to work the soil, would simply starve. Our kings would not be kings; what soldiers would we have? Who would work for the kings, or for anyone else? This would plunge Europe into chaos and create the darkest confusion.

And one gets the impression that this is a setup for Adario’s response which is what Lahontan really thinks, and that Lahontan and Kandiaronk were actually on the same page:

So Adario, aka Kandiaronk replies:

Do you really think you will influence me by catering to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? Yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a leveling equality would then take its place among you as it does now among the Wendat.

And he goes on to say that all the useless parasites who live off of others’ labour will die off but their children will know how to work and the world would be a much better place.

I’ve enumerated many times the qualities which define humanity: wisdom, reason, justice, etc. And I’ve shown that people having opposed material interests turns all of these things on their heads. A man motivated by interests can never be a man of reason.

So you have this critique coming from native americans, but also from europeans like Lanhontan who clearly agrees with Kandiaronk, and this stuff is tearing across europe challenging the social order like heavy metal and rap records in the 1980s.

And ultimately, Graeber and Wengrow argue – and I think this is where their original argument comes in – the stuff about the native influence on the west has been argued before by other scholars – so they’re original argument is that it was in order to fend off these types of critiques from Native Americans, and the Europeans influenced by them, that European thinkers developed the theory of stages of human progress.

So the originator of this idea is not a conservative traditionalist, but a bourgeois liberal free market economist, Turgot, who notably was Louis XIV’s economic adviser who opposed the reduction of bread prices during a famine – so someone who was against the medieval hierarchies of the three social orders, and the rule of the church, but who was for economic hierarchies, and also for a monarchical absolutist government.

In Turgot’s formulation, people start as hunter-gatherers, and then move up and advance to being pastoralist animal herders, then they advance to being farmers, and then finally they advance to commercial market civilization, with each stage being better and happier for everyone than the previous one.

And in this schema, the liberty and equality that the native americans enjoyed were ultimately signs of economic and cultural backwardness, something that’s incompatible with avanced civilization. At the end of the day hierarchy and submission to authority were the price that people had to pay for all the benefits of civilization and markets.

Quoting from Graber:

Yes, we all like the idea of liberty and equality, Turgot writes, that is, in principle. But one must take into account the larger context. In reality, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority, but proof of their inferiority, since such equality is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient, and thus where all are equally poor. As societies evolve, and technology advances, the natural differences in talents and abilities between individuals become more and more important, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labor… and where the poverty and dispossession of some, however lamentable, is the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole. There is no way to avoid this. The only alternative, according to Turgot, would be massive state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions, an imposed equality that could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and thus be an economic and social catastrophe.

And these are the same arguments we have heard over and over ever since, but which reached a particular crescendo during the Cold War when these arguments became the heart of the pro capitalism argument, with the Soviet and Chinese communist dictoatorships as the ultimate examples of Turgot’s thesis. But in Turgot’s time they were actually referring to the Peruvian Incan empire which was sort of the soviet union of the americas, but not really – though interestingly some russian communists like Georgi Plekhanov in the late 18thC were worried about a communist government becoming an Inca style dictatorship if a revolution happened in the wrong conditions, which is more or less what happened after 1917.

But note the assumption built into Turgot’s theory, that natural inequalities of ability – Peenerson’s “hierarchies of competence” automatically lead to wealth inequality as soon as you have wealth surplus and accumulation, and that these can only be reversed by some tyrant imposing unnatural equality from above. Now this isn’t true as we’ll see next time, but it’s an idea that’s very much ingrained into our own culture today.

So you had the Native American and European critique of european hierarchy, and then you had Turgot’s and others’ defense of european hierarchies, particularly of wealth and power.

And then, you have Jean Jacque Rousseau – and according to Graeber and Wengrow, what Rousseau does with his Discourse of Inequality, is that he synthesizes the two opposing views into a masterful declaration of impotence. He issues a scathing and shocking for the time critique of European hierarchy and economic inequality, but according to Graeber and Wengrow his critique ultimately implies that we have no alternative, and thus his critique ends up serving as a justification of the status quo, or at least of a society with unjust dominance hierarchies.

Woe is me, everything sucks, it’s not right, and it goes against human nature – but hey what can you do, we can’t go back to living in trees amirite? Whip yourself on the back and jerk off with your friends about it while servants get you tea and clean your piss bucket.

Now I don’t exactly buy this.

If you read Rousseau’s essay, it concludes with a “what then is to be done?” section – the last big paragraph basically, where he asks how do we improve our unnatural hierarchical conditions. And he more or less says well we can’t go back to living on acorns, but what we can do is be good people, obey our laws when they’re just, obey our leaders, but make sure they put out good laws and good constitutions…

Now this is very reminsicent of what weird hypocritical left liberals do today – they issue a harsh and perceptive critique of our social institutions, and then instead of calling to overthrow or fundamentally change those institutions, they’re like that’s why “corporations need to be good corporate citizens!” Or “we should vote for a president who’s a nice good boy instead of a meany weenie!” Almost every book written by a non-socialist author ends up with this kind of garbage. Or in the wanna be left post raisin bran critical theory academic version, they’re like “revolutions are doomed to failure because the hegemonic power discourse reproduces the structures of power, but challenges to power are still possible in the interstices of power – like we can make tiny useless changes – so let’s fight the power by criticizing the representation of data as an autistic coded person in star trek the next generation” yibbedeyabbedyibbede.

So all of this does track with what Graeber and Wengrow are saying, but realistically, if Rousseau had actually proposed any real solutions – like had he called for the overthrow of Monarchy and the Church, he would have ended up in jail! Like it was the enlightenment and all, but France was still an absolutist Monarchy. And if you read that concluding paragraph it really just seems like like he just slapped that in there so as not to get in trouble.

in short, who are persuaded that the Divine Being has called all mankind to be partakers in the happiness and perfection of celestial intelligences, all these will endeavour to merit the eternal prize they are to expect from the practice of those virtues, which they make themselves follow in learning to know them. They will respect the sacred bonds of their respective communities; they will love their fellow−citizens, and serve them with all their might: they will scrupulously obey the laws, and all those who make or administer them; they will particularly honour those wise and good princes, who find means of preventing, curing or even palliating all these evils and abuses, by which we are constantly threatened; they will animate the zeal of their deserving rulers, by showing them, without flattery or fear, the importance of their office and the severity of their duty.

At the end of the day, given that Rousseau was a major inspiration for the Jacobins and the sans culottes – the more radical egalitarian factions in the french revolution – it’s clear that those people took the critique part of Rousseau way more seriously than the stupid passive 3 second slapped on stephen king novel conclusion.

It’s actually Turgot that does what Graeber and Wengrow say Rousseau is doing – and you can see that just from reading their own section on Turgot which I talked about above!

Graeber and Wengrow also point out that Rousseau can’t really envision what a society would actually look like in a state of liberty and equality. Rousseau says that humans in a state of nature are free and equal, but Rousseau’s description of humans in a state of nature – a state of liberty and equality according to Rousseay – is individuals living all alone in the trees with no ties to one another and without even language.

But, his description of humans in a state of nature is not supposed to be real, it’s not based for example of any of the literature on native americans for example – instead he’s talking about a hypothetical people, lacking many essential human traits like language and sociality, who exist in a hypothetical state of nature—a state that, as he puts it, “no longer exists,which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist,”

It’s just a thought experiment of the situation that it would take in order to reveal the true nature of humans.

What Rousseau is saying is that if humans are just left to their own individual devices, without any dependence on anyone else for anything, then we have no need to oppress anyone and we would live free and equal lives.

In a way, his concept of human nature prioritized freedom, but it was also fundamentally anti social. According to Rousseau, it’s almost society itself – social ties and obligations that oppress us. It’s like a spoiled north american kid – or adult – who thinks that happiness is just the right to do whatever you want whenever you want at any second without any limits or obligations to anyone interfering with it, and then they become an ayn rand libertarian. Just like Ayn Rand he saw social obligations as the antithesis of freedom. The second every person isn’t totally self sufficient, you are oppressed.

As Rousseau puts it in english translation:

…from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.

And interestingly, Rousseau, like Turgot also takes for granted the assumption that inequalities or hierarchies of ability will necessarily result in economic inequalities. Quote:

In this state of affairs, equality might have been sustained, had the talents of individuals been equal … but, as there was nothing to preserve this balance … the strongest did most work; the most skilful turned his labour to best account; the most ingenious devised methods of diminishing his labour: the husbandman wanted more iron, or the smith more corn, and, while both laboured equally, the one gained a great deal by his work, while the other could hardly support himself. Thus natural inequality unfolds itself insensibly with that of combination, and the difference between men, developed by their different circumstances, becomes more sensible and permanent in its effects, and begins to have an influence, in the same proportion, over the lot of individuals.

Graeber and Wengrow see Rousseau’s thinking as stuck in european notions of liberty which are rooted in individual ownership of private property where liberty ultimately comes at someone else’s expense, like the ancient athenians who needed slaves to be able to enjoy liberty – as opposed to Native Americans who saw that liberty actually comes from being part of a society, from mutual interdependence.

So quoting from Graeber and Wengrow

For the Americans, the freedom of the individual was supposed to be based on some level of basic communism,

And as articulated since his Debt book, Graeber’s concept of communism is basically the idea of a sharing relationship with someone, like between parents and children, or between friends, rather than a relationship where you keep score of exchange and debts. Quote:

For the Americans, the freedom of the individual was supposed to be based on some level of basic communism, since, after all, people who are starving or without adequate clothing or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything except what is necessary to stay alive.

The European conception of individual freedom, on the other hand, was intimately linked to conceptions of private property.

From a legal point of view, it goes back to the ancient absolute power of the Roman head of the family to do whatever he wanted with his personal and private property, including his children and slaves. In other words, freedom was always at least potentially at the expense of others.

Moreover, there was a strong sense that households should be self-sufficient; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of will, but in no way dependence on other human beings (except those under their direct power or control).

Rousseau, who himself always insisted that he wanted to live his life in a way that did not make him dependent on the help of others (even if he had all his needs met by mistresses and servants), echoes this logic.

When our ancestors made the fatal decision to divide the land into individual parcels and created, first, legal structures to protect their property and then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined that they were creating the means to preserve their freedom.

But in reality, they ‘ran headlong into their chains’. This is a powerful image. But it is hard to imagine what exactly Rousseau’s lost freedom consisted of, if (as he insisted) any continuing human relationship, even of mutual aid, was a restriction on freedom. No wonder, perhaps, that he ended up inventing a purely imaginary age in which each individual human wandered alone among the trees.

and then a bit later we have this passage:

Of course, Rousseau’s effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and the lost ages of liberty and equality were in no way responsible for the French Revolution in the sense of putting strange ideas into the heads of the sans-culottes (as we have noted, it was the intellectuals in European history who seem to have been the only class of people who were unable to wrap their heads around these ideas). But, it could be argued that by bringing together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, that he in fact wrote the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.

So here they’re differentiating between the spirit of the sans-culottes, the true revolutionaries of the french revolution, and the intellectual left – the lawyers and intellectuals who took power – and they’re saying that Rousseau’s narrative which according to Graeber and Wengrow is a half assed cop out synthesis of the indigenous critique and the right wing reaction to that critique, where we criticize inequality, but we ultimately resign ourselves to hierarchy – they’re saying that this cop our is the foundation of the intellectual left!

So what Graeber and Wengrow are doing with this chapter, is they’re setting up some of their main arguments for the rest of the book. In the paragraph I just read, they’re setting up a critique of the intellectual left, by which I assume is going to become a critique of the marxist left. So like in their interpretation of Rousseau, where you have a harsh critique of hierarchy based a vague two dimensional vision of a society of free and equals that is ultimately a justification for hierarchy to persist, in the marxist left and leninist left you have a far off vision of a free and equal future, but you need these hierarchical parties and states to get us to that point, which never really materializes, and this is where we get the USSR and Communist China etc.

So in the next few paragraphs they quote an original member of the illuminati calling for a small cadre or intellectuals to lead society into an era of equality and liberty and they point out that this seems to prefigure the French and Russian Revolutions and also that it looks just like an excerpt of Rousseau’s writing.

And hopefully they’ll also throw in a critique of the post-raisin bran academic left and it’s ideology of powerlessness as well.

And then, as part of this critique of the intellectual left, they’re going to argue that the idea that human beings started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers, and then transitioned to hierarchical societies because of changes in material conditions, like the advent of agriculture and civilization, is part of this intellectual left justification for hierarchy – in other words people who argue that human beings started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers – which is the majority opinion among anthropologists since the 1960s’ – that what these people are ultimately doing is saying that we can’t have egalitarian societies anymore because we’re not hunter gatherers anymore, like Turgot or Rousseau saying that hierarchy is the price of civilization.

And this is one of the big points they’ll be making in their article “How to Change the Course of Human History” which is what we’ll be focusing on next episode, and this is where I’ll be starting to critique them ferociously, because this argument is just not true.

There are some people with no expertise like Francis Fukuyama who make arguments like that, usually in passing – it’s just dumb “common sense” folk wisdom – but there are no hunter gatherer specialists who make arguments like that, and there are many hunter gatherer experts who make the exact opposite argument – that the fact that humans probably started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers enjoying liberty and equality at the same times shows that human being are capable of living in a state of equality and liberty – and maybe that we’re even evolved and best suited to be living that way, and that we can do that in a context of civilization if we change some of our major institutions and our material conditions.

And we’ll see why the evidence that they present that humans weren’t mostly egalitarian hunter gatherers is really weak, and based on a really flimsy theoretical basis, and total ignorance or in Graeber’s case total denial of the anthropology of egalitarian hunter gatherer societies – and we’ll see why the egalitarian origins thesis is still the majority opinion among anthropologists and hunter gatherer specialists.

Critique of Equality

OK, so up until now, I have a few quibbles with what Graeber and Wengrow have been saying, but in general I find this chapter super interesting, it’s really exciting I learned all sorts of interesting history I didn’t know, it changed my view of the enlightenment etc.

But then in the closing paragraphs of the chapter, we get to the part that makes me want to pull my hair out, because it’s basically a big tirade against the idea of equality as a meaningful concept – Graeber and Wengrow say that they don’t know what equality means, and then instead of trying to figure out what it means given that it’s such a foundational concept – they just want to throw away the whole idea. And this is a theme that has quietly appeared in Graeber’s work throughout the years – but here he’s finally saying it outright – the arguments in this section are based on all sorts of inaccuracies, outdated information, and weak cop-outs.

And it exemplifies what’s wrong with the state of political theory today, and what’s wrong with anthropological theory today, and what’s wrong with David Graeber’s thinking on human social organization, and it’s why I’m doing this show in general and these episodes in particular.

But in order for you to really see what’s wrong with this stuff, and why it’s just so obnoxious and counterproductive – and why their arguments in How to Change the Course of Human History are so obnoxious and counterproductive – I need to give you a little lesson on the history of the anthropology of hunter gatherer societies.

And that’s what I’ll start off with next week, before I read the end of this Kandiaronk Chapter, and then I go on to read and criticize the How to Change the Course of Human History preview article, and hopefully I can get that out there before Graeber and Wengrow’s book comes out on october 15^th!

In the meantime, please tell other people about this show, and share the epsiodes, and please like and subscribe and also review and rate on itunes or urple music, its really important and helps the show pop up more readily on searches – and please subscribe to my patreon so I can keep doing this and until next time … seeya!

10.1 Graeber & Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”: What is an “Egalitarian” Society?

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.

all music by *69

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vNADAH-Rxk

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

Script

Hello fellow kids!

And welcome to the second instalment in our critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new book the Dawn of Everything.

Today we’re going to read and critique the conclusion of the Sagesse de Kandiaronk preview chapter that Graeber and Wengrow released in 2019 and this conclusion is basically unchanged in the actual book, where the chapter is called Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress.

And we’re going to start off with a short political and anthropological theory/history lesson so that we have the tools to evaluate what we’re reading and also what we’ll be reading in the future, so you can come back to this episode before we critique other parts of the book.

But first – something unexpected happened right after I recorded this episode – and that is the publication of the full book, the Dawn of Everything.

My initial plan had been to critique some of the preview articles and chapters from Dawn of Everything that Graeber and Wengrow had been putting out since 2015 before it was published, but I didn’t realize that the UK release date was 3 weeks before the US/Canada release date, so my initial plan got messed up and the book is already out now…

And of course I got a hold of it, and I haven’t had the time to read the whole thing yet, but from what I have read, I can say two big things:

#1 it’s brilliant and it’s a really wonderful read, full of so much fascinating and illuminating anthropological and historical information, and tying together so much loose gunk that’s floating out there in the ocean of anthropology and history about human origins, in a really clear and insightful way. And to my great surprise, it’s maybe my favourite Graeber book of all – and I’m relieved, because I really hate a lot of the stuff that’s in some of the preview chapters, and I was expecting this to be his worst book.

Now I still disagree with a lot of what’s in this book, but now I just respectfully disagree, instead of thinking they were doing something dishonest or incompetent, because for maybe the first time in David Graeber’s career, he actually stops pretending that the past 50 years of hunter gatherer studies on extremely egalitarian societies never happened – I think maybe he was forced to read this literature properly for the first time because of the book – and I’ll be explaining in this episode what I mean by that, and why it’s been making a lot of anthropologists on the left pretty pissed off.

Which brings us to the second big thing I wanted to say about the book:

The book, as glorious as it is, does not actually answer the big and hugely important questions that it sets out to answer at the beginning – how did we get stuck with these permanent, oppressive hierarchical societies for the past however many thousands of years and what can we do about it? They hazard a guess at the end, but it’s a really goofy guess as you’ll see when you read it.

And the reason that they can’t answer these questions is because of bad theory. The answers are right there under their noses, in the very texts that they cite – they even manage to figure out some of the ingredients, ability to escape for example – but they can’t get the actual answers, because they think that if you look for materialist explanations, that the answers that you’ll find are will be deterministic such that we truly are permanently stuck with hierarchies for ever and ever, which is a common misconception. Like they can’t even figure out where male domination comes from even though there’s some classic anthropology that explains this pretty successfully, which I’ve covered – and compare my explanation in episodes 7 and 7.1 with the goofy guess they give at the end of the book about refugees in temples if you want a good giggle. And they don’t really understand what hierarchy is. They think that seasonal hierarchies in traditional societies were just games and theatre rather than the result of bargaining power of different social groups in different seasons, and also practical solutions to the practicalities of seasonal conditions.

And bad theory leads to bad practice – the reason that this book is such a glorious success, but then ends with such a flop, is the same reason that occupy wall street was such a glorious success and then such a pointless flop at the same time, which I’ll talk about in a video which is an outtake from this episode. And the reason that I started this show is so that our minds are less gunked up with nonsense so that we can have more clarity of vision, better instincts and therefore make better decisions in our political lives.

But – I’m actually pretty happy that Graeber and Wengrow punted on these questions, because now my work after this episode is cut out for me. Graeber and Wengrow put together an almost masterpiece and now I get to put the crowning jewel on top without having to do the hard work of setting it up and putting these important questions into public consciousness.

So subsequent to this episode – not exactly sure when, maybe next episode – I am going to answer the central questions of Dawn of Everything which they punted on – how did we get stuck with seemingly permanent entrenched hierarchies – Marx’ riddle of history – and also why some cultures change social structures seasonally – and I’m going to do it using the very texts that Graeber and Wengrow themselves cite and discuss, adding the missing ingredient of some very basic ABC material analysis, which for reason’s that we’ll discuss. seems to have become a lost art.

But for now, let’s get back to the conclusion of The Wisdom of Kandiaronk / Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress.

So the three main issues that I have with Dawn of Everything, and the preview chapters that have been coming out since 2015 are:

Graeber and Wengrow’s allergy to materialist explanations for human social structure – which is the fatal weakness of an otherwise wonderful book.
Graeber and Wengrow’s maddening mis-representation of the literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies and the intentions of the people who write that literature.

and #3. Graeber and Wengrow’s tirade against the concept of equality and egalitarianism, which is a big problem in our political discourse in general, and which is the central theme of the text that we’ll be reading today.

I’ll be talking about the materialism issue when I tackle the book as a whole so let’s start off with our little theory and history lesson and then the text – but please keep in mind that the rest of this episode, besides this intro was recorded before the book was released – so while everything I’m staying is still accurate, in Dawn of Everything, after a career of ignoring 50 years of hunter gatherer research, Graeber and Wengrow finally do talk a little bit about actual egalitarian societies, and they do so honestly – so my condescending attitude that I express in this video is a bit obsolete, even if my criticisms of the text that I’m reading are still basically the same.

OK, let’s do dis:

Now I’m going to be pretty harsh in my critiques today and in the next episode, and I want to say a little bit about the importance of political theory and getting certain things right before I make those critiques, because I want everyone to understand that I’m not just upset because a great anthropologist and thinker got a couple of concepts wrong – I’m upset because of the political real world consequences of getting it wrong.

For a lot of people political theory can end up being either an academic wankfest or else a bit of a game of identity cosplay. But when I’m talking to you about theory, the point is to have a basic understanding about how certain things work, so that we actually take political action, that we’re likely to take actions and adopt strategies that move us closer to our goals, and make us less likely to run full speed into a painting of a train tunnel like in a roadrunner cartoon.

What is Equality

The meaning of equality in a political context is an extremely simple concept. But like I always talk about, even the most simple concepts are obscured and confused in our political discourse, even at the highest levels of academia and journalism.

So, refresher course and you can get more details from my past podcast episodes on left and right:

The word politics refers to everything relating to decision making in groups. Who gets to decide, who doesn’t, how are decisions made etc.

In other words, politics is about who has power and how it is exercised.

So when we’re talking about equality in the context of politics, and Graeber and Wengrow’s book is about anthropology and history as they relate to politics – we’re not talking about people being equal in terms of size, or attractiveness or in terms of their abilities – we’re talking about equality of decision making power.

Equality means that everyone has an equal say in the decisions that affect them. In other words, democracy. And full political equality implies not just representative democracy, but direct democracy.

And equality of power, has all sorts of implications.

First it implies a high degree of individual freedom and autonomy. Because if everyone has equal decision making power, that means that there is no authority figure who has the power to tell anyone what to do. The only time you can’t do something is if what you’re doing interferes with the autonomy and freedom of other people and they join together to stop you.

Next, equality of power, also implies a high degree of economic equality.

Our political discourse always separates decision making involving the state from decision making in the private sphere, like at work in to two totally separate categories. We tend to think of state decision making as politics, and private decision making as just life. But that kind of thinking makes us stupid because power is power. And politics is decision making in any groups, at work and at home as much as in the halls of parliament or congress.

And when there is great economic inequality, that means that there are some people who dominate the resources that other people need to live, which means that the people with the wealth have the power to make the people without the wealth do what they want all day long, in exchange for some food or shelter or some salary.

That’s why your boss tells you what to do all day at work, because he owns a revenue generating business and you depend on that revenue to live. You and Jeff Bezos each have one vote in your political system – if you’re a citizen – but bezos can tell tens of thousands of his employees what they have to do all day, and how to do it and how fast to do it – and he can make them literally piss and shit in bottles and diapers if that suits him.

And that’s because economic inequality is power inequality, i.e. political inequality.

Meanwhile the only people that you can boss around is your dog and your kids, because they’re economically dependent on you, just like you’re economically dependent on your boss.

And wealth inequality also means inequality in terms of government decision making power as well.

You and George Soros or Bill Gates or the Koch Brothers or Jeff Bezos – you all have one vote each, but all of those zillionaires can afford to hire an armies of lobbyists to work 24–7 to teach your representatives what to think and how to think. And they can flood them with electoral campaign contributions to incentivize them to do what he want.

Meanwhile all you can do is vote every few years, and maybe go to a town hall meeting every once in awhile, and ramble about things that you don’t really understand very well, and no one pays much attention to you.

Third, equality of decision making power also implies that there are power hierarchies or no negative discrimination based on cultural categories, like race, gender, religion etc. Because cultural discrimination translates into inequalities of decision making power.

Like in a patriarchal society, men have more power by virtue of their status as men. In a gerontocracy old people have more power based on their age etc.

So, in anthropology, like in politics, when we talk about an egalitarian society, we’re talking about a society which has a high degree of equality of decison making power. And that includes a high degree of economic equality, and a high degree of power equality between cultural categories like age and gender categories.

So in theory, a truly egalitarian society would be one where there are no authority figures, where men and women are equal and where there’s total economic equality.

And as we’ll see, it turns out that isn’t just theoretical, there are actually several societies that approach this type of equality – but for some insane reasons that we’ll explore about next episode, David Graeber spent his whole career pretending that these societies do not exist, and also pretending that 50 years of hunter gatherer studies that talk about these societies, never happened.

And finally, keep in mind that whenever we talk about the political left and right, that the left refers to hierarchy and equality in terms of political power. The left refers to those who support equality precisely in the ways that I just described – equality of decision making power, which implies cultural equality and economic equality. And the political right refers to those that support hierarchies of power, which also implies economic inequality and also gender or age or other hierarchies.

Why Hunter Gatherers

So that’s equality – so now let’s look at hunter gatherer and hunter gatherer studies.

First, what is a hunter gatherer and why does it matter what hunter gatherers do today or did in the past? The definition of a hunter gather is sometimes in dispute, but most commonly it’s a negative definition – it’s subsistence level society where it’s members do not do any agriculture. And that’s a broad category that includes all kinds of societies that sometimes have very little in common with eachother. Like there are nomadic super egaltiarian societies with few possessions that follow herds of animals around all year, and there are sedentary, territorial fishing societies with chiefs and and nobility and slaves and all sorts of societies in between.

Now all human societies are interesting from the perspective of politics, and I can’t stress enough how if you’re interested in politics, you should be reading ethnographies of different societites – but hunter gatherers are especially interesting in this regard because modern human beings evolved into a species while we were hunter gatherers, and we spent the first 93–97% of our existence as hunter gatherers depending on how you count it.

Hunting and gathering shaped who we are. It’s shaped our bodies, and our minds, our desires, our proclivities and our political dispositions. And many of the problems we have today are commonly seen as being the result of our hunter gatherer bodies and minds being not well adapted to our current lifestyles and environments.

One non controversial example of this is our endless desire for sugar, salt and fat, which was adaptive in a foraging environment where those things were relatively rare and when we did so much more exercise, but which cause an epidemic of diabetes and heart disease where those things are plentiful and where we sit in front of computers or stand in front of cash registers all day.

So people have a lot invested in how our hunter gatherer ancestors are and were organized because there’s an implication that if hunter gatherers do or did things a certain way, that this must be the way that we’re best adapted to live. And many of our social ills are therefore the result of us deviating from our natural species being, the same way that being exposed to so much more sugar than in the palaeolithic era makes us sick today.

Are we best adapted to be politically and economically egalitarian or are innately hierarchical? Are humans cooperative or are we competitive? Are we selfish or altruistic? Are we monogamous or polygamous and polyamorous. Is gender natural or is it just an artificial construct? How much of us is “made” to be any particular way, and how much is determined by culture? Or are we just a mess of contradictory desires and impulses that aren’t really perfectly adapted for anything at all, but which have worked well enough to survive in a variety of conditions? These are the sorts of things that people are constantly looking into and debating about when it comes to hunter gatherer societies.

In trying to understand the conditions that we evolved in, we look at archaeology, but hunter gatherer societies don’t leave a lot for us to find that lasts for tens of thousands of years, so we also need to make inferences based on hunter gatherers from today and from recent times who can help us intepret what we find, and who are presumed to share many of the same conditions as our ancestors. And then we end up with all of these debates about how much the hunter gatherers of recent times resemble or don’t resemble the hunter gatherers of palaeolithic times and how much the conditions of today do and don’t resemble the conditions of 20,000 and 200,000 years ago.

History of Hunter Gatherer Studies

Now until the 1960s, there were all sorts of assumptions about hunter gathers among anthropologists which were based on a mix of common popular misconceptions, and also on the work of some famous anthropologists like Alfred Radcliffe Browne and Claude Levi Strauss both of whom had worked among Australian Aborigines in the early 20^th century.

Like a lot of people think that if someone is running around in a grass skirt with a spear that this is a hunter gatherer or close enough – and even many anthropologists have assumed that we can infer things about our palaeolithic ancestors based on anyone that looks “primitive” but most people with grass skirts and spears in recent times are actually horticulturalists – small plot farmers. Something which didn’t exist in the palaeolithic era and which has completely different incentives and social structure and belief systems than hunting and gathering usually does.

So, based on all this stuff, it was often assumed that hunter gatherers were male dominated societies where women were basically slaves and babymakers.

It was assumed that hunter gatherers were made up of bands of closely related males, with unrelated females marrying into the group, and that cooperation was based on advancing the interests of the people genetically closest to you.

It was assumed that hunter gatherers were fiercely territorial and competed and warred frequently with neighbouring groups.

It was assumed that most of their food came from male hunting and that female gathering and hunting were relatively unimportant.

It was assumed that existing hunter gatherer life was a nasty brutish and short, eternal hungry search for food, and that the worlds remaining hunter gatherers were the ones who were too stupid to figure out awesome efficient agriculture, or who were unlucky enough to be stuck in territories unsuited for agriculture.

And particularly in the popular imagination it was assumed that there were chiefs and priests telling everyone what to do and what to think and to be afraid of powerful vengeful gods.

Man the Hunter

But then in 1966 there was the first big conference of hunter gatherer specialists from cultural anthropology and archaeology, called the Man the Hunter conference. And that conference, which established the modern field of huntergather studies, and the research that came after it, completely upended all of these assumptions.

While there was a variety of different kinds of hunter gather societies, living in all sorts of different circumstances, it turned out that hunter gathers are usually better nourished and healthier than their farmer neighbours. They usually work less hours and less intensively than farmers do, and the work they do is usually more diverse and more enjoyable.

Meanwhile archaeological finds showed that prehistoric peoples’ health almost invariably got much worse once they switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture. And in many places the health of the general population never matches or surpasses hunter gatherer health until the 19^th century, except among small urban elites.

And hunter gatherers weren’t hunter gatherers because they were too stupid to invent or adopt agriculture, or because they lived in conditions that were too harsh for agriculture. Most of them are well aware of agricultural techniques, but purposefully avoid agriculture as an unpleasant and undignified way to live.

So for example, archaeology showed that huge parts of north america were perfect for agriculture, yet people stuck with hunting and gathering for 10,000 years.

In terms of gender relations, far from being male dominated, women in most hunter gather societies tended to have a much higher degree of autonomy and freedom than their farmer or pastoralist counterparts – and several hunter gatherer societies turned out to be the most gender egalitarian societies that we’ve ever known, which we’ll get back to in a bit.

Surprisingly it turns out that many hunter gatherers are not organized into bands of closely related members, but rather into bands of largely unrelated members that are always coming and going, kind of like a modern urban neighbourhood.

It was also remarked that many hunter gathers societies are not territorial at all, and that they seem to engage in very little if any intergroup warfare.

Many hunter gatherer societies turned out to have no chiefs, no big men, no religious or patriarchical authorities nor any authorities of any kind.

And most hunter gatherers don’t worship their ancestors, they aren’t too concerned with their lineage, and and they often have very loose religious beliefs, again kind of like urban people.

And it turned out that many hunter gatherer societies strictly enforced economic equality via all sorts of interesting methods and institutions. From social pressure to gambling to sharing on demand to explicit sharing rules. Competition, grandstanding and status seeking are extreme social taboos in many of these societies, with the best hunters often ritually prevented from gaining status, wealth or power for their skills.

In these societies, Men, women, and children alike enjoyed a life of material equality and personal freedom that had been considered impossible according to the prevailing cold war era ideology, where freedom and equality were presented as mutually exclusive propositions.

In particular the kalahari bushmen cultures and the central african rainforest pygmy cultures and the Hadza in Tanzania were described as examples of the type of libertarian communism that socialists had been dreaming of since the early 19^th century.

And in terms of political implications of this research, to paraphrase anthropologist Robert Kelly, these societies were seen not just seen as a model of what our ancestors were like, but also as a model to emulate for our future.

*“Increasingly dissatisfied, many rejected the materialism of Western society and searched for an alternative way of life in which material possessions meant little, people lived in harmony with nature, and there were no national boundaries to contest. It was the context for John Lennon’s song, Imagine, and for the numerous hippie communes. Hunting and gathering had kept humanity alive for 99 percent of its history; what could we learn from it?”

In the late 1970s and early 80s James Woodburn, who did his field work among the Hadza people in Tanzania, noticed that there was one category of hunter gatherer societies which stood out not only from other hunter gatherers, but from all other known human societies.

These were the super egalitarian societies that I mentioned earlier, where there’s no political or religious authority, where men and women are as equal as anywhere on earth, and where personal liberty coexists with strictly enforced economic equality.

“Unlike almost all other human societies, people – men, women and older children alike – are entitled to direct and immediate access to the un-garnered food and other resources of their country. These rights of access are not formally allocated to them and cannot be withdrawn from them. Neither parents nor other kin provide, control or direct access. … These open rights of access to material resources are matched by open access to secular knowledge and skills

For members of these societies one might almost say that the notion of property as theft is not a novel revolutionary ideology but an implicit everyday view of the world”

Woodburn noticed that without exception, all of the societies who had all of these remarkable egalitarian characterstics all practiced the same type of hunting and gathering economy – which also happens to be the simplest type of economy – which means that it also happens to be the economy that was practiced by our first ancestors – where people are nomadic following animals around, and more or less less acquiring food and then eating in within the next few days without processing it or storing it in any elaborate way.

Woodburn called this an “immediate return” economy, where you produce and the consume right away, as opposed to the “delayed return” economies practiced by every other culture in the world, where you produce now and consume later.

Starting with his 1982 article, Egalitarian Societies, Woodburn hypothesized about why it is that every single society that’s so egalitarian and autonomous happens to practice an immediate return economy? And he points out that inherent in the practical realities of that type of nomadic hunting and gathering, is the fact that there’s just no real way to dominate anyone.

No one can control any particular territory or important resources, so there’s no way to force people into the dependence relationships that political hierarchies are mostly based on. If anyone tries to bully you, you can just go off an join another camp. If any one tries to monopolize some resources, you can just go somewhere else and get similar resources yourself.

And importantly, since everyone has access to projectile weapons and poisons, if anyone really gets out of line with domineering or anti social behaviour, they can just be killed or exiled, which is a big disincentive to even try.

In 1999 Christopher Boehm in his important book Hierarchy in the Forest called this “reverse dominance” where the majority of people together to prevent anyone from becoming dominant. And according to Boehm this has all sorts of evolutionary implications, because our ancestors killed off all the aggressive alpha male types which led to all sorts of physical and dispositional changes over tome.

In other words the balance of power is relatively equal between all members of society. Any person or coalition who tries to dominate others will inevitably fail. All they can do is cause chaos and then get killed. And that’s why you develop cultural values to prevent that chaos, to stabilize the system. That’s not Woordburn talking that’s my original contribution to this body of work, which I’ll elaborate on another episode.

Note that this is not a utopian argument. No one is saying that immediate return foragers are magical unicorn people who don’t have competitiveness or dominance instincts. And no one is saying that they’re innocent children who don’t know the sins of civilization. It’s just that the conditions that they live in and institutions they have developed in order to adapt to those conditions, prevent a lot of the social ills that we take granted from from happening very frequently.

Interestingly, game theory studies have shown that immediate return hunter gatherers, actually behave more selfishly when their actions are anonymous and their identities are secret than people from other cultures do! And that’s because they have such strict obligations to share everything on demand.

For example when musicologist Michelle Kisliuk casually gave a slice of tomato to an aka man sitting next to her, he immediately looked around, and then cut it into 16 tiny pieces and gave one to every person in sight.

So when people who have sharing norms like that get some privacy they just want to eat the whole damned tomato by themselves!

Evolution of the Word Egalitarian

Now before the Woodburn articles and before Man the Hunter and the subsequent focus on these hyper egalitarian immediate return societies, the term “egalitarian society” was often used to describe societies that still had significant elements of hierarchy.

For example, the Nuer who are a traditionally pastoralist people of southern sudan were usually described as an egalitarian society because they have no chiefs, and they are egalitarian in terms of there being equal political authority between men. But at the same time, they also have clear gender hierarchy and some wealth inequality.

Or else people would talk about the nations of the Haudenosaunee confederation in north america as being egalitarian because they had a lot of economic equality and gender equality, even though they also had a significant degree of political inequality and gerontocracy.

But, since the 1980’s, when anthropologists talk about an “Egalitarian society” or “egalitarian hunter gathers”, they’re usually talking about those hyper egalitarian immediate return hunter gatherer societies that I’ve been talking about. Because even if you accept the arguments made by critics about how their egalitarianism is exaggerated, those are still the most egalitarian societies known to exist in just about every respect.

Hunter Gatherers and the Left

Needless to say, these developments in hunter gatherer studies have had an important impact on leftist politics, at least among people who know about them. And of course, not enough people know about them, because we wouldn’t expect our elite educational or media institutions to really publicize too strongly that free and equal societies are actually possible or actually exist!

Most anthropologists who study immediate return societies have left wing commitments of one sort or another. Richard Lee, maybe the most famous hunter gatherer anthropologist who wrote about the Kalahari bush people is a marxist anthropologist and political socialist, and he was explicitly writing about the implications of hunter gatherer egalitarianism on the prospects for egaltarianism in industrial civilization. Most other people working in that field are also very interested in human equality even if they’re not as explicitly political about it.

And there’s a whole anarcho primitivist movement that spring up in the 1990s based on this anthropology – which honestly is a pretty ridiculous, because you’d need 95% of the world’s population to die in order to live as immediate return hunter gatherers.

More recently there’s a Radical Anthropology Group in the UK that’s been around since the early 2000s made up of people liek Jerome Lewis, Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Chris Knight who are communists who have been doing a lot of amazing work about immediate return foragers – about the dynamics of their egalitarian ideology and how gender equality is maintained, and their religious beliefs – I strongly suggest you check out their work – I’ll put some links in the bio – and as I was writing this I was contacted by Camilla Power and Chris Knight and they will be appearing on my show very soon, so look out for that, very excited about it!

And it’s worth noting that in almost all of the debates that have happened about egalitarian hunter gatherers over the last 50 years, it’s almost always people who haven’t lived with these societies who argue that their egalitarianism is an exaggeration or that it’s not real, or that it’s the result of extreme poverty and circumscription, and it’s always the people who know them the best who argue that yes they are really egalitarian and by choice.

But ironically, one place on the left of anthropology where you won’t find anything at all about these perfectly functional anarcho communist societies is the one place you would most expect to find something about them – and that is in the works of the anarchist anthropologist and activist David Graeber!

David Graeber is Wack on Equality

When I was a wee lad and in university I was soo excited when I discovered David Graeber. An anarchist anthropologist and activist! Like a Noam Chomsky of anthropology! And he was a great and original writer who was writing all sorts of amazing stuff of debt and on manners and hierarchy, and I couldn’t wait to see what he had to say about egalitarian hunter gatherer societies!

But if you look through Graeber’s bibliography, like I did when I first learned about him – I don’t think he mentions a single immediate return society one single time.

And then I noticed that whenever he did mention a society as being “egalitarian”, it would never be an actual egalitarian society – it would always be a society with significant forms of hierarchy.

So like in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology there’s a short section when he discusses three supposedly egalitarian societies the Piaroa, the Tiv and Malagasy cultures, and he describes a bit about them, and his takeaway is that they aren’t really egalitarian.

None of these societies are entirely egalitarian: there are always certain key forms of dominance, at least of men over women, elders over juniors.

And this is totally true about those three particular societies. The Piaroa which are the most egalitarian of that bunch, have positions of authority that are all dominated by men. The Tiv have very clear patriarchy and gerontocracy, and the Malagasy are not really egaltiarian at all – they have all kinds of class and wealth distinctions, cultural hierarchies and discrimination, gender.

The clear implication is there’s no such thing as an actual egalitarian society, there’s always a significant form of hierarchy in every society.

Reading this stuff I kept wondering – does he just not know about immediate return societies? How could he not?

And then in 2015 Graeber and Wengrow published Farewell to the Childhood of Man – the first preview of Dawn of Everything, where they argue that humans were always going back and forth from hierarchy to equality, and that to claim that people used to be egalitarian is to claim that they’re children without agency.

And then in 2017 Graeber published On Kings, co-written with Marshal Sahlins. And in it, Graeber and Sahlins try to argue that even the most supposedly egalitarian societies have hierarchical religions and cosmologies where the gods rule the humans who must obey or face their wrath…

And they go as far as to say that the true primordial state of humanity is authoritarianism not liberty or equality!

Even the so-called “egalitarian” or “acephalous” societies, including hunters such as the Inuit or Australian Aboriginals, are in structure and practice cosmic polities, ordered and governed by divinities, the dead, species-masters, and other such meta-persons endowed with life-and-death powers over the human population. There are kingly beings in heaven where there are no chiefs on earth.

Although Chewong society is described as classically “egalitarian,” it is in practice coercively ruled by a host of cosmic authorities, themselves of human character and metahuman powers.

So while, on one hand, Howell characterizes the Chewong as having “no social or political hierarchy” or “leaders of any kind,” on the other, she describesa human community encompassed and dominated by potent metapersons with powers to impose rules and render justice that would be the envy of kings.

…basically similar cosmologies are found among basically similar societies ... the Central Inuit; …, Highland New Guineans, Australian Aboriginals, native Amazonians, and other “egalitarian” peoples likewise dominated by metaper-son-others who vastly outnumber them.

and later on Graeber alone says

In the first chapter of this volume, Marshall Sahlins makes the argument that insofar as there is a primordial political state, it is authoritarianism. Most hunter-gatherers actually do see themselves as living under a state-like regime, even under terrifying despots; it’s just that since we see their rulers as imaginary creatures, as gods and spirits and not actual flesh-and-blood rulers, we do not recognize them as “real.” But they’re real enough for those who live under them. We need to look for the origins of liberty, then, in a primal revolt against such authorities.

Again, not one of the societies discussed in this entire book are immediate return egalitarian societies. There are no immediate return societies in the amazon or in Papua New Guinea. All the societies he talks about have some sort of obvious hierarchy right here on earth, usually male domination. The Chewong and Highland New Guineans discussed above are not even hunter gatherers.

It’s like Graeber and Sahlins were writing in the 1970s when these societies would have been considered egalitarian, except this was 2017.

And more shocking, is that what they’re saying just isn’t true. If you look at the religions of actual egalitarian societies, central african foragers like the mbuti, aka, efe and mbendjele, the bush people of the kalahari desert, the Hadza in Tanzania, the Batek in Malaysia, or the Nayaka in the mountainous forests of India and various societies related to these societies, you’d see that their religions don’t fit Graeber and Sahlins’ narrative at all.

For example, the Mbuti and the Nayaka – these are two totally unrelated immediate return societies located more 4000 miles apart on different continents. They each have a very similar religion where they see their respective forests as a generous genderless loving mother father deity who provides everything for their children. Far from quaking in fear of it, Turnbull tells the story of one Mbuti man who was literally having sex with the forest bceause he loved it so much. And the forest never tells anyone what to do besides just respect and maintain the forest, don’t overhunt the animals, don’t use up more than you can replenish etc.

Meanwhile, the Hadza have been argued to not have a religion, which I don’t think is correct, but they certainly don’t have any Gods that they take very seriously. If you ask a Hadza what happens after you die they will say stuff like “we bury you and people cry” and if you keep pushing them they say things like “maybe you go to the sun, we don’t really know”. They see their gods as legends and stories not as any sort of authoritarian figures. It’s very modern in a weird way, which I don’t think is a coincidence, and we’ll talk about that another time

I’ll link to an article about Hadza religion, and also to a recent video by some safari bro dude who asks some Hadza philosophical questions and then gets the most material, unreligious answers you can imagine, and that’s a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, the Kalahari bush people have a trickster type of god that they often complain about but again it never tells them what to do, it just causes random bad luck, which they resent. And far from a hierarchical relationship to this god, they see themselves as equals to it, as they do to all their deiteies! l’ll link to a video of Helga Vierich telling a funny story about this, where they tell stories about their god like he’s some sort of mr magoo character getting himself into all sorts of goofs.

Now you can certainly make an argument that there’s no such thing as a truly egalitarian society, and that all societies have some elements of hierarchy in them. But if you’re going to make that argument properly and honestly, you would take the most egalitarian societies and then try to point out that inequalities of wealth and power and ideology that exist there.

And there are some arguable signs of potential inequalities worth looking into and debating about in immediate return hunter gatherer societies – and several anthropologists have done just that. But not Graeber. He acts like they’ve never existed.

If you’re familiar with hunter gatherer literature, It’s so conspicuous that it seems dishonest. What he does is the equivalent of arguing that there are no countries on earth where men and women have equal legal rights, and then citing Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, 17^th century France and the old Testament as proof. It’s like he’s counting on the fact that his readers don’t know anything about immediate return societies so he can push his narrative.

Why??

Now the big questions here is Why? Why would a left wing anarchist anthropologist with commitments to all sorts of legitimate and serious left wing causes and organizations want to pretend that the most anarcho communist societies ever known do not exist? Why would he sign off on the idea that the true primordial state of humanity is authoritarianism?? And how is it that Unabomber has literally done a more thorough and honest job of arguing that egaltiarian societies don’t exist than David Graeber has!

I’ll answer that question, next episode when we read How to Change the Course of Human History, but now, we finally have the background that we need in order to be able to intelligently judge the conclusion of The Wisdom of Kandiaronk that we glossed over last time, so let’s get to it, and let the cartoon begin!

The End of Kandiaronk

So the entire conclusion of Wisdom of Kandiaronk is basically a call for rejecting the whole idea of equality.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ were the rallying cries of the French Revolution. Today, there are whole disciplines, sub-branches of philosophy and political science and legal studies, which make equality their raw material. Equality is almost universally recognized as a value, despite the almost total absence of consensus on what the term actually refers to. Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?

Well if Graeber RIP and Wengrow had only listened to this podcast they would know that equality refers to equality of decision making power.

Similarly, societies such as the Mi’kmaq, Algonquin or 17^th century Wendat are regularly referred to as ‘egalitarian societies’ – or, alternatively, ‘bands’ or ‘tribal’ societies, which are generally assumed to mean the same thing.

Oof – so two major problems in this one sentence. As always, Graeber is ignoring the most egaltiarian societies and then focusing on societies that have clear signs of hierarchy in order to argue that equality doesn’t exist.

So the Mikmaq, Algonquin or 17^th century Wendat would have been referred to as egalitarian societies before the 1970s – but not an anymore.

And to be clear, you will still see some people referring to societies like these as egalitarian if they’re comparing them to our society, because they’re significantly egalitarian, compared to us, but Graeber and Wengrow should know better. The Mikmaq had a degree of patriarchy and the Algonquin and Wendat had a degree of political hierarchy all beyond what you find in egalitarian immediate return societies.

Now the next part of the sentence really surprised me. Bands and Tribal societies are assumed to mean the same thing? By who? Homer Simpson or Fred Flintstone? No anthropologist thinks this.

A band is a group of people who travel around together – like a music band! Membership in a band is determined by who’s present when you’re counting. If you’re not present, then you’re not part of the band. Most, but not all hunter gatherers are organized into bands, and the membership of those bands is usually pretty fluid. People are coming and going all the time, visiting friends and relatives, getting away from their enemies or their spouses, leaving one band and joining another. And as a result bands are most often made up of largely unrelated people, which has interesting evolutionary implications which we’ll talk about another time.

A tribe on the other hand is an entirely different shebang. A tribe is a descent group. You’re born into a tribe. If you go off and live somewhere else, you’re still part of your tribe.

A larger tribe is usually made up of clans which are made up of lineages, which are made up of nuclear families, which is why in more recent times anthropologists will refer to tribal societies as segmented lineage societies – because each unit is made up of larger segements, and also because the word tribe has a bit of a confused definition because colonial governments used to invent “tribes” in order to make it easier to govern and those tribes didn’t really have any organic existence.

Ordinary people, like Fred Flintstone and Homer Simpson, will often erroneously use the word tribe to mean an ethnic group – people who have the same language and general culture – but one ethnic group can have multiple tribes – like think of the 12 tribes of ancient israel, or current various tribes of afghans or kurds.

Now the whole reason that a traditional, tribal system exists is because it’s a way of dealing with collective property. If your subsistence depends on a particular fishing territory or farming territory or a herd of animals, then a descent group like a clan or tribe is a way to have clear ownership rules, and to have a group that can collectively defend the territory.

So if you see a tribal system of organization you know that this society has collective property to manage, whether it’s a hunting territory like the Mikmaq, a farming territory like the Huron a fishing territory like the Tlingit, or a herd of animals like the Nuer.

An anthropologist not knowing the difference between a tribe and band is like an architect not knowing the difference between a house and an apartment building. It’s ridiculous.

OK, back to Graeber and Wengrow:

It is never clear what the term equality is supposed to refer to. Is it an ideology, the belief that everyone should be the same – obviously not in all ways, but in some ways that are considered particularly important? Or should it be a situation in which people are really the same? And if the latter, should it mean that an egalitarian ideal that characterizes this particular society is in fact largely realized, so that all members of society can be said to have equal access to land, or to treat each other with equal dignity, or to be equally free to make their opinions known in public assemblies? Or can it be a measure imposed by the observer: monetary income, political power, caloric intake, size of house, number and quality of personal possessions?

I bet that if Graeber and Wengrow had spent like 20% of the energy that it took to think up all these goofy examples and put that energy into trying to think about what equality should mean if you want to have a coherent politics, especially a coherent left politics, they would have easily figured out that it means equality of power, point final

Would equality mean the erasure of the individual or the celebration of the individual? (After all, a society in which everyone was exactly the same, and they were all so different that there was no criterion for saying that one was superior to the other, would seem both ‘egalitarian’ to an outside observer.)

yibbedeyabbedeyibbedy – well, if you know that equality means equal power, then you can figure out pretty easily that it means the celebration of the individual. Because no matter who you are, how big or small, ugly or good looking, strong or weak, how much or how little or how much you contribute to society, you matter, your say matters as much as everyone else’s.

And when we look at immediate return societies that’s what we see. You can be weird, and contradict gender roles, you can be ugly, you can be gay – and people don’t judge you for it. People are only judged negatively only insofar as they disrupt, disturb or threaten the equal power of everyone else.

Can we talk about equality in a society where the elders are treated as gods and make all the important decisions, if everyone in that society who survives past, say, fifty years becomes an elder?

No, you can’t because that’s not equality, that’s a weird kind of gerontocracy that does’t exist. And note to the editor – humanities writing is usually way better when you use real examples to illustrated things vs nonsense examples…

What about gender relations? Many so-called ‘egalitarian’ societies are really only egalitarian between adult men. Sometimes the relationships between men and women in these societies are anything but equal.

Yes, that’s exactly right – if you’re writing this from 1970. That’s why we don’t usually call patriarchal societies egalitarian anymore unless we’re comparing them to much more hierarchical societies. Today you’d call a society like that “male egalitarian”. Left wing anthropologists should know this.

Other cases are more ambiguous. It may be that men and women in a given society not only do different jobs, but have different theories of what is important, so that they both tend to think that the other’s main concerns (cooking, hunting, child care, war…) are insignificant or so profoundly different that it makes no sense to compare them at all. Many of the societies encountered by the French in North America fit this description. They may be considered matriarchal from one point of view, patriarchal from another. In such cases, can we speak of equality between the sexes?

So if Graeber and Wengrow knew anything about hunter gatherers, I would think that maybe this was a reference to some debates that were had in the aftermath of Man the Hunter, and that you still have today, where some people argue that the very fact that there are general gender roles in immediate return foraging societies, is proof of male dominance.

Hunter gatherer experts usually reply that yes there are gender roles, but they’re not enforced or policed in any way. Men and women do eachther’s work when it’s convenient or necessary without any stigma, and often aren’t interested in doing the other gender’s work. The video I’ll post from Helga Vierich on this is pretty interesting and fun so check that out.

And then the thing about societies that seem patriarchal from one angle and then matriarchal from another is probably a reference to societies like the haudenosaunee in north america, where women monopolized all of the positions of authority at the local level, but it’s only men who got to vote on broad public affairs beyond the clan level. And the chief of the tribe is always a man, though he’s elected by the exclusively female clan mothers who can always recall him.

Now you can debate on whether societies like the Haudenosaunee are gender egalitarian or not – but they are not egalitarian societies – at least not to the level of immediate return societies – because you do have positions of authority to begin with – clan mother, chief, head of the household, gerontocracy.

Or could we do so only if men and women were equally equal according to some minimal external criteria: to be equally free from the threat of domestic violence, for example, or to have equal access to resources, or to have a say in common affairs?

Equal say in common affairs! Hello, I’m right here!!

Now this is just bad writing on op of being about more non existent hypotheticals – equally free from the threat of domestic violence? Interestingly, I think Frank Marlowe talks about how he’s never seen an Aka man hit his wife but he has seen an Aka woman hit her husband a bunch of times..

But regardless – I can’t help but notice how they can say equal when it comes to equal access to resources and they say equal when it comes to the threat of domestic violence, but that they can’t bring themselves to say an equal when it comes to an equal say in common affairs, which is the definition of political equality.

Is that freudian thing on their part, or am I just seeing conspiracies everywere beacuse I’m so fed up with this crap?

Since there is no clear and generally accepted answer to any of these questions, the use of the term ‘equal’ has led to endless arguments. In fact, it is still unclear what the term ‘egalitarian’ means.

Let me just interject here again, because I want to point out how completely insane it is that we live in a society where a left wing anarchist political activist with proper bona fides like Graeber does not know what egalitarian means, especially when commitment to equality is literally the defining trait of the left.

This is a testement to how impovrished and confused our political theory is and to how important it is to do what I’m doing in this series, cleaning up the definitions of political terms, rebuilding our political alphabet from the ground up.

And actually before all you Marxists get smug about how these foolish anarchists don’t know any theory, Graeber was in good company – good old papa smurf himself Karl Marx and MC Freddy Engels actually made similar arguments back in their day.

But they had a better excuse – in Marx’ day, the word equality was most often used to describe “procedural equality,” i.e. equality before the law, where the same rules apply to you if you’re from the nobility or a bourgeois or a farmers or a labourer – as opposed to before the french revolution where separate rules applied.

And on the left liberal side, equality was used to describe universal male suffrage in a capitalist economy – where every man gets an equal vote, even though the wealthy still have all the power via owning the means of production and funding the political system.

So Marx didn’t like the word equality because he wanted to make sure that the focus was on the abolition of classes instead of on procedural equality

But if you watch this podcast where political terms get proper definitions and where political theory actually makes sense, you know that actual equality clearly implies the abolition of classes because wealth is power – see episode 3 for example.

For his part Engels must have been listening to my podcast because he does use the word equality – he makes the criticisms as Marx but he would make sure to endorse “real equality” as opposed to “bourgeois equality”.

So back to Graeber and Wengroats:

Ultimately, the term [equality] is not used because it has positive substance, but rather for the same reason that sixteenth-century natural law theorists speculated about equality in the state of nature:

The term ‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity that is imagined to be left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. The ‘egalitarian’ people are those who have no princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests, and are generally without cities or scriptures. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious signs of inequality are missing.

So what they’re doing here is saying that like Rousseau’s vision of equality was two dimensional because it’s just not anything real, it’s a caricature, or marx talks about a future where everyone’s free and equal but he never elaborates or goes into any detail because at the end of the day equality isn’t real, we’re never supposed to get there.

And this is some straight up bullshit, and it should be embarassing to the authors.

If unlike Graeber and Wengrow you take the time read any actual ethnographies or articles by people who have spent time with real egalitarian societies you’ll see that writers constantly talk about how pro-active and deliberate their egaltiarianism is.

You can read endless anecdotes and quantitative studies on how thoroughly demand sharing is enforced – again, think of that man cutting a tomato slice into 16 tiny pieces to give one to everyone in sight. Because if he didn’t he would get in huge social trouble.

And you can read countless stories about how anyone who seems to be accumulating too much prestige or power is seen as a threat to be actively dealt with via various cultural mechanisms, from anonymous public criticism to joking to shaming to excommunication and even execution.

There’s the famous story about shaming the meat that I talked about in episode 6 among the Kalahari people, or more recently Jerome Lewis talks about how a very excellent hunter among the Mbendjele was run out of his local area by the women’s organization because he refused to stop boasting about his skills.

And they did this despite the fact that he brought home an enormous amount of meat which was obviously to everyone’s material advantage, and these are people who prize meat above all foods and who love food almost more than anything. Again I’ll link to the article in the notes.

It follows that any historical work that purports to investigate the origins of social inequality is in reality an investigation into the origins of civilization; a work that in turn implies a vision of history that, like Turgot’s, conceives of civilization as a system of social complexity that guarantees greater overall prosperity, but at the same time guarantees that certain compromises will necessarily have to be made in the area of freedoms and rights. We are trying to tell a different story.

Yeah a bullshit story that you guys invented. Again this is incredibly insulting garbage, and this paragraph has two big false or foolish statements.

First of all, investigating the origins of hierarchy is not about civilization – it’s about the origins of hierarchy. Why do men dominate women in so many societies. Why is there so much racism. Why do religious groups dominate and exclude and kill eachother. Why did slavery happen?

All of these things happened thousands of years before civilization ever developped. Is it part of our nature? Is it circumstance? Is there anything we can do to about it?

If anything an inquiry into the origins of hierarchy is about human nature and about the future.

Next, and this is the truly obnoxious part – Graeber and Wengrow are saying that anyone investigating the origins of hierarchy is ultimately arguing that the hierarchies and inequalities of civilization are a necessary price for all the blessings of civilization.

This is an insult to 50 years of hunter gatherer studies. Yes, you can find some authors doing this – or one author – Francis Fukuyama is maybe the only one I can think of, maybe there are other non experts who do this.

But most of the people interested in the origins of hierarchy, especially if they’re deep into hunter gatherer studies are precisely interested in how we can get rid of hierarchies. How do our hunter gatherer brothers and sisters live without hierarchy? What lessons can we learn from them to be applied to industrial civilization?

Ironically, in an introduction to a new edition of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, David Graeber quotes Kropotkin, saying

Radical scholars are “bound to enter a minute analysis of the thousands of facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of contemporary ethnology; and after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.”

The only viable alternative to capitalist barbarism is stateless socialism, a product, as the great geographer never ceased to remind us, “of tendencies that are apparent now in the society” and that were “always, in some sense, imminent in the present.”

But this is exactly what Graeber and Wengrow are throwing out the window with this Dawn of Humanity book. You have all of this literature about all of these stateless socialist societies, which can teach us so much about where equality comes from, and about how we can create an order that preserves both equality and liberty at the same time just like they do – but instead Graeber and Wengrow are intent on pretending that these societies don’t exist, and that the literature about them is actually some kind of conspiracy to justify the hierarchies of our day!

And they continue:

It is not that we consider it unimportant or uninteresting that princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests – or for that matter writing and cities – emerged only at some point in human history. On the contrary: to understand our present predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial to understand how these things came about. However, we also insist that, to do so, we must reject the idea of treating our distant ancestors as some kind of primordial human soup.

To say that all of the anthropologists who have been doing so much amazing and important writing and reserach about immedate return foragers are treating them as primordial human soup is a complete insult to those authors.

It’s also a complete insult to the people they write about, and it’s also a complete insult to the intelligence of all the people who have ever read those works.

And I urge you to read that literature, not just to dispite Graeber and Wengrow, but so you can see for yourself how human beings like you and I with all our shitty flaws our selfishness our weaknesses, our pettiness and stupidities can nonetheless manage to live in and maintain a free and egalitarian order, not in utopia, but in this world full of injustice and brutality, so much of which simply does not need to exist and which does not exist in many societies.

Accumulating evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and related fields suggests that, like the Native Americans or the eighteenth-century French, our distant ancestors had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies, that these varied considerably over the thirty thousand years or so between the beginning of the Ice Age and the dawn of the civilization we call home, and that describing them in terms of uniform ‘egalitarianism’ tells us almost nothing about them.

This is a strawment statement that doesn’t mean anything. No one has ever said that every society only valued egalitarianism until civilization showed up and then people suddenly had complex lives. Societies started switching away from egalitarianism long before civilization – though by Graeber and Wengrow’s definition, egalitarianism seams to mean that if you run around in a grass skirt, and there’s no state you’re somehow egalitarian, which is why they think the term doesn’t mean anything.

And if you read the hunter gatherer literature you’ll see that these are complex people with emotions and conflicts and jealousies and everything that we have, except their worst emotions and impulses tend to be held in check in ways that we fail to do.

There is no doubt that there was generally some degree of equality by default: a presumption that humans are all equally powerless against the gods; or a strong sense that no one’s will should be permanently subordinated to another’s. It would probably have been necessary to ensure that hereditary princes, judges, overseers or priests did not appear for such a long time.

No, not equally powerless against the Gods, that is not a feature of our most egalitarian societies, despite what Graeber and Wengrow and Marshall Sahlins for some reason want us to believe. But yes, a strong sense that no one’s will should be subordinated to another’s – that is the essence of egalitarianism, and a core feature of egalitarian societies and it is the core principle of the left and of anarchism in particular, which makes it even more ridiculous that Graeber is doing his best to deny it.

But self-conscious ideologies of ‘equality’, that is, those that present equality as an explicit value, as opposed to an ideology of freedom, dignity or participation that applies equally to all, seem to have been relatively recent in history.

Again, you need to be ignorant of 50 years of hunter gatherer research to think this. Read Richard Lee on shaming the meat, or Jerome Lewis on the exile of Benasongo the boastful hunter. THe commitment to equality is so strict that when Hadza for example have disputes that need mediation, they have to go get someone from one of the neighbouring non Hadza communities to do it, because they idea that a fellow Hadza can sit above the others to arbitrate or mediate is seen as unacceptanble!

There’s no reason to think that the Kalahari bushmen or the Central african forest pygmies or Hadza made this stuff up in relative recent history, and to say that Europeans made this up in the 18^th century is just obnoxious.

Even when they do emerge, these ideologies rarely apply to everyone. The ancient Athenian democracy, for example, was based on political equality among its citizens – even if they represented only 10 to 20 per cent of the total population – in the sense that everyone had equal rights to participate in public decisions. We are taught to see this as a milestone in political evolution, as we consider that this older notion of equal civic participation was revived and expanded, some two thousand years later, at the time of the French and American revolutions. This is a dubious proposition: the political systems referred to as ‘democracies’ in nineteenth-century Europe have almost nothing to do with ancient Athens, but that is not really the point. Athenian intellectuals of the time, who were mostly of aristocratic origin, tended to regard the whole arrangement as a sordid affair and much preferred the government of Sparta, which was run by an even smaller percentage of the total population, who lived collectively off the labors of the serfs. The Spartan citizens referred to themselves as the Homoioioi, which could be translated as ‘the equals’ or ‘those who are all the same’; they all underwent the same rigorous military training, adopted the same haughty disdain for both effeminate luxury and individual idiosyncrasies, ate in communal halls, and spent most of their lives practicing warfare.

Again, all this is interesting, and great critique of the use of the word “egalitarian” in the 1970s and before, but the fact that they’re saying this stuff now while ignoring 50 years of hunter gatherer research in order to discredit the idea of egalitarianism is completely idiotic and also completely insane coming from two left wing anthropologists.

And the dynamics of societies like athens or sparta where have a community of equals ruling over others is super interesting and we’ll talk about it in the future.

So this is not a book about the origins of inequality.

Well then what the hell is this book about? They just punted on one of the biggest questions of all humanity!

And we’ll see next time that they’re going to end up arguing that we’ve always had inequality, humans were always shifting between hierarchy and equality, even though equality doesn’t exist anyways, but then something caused us to have more inequality… but somehow equality does exist for Graeber and Wengrow when they start talking about egalitarian cities and civilizations! Which is actually the good part of their book which I recommend you read because it’s fascinating.

But back to Graeber and Wengrow:

But it does aim to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. A very small percentage of its population controls the destiny of almost everyone else, and it is behaving in increasingly disastrous ways. To understand how this situation came about, we have to go back to what made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming that we already know exactly what it was. Drawing on indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we must approach the historical, archaeological, and ethnographic record with fresh eyes.

More like fresh eyerolls…

My pancreas hurts reading this. Yes we do know how this situation came about. It came about because conditions on earth changed over time, such that some people were able dominate others in ways that hadn’t been possible earlier. And we’ll talk about that next time when we finally do How to Change the Course of Human History, one of my least favourite pieces of anthropology that I’ve ever read!

And by then the full book will be out, and maybe I’ll do a follow up if there any surprises in there…

In the meantime, please tell other people about this show, it’s really hard to get the word out in this algorythm ruled, supersaturated podcast landcape, especially for a show that doesn’t have a ready made teenage sectarian political niche, so spread the word share the epsiodes –

and speaking of which I want to give a special thank you to Saint Andrew – not the apostle, but the youtubesman from Trinidad who posted one of my episodes on his channel and on his tweeters. I’ve gotten more views and subscribers and great comments and questions than I’ve ever had in such a short period of time thanks to that, and I checked out his videos and they’re great, dealing with a lot of the same questions that I’m dealing with, so that you andrew, and check out his channel called saintandrewism.

Also a shout out to Tom Obrien host of Alpha to Omega for hooking me up with Camilla Power and Chris knight, and it’s one of my favourite podcasts, check out the Fundamental Principles book series which is super exciting a previously forgotten book of socialist theory.

And also thanks to lucky black can another great youtuber who’s always been supportive and to Arnold Schroeder who has maybe the best political podcast out there FIght Like an Animal, just check that out you will thank me, history psychology personal experience such important stuff.

And please like and subscribe and also review this show on itunes or urple music, its really important and helps the show pop up more readily on searches – and contact me with any corrections or suggestions or comments at worldwidescrotes (at) gmail (dot) com or comment on yout u-tubes, and please subscribe to my patreon so I can keep doing this because it takes an unbelievable amount of time and the economic sacrifices that I have to make to keep doing these are complelety insane … and until next time … seeya!

10.2 The Dawn of Everything: How Graeber & Wengrow’s book sets us up for political failure

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”.

https://youtu.be/iZqyXSkHeeM

For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Script

Hello fellow kids, and welcome back to What is Politics, and to our critique of Graeber & Wengrow’s new book The Dawn of Everything.

Today in this 3^rd instalment of our critique we’ll be circuitously covering Chapter 1 from the book which is called Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood: Or Why This is Not A Book About the Origins of Inequality.

As always before I dig in, I want to lay out a bit of background theory and history in order to give some context to my critique.

And because a lot of people who aren’t regular listers to the show have been checking out these Dawn of Everything episodes, I want to outline where I’m coming from and why I’m spending so much time and energy criticizing this book.

Why Criticize This Book?

I don’t destroy my income and spend insane amounts of time making podcasts about political theory because I like blathering on about abstractions and not having any money. I do it because in politics, like in any field, bad political theory leads to bad political instincts which means doomed political action.

If you’re a doctor and you don’t understand how germs work or how the body works, you will treat illness with leeches and mercury and hysterectomies and you will harm your patients instead of helping them. If you’re an architect and you don’t understand math or physics you will build buildings that fall apart. And if you’re a human being engaging in political action, and you don’t understand how human beings work, you’re going to build social movements that hamper your objectives instead of advancing them. You’re going to write laws that can’t be enforced, or that produce the opposite effect to what you want to achieve. You’re going to be easily seduced by bad ideas, and by people who don’t share your interests or by charismatic idiots and charlatans.

And if your goal is to change the world in major ways, you’re going to end up making revolutions that fail, or else that succeed and then end up replicating similar hierarchies to the ones that you’re trying to overcome in the first place.

Now, in a society with a hierarchical power structure, where some people have power and freedom at the expense of other peoples’ power and freedom – be it capitalism, the soviet union, medieval europe or ancient babylonia, one would always expect that the political theories and concepts coming out of the main institutions in that society will be confused and convoluted, particularly when it comes to it understanding the most basic features of that society. And that’s because no one with power wants the general public to understand that they’re being exploited by the people in power, much less how they’re being exploited and much much less what they can do about it. And the people in power often don’t want to believe that they’re exploiting anyone in the first place. They’re always there for a good reason.

For example, young people today love reading about Marx and his ideas – but if you took a course on Marxism in the soviet union at a top elite university in the 1970s, you were going to be taking one of the most boring mind numbing classes imaginable. And that’s because if Marx’ work had been taught in a straightforward and easy to understand manner, students would immediate recognize that the ruling party needed to be overthrown and the workers should take power directly.

Today, in the rich capitalist countries, we have a political culture where none of the basic terms of our political vocabulary have any consensus definitions. Terms like left and right, or the market, or socialism or capitalism mean something different to each person who uses them – we just kind of “feel” what they mean. People with Poli Sci PhD write entire books about all of these topics without defining them or even knowing what they’re really talking about. And instead of our academic journals and our book reviewers laughing at them for it, they get celebrated.

Terms like politics and government are routinely used in ways that obscure power by hiding the fact that politics and government exist in the private sphere not just the public state sphere. So people think they love democracy and hate top down government but they don’t notice that when we go to work we’re spending most of our waking hours subjected to a top down government where the owner is the dictator, with only your bargaining power and the state as a check on their power.

And then we have all of these stupefying ideologies and myths that obscure the nature of power – take contracts for example – contracts are supposed to be the foundation of our economic system – and the ideology of contracts is all based on this total falsehood that you will learn in every single law school: that contracts represent the will of the parties signing the contract. Therefore, every contract is a win win situation, where both sides get something they want more that the thing they’re giving away for it.

But in the real world, contracts actually reflect and consolidate the relative bargaining power of the parties, not their will. Your will is expressed in the contract, only to the extent that you have bargaining power. Like if you’ve ever paid way more rent than you can afford, because the market is a nightmare and you have no choice, you know that your lease contract reflects 95% of your landlord’s wishes and 5% your wishes. And much of that 5% is actually only there because of the law – for example your landlord’s obligation to keep the place in livable order is only there because of the law makes it implicit in every contract, though getting that enforced is another thing.

All of this bad theory doesn’t just confuse us or pacify people who accept dominant ideologies and ideas, it also clogs up the minds of those of us who reject them, with disastrous consequences.

1381

One of the most spectacular examples of this is the English peasants’ revolt of 1381 which I talked about in Episode 8.

After the black plague killed off half the population of england, the peasant class suddenly had much more bargaining power than they had ever had before. And over the course of the next 40 years, the peasants and local priests who understood that their position had changed, proselytized and organized and clashed with the nobility and state authorities, leading up to the astonishing events of 1381 when an army of 100,000 organized peasants basically overthrew the nobility.

And then the peasants marched up to the castle of King Richard the II. But instead of chucking him into the river, and declaring the republic of libertarian socialist christian communes that they had been dreaming of for the previous 40 years – which they could easily have done because his troops were away fighting war in France – instead, they shook his greasy 14 year old hand and cheered him when he signed charters agreeing to abolish the nobility and all of their other demands.

And then they went home with big smiles on their faces, only to get slaughtered in their beds by the King’s troops when they came back from France, which anyone who understood feudalism could have predicted.

The peasants, as intelligent and well organized as they were, did not understand the structure of their political system. They did not understand that the King’s material interests were such that he would almost certainly side with the nobility against the peasants. Despite having rejected much of the ideology of their day, and having built up their own egalitarian vision of Christianity, they still believed in one of the most pernicious political mythologies of the middle ages – that they King was a divinely appointed monarch who cared about his people. So they thought it was just those mean local lords and officials who were the bad guys, messing everything up unbeknownst to pure hearted noble Richard. It was kind of like Qanon people who believe that donald trump was in government fighting corruption and pedophiles instead of just being just a particular a loudmouth manifestation of it.

Occupy

Another, more recent example of a situation where you had mass organization bolstered by favourable conditions all wasted by bad theory is Occupy Wall Street which just had it’s 10^th anniversary.

And of course I’m bringing up Occupy because one of the big intellectual lights behind Occupy’s spectacular success, and its mindless failure was none other than David Graeber himself, co-author of The Dawn of Everything. Like I said before, Graeber is kind of like the Ernie of politics from Ernie and Bert. Lots of great ideas, lots of charisma, a good heart, loves cookies – but a total chaotic mess who needs Bert to clean up after him, which is the role that I will be playing in this series.

So on one hand Occupy was an incredible success. It mobilized an unheard of number of people for weeks on end camping out in over 2200 parks in over 1300 cites and towns across the world. It’s slogan “We are the 99%” which was Graeber’s idea – reintroduced class conflict into mainstream political discourse for the first time in 70 years. In it’s aftermath it inspired a reinvigorated socialist movement that had become moribund even before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Occupy articulated an explicit rebuke to finance capitalism, and an explicit rejection of corrupt representative democracy and authoritarian “socialism”. And instead it espoused and adopted deep democratic decision making forms inspired by the historical libertarian socialist / anarchist movement.

Polls showed that Occupy had the support of the overwhelming majority of the people in most of the countries where they mobilized – something unheard of for a movement with such a radical message and ideology. And authorities were secretly afraid of them. It received no media attention at the time, but the Obama administration shelved some pro wall street lizard reforms that they were going to implement for fear of incurring the wrath of the occupyers and their admirers.

And just the fact that they were able to illegally occupy so many parks for so long, in violation of the law, shows that in the right circumstances, organized people can be stronger than the state despite all of it’s police and nukes and tanks.

All of this success and was a huge surprise to even the organizers!

And once it got going, many occupy participants with roots in working class organizing, wanted to take advantage of what they understood was going to be a short window of leverage that they would have before the whole thing would end up getting shut down, in order to put forth one overwhelmingly popular demand.

This was seen as a win win situation. If the government would actually buckle and make concessions, this would embolden the movement and set a precedent – like imagine that every time the government did something that an overwhelming number of people or opposed, or didn’t do something an overwhelming majority wanted, that people would rush out to occupy everything until the government buckled and people got what they demanded or at least some version of it. A bit like the early soviets in Russia in 1917.

And if the demands got rejected, well then the whole world would see that our political systems are so corrupt and undemocratic that even when 99% of the population wants something, our supposed representatives do nothing except send the police come in and beat us up, which would lead to more radicalism and a higher level of general consciousness.

And some of demands that they were considering were things like ending corporate personhood, implementing a universal jobs program and getting money out of politics which I think would have been a winner as it had and still has upwards of 90% support even among self described conservatives in the US.

Occupy Narcissus

But the people who initially organized occupy wall street were largely upper middle class kids coming out of expensive universities. And coming from comfortable backgrounds on the whole, they were more interested in their theories and identities than in actually achieving anything. And they had some pretty narcissistic ideas – like they thought that making demands of the government would somehow taint the their movement, and legitimize the authority of the state – which is like – imagine if someone is invading your house and instead of demanding that they drop your things and get the hell out of the house or else you’ll go club them with a bat, you just pretend they’re not there and have a jerk off festival with your roomates so as not to sully yourselves with foul criminals. Making demands is not legitimizing anything, it’s exercising your power!

But to the initial occupy organizers it was seen as quite the opposite, they saw making demands as somehow giving up their power! To quote Graeber at the time, who was one of the big proponents of the no demands ideology:

I think that the problem of asking for demands is that, who are you demanding them of? You’re in a sense saying to the people in power, “We would like you to do things differently. Do something for us. Save the whales. Who’s going to save the whales? I’m not going to save the whales, I guess they’re going to go out and save the whales.”… But ultimately the idea of protest is you’re saying, “You people in power are doing this wrong and we want you to do something.” And even if that something is “step aside,” you are addressing them directly.

Ooh no – addressing them directly! That causes anarcho-cooties!

Now the issue of course wasn’t saving the whales, it was bailing out home owners instead of banks, it was re-regulating the finance industry so they can’t rob the country, it was enforcing the actual existing laws so that they wouldn’t be incentivized to do it all over again – it was running the economy in the interests of the population not the lizard class – and if Graeber had listed those actual issues in that interview instead of saving the whales, then we would see right away how absurd this proposition was.

Put down that cookie jar ernie, you’re making a mess!

If you’re not in a position to do the types of things that the state is currently does – like if you’re not in a position to start regulating finance, and redistributing money from banks to humans – then the only way you’re going to make the things that you want happen happen, is by putting pressure on the people who do have the power to make those things happen and forcing them to obey you instead of their big moneyed circus trainers. And this is true whether you think the state is a legitimate institution or whether you think the state should be abolished.

Using a hammer to hammer in a nail, isn’t giving away your power to the hammer, it’s wielding the hammer as a tool to make your will a reality – you are the one with the power. Yes the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house, because tools don’t just do things on their own, they do what you make them do.

Erased from the recent celebratory retrospectives on Occupy is the fact that the pro demands organizers sometimes had huge majorities in the occupy assemblies. So in order to keep their control over the movement, the anti demands people pulled all kinds of anti democratic shenanigans. First they jacked up the required majority to pass resolutions from 75% to 90%. And then they engaged in smear tactics against the pro demands organizers, and they shut down their internet presence, and they even tried to physically disrupt their efforts. You’d think these people were corporate democrats trying to sabotage bernie sanders in 2016 and 2020, or else labour centrists in the UK to make Jeremy Corbyn lose the election on purpose in 2017.

Ironically the organizers were so wrapped up in their identities as anarchists – that they ended up betraying the actual values of anarchism – democracy and horizontalism. And instead they acted like a “vanguard party” in the words of one of the pro demands occupiers.

And you can read all about this stuff in an essay by sociologist and occupy participant Susan Kang called Demands for the 99% which I’ll link to in the show notes.

And so, no demands were made, and as a result, when the protests were eventually crushed, which anyone could have predicted – especially given that the movement was bound to lose energy without any accomplishments to keep it going – the movement had absolutely nothing to show for it.

Not just nothing, they actually set back their own ideals and goals in several important ways.

Interest in socialism had revived because of occupy, which is one of Occupy’s big successes – but the anarchist and libertarian socialist varieties favoured by the organizers lost an enormous amount of prestige and have faded in importance and relevance. To young people today who are facing increasingly grim futures and want results and real change, Lenin and increasingly Stalin are seen as heroes who know how to take power as people look for mighty superheroes and vanguard ninja parties to rescue them.

And the most damaging consequence of Occupy’s no demands whimpering belly flop is that it taught hundreds of millions and maybe billions of sympathizers around the world that organizing and mass mobilization are a waste of time – a juvenile exercise in blowing steam for college kids – you organize a zillion people, get the world on your side to agree about a whole bunch of issues … but who cares – because nothing happens, nothing changes, like nothing ever changes! There’s no point in ever trying.

Back to the Book

So, the reason that I’m covering the Dawn of Everything, not just because David Graeber was a great anthropologist, but more importantly because he was also an important activist who has many admirers and followers who hopefully are or will be engaging in political actions of various sorts now and in the future, and because this book will have a tremendous influence on these people and on our movements and our political imagination going forward.

And much like Occupy Wall Street, The Dawn of Everything is a savant-idiot mix of dazzling success and ridiculous failure. It’s a great success in that it puts some of the most important questions and issues of our age into public discourse for the first time. How did we get stuck in these awful dominance hierarchies that are destroying our planet and our souls, and what can we do about it? And it directs us to look for those answers in anthropology, which is something political theorists rarely think about or know about – which is another testament to the poverty of our political culture – because you simply cannot understand politics without knowing anthropology. So this is a huge achievement.

But also like Occupy Wall Street, and like the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, the book self destructs because some really foolish theoretical confusion and nonsense that render the authors completely incapable of answering their own questions, even though the answers are staring them directly in the faces in the form all of the amazing anthropological and archaeological and historical facts and anecdotes that comprise the book. And like Occupy or the 1381 revolt, this gaping theoretical blind spot will set up readers for profound political failure and wasted opportunities if the incoherent message of this book is taken at face value.

The Message

So what is the message of this book, and why is it such a poison pill?

The authors make all sorts of claims – but ultimately, everything they discuss in the 700+ book is geared towards one half baked message: human beings consciously “choose” our own social structures.

Whether we live in a hierarchy with kings and patriarchy and serfs and slaves or an egalitarian hunter gatherer band with no authority figures and gender equality, the form of our society and social institutions is and always has been ultimately a matter of conscious experimentation and choice. And because it’s a matter of choice, we can today choose a different path than the one we’re on now if we set our minds to it. The main obstacle is simply that somewhere along the way, we got confused, and we’ve forgotten that we have a choice.

I say half baked because what does it even mean to “choose” our social structure?

What does it mean for a society to “choose” things, when different people have different ideas and conflicting interests. Do women in traditional patriarchal societies “choose” to be second class humans and to subject themselves to abuse and rape and servitude? Why do some people get their way and others don’t? What is it that gives men the advantage that they need in order to impose second class status onto women in a patriarchal society? Did you get to choose how your society is structured? I know I didn’t, did I miss the meeting?

None of these questions or concepts ever arise in this book.

The authors correctly point out that mode of subsistence categories like hunting and gathering and farming, don’t in and of themselves determine social structure – but then why do we see the same patterns over and over all over the world across time? Why are the exceptions that the authors spend almost 100% of the book focusing on, exceptional?

Again, nothing. Everything you know is wrong, but there’s nothing to replace it with, and nothing happens for any reasons, besides magical choice, which doesn’t mean anything.

Crack Pipe Ideology

Now review after review of the book talks about how liberating it is to be free of the shackles of conventional narratives about how social structure is a function of the practical conditions that we find ourselves in!

But there are two problems with this:

For one thing, as we’ll see shortly, Graeber & Wengrow don’t actually debunk the conventional narrative about social structure, because they never even articulate it. Instead, as we’ll see, they debunk a 2 dimensional elevator pitch caricature version of the conventional narrative that you read in popular books by people who no anthropology expertise like Francis Fukuyama or Steven Pinker.

And more importantly, believing nonsense that isn’t true is not liberating, it’s delusional and potentially fatal. It’s liberating in the same way that smoking crack is liberating. It’s a mindless rush that you’ll come crashing down from because it doesn’t actually give you any tools except for false confidence.

Like if I tell you – stop limiting yourself to the conventional narrative about how we’re confined by gravity to be stuck on the ground! Flying is a choice! And I actually had a friend who literally tried to argue this with me once – Smokey D I’m talking to you. That might sound liberating – if you’re high – and my friend is called Smokey because he smokes Pineapple Express amounts of weed – but if you take that idea seriously and you act on it, you will jump out the window and fall to your death.

This is barely an exaggeration of what this book is telling us to do. After a roller coaster of 700 pages of fascinating facts and anecdotes from a dizzying array of fields, the authors have no answers for us as to their main thesis question of how we got stuck in these awful hierarchies for the past several thousand years, besides the notion that it’s all in our minds. Revolution is possible though! How? Why? I dunno, don’t think about it, just do it! The window’s right there!

It’s all written with such charisma and optimism and breadth of scope that it’s easy to miss how incoherent so much of it is, unless you have some expertise in the subjects that they’re talking about in which case you see how so much of it is so incoherent that it isn’t even wrong, it’s just nonsense.

It reminds me of the movie Billy Madison featuring Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts alumnus, Adam Sandler. Billy Madison is a 28 year old man who needs to redo elementary school and high school over the course of a few months in order to prove to his dad that he deserves his inheritance. And in one scene that reminds me of Dawn of Everything, he has to do a Jeopardy-style quiz show contest to test everything he’s learned. When he gets a difficult question about literature and the industrial revolution it seems like all hope is lost – but then he brilliantly synthesizes everything he learned during the course of the film, from his kindergarten class where he read the Little Puppy that Could through grade 12 biology into a wonderful, funny, inspiring triumphant narrative. And then the whole audience jumps up and gives him a roaring standing ovation. And when the applause dies down, the the principal gives his evaluation:

“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

My Goal

Now, what I want to do with this book review is to turn nonsense into sense by filling in the gaps of this book with all of the things that Graeber and Wengrow neglected to mention that we need to know about how social structure works, and how it can be changed.

Instead of telling you, “yes we can fly – it’s our choice to defy gravity, here’s a sweet window, go for it!” I’m going to say yes we can fly, but, first you need to build an airplane.

So, where Graeber and Wengrow are telling us we can just change our social structure, but they don’t know how – what I’m going to do via my critique of their book, is tell you, yes we can change our social structure, but here are the principles and ingredients of hierarchy or equality – here are the constraints and limits that incentivize one or the other. Here is why some societies have male dominance and others don’t. Here’s why some societies have authority figures and some don’t. Here is why authority figures in some societies have very little power, and why they have godlike power in others. Here is why some societies shift back and forth from more hierarchy to more equality in different seasons. Here is how social change happens, and here’s what we can learn from all this to apply to our current situation.

And I’ve already talked about some of this stuff in epsides 6, 7, 7.1 and 8, so you can check those out while you’re waiting for the next episodes which takes weeks to put together.

Chapter 1

OK, so let’s get into the actual text of chapter 1:

The authors begin by by telling us that most people don’t think about the “broad sweep of human history” very much, but when we do,

“it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?”

And according to the authors, there are two standard answers to this, which have been with us since the enlightenment if not since biblical times.

One famously articulated by Thomas Hobbes basically says that people are inherently selfish and operate mostly based on self interest. And this is why we need authority figures and police and coercion to keep us from killing and destroying eachother. And the other answer, articulated by Jean Jacques Rousseau, tells us that people are innately altruistic and cooperative but it’s the coercive institutions of civilization like authority and private property that corrupt us and pit us against eachother, turning us into selfish brutes.

These stories have been with us since the enlightenment, and they have roots in biblical times – the idea of original sin, or the fall from eden – but they have modern equivalents.

So you have people like Steven Pinker who is a quintessential modern hobbesian according to the authors, arguing in his book the Better Angels of Our Nature that human history and pre-history was just a giant murder starvation festival until the structures and institutions of modern liberal representative democratic civilization finally allowed us to have order and prosperity.

And then you have the modern versions of Rousseau – and they cite Jared Diamond and Francis Fukuyama as examples – who in their recent books both state that human beings started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers and then ended up in different forms of hierarchy after the advent of farming and private property.

And surprisingly, the authors argue that both these modern Hobbes and Rousseau versions are extremely depressing and pessimistic.

The Hobbes version is pessimistic for obvious reasons because it assumes that we are selfish to the core, but the authors also see the Rousseau version where humans have an egalitarian altruistic nature best suited to freedom, direct democracy and cooperation as fatalistic because according to them, it’s mostly deployed to tell us that equality and freedom are nice and all, but that’s only possible for people who live in tiny hunter gatherer bands, such that “while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering.”

And they go on to tell us that the term ‘inequality’ is kind of like a conspiracy to erase class power, and to make us focus on abstractions, which is basically the opposite of the truth, which I talked about at length in my critique of the conclusion of chapter 2.

Thankfully, they tell us, both these stories are wrong, and instead they’re going to tell us a hopeful story that gives us back our agency and makes the type of society we live in ultimately a matter of choice.

Now there are a few things we need to understand here in order to put these assertions into context:

First, as regards human nature – no one with any expertise in the relevant subjects believes in either of the Rousseau or Hobbes good vs evil versions of human nature anymore probably since the 90s.

These debates were happening until into the 90s, but by now the general picture that comes from decades of psychology experiments and anthropology and archaeology, is that … surprise surprise, people are both innately selfish and altruistic – though there are still interesting debates on the nature of altruism – is it selfish gene kin selection altruism à la Richard Dawkins, which is the majority view, or is it genuine, multilevel selection altruism as described by David Sloan-Wilson, which I subscribe to but which is still a minority view, and which is a debate for another episode..

Now when it comes to theories about the origins of inequality and hierarchy, the picture is different. The Steven Pinker / Hobbesian idea of prehistory consisting of constantly warring people being so innately selfish that we’ve always needed alpha male authority figures dominating us since the dawn of time is an idea that a majority of ordinary people living in this capitalist realist hellscape might believe – but almost zero people with any expertise in anthropology or archaeology believe or have believed since the 1970s. The fact that an author with so much prestige and access to resources as Steven Pinker can be repeating debunked ideas from the 1950s should be extremely embarrassing to him and to his publishers. But hey, loot is loot.

Meanwhile, the Rousseauianish narrative about humans originating as egalitarian hunter gatherers for 95% of our existence and then shifting towards more and more hierarchy after the advent of agriculture has been and still is the majority / almost consensus view among anthropologists, and has been since the late 1960s after the man the hunter conference I talked about when I covered the conclusion of chapter 2 of the book.

Graeber & Wengrow tell us that:

When it comes to cherry-picking anthropological case studies, and putting them forward as representative of our ‘contemporary ancestors’ – that is, as models for what humans might have been like in a State of Nature – those working in the tradition of Rousseau tend to prefer African foragers like the Hadza, Pygmies or !Kung. Those who follow Hobbes prefer the Yanomami.

But what they don’t tell us is that most anthropologists think that most of us probably resembled something like the egalitarian Hadza or Pygmies or !Kung, while none of them think we were like the patriarchal endlessly feuding Yanomami. Why is that? We’ll see in a few minutes.

Now the next thing to understand when you’re reading this book is that the narrative that Graeber & Wengrow spend the early chapters in the book pretending to debunk, isn’t actually a narrative that anyone with any expertise really believes. It’s a deliberate convenient oversimplification of a much more complicated picture that has all sorts of interesting exceptions and reversals and timelines that are too complicated to explain in a short article or even a book that isn’t specifically about the palaeolithic, or about the origins of inequality. And the people they keep referring to, Jared Diamond, Noah Hararri, Francis Fukuyama – these aren’t even experts in subjects relevant to human origins, they’re popular writers with expertise in other fields who use the elevator pitch version of the conventional narrative of human origins in order to make points about other things.

It’s like if I wrote a book about how the conventional narrative about the 4 seasons is wrong – and I say things like,

“experts like Big Bird and Elmo and Dora the Explorer, will have us believe that there are only FOUR seasons – first you have the summer which is warm and sunny goes the conventional story, and then you have fall, which is cold and rainy, and then winter which is even colder and snowy, and then comes spring where it warms up and rains so that march showers bring may flowers, and the cycle starts anew!

But it really realistic that these same four seasons happen like this every year for millions of years? The evidence shows the opposite – the actual wealther is a bold parade of conscious experiments! Summer is supposed to be sunny – but last summer it rained 20 times! And in Arizona, there’s never even any snow at all! Winter? yeah right! It’s sunny all year round in the arabian desert! Yet muppets still cling to this fantasy of snowy winters with rudolph and prancer and santa! And in india they only have two seasons! And in Australia it’s summer in december! Maybe it’s about time we do away with this whole mythology about “seasons” entirely. The weather is a choice!

In Graeber and Wengrow’s own words:

Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification…

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

But anthropologists only simplify when writing for popular audiences, just like any scientist or astronomer or doctor or mechanic will simplify things written for popular audiences. So Graeber & Wengrow go around pretending that they’re “debunking” the cartoon version of the standard narrative, but they never actually tell you what the non cartoon version is, or why most anthropologists think that the cartoon version is still a pretty good elevator pitch despite all the supposedly contradictory facts that comprise the Dawn of Everything. And in a few minutes I’ll explain to you what the standard narrative actually is so that you can evaluate it for yourself against their supposed debunking of it. And given that this is a podcast, not a master’s thesis, I myself will be simplifying to some degree as well!

To be fair to Graeber and Wengrow, while there are tons of articles discussing all of the exceptions the summary narrative that they focus on, there aren’t many expert writers integrating all these facts into a nice grand narrative. So writing a new revised one is fair game. And there is room given the facts to postulate that there was more hierarchy in the past than we currently think there was – but not for the reasons that Graeber and Wengrow give us – because they don’t actually give any reasons! Their whole book is based on throwing out even the idea of having reasons for things. It’s all just magical choices and “theatre” – their words not mine.

Compare Dawn of Everything to a recent article by anthropologists Manvir Singh and Luke Gloawacki published in 2021, which tries to argue many of the same things that Graeber and Wengrow argue in their book – mostly that there was a lot more diversity of social organization in the palaeolithic than the largely egalitarian portrait painted by the standard narrative. But in order to get to that hypothesis, Singh and Glowacki use the basic analytical tools that the standard narrative is based on – i.e. they work from the same assumptions about how environment shapes social structure that everyone else does.

Now I still disagree with Singh and Glowaki’s interpretation of the facts, but reading it will not make you stupid in the way that Dawn of Everything will, because Singh and Glowaki have a basic understanding of how social organization works, while Graeber and Wenrgow want to obscure that understanding in order to make it look like everything is a random choice.

The 3^rd thing to think about when reading this, is that when they tell us that

“nowadays [the consensus narrative is] mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering”

that this is extremely misleading. They quote Jared Diamond to the effect that you can’t have a stateless society or direct democracy once you go above 10 000 people

As Diamond patiently explains to us:

Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.

but the authors don’t mention all of the expert anthropologists who think the exact opposite – that our egalitarian origins prove that we can and should organize in ways that maximize freedom and equality. And they don’t mention that the people who argue this the most ardently tend to be the ones who specialize in egalitarian hunter gatherer bands and who know them the best.

Whether you think it’s correct or not, the story of humans as egalitarian hunter gatherers who eventually got derailed into hierarchy and oppression by the advent of agriculture has been the narrative favoured by basically every revolutionary minded person with any interest in anthropology since Rousseau himself – from the anthropologost Lewis Henry Morgan in the 19thC century who influnced Marx and Engels, to hunter gatherer experts Leslie White, Eleanor Leacock, and Richard Lee who wrote extensively in the 1970s to the 1990s, and Lee still writes today – down to the hunter gatherer experts in the Radical Anthropology Group who are very active today like Jerome Lewis, Camilla Power, Chris Knight and Morna Finnegan – these are all people who thought and think that the proper form for industrial civilization is an adaptation of the same egalitarianism which we were born into as a species.

It’s what Marx called the “riddle of history” – the idea that humans evolved in, and are thus best suited to, a life of freedom and equality, and all of human history since we lost our freedom and equality has been a mess of people trying to regain their freedom at the expense of other people – which is a hopeless and self-defeating endeavour which can never bring peace or happiness. And that therefore the only solution is to go back to a life of freedom equality, which the fruits of advanced civilization finally make possible for us to achieve once again. This version of the standard narrative is glaringly absent from the pages of Dawn of Everything.

Now as regards the fatalistic views of people like Diamond and Harari and Fukuyama – like I talk about in my ongoing culture wars / cancel culture series, every idea that is a threat to power – socialism, anarchism, feminism, antiracism, christianity, you name it – will always end up filtered through elite institutions and elite people into watered down, defanged versions that support the existing power structure. For example the care bears version of Martin Luther King that we get on TV and high school history classes vs the real life socialist one. But by only pointing to the people who use that narrative to resign us to hierarchy, while ignoring the history of that narrative as a force for equality, Graeber and Wengrow are misleading us while weakening their own arguments.

The Consensus Narrative

So back to the consensus narrative. What is it, and do Graeber & Wengrow disprove it at all? Do they even really disagree with it?

According to the authors:

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is [from the standard narrative]: it’s now clear that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.

Agriculture … did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators…

Nothing they’re telling us here is new or controversial besides the stuff about egalitarian cities.

When you read anthropology articles about social organization in the palaeolithic or the transition to agriculture, scholars routinely discuss all of this stuff – that there were sedentary and semi sedentary hunter gatherers in the palaeolithic, particularly in europe in the upper palaeolithic, that the shift to hierarchy after agriculture didn’t happen overnight, that there were relatively egalitarian farming settlements at first that often lasted hundreds or even thousands of years.

The progression from equality to hierarchy was slow and patchy, and although everyone agrees that agriculture led to increased hierarchy, different authors propose different theories and reasons for the extended timeline of that progression, none of which are articulated in this book, despite lots and lots of pages and the relevance of those theories to the authors’ thesis.

Later on in the book, Graeber and Wengrow actually admit that ok yeah, after agriculture became dominant, societies eventually did become more and more hierarchical, but they treat it it must be like a coincidence or something – it didn’t happen overnight, so obviously agriculture doesn’t lead to hierarchy!

What is the relationship then between agriculture and hierarchy, or population density and hierarchy, or mode of subsistence and social structure? They don’t even look into it nevermind trying to come up with an answer.

The story is different when it comes to the idea of egalitarian cities, which genuinely does seem to go against the standard narrative in archaeology – and if it’s true that there were egalitarian cities – and I hope it’s true – well then that has really exciting implications – if it’s true – I’ve already seen at least one reviewer pointing out a bunch of holes in Graeber & Wengrow’s presentation of that issue, but I don’t have much to say about it because I just don’t have enough knowledge to argue about it one way or the other. As much as I want to believe their stories about egalitarian cities, I am skeptical of whatever they say because of how badly they mangle those things that I do know about.

The Basis of the Dominant Narrative

Now, why has the dominant narrative for the past 60 years been that human beings started out as egalitarian hunter gatherers and that the main impetus away from egalitarianism was agriculture? And what about all the examples Graeber and Wengrow cite which seem to contradict this progression?

First, we know that human beings started out as hunter gatherers – because almost all animals are basically hunter gatherers, which is generally defined as anyone who doesn’t practice agriculture. Homo Sapiens start showing up in the record at about 500-300kya, and evidence for farming as a means of subsistence only starts after we get into the holocene geological era which starts 12000ya, though we do have evidence of failed experiments with subsistence farming going back to 35,000 ya.

There used to be a lot of debate about why farming only shows up after the Holocene begins, but it turns out that it’s probably because there just wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere [i erroneously said nitrogen in the soil in the video!] to support sustained agriculture until the holocene era. And then once there was, when hunter gatherers in different places and times found themselves in conditions where hunting and gathering was no longer sustainable and there weren’t unoccupied places left to migrate to, they now had the option to switch to agriculture instead of the previous options of going to war or dying of starvation.

Now why do we think that humans started out as specifically egalitarian hunter gatherers?

Most hunter gatherers that we know about are more egalitarian than we are, but many still have various forms of inequality like gender inequality or gerontocracy, and some positions of limited authority, while some historical hunter gatherers even have had much more elaborate hierarchies with chiefs, nobility and slaves.

Meanwhile one subset of hunter gatherer societies that we know of are extremely egalitarian and deliberately so. They have all sorts of institutions and practices to make sure to make sure that no one ever accumulates much more property or authority than anyone else. Men and women form gendered organizations to defend their interests and to make sure that the other gender never gets an upper hand, they have no chiefs or authority figures and even adults don’t have much authority over older children.

As anthropologist Camilla Power articulated it recently, they’re not just communists, but anarcho communists. They have a strong sense of individuality and autonomy coexisting with an equality strong social pressure to cooperate and share all their property.

Now these are a minority of the hunter gatherers that we know of. There are only about 6 groups of cultures who fall into that category historically and comprising maybe a couple of dozen ethnic groups in total. The Hadza in the savannah in eastern Tanzania, various Kalahari desert hunter gatherer cultures, various Central African Rainforest Pygmy groups like the Mbuti, the Aka and the Mbendjele, various South Indian Mountain Forest groups like the Nayaka, Paliyan and Hill Pandaram various Malaysian rainforest groups like the Batek and Penan and the historical Montagnais-Naskapi people in the coniferous forests of quebec and Labrador who were hunter gatherers at the time of the Jesuit Relations writings in the 1600s.

So why do we think that most of our early ancestors were like this specific subset of hunter gatherers rather than all like all of the other less egalitarian hunter gatherers that we know of?

We think this, because despite the fact that these egalitarian foragers live in all sorts of geographic areas on different continents, every single one of these cultures practices or practice-d the same type of hunting and gathering economy, which happens to be the type of economy that we believe that most – but not all – of our ancestors practiced until the holocene era, and which maybe all of our earliest ancestors practiced.

And that type of economy is what anthropologist james woodburn called an “immediate return” economy where you hunt and gather and then consume what you collected within a few days without processing it in any elaborate way.

Why do we think our ancestors were mostly immediate return foragers? Again, most animals are basically immediate return foragers, and our closest relatives, bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas certainly are, so it’s pretty safe to assume that the first homo sapiens were also immediate return foragers as well. And the further back in time we go, the less evidence we have, but most of the evidence that we do have shows that people in the middle palaeolithic, which is where we become humans – seem to have been mostly doing nomadic big game hunting, much like those recent egalitarian hunter-gatherers do. We do have occasional sites that look like some people in particular pockets may have been doing other kinds of hunting and gathering as well here and there. So we would assume that those exceptional societies might look like some of the other kinds of hunter gatherer societies that we know about from recent times, who aren’t always so egalitarian, and some of whom are decidedly hierarchical.

To be fair, the record is sparse – there is definitely room for alternative scenarios – the problem is that graber and wengrow aren’t just throwing out the standard scenario, they’re also throwing out the analytical tools that people – like Singh and Glowacki for example – need in order explain any kind scenario at all. It’s like when doctors disagree about what causes this or that illness, they still agree on the basics of biology and science – well what graeber and wengrow are doing is like if a doctor decides to reject medicine and science altogether because he believes the current standard explanation for the cause of a particular illness is wrong.

Graeber and Wengrow tell us that

…it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom?

But, no one says that everyone on earth had the exact same form of human social organization for all that time – we all know the exceptions. So congratulations to Graeber & Wengrow for winning an argument against Big Bird and Dora the Explorer. But, if the people who lived around Altamira lived in similar conditions for all that time, then we would actually except them to have had similar forms of social organization, even if they had different languages and identities and genes and other differences – and we’ll see examples of this when we cover chapter 5 of the book.

And this is not because they didn’t have any agency or the ability to make choices, or because that they were living in a state of childlike innocence – but precisely because they did have agency and the ability to make choices, and because they were just as savvy and stupid as we are. People in similar situations make similar choices over the long term because that’s what works.

It’s funny how on a daily basis, people in our society will have no problem understanding that politicians change their policies and even their beliefs under the influence of money. And people understand that being a landlord or boss gives you a different world view than being a tenant or a worker, or that growing up rich tends to give you a different ideology than growing up poor – and people say things like “you may be a socialist now, but when you own a house and have to pay taxes – you’ll become more conservative” yet somehow the idea that traditional peoples are influenced by the exact same material and logistical factors that influence urban people is considered to be infantilizing them.

Meanwhile the same people who accuse materialists of infantilizing traditional societies are the ones who portray them as if they’re magical space unicorn ponies who are beyond material influences and who have the superhuman conscious powers of gods that would be necessary in order to create their social structures from scratch instead of as an adaptation to their conditions, which is how every other society organizes itself!

Something that never seems to have entered the minds of the authors is that a hierarchical social structure is rarely some kind of democratic choice. Rather, it’s a matter of relative bargaining power.

People have conflicting interests and desires – but certain conditions give certain people advantages such that some people get more of what they want than others do. If your livelihood depends on a specific territory – like it does for farmers or for fishing based hunter gatherers – then if you and your allies can control the productive territory, then you have power over those people who need the products of that territory to survive – boom hierarchy. That’s how capitalism works. Or how any hierarchical system works. In other words, social structure is usually a reflection of the balance of powers in a given society.

Sometimes, social structure can be more of a democratic choice involving trial and error. But people don’t do those kinds of experiments for kicks or as an BDSM bondage kink game or because they have superhuman agency. We do it to solve problems. And people with similar problems in similar conditions end up coming on similar solutions over time – because reality!

Like people who are stuck together on plots of land for extended periods of time will often choose some kind of person to endow with a little bit of authority so that they can arbitrate disputes, which are much more frequent and hard to resolve when you’re sedentary than if you can just go off to another band when you get annoyed or want a divorce like nomadic hunter gatherers do. And theories around how we got stuck with more serious hierarchies over time all revolve around certain changes of conditions which gave people in those positions of weak authority, leverage to turn it into stronger authority. Conditions!

Another example of people making conscious choices in reaction to conditions is when people come under frequent attack, they’ll usually organize themselves around closely related men who grow up together and stay together forming a tight team, while their sisters will marry outside the group, and unrelated women will marry in to the group from the outside.

And this choice, called patrilocal residence, which we see all the over world among people faced with frequent attacks – for example every single nomadic pastoralist society known to exist or to have ever existed organizes this way because it’s easy to steal animals from herds – when people organize this way for self defense, it means that all the women end up coming from separate families and are socially isolated from eachother while all the men are close allies and form a close coalition.

And so, the unintended consequence of this is that it gives men political advantages that women don’t have, which leads to varying degrees of patriarchy. And this is why every single nomadic pastoralist society ever known to exist from northern scandinavia to the deserts of arabia to the mongolian steppe, have all been male dominated.

This is one of the best known and easiest to explain paths to male domination – but it’s totally absent from The Dawn of Everything, because they don’t want us to think about conditions, it’s all just freedom and choices! They tell us that they think patriarchy might have started in babylonian temples which is the equivalent of saying ancient that aliens did it with the 2001 obelisk. Pure nonsense.

In the short term, people might make different choices, but our range of choices is usually limited. If you make a really bad choice in terms of defence or subsistence activity and you stick with it, you’ll die out over the long term, and then we won’t hear from you anymore. This is what happened to the Greenland Vikings whose farming based economy was a bad fit for the climate of Greenland over the long term, versus the Greenland inuit who actually showed up in Greenland later than the Vikings did, but who survive until today because their subsistence mode works in that environment. The Vikings had a choice – adopt the Inuit way of life or leave or die, and they left and they died.

And if you dont die off, the chances are that over the generations, people with brains and ideas will consciously experiment their way into figuring out the most efficient solutions to various problems – i.e. the same solutions that other people figured out to those same problems around the world – but, with one important caveat, that you also have to take into consideration the inherent balance of power created by any given situation which might result in less efficient “choices” that favour the class with the balance of power. That is why we’re currently barreling towards climate destruction, seemingly unable to stop despite the will of the majority of people in the world.

Now if we look at the paintings in altamira and at many other cave sites, what we see over that enormous time span is depictions of the types of the types of things that immediate return hunter gatherers are concerned with, like large game hunting. So maybe the people who used those caves actually did have similar social structures for all of that time. It would really depend on the conditions in that area.

And never mind a puny pee-wee 10,000 – 20,000 years that separate the various paintings at Altamira – there’s a site called Fulton’s Rock in sourthern africa that has paintings that are 70 000 years old that depict what looks like the very same Eland Bull Dance coming of age ritual that kalahari desert foragers practice TODAY, 70 000 years later. It could be that social structures changed with conditions, but then changed back again with conditions, or it could be that the relevant conditions were similar for all this time – we don’t know, but it is fascinating, and I’ll link to an article about that.

[NOTE: i originally gave the age of the fulton rock painting as 250 000 years old, and then i corrected it to 70 000 – I recently re-read the articles about the painting and the Eland Bull Dance and I have no idea where i got any of these numbers! The articles about the painting don’t mention its age and I can’t find the age of the painting anywhere, it’s not in my notes – I see several websites mentioning that paintings at that site are between 3,000 and 450 years old – apologies!]

The Tea Time of Everything

Now, although homo sapiens emerge 500–300 000 years ago, Graeber and Wengrow only start their discussion in the book 40,000 years ago, in the upper palaeolithic, and their focus in that time period is almost entirely limited to europe. Anthropologist Chris Knight jokingly titled his review of Dawn of Everything “the Tea Time of Everything” in reaction to this.

The authors claim that they did this because there just isn’t enough evidence before that period for us to say anything about human social organization – which isn’t true – you can read dozens of archeology and anthropology papers that talk about social organization based on the economic activities in that period – but the authors don’t want us to think about economic activity having anything to do with social organization so they don’t discuss any of it, not even to refute it.

More likely, the real reason that they start at 40 000 years ago is because that’s exactly when you start to see more evidence of diversity in foraging strategies and social organization that Graeber and Wengrow want us to focus on in order to paint their image of a carnival of bold political experiments, even though these were still few and far between especially outside of europe. So in europe we see some clear sedentary and semi sedentary settlement patterns and we also evidence of a few sites with possible potential social hierarchy – vs in the middle palaeolithic whereas you mostly – but not exclusively – see evidence that suggests nomadic big game hunting all around.

And another thing that the authors don’t mention is that this supposed carnival of social experiments isn’t just random experiments for no reason. Culture is an adaptation to environment. That’s why we have culture. That’s how a super general jack of all trades species like humans can survive all around the world. These are “experiments” in new subsistence strategies which are adaptations to changing conditions!

When immediate return nomadic big game hunting and gathering – which is one of the most efficient forms of subsistence – is no longer viable, people start focusing on other types of hunting and gathering practices – so-called “intensification” strategies, that are more work – things like focusing on shellfish, smoking and storing meat or fish, living in semi sedentary or sedentary camps, and raiding and stealing from and killing other groups of people. And these changes in economic activities resulted in changes of the circumstances of peoples lives, which either caused new problems that needed new solutions, or that gave some people bargaining power advantages over others, which is where hierarchy comes from.

Europe in the upper palaeolithic, was a particularly difficult place to live as this was the last glacial maximum, a time where ice sheets were extending deep into northern europe down to modern germany. There were only about 70,000 people on the whole continent, because means of subsistence were sparse. And at the same time, climate in the Pleistocene was fluctuating very wildly and rapidly compared to today in the holocene, so at certain times things got warmer and more territories opened up and there were more animals to hunt and plants to live from and populations grew – but then within a generation or two things would quickly freeze up again, and you’d have the same or larger amount of people living in less plentiful environments, meaning that people had to adopt “intensification” strategies to survive.

Now some anthropologists from the beginning have argued that you can’t extrapolate social structure in the palaeolithic based on what hunter gatherers living today are like because the conditions in the palaeolithic were very different from what they are today or what they were even at the time that father LeJeune wrote about the Montagnais Naskapi in 1630s. So for example, today’s foragers are surrounded by non foragers and they’re only limited to territories that farmers and pastoralists and civilizations don’t want – or at least that they didn’t want until recently, which is why most foragers are being wiped off the map and forced into wage labour and agriculture as we speak. Singh and Glowacki make these arguments in 2021, just like other have made since the late 1960s.

But even though the world was a very different place in the palaeolithic, other anthropologists argue that those specific conditions that promote egalitarian social structure, things like nomadism, the ability to leave and go off to another band if someone is bothering you, and universal availability of lethal weapons – that those conditions also existed in the palaeolithic for most societies. Not only that, but middle palaeolithic conditions in particular may have been even more favourable to egalitarianism than today, given that there was less population density and more available uninhabited territories to forage in, more places to immigrate to, less need for conflict or to resign yourself to intensification strategies to survive.

Farming

Now, when we get to farming, the conditions that we see in immediate return hunting societies which equalize everyone’s bargaining power, and which make egalitarianism the most stable choice, change, in ways that make hierarchy easier to impose, while making equality harder and harder to maintain. If your economy is based on territory and you manage monopolize access to that territory, then boom you have power over others – hierarchy.

And this is true for anyone not just farmers – which is why we see so much hierarchy among hunter gatherer societies whose economies are based on fishing territories, like the Pacific Northwest Coast people or the Calusa who lived in southern florida.

Once farming has been around long enough and population densities in the surrounding areas increase such that there’s less room to escape from people who dominate productive territories, we see completely different dynamics and social structures arising with more and more hierarchy.

And Graeber and Wengrow talk all about the right to escape over and over, but they talk about it as if it’s a choice that you put in your constitution at some democratic occupy assembly that isn’t being sabotaged by upper middle class rich kids, instead of something that is determined by the facts around you.

With all of this in mind, the reason that it’s so idiotic for Steven Pinker to try to use the Yanomami or Otzi the bog man to illustrate the conditions that we evolved in, is that the Yanomami and Otzi were farmers not foragers.

The ways of life of the Yanomami or Otzi and the material conditions and constraints and incentives associated with them did not exist on planet earth for the first several hundred thousand years of our existence. Like at least talk about warlike hunter gatherer societies like the Haida or the Calusa if you want to make that kind of argument, duh.

Now the Yanomami example might not be useful in terms of understanding our origins, but it can teach us a lot about why some cultures are so violent and get stuck in an endless cycle of wars and feuds with proud martial cultures – which is something you see often among certain pastoralist and horticultural societies – think of the ancient hebrews, or the beduin, or ancient sparta and athens. And it’s useful to contrast these examples with the dynamics of immediate return foragers societies who rarely engage in any extended feuding or warfare at all.

This stuff might be good to know if you want to establish a peaceful world. But instead of doing anything like that, Graeber & Wengrow just try to argue that according to a study, the Yanomami aren’t actually all that violent relative to other amerindian societies – which would probably come off as an insult to many yanomami people – but the study isn’t named or listed anywhere – the footnote for that passage just tells us as story about how Yanomami like to sleep together huddled up in groups, where the authors argue that being snuggly with your friends is incompatible with murdering your enemies.

The Right Wing Implications of Graeber & Wengrow’s Arguments

Something that’s worth noting about the idea that human social structure is mostly a matter of choice, is that if you take it to it’s logical conclusion it just ends up taking us to some very ugly places. Like if the traditional Haida of the pacific north west coast have chiefs and nobility and commoners and used to have slaves, and the Nuer in Sudan have male dominance, but the Mbendjele are totally egalitarian and gender egalitarian, and if it’s all just a matter of conscious choice, then that must mean that the Haida and the Nuer people are just choosing to bad people and the Hadza are just good people.

Or maybe Lese women are pathetic because they choose extreme subservience instead of “choosing” equality the way awesome Hadza women do. It’s like in our society, when people say that if you’re working the cash at McDonalds it must be because you’re stupid and lazy and it’s your choice, but if you’re CEO of ratheon, it’s because chose to be some kind of brilliant hard working genius, and you chose parents who could afford MBA school.

It’s ultimately right wing thinking – thinking that justifies hierarchy. Obviously that’s the opposite of what Graeber and Wengrow are trying to do, but again, their whole project is an incoherent, ill conceived mess, and one of the reasons it upsets me so much is that on top of making us stupid, it’s inadvertently giving right wingers a bunch of rhetorical gifts, just like occupy not making any demands was giving all the banks and governments of the world a giant gift.

In contrast, if you shift the focus onto the conditions that shape our social structures and our choices, this implies a “there but for the grace of God go I” type of philosophy. Individuals are different, and we all have agency, but in similar conditions, given similar constraints, people will tend to make similar decisions on average, and in the long run which is the scale of social structure formation. We spend less time judging people and more time trying to figure out how we can change the conditions which generate shitty people.

Speaking of taking a right wing turn, the authors are somehow shocked that many anthropologists on the left are pissed off at them for trying to get rid of the idea that humans have egalitarian origins:

The first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. Strangely enough, though, this is often seen as a reactionary move. ‘So are you saying true equality has never been achieved? That it’s therefore impossible?’ It seems to us that such objections are both counterproductive and frankly unrealistic.

In their minds they think that they’re somehow giving us hope for the future, but I think they’re actually making it harder to have hope by removing one of our most potent rhetorical weapons that we have in our arsenal.

In my experience talking to normal people I’ve almost never met anyone who said anything like “yes we had an egalitarian origins and we’ve best adapted to be free and equal, but alas, we can’t go back to those day because civilization, oh well”.

Most people have never heard of the idea that we had egalitarian origins! Most people think it’s against human nature to have equality and that we’re not even capable of it. What I do get all the time from regular people is “freedom and inequality are impossible. Inequality is the price of freedom. And equality can only come at the expense of losing your freedom.”

And when they tell me those things, and I say “well did you know that human beings started out living in egalitarian and free societies with no chiefs or male domination, and that we’ve lived that way for 95% of our existence?” when i say that they don’t believe me. And then when they look it they’re shocked, and it really makes them think and opens them to a whole world of new ideas about what we’re capable of.

But since 2018 when Graeber and Wengrow published a their popular “How to Change the Course of Human History” article, which is like chapters 1 and 3 of Dawn of Everything – since that time, when people tell me that human beings aren’t capable of living in equality, and when I reply about our egalitarian origins, now half the time they reply with “even left wing anarchists Graeber and Wengrow debunked that idea”.

Gee, thanks guys! Great work! Now I have to waste an extra 45 minutes explaining the long version of the standard narrative and why their thesis is nonsense. I mean it would be one thing if they were right, but their thesis doesn’t even make sense at the end of the day, on top of it just contributing to right wing talking points. It’s one of the reasons I started criticizing them last year in my first anthropology epiosdes.

And speaking of right wing talking points, for some insane reason – or rather as a further testament to the poverty of political theory in our society, even among revolutionary minded leftists, Graeber & Wengrow explicitly de-couple the idea of wealth inequality from power inequality in this book, starting with this little nugget in chapter 1:

The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together…

Hmm is there any relationship between equal access to resources and equality of decision making power? You won’t find out in this book!

The authors continue:

If … our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.

So the way that we’re going to achieve freedom, is by rediscovering our freedoms. Brilliant!

Why does wealth so often translate into power though? Bah, Bo-ring! They never look into it.

In an interview on Majority Report with Sam Seder, David Wengrow said

“it’s the mystery of capitalism – it’s what Karl Marx was trying to figure out, what is this magical force by which just having more stuff than somebody else gets transformed into power”

Yup, poor Karl, he just could not figure out that control over the means of production is control over people who depend on that production – i.e. Marxism 101 … Newsflash, when you control the resources that other people need to live, then you control those people. If you have more wealth than someone else but you don’t control the resources that they need to live, then you can’t exert the same level of domination over them, but you can still influence them with gifts and bribes. That’s how wealth inequality translates into power. This is not rocket science to anyone but Graeber and Wengrow.

Unsurprisingly the right wing loves this Dawn of Everything argument about wealth and power not being related – and already a regular columnist on the UK Conservative Home website has quoted that same section of the book favourably! Link in shownotes. And i’m sure the right wing will also love the idea that hierarchy has been with us since our earliest days.

Great work guys!

Why Did They Do This?

And so, the big question is, why? Why do they choose to make arguments that any right winger would be happy to cite? Why would Graeber and Wengrow choose to stick to such an incoherent view of human social structure and focus entirely on choice to the point of describing hierarchy as theatre a bunch of times? Why do they focus on the fatalistic narratives of Yuval Harari and Francis Fukuyama and ignore the optimistic ones of actual anthropologist experts and revolutionaries? Why are they able to dig up mountains of fascinating facts and anecdotes, but they can’t seem to find one of the best known causes of male dominance? Why do they throw away the analytical tools that they need in order to explain the phenoma that they’re describing and that we need in order to understand how to build egalitarian institutions in this hierarchical world?

I can only guess – or maybe I can ask David Wengrow, though I doubt he’d agree with the premise of the question – but it seems pretty clear, that in Graeber and Wengrow’s minds, if human beings are in fact limited in our choices by practical material conditions – and by material conditions I just mean anything that constrains your choices, that means that we are in fact doomed to live in hierarchy because we live in civilization.

Like deep down inside they’re so afraid that Jared Diamond and Frances Fukuyama and Yuval Harari are right that they don’t want us to think about material conditions at all. It’s kind of like not wanting to get a mole checked out because you’re afraid it might be cancer.

But fear not, as we’ll see in future episodes, we can’t predict the future, but despite obvious reasons to be pessimistic, there is also lots of room for optimism for people who want an egalitarian and libertarian future. Contra to what Frances Fukuyama and ironically Graeber and Wengrow seem to subconsciously think, the material conditions of the advanced industrialized world that we live in today, actually recreates some of the same conditions that make equality possible in immediate return egalitarian hunter gatherer societies in all sorts of interesting and key ways.

And when we do that I think we’ll see that the ingredients for a much more egalitarian and libertarian world are all there, it’s just that our awareness hasn’t yet caught up to it, which historically is often what it takes to set people in motion to make big changes, like we saw in episode 8.

And what I want, is that when that catalyst happens that triggers people into action, that our eyes will be on the prize and our heads will be filled good ideas instead of half baked nonsense so that we’ll take actions that might actually bring us closer to our goals rather then flapping our arms as we fall out the window.

The Good

But before then, I want to read a little part of this chapter that I really like.

Towards the end of the chapter they push back against descriptions of the Yanomamo as violent (despite what every single anthropologist who’s ever spent time with them says, and despite what they themselves say about themselves) by telling the story of Helen Valero, a white woman who was kidnapped by Yanomamo when she was 12 or 13 in the 1930s.

Pinker briefly cites the account Valero later gave of her own life, where she describes the brutality of a Yanomami raid.26 What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in ‘Western civilization,’ only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.

Now this is true, but Graeber and Wengrow neglect to mention that her european family rejected her so that she was totally isolated and living in hunger at a local mission, making Yanomamo life with all its dangers a step up in many ways.

BUT then they do accurately point out that for the first few centuries of the european and native american encounter, people who had the choice and the experience with both European society and Amerindian societies, preferred to among native americans. And they pull out this amazing quote from Benjamin frankling written priavately to a friend, which reallly deserves more airtime:

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.

And this is important, not because we’re interested in finger wagging “europeans so bad, natives so good” posturing, but because it’s a powerful example of how people prefer freedom, relative equality and community to all of the endless frustrations, humiliations, insincerity and alienation of living in a highly stratified hierarchical society which we talk about a bit more when we discuss chapter 2 of the book.

Again, the answer to the riddle of history lies in a return freedom and equality.

OK, so next time we’ll be covering chapter 3, Unfreezing the ice age where the authors try to prove that we didn’t start out as egalitarian hunter gatherers by ignoring the first 200 000 years of our existence, and then they try to tell us that social structure is not determined by material conditions by pointing to cultures that change their social structures every year with the seasons, as if the changes of the seasons were not material conditions…

Wrap Up

In the meantime, if you feel new creases forming in your formely smooth brain because of this show and you want to support me please subscribe to my patreon or send me a one time donations – which I will need to set up – making a show like this take a lot of time and thought, and reading, and writing, and wrong turns, and start-overs, and editing – and I’m very slow at all of these things, so it takes me about 2–6 weeks full time to produce one episode of this, in which time I’m not doing work so I’m not earning any money which is just brutal and not sustainable. Also I don’t monetize my channel even though I’m eligible for it, because I don’t want to gunk up your life with more stupid advertisements that you’re already subjected to, and I don’t do paywalled content because that defeats the whole purpose of doing a show geared at spreading knowledge and skills. So your subscriptions are not purchasing a commodity, they’re solidarity payments, because you can afford it and you want the show to keep going. And I charge per episode not per months because it takes so long to actually make these and sometimes I need to take breaks.

Bibliography / Suggested Readings

Sandler et al 1992 — Billy Madison

Norman Stiles 1977 — The Ernie and Bert Book

Sarah Roberts 1981 — Ernie’s Big Mess

Graeber and Wengrow

Graeber & Wengrow 2021 – The Dawn of Everything

Graeber & Wengrow 2015 – Farewell to the Childhood of Man

Graeber & Wengrow 2018 – How to Change the Course of Human History

1381 Peasants Revolt

Paul Foot 1981, “This Bright Day of Summer”: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; see also the lively original audio version of this speech

Mark O’Brien 2004 – When Adam Delved and Eve Span, a History of the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

Occupy Wall Street vs. Demands

Susan Kang 2013 — Demands Belong to the 99%? The Conflict over Demands, Issues, and Goals in Occupy Wall Street in Welty et al (eds) 2013 — Occupying Political Science, The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World

Critiques of Dawn of Everything

Chris Knight 2021 — Wrong About Almost Everything

Nancy Lindisfarne & Jonathan Neale 2021 — All things being equal

Kwame Anthony Appiah 2021 — Digging for Utopia

Response to Appiah by David Wengrow, with counter-response by Appiah

Arnold Schroeder 2021 — Fight Like an Animal Podcast ep. 38: Ethnogenesis pt. 4: Becoming a People in Terra Incognita

Egalitarian Origins

Chistopher Boehm 1999 — Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm 2012 — Moral Origins

Sarah Hrdy 2011 — Mothers and Others

Doron Shultziner 2007 — From the Beginning: Paleolithic Democracy, the Emergence of Hierarchy, and the Reemergence of Political Egalitarianism

Doron Shultziner et al 2009 — Causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial

Camilla Power 2004 — Women in prehistoric rock art. In New Perspectives on Prehistoric Art.

NOTE: i originally gave the age of the fulton rock painting as 250 000 years old when I recorded the audio/video,, and then i corrected it to 70 000 in a subtitle while editing the video — I recently re-read the articles about the painting and the Eland Bull Dance and I have no idea where i got any of these numbers! The articles about the painting don’t mention its age and I can’t find the age of the painting anywhere, it’s not in my notes and I can’t find any good estimate of the ages. I do see several non-scholarly websites mentioning that the paintings at that site are between 3,000 and 450 years old — which is nowhere near the ages that I put in the video — I’m very confused about this and my apologies, I’ve clearly screwed something up, but I don’t know how or why!]

10.3 The Ingredients of Dominance Hierarchy: Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, Chapter 3

https://youtu.be/nsIxMzLjEfs

For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Script

Hello fellow kids!

And welcome back to What is Politics, and to the critique and correction of the first five chapters of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.

Today we’ll be covering the first half of Chapter 3: Unfreezing the Ice Age, where the authors try to argue that human beings did not begin as egalitarian hunter-gatherers by ignoring the first several hundred thousand years of human existence.

Hierarchy: Democratic vs Dominance

The thesis question of this book, which the authors finally ask towards the end of this chapter, is how did human societies get “stuck” in dominance hierarchy, which today is how almost every society on earth is organized, where some people have more power, more wealth and more rights than others.

Now we already defined hierarchy a couple of episodes ago and talked about what that means in a political context – politics means decision making in groups, so a political hierarchy is one where people are ranked into different categories/classes according to different levels of decision making power. Kings over barons over serfs, owners over managers over workers, officers over enlisted soldiers, parents over children.

And the whole point of this book as I see it, even though the authors don’t say it explicitly – is to tell us that while it may seem like we’re stuck in hierarchy today, and like the circumstances of industrial civilization determine our social structure and all of the inequalities that go with it – it doesn’t have to be that way – human beings used to choose our own social structures in the past in all kinds of different conditions – and in fact, the very thing that makes us human is our ability to choose our own social structures. Therefore we can change our social structure once again if we can only remember that we have the power to do this. There is nothing about civilization that inherently forces us to be stuck in hierarchy – or at least not the kinds of hierarchies that we’ve been stuck with.

And while I agree with that last sentence – the ideas that’s it’s predicated on are a confused mess, which turns the whole book into a huge mess and which makes it harder for readers to actually know what to do in terms of getting unstuck from dominance hierarchy today.

Now maybe the main source of the mess in question, is that the authors don’t distinguish between a conventional hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy, and also that they seem to have no concept of how dominance hierarchy actually works.

A conventional or democratic hierarchy is where a group of people voluntarily organize into a hierarchy in order to achieve some goal. And while, like in every decision-making hierarchy, the people on top of the hierarchy have more decision-making power, the people at the bottom are still the ultimate deciders, in that the leadership position exists only because it serves their interests – and they can remove the person filling that position it if they’re not happy with their leadership service, and even remove the position entirely if they want to. And the terms of getting to be on top of a conventional hierarchy – like the degree of authority and responsibilities you might have, and the rewards you get – if any – are all ultimately determined by the people on the bottom.

A dominance hierarchy on the other hand, is something that people on the top impose on the people on the people below them because of differential bargaining power between the two sides. And if the people on the bottom tolerate the power imbalance, it’s because they don’t have any better options – like how you go to your job that you hate and you obey your dingus boss, because not going to that job will be worse in various ways than going to it.

For an example of a conventional hierarchy – even in the most hyper egalitarian hunter gatherer societies, who have no chiefs or authority figures – when there’s a hunting party, the hunters will often pick someone among them who has a lot of experience and good skills and instincts to be the party leader, and they’ll look to him for guidance and leadership on the hunt.

Not only do these hunting leaders not have any official authority, but the second that people don’t like what he’s doing they’ll either stop listening, or else never appoint him again, depending on the circumstances.

In that video I mentioned last time with the bro dude going hunting with the Hadza, the translators refer to one man called Sokolo as the “chief” but that’s a mis-translation from the translator who’s from a different more hierarchical ethnic group – Sokolo was just the hunting party leader – and any Hadza trying to pass himself off as a chief would get into enormous trouble with the rest of the community.

Now sometimes the lines might get blurry between a conventional and dominance hierarchy, and there’s a bit of a spectrum, which we can talk about more another time – but a good analogy to know which kind of hierarchy you’re dealing with is like the difference between Sadomasochism and sexual assault. On the surface they might look like the same thing – but the second someone says stop, and the other person doesn’t stop, then it becomes sexual assault.

So, by definition, when the authors ask “how did we get stuck” in hierarchy – what they’re talking about is dominance hierarchy not a democratic hierarchy, because you’re not stuck in a democratic hierarchy, you have entered into it on an equal footing with all the other members of that hierarchy, and you have an equal say with everyone else on determining how it will be shaped, and who gets to be in what position, and whether or not the hierarchy continues to exist at all.

Now one thing to note about dominance hierarchy is that since by its very nature, no one chooses to have it imposed on them – dominance hierarchy can only exist if there are certain conditions or circumstances that give some people a set of advantages which allow them to impose their dominance onto other people.

These sorts of conditions are things like – I have guns and you don’t, i’m an adult and you’re my child and you depend on me for food and shelter – or our economy depends on fishing, and my family got to this fishing spot first, and we’re numerous and strong enough to control it by force and you have no where else to get your fish, etc.

And so, by not distinguishing between conventional vs dominance hierarchies, and by not understanding that dominance hierarchy can only exist because of conditions and circumstances – the Dawn of Everything creates a lot of confusion when it comes to understanding why we got stuck in hierarchy and how we can get unstuck.

For example, starting in this chapter and the next chapter, they authors give us all of these examples of traditional societies that have conventional hierarchies – hierarchies by choice – like the Nambikwara chief who has no coercive authority, and who loses his position if people choose not to follow him – and then they point to societies which had seasonal dominance hierarchies like the the Inuit who had patriarchy but only in the winter – and then they say, ‘see – social structure is all a matter of choice, people used to move in and out of hierarchy all the time for expedience, and they used to disobey their chiefs if they didn’t like them – there’s no reason why people need to be stuck in hierarchy today!

But they’re totally missing the point that a hierarchy of expedience is a conventional hierarchy, while today we’re stuck in dominance hierarchy and not conventional hierarchy – and they’re completely oblivious to the fact that the people on the bottom rungs of those seasonal hierarchies, like inuit women in winter, were in fact stuck in those hierarchies, it’s just that the conditions that got them stuck – i.e. the conditions which gave men a bargaining power advantage over them – only lasted for a few months every year! As we’ll see later on in the chapter.

So despite the uplifting message of the book, and despite 700 pages of wonderful stories and history anecdotes and anthropological and archaeological facts, the authors never come anywhere near being able to answer their question of how we got stuck. They basically render themselves incapable of answering that question by focusing on discombobulated choices instead of about bargaining power and the conditions that give some people power advantages over others.

And this takes them to some really ridiculous places – like later in the book, they basically end up implying that maybe the reason why got stuck in hierarchy is because the whole world became a bunch of confused dumdums who confused violence for care and forgot that we can be free.

The worst part of this is that focusing on conscious choice instead of on changing the conditions that create power imbalances is exactly the opposite of the focus that we need if we’re going to be able to do anything about dominance hierarchy.

The Recipe for Dominance Hierarchy

Now before I get into the text of this chapter, I want to lay out the basic building blocks or ingredients of dominance hierarchy, it will be a lot easier to understand what’s happening in this book and more importantly what’s going on in he world around us.

So, the particular details of the road to dominance hierarchy will be different in every case – but the general path is always the same – the only way that you can get a dominance hierarchy is if two general conditions are met:

#1 is that some people are able to control access to resources that other people need in order to live.

and #2, which I ironically realized from reading this book – is that you also need for there to be no easy or preferable way for those people who don’t control the resources, to go off and go get decent alternative resources somewhere else.

Those are the ingredients of dominance hierarchy. That’s it, that’s all.

In any given situation, if you want to understand why there is a dominance hierarchy, and why it’s milder or harsher in one place than in another, then your task is just a matter of figuring out what the circumstances are which establish these two criteria. And if you want to reduce or get rid of that hierarchy, you need to figure out how you can change or moderate those circumstances.

Examples:

So for an example of how these 2 criteria work, in our society, your boss tells you what to do all day and not the other way around, because he controls the salary that you need in order to eat. That’s criteria #1

But, if you could just go start a farm in your backyard and survive easily that way, and if you could easily save up and buy a 3D printers to make all the things you need, then you won’t want to waste time doing what your boss wants for much longer than it takes to save up to buy the printer and set up your farm. So if you could start a farm and get an amazing star trek 3d printer, criteria #2 wouldn’t be met, and the boss would need to provide you with conditions and rewards that are better and more interesting and more pleasant for you than the conditions of farming in your back yard and making stuff with your 3D printer, dramatically reducing the power imbalance between worker and owner, probably to the point where there’s it’s not profitable to hire you at all.

But you don’t have a farm in your backyard, or a good enough 3D printer, so criteria #2 is fulfilled, which is why you go to work.

Now when capitalism was getting started, people did have farms in their back yards. And they also had access to common lands that their animals could graze on and forests that they could hunt and fish in. So most people had no reason to subject themselves to being bossed around and abused by some asshole all day for peanuts just to enrich him and his ugly spoiled brat monster children. So you didn’t have criteria #1 or #2 to create a dominance hierarchy by capitalists, and those capitalists had trouble getting their enterprises of the ground.

But what the capitalists did have is a lot of wealth inequality versus the peasants, and they also had control over the state. And so, the capitalists via their influence over the government, did everything they could to take away these alternatives to employment servitude. They closed off and privatized formerly common lands, they made it illegal to hunt in certain forests, and fish in certain lakes, and they pulled all kinds of other shenanigans to make it harder and harder to survive by farming. As a result, formerly free farmers, were now forced to “choose” the labour market in order to survive.

So those are the criteria that give you hierarchy, but you also want to pay attention to specific conditions in order to understand the degree of dominance that people in power get to exert – i.e. how stuck you are.

Why do some people get paid really well at their jobs, and have decent working conditions, while other people get paid barely enough to not die, and have absolutely miserable humiliating working conditions? In capitalism, that will usually be a factor of market conditions. You might not have a star trek 3-D printer replicator, but maybe you do have a really rare work skill like an expertise in corporate tax law that’s worth a lot of money to wealthy employers. Or maybe there’s a labour shortage and you have 20 employers that want you to work for them and who have to compete for your service by offering you better wages and working conditions. So conditions 1 and 2 are still met – you still have to obey someone, but they’re not as dire – you have some degree of escape, at least from one employer to another.

But if you have 20 applicants competing for every job you’re qualified for, or if you have no savings, and you can’t afford to be unemployed for more than 3 days without getting evicted, or if you have diabetes and depend on your boss for health insurance – well then condition #2 is way tighter for you, and you will be much more stuck than a tax lawyer or trust fund diaper person.

The Book

OK, so now that we have a clear idea of what dominance hierarchy is about and how it works, let’s read the book:

Chapter 3 Unfreezing the Ice Age

The authors begin the chapter telling us that

“accounts of ‘human origins’ play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians, or the Dreamtime for indigenous Australians. … there actually was an age in which the lines between … human and animal were still indistinct; and when someone … [had] to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened, but we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened … which … reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.”

And this is exactly right – ever since we realized that humans evolved from other species, the domain of human origins has been a hotly contested battlefield both in academia and in popular literature, with people projecting their political ideologies into the giant gaps in our knowledge – gaps which have been shrinking over time, leaving less and less room from speculation.

You basically had two camps, the right and the left. And remember that the right means those people who support particular hierarchies, while the left means those who want to reduce or eliminate those hierarchies. So unsurprisingly, thinkers on the left generally argued that humans had egalitarian origins and that therefore we are best suited to live in societies of relative equality, like Rousseau and later Marx and Engels and many hunter gatherer experts today – and then you had thinkers on the right who either believed that we had hierarchical or at least ultra competitive origins and are best suited to live in natural hierarchies, like Hobbes argued, and like others since then, like E.O. Wilson in the 80s or Jordan Peterson does today.

Another right wing argument that gains importance among people with anthropological knowledge was that even if we did have egalitarian origins, well that this was a bad thing – a state of childishness, and that we couldn’t reach our full potential without hierarchy – which is what the 18^th century economist Turgot argued which Graeber and Wengrow highlight in chapter 2.

And, after having re-read this chapter and chapter 4 for this critique, I’m actually putting Graeber and Wengrow as unwittingly belonging in this Turgot camp of thinking that equality is for children. And I know peoples’ heads are going to explode, but you’ll see what I mean later on in this episode and when we cover chapter 4.

Anyhow, a more modern argument justifying hierarchy which Graeber and Wengrow point out in chapters 1 and 2, is the liberal synthesis cop-out idea that well, maybe we are ideally suited to equality, but it’s just not an achievable goal anymore because civilization is just too damned complicated and large. And the authors attribute this Rousseau, and they quote Jared Diamond articulating it quite explicitly in chapter 1 of the book. And even though Jared Diamond is kind of a liberal left type guy, and Rousseau is often seen as one of the founders of the left, this is a right wing argument because justifying hierarchy is by definition right wing.

So at various points in history one or another version of these left and right ideas was more popular or more prominent, and different variations on these themes appeared and evolved as new information and evidence came in, which constrained the limits of our imaginations and narrowed the spectrum of possible scenarios about our origins.

And today, in Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow are trying to position themselves above this fray by taking a weird postmodernish 3^rd position where we have no particular origins. We sort of magically appear on earth with all sorts of social structures somehow, which I don’t think is even really possible – and which as Arnold Schroeder pointed out recently in the Fight Like an Animal podcast, is in and of itself is a very mythological idea (especially since it makes no actual sense). But I guess the point the authors are trying to get across, which does make more sense, is that when it comes to hierarchy or equality, our nature is to have no nature, the essence of being human is our ability to choose our social structures.

And like Arnold says, Graeber and Wengrow’s origin myth is that once upon a time we all had all of this agency and choice and we could and did assemble and dissemble ourselves into different levels hierarchy and equality because of expedience or theatre or play – as the authors put it in this chapter – but then humanity mysteriously fell into a state of becoming stuck in hierarchy, maybe because we all became dumbasses as the authors suggest later on. And so, the solution is that we need to remember our freedom in order to regain our freedom, as the authors circularly tell us in chapter 1.

Anyhow, after centuries of going back and forth between right and left wing visions of human origins, which waxed and waned in popularity with events like the rise and fall of french revolution, the rise of global colonialism, the rise of capitalism, the rise of socialism, the rise and degeneration of the soviet union, the rise and fall of fascism and the cold war – eventually, in the 1960s, a version of the left wing egalitarian origins theory basically won the debate, and has been the consensus or at least majority opinion among the relevant experts since that time, much to the chagrin of Graeber and Wengrow – or Graebgrow as Matt Christman is calling them in his review of the book – and if anyone has contact wth him, please let him know about this series – maybe send him a transcript! I feel like he’ll get a lot out of it.

Anyhow, this victory of egalitarian origins started with the Man the Hunter conference that I discussed in earlier episodes, which brought to the fore the existence of hyper egalitarian societies, all of whom practice the same specific type of immediate return nomadic hunting and gathering that our earliest ancestors are thought to have practiced. Since that time, it’s been assumed that Rousseau and Marx and Engels were basically right – our ancestors were indeed mostly either hyper-egalitarian like most immediate return foragers – or at least that they were relatively egalitarian like most other kinds of hunter gatherers that we know about.

And although this egalitarian origins vision has been challenged several times over the years, and it has evolved and changed in reaction to those critiques and to new discoveries in archeology and anthropology and also psychology – a new and evolving synthesis of egalitarian origins is still the dominant view today.

The Current Synthesis

Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest

So now I’m going to explain what the current synthesis version of egalitarian origins is, and why most people with enough expertise to have an informed opinion believe in it, despite knowing all of the evidence that Graebgrow cite in this chapter as if to disprove it.

And this is really important for readers of Dawn of Everything, because Graeber and Wengrow attack the idea of egalitarian origins without ever explaining to us the logic behind it. And as a result it makes it seem like the people who believe in egalitarian origins are just stupid or in denial or something.

Now, our current understanding of what our original social structures were like in terms of presence or absence of dominance hierarchy, is largely a synthesis of the work of Christopher Boehm and Sarah Hrdy, plus some psychology and game theory research done over the last few decades, done on people from societies from around the world.

Christopher Boehm tells us that the Hobbes vs Rousseau debate about whether humans are innately cooperative or competitive is a red herring. The Rousseauian idea of humans as inherently good natured cooperative egalitarian smurfs and the hobbesian Gargamel view of human nature as selfish, competitive and hierarchical are not in conflict – they’re both correct.

We all have a tendency to want advantages over others, and therefore to be at the top of a dominance hierarchy – but we also innately hate being dominated and exploited by others and we will do what we can to prevent it if we can, which usually means teaming up with others to stop would-be dominators. It’s the conditions that we find ourselves in, that either give some people an advantage that they can use in their quest to dominate others – or else that give the advantage to the people who are trying to resist domination. And as it happens, the conditions that our earliest ancestors lived in were such that we were able to successfully form coalitions to resist domination – at least for a the first 95% of so of our existence, and the result was egalitarian societies where everyone has equal decision-making power.

One of the practical conditions of our earliest ancestors which allowed people resisting hierarchy to win the day of would be dominators was the invention of lethal projectile weapons by our homo erectus ancestors.

Once jimmy homo erectus invented lethal projectile weapons, it was no longer possible for alpha males to maintain the types of dominance hierarchies that we see in our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins today – because even the wimpiest pee-wee herman homo erectus cold just kill off the biggest macho man high T alpha man with a spear from a safe distance. An Boehm doesn’t mention it, but this would later on extend to poisons and poisoned projectile weapons, which could be used by women as well.

Graeber and Wengrow don’t mention it, but Boehm calls this process of killing off the alpha males and of banding together to prevent domination the “egalitarian revolution” – and this revolution is how Boehm believes that we became human beings. The physical features that we see in animals where men compete with eachother for dominance like males being a lot bigger than females, or like giant fangs or canines, or thick brow ridges to prevent our skulls from getting crushed from blows to the face – these traits fade out over the millenia and almost disappear by the time our modern ancestors appear on the scene 300,000 years ago. Basically, alpha male dominant types just kept getting themselves killed over and over, and people had to learn to cooperate on an egalitarian basis if they didn’t want to get merked by pissed off pee wees and womens.

And the climactic conditions in the paleolithic plus the conditions inherent to the types of hunting and gathering that people did in order to live in that era were such that there was just no way for a bully or more likely a coalition of bullies to succeed in their attempts for dominance for very long.

And these conditions favouring egalitarian social organization continued until after the advent of agriculture and the environmental conditions of the holocene which eventually in combination with other factors made it harder and harder to prevent domination and easier and easier for bullies to form coalitions with which to dominate their peers.

Boehm doesn’t go too deep into theorizing about the conditions that favoured egalitarianism, but he mentions various things which hunter-gatherer specialists discuss like the mobility of hunter gatherer groups in that period which means that people could easily escape any attempts at domination – criteria #2, and the instability of the palaeolithic climate which made it very hard for anyone to dominate any particular territory or hold on to any particular dominance formation for very long – criteria #1.

Now if Graeber and Wengrow actually wanted to disprove egalitarian origins for real, rather than just spin a narrative for a feel good propaganda book, they would have tried to argue that those conditions don’t actually lead to equality. This is what scholars who are against egalitarian origins do. But instead they chose to just leave out all of Boehm’s logic and then they act confused as to why he comes to the conclusions that he does – banking on readers’ not having read his book in order to make egalitarian origins seem foolish and incompatible with the archaeological record.

Sarah Hrdy’s Mothers and Others

Meanwhile Sarah Hrdy’s work tells us that more than just not liking to be dominated, humans also do innately love cooperating and working together and are that we are hardwired to do so. Given how expensive it is in terms of calories and energy and time required to raise a human child until it can feed itself, human beings could not have survived as we did without cooperative child rearing. And unlike other great apes, humans don’t just enlist immediate family in childcare, but we also trust and cooperate with unrelated humans to help each-other with child care. Today we have public or for profit daycares depending on where you are, where unrelated strangers take care of our kids, but hunter gatherer camps are a lot like giant daycares with everyone as the staff helping with the little snooglers.

And the only way that we could cooperate on this level – before a wage economy – was by evolving all sorts of traits that could not likely have emerged in a very hierarchical or competitive society – traits like involuntary facial expressions that give away our feelings, or like the cooperative eye where the whites of your eyes are visible so everyone can see what we’re looking at, which other great apes don’t have, because they are constantly competing with eachother in various respects.

And Hrdy doesn’t mention this in her book, but people from the radical anthropology group that I always talk about like Camilla Power and Morna Finnegan have pointed out that many of these sorts of situations like caring for unrelated infants could not have likely happened if people were organized patrilocally – and that therefore this suggest matrilocal residence, which apparently Hrdy has agreed with, and in turn this means that our early ancestors at least were most likely gender egalitarian as well, contrary to what Boehm says in his work which is focuses on dudes killing eachother and takes male dominance for granted.

There are also a lot of other reasons to believe that we were egalitarian – for example, like I mentioned last time, the most hyper egalitarian societies that we know of from modern times practice the same kind of economy that most of our earliest ancestors are likely to have practiced – and the practical conditions of that type of economy usually favour political egalitarianism. There’s also evidence from the way that technology was spread out and trading networks and artifacts were distributed, and even mitochondrial DNA evidence that suggest matrilocal organization, which is often associated with political and gender egalitarianism.

Anyhow, all this stuff plus some psychology experiments which show that we like to dominate and not be dominated and we like to cooperate – more or less constitute the dominant egalitarian origins thesis that Graeber and Wengrow are trying to overturn in Dawn of Everything.

OK so back to the book. Graeber and Wengrow set the scene by telling us that humans today, for all of our superficial differences, are all basically the same animal with minor variations. Not only in terms of our looks, but also our behaviour – and they name some human universals like eyerolling as a sign of disdain, as well as the structural commonalities of all languages, and the universality of music and dance as features of all societies.

However, according to the authors

Rewind a few hundred millennia and all this was most definitely not the case.”

And they tell us that up until 40,000 BC or so, homo sapiens were sharing the earth and interacting with now extinct human cousins like the neanderthals and denisovians and smaller brained more ape-like homo naredi. And

“The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.”

I like this description of the deep past, and I wonder if that’s the source of those types of legends about elves and dwarves and giants.

But, then they authors tell us that even though homo sapiens came up on the scene some 300,000 years ago or more, we can’t really have any idea what our ancestors were doing in terms of social organization until 260,000 years later in the upper palaeolithic.

“There’s only so much you can reconstruct from cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint – which is basically all we have. Most of the time we don’t even really know what was going on below the neck, let alone with pigmentation, diet or anything else. … It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.”

OK, so in these 3 sentences we have two extremely questionable statements: First the idea that we don’t have the slightest idea what social organization was like, and then the idea that we can assume that there were lots of different types of social organization in terms of presence or absence of dominance hierarchies because people came in different shapes and sizes – which of course contradicts the first statement… Like either we can know something or else we’re just guessing – pick one…

Now, saying that we can’t possibly know what social organization was like before 40,000 years ago is like saying – ‘well, we can’t possibly know who murdered Colonel Mustard in the dining room, because all we have is some fingerprints on a candlestick and some blood and some mysterious hairs.’ Or ‘we can’t possibly know if there are other planets beyond our solar system because we can’t possibly see them with even the best telescopes.’ Like it’s true that we don’t have VHS videos of the palaeolithic, and this might make sense if you know nothing about forensics or spectral analysis, but we can actually figure out a lot and make decent assumption with what seems like scant evidence.

And the idea that it would be reasonable to assume that presence or absence of dominance hierarchies must have varied at least as much as physical types – that’s a really weird argument – how does that even follow – we never get any explanation or any theory of how hierarchy works or forms – we’re just expected to intuitively accept this bizarre craneometry logic. And it certainly doesn’t track with Boehm’s logic – whether you’re a goblin or hobbit or a homo erectus – if you have projectile weapons and you are doing nomadic foraging, we would expect egalitarianism. And as we’ll see, this argument about hobbits is actually the authors only real argument for the presence of dominance hierarchies in the palaeolithic!

But, first let’s tackle the idea that we can’t know what happened until 40,000 years ago:

If we just take one of the main sources that Graeber and Wengrow cite in this section – an article by Eleanor Scerri, called The North African Middle Stone Age and It’s Place in Recent Human Evolution cited in footnote 4 for this chapter – we can already see that this statement clearly isn’t true.

And the middle stone age aka the middle palaeolithic goes from about 280,000 to 50,000 years ago.

So let’s read some snippets from this article:

“Hunter-gatherers in the NAMSA were extremely seasonally mobile, had low overall population sizes, and followed increasingly complex and diversified subsistence and social practices. … sub- sistence strategies included the use of both large game … and small fauna such as birds, tortoises and mollusks …

Evidence for subsistence strategies other than animal consumption dates to the early NAMSA. At Saï Island, [people processed] siliceous and starchy plant materials. This constitutes some of earliest documented evidence for plant-processing behaviors …

Site use appears to reflect diverse activities, and longer-term occupations may have been seasonal… Together with raw-material transport distances of up to 200 km and shell “bead” transport over distances of 190 km, these data show that NAMSA populations were highly mobile. Significantly, these distances are comparable to those covered by ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers in arid regions. Like these modern groups, NAMSA populations may have practiced seasonal patterns of fragmentation and contraction to remaining water sources during dry seasons. Patterns of mobility may have been more localized in regions of greater resource abundance.

… It is likely that overall population size varied significantly with the arid-humid cycles of the Sahara, indirectly triggering social responses such as long-distance social networks.

The concurrent emergence of technological regionalization, extensive use of pigments, bone tools, and personal ornamentation in North and southern Africa, as well as the later culture efflorescence in East Africa, have been linked to possible isolation and increases in overall population size, triggered by environmental stability and amelioration.

Environmental risks such as strong seasonality and prolonged drought may have also provided the impetus for material culture diversification, as has been demonstrated.

OK so this isn’t riveting stuff, but in just this one article about one region of africa we have all of this information about what people were eating, about how mobile we were, about how we had symbolic culture, transported things for hundreds of miles, and had similar dispersal and congregation practices as modern hunter gatherers and a bunch of inferences about other behaviours.

The article doesn’t say much about social structure in regards to dominance hierarchy – but with all of that information there are a lot of inferences that anthropologists we can and do make based on the social structure of contemporary foragers practicing the same types of subsistence activities, and migration patterns etc. And there all sorts of other articles and book chapters that you can find talking about Pigment use and rituals, burials, how meat was cut and distributed, how technology was distributed etc which also tell us a lot about what was going on in this period.

There’s one article I found where the authors argue that we had egalitarian meat distribution in the middle palaeolithic based on the types of cut marks we find on ancient animal bones, though I honestly couldn’t follow their logic – and you even have articles figuring out that the main type of descent group in the Palaeolithic was likely matrilineal based on the way technology and religious artifacts are spread around and from mitochondrial DNA evidence.

Notice that in the article i just read from, the author keeps linking human behaviour and social organization to environmental conditions. Semi arid environments lead to small populations stretching over larger territories, high resource abundance often leads to less migration, large social networks are a response to varying humidity, migration patterns look like those of modern foragers who react to all of those conditions. And you’ll notice as you read Dawn of Everything that this sort of reasoning is almost totally absent from this book when it comes to dominance hierarchy. Except in a couple of places like this one that follows the part we just read:

“The only thing we can reasonably infer about social organization among our earliest ancestors is that it’s likely to have been extraordinarily diverse. Early humans inhabited a wide range of natural environments, from coastlands and tropical forest to mountains and savannah. They were far, far more physically diverse than humans are today; and presumably their social differences were even greater than their physical ones. In other words, there is no ‘original’ form of human society.”

OK, so they’re repeating their craneometry argument, but at least they’re adding a material argument to it – people had different weiner sizes AND we also inhabited a wide range of environments – that’s better – and it makes more sense – except that that’s not at all how material conditions work when it comes to dominance hierarchy – a particular natural environment doesn’t just automatically equal a particular social structure.

Again, note how they’re telling us that we can’t possibly know anything about social organization from the archaeological record – but then they’re also telling us with full confidence that we can somehow assume that there was a lot of social diversity, and that there was no original form of human society! Again, pick one, you can’t have it both ways!

So what’s wrong with assuming that humans must have had diverse social structures in terms of dominance hierarchies because we lived in diverse environments and had physical diversity? This seems intuitively reasonable – if you’re Homer Simpson and you don’t know anything about anthropology of human or even animal social structures.

But if you are an anthropologist who studies this stuff, and you’ve read some bo-ooks, then you know that the type of environment you live in and the size of your skull or weiner aren’t the relevant material conditions that determine social structure.

For example, the Mbuti pygmies are on average about 4 feet 6 inches tall and live in the central african lush rainforest. And they have almost the same exact same hyper egalitarian social structure and very similar values and cultural institutions as the big n tall montagnais naskapi foragers who lived in coniferous forests of quebec and Labrador in the 17^th century. And also they have the same structure and similar values and institutions as the Kalahari bush people living in the nabimian desert. And also the same as other foragers living in the mountains of India, and the rainforests of Malaysia. Why are all these cultures who are physically so different and living in such different environments so far from eachother so similar in terms of social structure and other cultural traits? Doesn’t this show that the environment is irrelevant to social structure?

No, because when it comes to social structure – hiearchy vs equality – we’re looking for whether or not the existing conditions enable some people to control the resources that other people need in order to live, and whether or not there are any easy alternatives to those controlled resources. Living in a desert vs in a savannah or rainforest or artctic tundra aren’t what determines these things.

In the case of the societies I just mentioned, it’s what you do for a living in those different environments that ends up generating the conditions relevant to favouring egalitarianism. And those conditions end up being very similar despite the wildly different environments.

All of these groups do what is called immediate return nomadic foraging. And as we’ll see when we look at chapter 4, the practical realities of nomadic immediate return foraging usually generate conditions that result in societies with very high levels of freedom and equality because there’s no way for anyone to dominate the resources that other people need to live, and because it’s easy to escape any domination attempts – criterias 1 and 2 of the ingredients of dominance hierarchy.

Now the environment is in fact very important in the sense that the environment will determine what sorts of economic activities are possible in a given area and which types of economic activities are optimal – meaning you get the yummiest foods with the least effort. Immediate return big game focused foraging is thought to be one of the most efficient or optimal types of foraging, but you need for there to be a pretty low population density, and then you need enough availability of wild animals and foods that provide a balanced diet, or else you can’t practice that type of economy.

So for example it’s possible that the Ituri rainforest where the Mbuti people live would not have been possible to forage in, until the intrusion of Bantu farmers into the area, because the rainforest alone doesn’t provide enough edible carbohydrates to survive, so the Mbuti can only live as foragers in the forest because they obtain carbohydrates via special trade relationships with the Bantu.

Anyhow, the authors then go on to talk about how the sapient paradox isn’t really a paradox, which is correct and we don’t need to get into that, but then interestingly, as part of that discussion they use more materialist arguments in order to hypothesize about why there was a lot of cultural activity in europe as soon as homo sapiens first migrated there about 40,000 years ago:

“[it] may have something to do with climate and demography. To put it bluntly: with the movement of the ice sheets, human populations in Europe were living in harsher and more confined spaces than our species had encountered before. … We have to picture our ancestors moving between relatively enclosed environments, dispersing and gathering, tracking the seasonal movements of mammoth, bison and deer herds.

While the absolute number of people may still have been startlingly small,17 the density of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially at certain times of year. And with this came remarkable bursts of cultural expression.18”

And unlike the nonsense about how presence or absence of dominance hierarchy must have varied a lot because people had different sizes of weiners, this is actually a solid assumption, and it’s something that we’ve seen happening throughout history and pre-history. The more people interact, the more art and technology flourish as people learn and build on top of the ideas of a larger numbers of people. That’s why art went from amazing 3 dimensional portraits and sculptures in ancient byzantine rome to weird 2 dimensional clunkerdunks in the middle ages and then exploded to Rembrandt level in the enlightenment era.

So when it comes to cultural flourishing, the authors have no problem with materialist arguments, but we’ll see as we go on that when it comes to dominance hierarchy, those same kinds of materialist explanations and ideas fly out the window – or rather get they get hidden under the rug.

So the next section is called “WHY EVEN VERY SOPHISTICATED RESEARCHERS STILL FIND WAYS TO CLING TO THE IDEA THAT SOCIAL INEQUALITY HAS AN ‘ORIGIN’”

Now this is an extremely weird title choice, because while I would have loved to see the authors explain why people believe in egalitarian origins theories, and then try to refute it – in fact they very glaringly do NOT do anything of the sort. Instead they just critique Christopher Boehm who I mentioned a few minutes ago for believing in egalitarian origins, and then they act like they’re puzzled by his beliefs, while straight up disappearing the part of his book where the he actually explains his reasoning!

So here the authors tell us that because we can’t possibly know what was happening for the first 2–400 thousand years of our existence – which as we’ve seen isn’t true true at all – that they’re just going to skip right ahead and start their inquiry about the original forms of human social structure at 40,000 years ago – what Chris Knight jokingly calls the Tea Time of Everything. Meanwhile, they’re going to ignore what’s going on the entire planet, including Africa where we were born as a species and where spent most of our existence, and they’re just going focus on what was going on in Europe during that time.

Now this is extreeeemely convenient, because Europe starting 40,000 years ago just happens to be when and where we find the most evidence of human organizational diversity and maybe the only place where we have any interesting hints of potentially non egalitarian societies. It also happens to be an extreme fringe environment where the ice caps went down deep into modern poland and germany – in other words an environment that is not particularly representative of what was going on in the rest of the world at that time, and an environment where we might expect to find unusual subsistence strategies and social structures.

Upper Palaeolithic Europe is extremely interesting and important – but it tells us almost nothing about what our earliest ancestors who lived in africa 300,000 years ago – were doing. Focusing on upper palaeolithic europe in order to get a sense of what our original human social structures were like is a bit like trying to understand was happening in Ancient Rome by looking at what people in the arctic circle were doing in the 19^th century. Hmm, looks like the Ancient romans ate lots of seal blubber and lived in igloos and traded with coureur des bois dudes from New France. All of those scholars who keep saying that the ancient romans were a densely population civilization with writing and republican government are clearly wrong!

OK, so now that we’re ignoring the entire world except for the northern most fringes of human settlement, and we’re also ignoring the first 250 thousand years of our existence, Graeber and Wengrow think that they can now confidently argue that there is no origin to human inequality:

“As we will see in a moment, the societies that resulted in what archaeologists call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000 BC) – with their ‘princely’ burials and grand communal buildings – seem to completely defy our image of a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands.

The disconnect is so profound that some archaeologists have begun taking the opposite tack, describing Ice Age Europe as populated by ‘hierarchical’ or even ‘stratified’ societies. In this, they make common cause with evolutionary psychologists who insist that dominance behaviour is hardwired in our genes, so much so that the moment society goes beyond tiny bands, it must necessarily take the form of some ruling over others.

In just these three sentences we have all kinds of annoying distortions and fishy statements:

For one thing they make it sound like Upper Paleolithic europe is full of these burials when we have like 5 or 6 sets of them across a 35,000 year timespan. We have about 200 burial sites, and maybe 5 of them have interesting evidence of what looks like social hierarchy. Maybe there are more of them, but every article on this subject lists the same few sites over and over again. And the “grand communal buildings” that they talk about as if they were the twin towers, are very similar to the sorts of longhouses that the relatively egalitarian arctic Inuit hunter gatherers have been building in recent times.

Next, they insultingly make it sound like evolutionary psychologists are all right wingers who think dominance is our nature – which is a real slap in the face of all the important left wing evolutionary psychologists and people influenced by them, like Christopher Boehm or Sarah Hrdy.

And, the authors go on:

“Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores [these burials] and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.”

Ugh the obnixious pinnochlios per sentence ratio is going off the charts – here you have 3 stinkers in two sentences this time.

First, no one in recent times ever says or even implies anything about primordial innocence. This is a hallucination – and i think also a projection by the authors who have some demented bugaboo where they where they think that anyone who talks about egalitarian societies is by definition seeing those societies as childish – which I think tells us way more about the authors views about equality than about the anthropology of egalitarian hunter gatherers which is nothing like that, except for maybe one book in the 1960s, The Forest People by Colin Turnbull, which I’ll take about later because I think it explains Graeber’s attitude towards egalitarianism. The more I read these chapters to prepare for these critiques the more I think that, much like Turgot, Graeber and Wengrow think that a state of true equality and freedom can only be a state of childishness – and they just hate the idea almost as much as any right winger does, if for different reasons. And we’ll see how they treat actual egalitarian socieites in chapter 4.

In reality, as we’ll see shortly, the egalitarian origins thesis, despite being a materialist argument, is at the same time, very much about conscious political action – like any good materialist thesis should be.

And these conscious actions include a lot of murder – like this is not at all some caricature of happy smurfs living together in giant mushroom houses that the authors seems to be stuck on.

Next, no one is ignoring this evidence, it’s been discussed a lot over the years and has challenged some of our previous assumptions. So today very few people now think that every single society was a hyper egalitarian immediate return society until 12,000 years ago, or that upper palaeolithic europe was all just immediate return hyper-egalitarian foragers.

But it doesn’t really change that much in terms of how we think social structure works or what we think our original social structures were like. The potentially hierarchical sites that we see in upper palaeolithic europe seem to be pretty exceptional, and seem to be limited to certain areas of europe – and they can reasonably be and usually are assumed to result from the extreme conditions of palaeolithic europe – and which I think is a precursor to what you see in the rest of the world later on as population density increases and climate changes everywhere making it harder to escape domination attempts.

More importantly, even those who are do interpret the evidence as pointing to hierarchy are always giving material explanations for it. For example Bryan Hayden who argues strongly for hiearchy in upper palaeolithic europe tells us

The fact that burials (especially those with substantial grave goods), cave art, portable prestige objects, and high site densities all tend to occur in the same restricted areas of Europe (such as the French Perigord and Charente) is a strong indication that there was something special about these locations favouring all these developments.

Finally, the passage I read where Graeber and Wengrow seem to imply that boehm is chastizing people for ignoring these burials because they’re stuck in a Rousseau vs Hobbes paradigm is pretty misleading – because Boehm actually doesn’t say anything about these palaeolithic burials in any work that I know of his. What Boehm is talking about there is the left right debates that I was referring to earlier which were going on from the late 1960s until Boehm’s 1999 book Hierarchy in the Forest – where people on the left and right were arguing about smurfs vs gargamel natured humans – a debate which Boehm’s book is largely responsible for having resolved – though there are always a few hobbesians out there desperately wanting the world to be a hellhole of selfishness and competition so this still does annoyingly still pop up in some texts.

And by the way, if you don’t know the smurfs, they’re a cartoon egalitarin communist society whose members all live in giant mushrooms, and their motto is “share an share alike” and they live under the benevolent guidance of papa smurf who wears a red hat and has a big white beard like karl marx and their enemy is this evil wizard gargamel who wants to enslave the smurfs and turn them into gold, much like capitalism wants to do to all of us.

So the authors continue:

“Boehm’s own work is revealing in this regard. An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way.”

OoooK – so some people might find this nitpicky, but to me this is a partial stinker in that it’s just a terrible way of formulating what Boehm’s is trying to say, and I think it confuses more than it clarifies.

The way the authors put it, it implies that people choose not to engage in dominance submissive behaviour because they have good values like Papa Smurf – and the smurfs. We want a good egalitarian society and not a bad hierarchical society.

And Boehm does talk about intention – but at the sametime Boehm is kind of saying the opposite of this: he’s saying that many people do in fact choose to act like bullies, but in the context of most hunting and gathering societies, when someone acts like a bully or tries to hoard resources or power, the conditions are such that the people that he’s trying to dominate will be able to successfully team up to stop him and his allies from getting anywhere. This is what Boehm calls reverse dominance, but which other scholars have since called “counterdominance” which I think more accurately describes what’s going on there.

And Boehm’s project in Hierarchy in the Forest, is kind of the inverse of Graeber and Wengrow’s project:

Graeber and Wengrow are asking how did we get stuck in hierarchy when we used to always go back and forth between hierarchy and equality? But Boehm is asking how did we manage to get unstuck from hierarchy and manage to enjoy and maintain equality for 200,000 or so – in between when we were stuck in the ape like dominance hierarchies of our pre-human ancestors, and then the middle of the neolithic – Boehm points to 5,000 years ago – biblical times which – when egalitarian societies really started getting phased out en masse in favour of hierarchical ones.

And like most left wing anthropologists – except for Graeber and Wengrow – Boehm is explicitly thinking about these questions in order to figure out if we can learn something from this that we can apply to our own societies, so that we can have some measure of equality again in the future, which Boehm talks about explicitly in the introduction to his book.

The authors continue

“Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be … bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and … sometimes even outright assassination)19 – .. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they did things differently…

This is decent, but again it isn’t exactly right – bullying behaviour might be instinctive but it’s also quite conscious. Bullies in human societies form coalitions in order to achieve domination, just like the alphas in our great ape cousins do. Also, counterdominance is just as instinctive as dominance is – Boehm takes it for granted that people instinctively do not like to be bullied and that they’ll resist domination if they can. Instinct and consciousness work together.

Then in the next paragraph the authors tell us:

This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another.”

Wait what? Boehm does not conclude that or say that anywhere! Like maybe he would agree with that statement, I don’t know, but he certainly doesn’t make any proclamations or statements about anything like the essence of politics or whatever. This is Graeber and Wengrow making Boehm into a muppet and putting words into his mouth. And they do this a lot – we’ll see some weird confusing examples of this next episode.

So yes – Boehm talks a lot about conscious action – and he argues that egalitarianism isn’t just automatic, it requires people to actually be active in suppressing bullies in order achieve it – but his argument is ultimately a materialist one about about force and the balance of power, not about winning arguments about the direction society should take at some big all inclusive occupy meeting:

You have a set of conditions: one being biological – people inherenly don’t like to be dominated and some like dominating others, and you have material logictical cirmustances inherent to nomadic hunting and gathering and palaeolithic climate fluctuations that make it possible to effectively band together to prevent domination and that make it hard to dominate one another. And if we ended up in hierarchy later on, it’s because those conditions changed.

Anyhow, the authors continue

“This is a brilliant and important argument –

referring to the statement that the authors put into Boehms mouth that represents what they themselves think…

but, like so many authors, Boehm seems strangely reluctant to consider its full implications. Let’s do so now: If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements,

something that boehm does not ever say

would that not mean that human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history?”

Well if you mean that human beings should have explored organizing ourselves into dominance hierarchies, then the answer is: of course not – because dominance hierarchy is not a choice, it’s an imposition! No on explores dominance hierarchy any more that one “explores” being sexually assaulted or beaten up or enslaved.

“In the end, confusingly, Boehm assumes that all human beings until very recently chose instead to follow exactly the same arrangements – we were strictly ‘egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear’ – thereby casually tossing early humans back into the Garden of Eden once again. Only with the beginnings of agriculture, he suggests, did we all collectively flip back to hierarchy. Before 12,000 years ago, Boehm insists, humans were basically egalitarian, living in what he calls ‘societies of equals, and outside the family there were no dominators’.

The authors are pretending to be confused, but there’s nothing confusing about this if you actually read Boehm’s book – which is really easy to read and I highly recommend doing so. It’s only confusing to the readers of Dawn of Everything, because Graeber and Wengrow, conveniently forgot tell us what Boehm’s logic and reasoning are – that conditions simply did not allow for domination beyond the family level.

This is like reviewing the Bible, and completely leaving out God, and then acting all confused about how the Jews crossed the red sea.

And Boehm never said that people were “strictly” egalitarian. For example he takes male dominance for granted, which I don’t agree with – but more importantly and more shockingly, the authors criticize boehm for thinking that humans didn’t explore a wide variety of social arrangements, when Boehm very clearly does believe that humans explored a wide variety of social arrangements – except that he assumes that they were all relatively egalitarian social arrangements.

In making his arguments about how palaeolithic societies maintained egalitarianism, Boehm discusses stories and examples from a whole range of different recent hunter gatherer societies – not just the hyper egalitarian immediate return foragers that I always talk about, but also all sorts of less egalitarian foragers who have gender inequality and gerontocracy and some times weak chieftainship positions – and he clearly assumes that these forms of hierarchies existed in the palaeolithic as well, but he lumps them all in to the category of “egalitarian” which is actually something I’ve criticized Graeber for doing in the past, because in hunter-gatherer studies, we generally reserve the term egalitarian for hyper egalitarian societies with gender equality and no leadership positions or gerontocracy.

Later in the book, Boehm goes on to point out that most societies on earth were still relatively egalitarian in this broad sense for several thousand years even after the advent of the Holocene and the adoption of agriculture by many societies. And as part of that discussion he list examples from a whole range of different agricultural and pastoralist societies who are relatively egalitarian but usually have male domination and gerontocracy – including tribally organized societies, and societies organized into confederations of thousands of pastoralist warriors, and even societies like navajo with chiefs who have very low authority.

Now if we assume that the authors actually read Hierarchy in the Forest – which we can’t actually assume because the standards of scholarship in humanities academia are shameful – they literally tell you in grad school not to read your books properly – but if we assume that they actually read this short, easy to read book, then the implications of what they’re saying are really astounding:

It means that for the authors, a broad range of different social arrangements, hyper egalitarian or with gerontocracy and male dominance and gerontocracy, small bands with no leadership positions, to weak chieftainships, to tribally organized large confederations of warriors, to pastoralists, to cereal farmers, to horticulturalists, nomadic to semi sedentary – all of this is not good enough for Graeber and Wengrow in terms of humans exploring potential forms of social organization.

Apparently for the authors, human beings are only exploring our full potential if we are also organizing ourselves into dominance hierarchies beyond just male dominance and gerontocracy – we need real hierarchies like the Pacific Northwest Coast hunter gatherers who had slaves and social classes and chiefs with economic power! And anyone who thinks that we were all relatively egalitarian is saying that we’re all a bunch of children with no agency. So says the anarchist anthropologist activist, sounding a lot like Turgot to my ears.

And this makes sense given Graeber’s pre-occupation in other parts of this book, and in other of his works with trying to project all of our current and past social institutions backwards and forwards in time. Graeber seems to hate the idea that societies were ever too different from one another.

According to Graeber, private property has always existed because the idea of the sacred is the root of private property which he says in chapter 4. He also thinks the state has always existed at least in our minds – i forget what his exact reasoning for this is but he says something like this in On Kings and I think Debt as well. And in Debt he explains that primitive communism exists today just as in the past, as expressed in family and friendship relations.

And in Dawn of Everything, Graeber asserts that dominance hierarchy always existed as well – like in On Kings where he and Marshal Sahlins pretend that even the most egalitarian societies see themselves as part of a cosmic hierarchy in their religious beliefs – which is total bullshit as I’ve discussed before. In Graeber’s ideology, we can’t be fully human unless we have all of the same institutions as always – including dominance hierarchies – anything less and we’re somehow less than human.

On the one hand I agree that being human means that we have the potential for all of these things and that the seeds or roots of these institutions exist through time – how could they not? And that’s actually a really brilliant and important insight from Graeber – if you don’t blow it up all out of proportion into this factually incorrect nonsense like what the authors do here and what Graeber does elsewhere.

Anyhow, they continue:

“So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’”

Again, not “nothing happened” – if you read Boehm, it’s implied that there were and still are constant power struggles – people repeatedly trying to get an edge over on others, and Boehm has a whole chapter just discussing example after example of people trying and failing to assert their dominance in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies, or else where they succeed for a time, but then eventually get disciplined and often executed. For example he talks about how sometimes an aggressive inuit man might succeed in dominating others and becoming something like a chief for awhile but that eventually the community would usually find a way to get rid of him.

So yes, lots of things happened in 200,000 years, but because of the conditions of nomadic hunting and gathering, most of the time no one would have been able to successfully dominate anyone else for very long.

And speaking of the relevant conditions to hierarchy or equality, in his 2012 Book, Moral Origins, Boehm makes a more specific case about why it would have been really difficult for any kind of hierarchical society beyond the level of male domination and some gerontocracy to take root in the palaeolithic.

The reason for this is because the temperature was fluctuating wildly throughout the palaeolithic. Not just in Europe but all over the world. Waters rising and falling within a generation or two, ice caps moving back and forth. Habitable territories expanding and contracting. Deserts growing and shrinking. Given these conditions it would have been extremely unlikely that you would be able to have societies with chiefs and commonners and nobilities and slaves, like you see in the Pacific Northwest Coast indians or the Calusa in Florida – nor would you be likely to find many larger scale settlements.

This is probably a big reason why homo sapiens is such a big brained jack of all trades species – for all of the extended 2 million year or so period of our evolution into homo sapiens, we lived in the crazy palaeolithic where our environments were changing every couple of generations and we had to change our subsistence strategies each time to adapt – which is what culture is all about.

You need a stable territory and a good amount of time in order to establish a proper stratified hierarchy. Like I mentioned in an earlier episode, it took 800 years for the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples to develop hierarchy – but in the Paleolithic an analogous society would have likely have had to move and shift their subsistence strategies something like 10 or 20 times over that period – and in squeeze times you might have a lot of competition and nowhere to escape to, but in times where habitable environments expanded you would have all sorts of places to expand and escape to. This is one of the reasons why many archaeologists and skeptical of claims of any kind of intergenerational hierarchy in upper palaeolithic europe.

I suspect that we were moving back and forth from hyperegalitarianism in growth times, to relative egalitarianism with some male dominance and gerontocracy like the Australians have in squeeze times and sometimes more hierarchy in exceptional circumstances – maybe like upper palaeolithic europe

This is why Boehm – and most people with knowledge – believe that we were mostly organized into small egalitarian bands for most of the palaeolithic – which the evidence seems to say as well until we get towards the end of the paleolithic where we start to see more semi sedentary foraging in various places around the world. But even if we were organized into small bands, they weren’t just isolated bands, these bands fissioning and fusing inside a web of enormous communities thousands of miles wide, as we’ll talk about in another episode, and which I believe Wengrow and Graeber talk about later in the book. And people in many places were surely agglomorating into larger groups seasonally as the authors will be talking about in this chapter. Even today every nomadic and semi nomadic society goes from smaller to larger camp sizes seasonally – which the authors forget to mention, they make it seem like changing social structure seasonally is some kind of lost art, forgotten or suppressed by anthropologists. Almost everyone changes structure seasonally, but that doesn’t always lead to changes in terms of dominance hierarchy.

Now the conditions that favoured equality changed significantly with the advent of the Holocene 12 000 years ago where the climate became much more stable. This made sedentary and semi sedentary living possible for much longer periods of time. And along with increased carbon in the atmosphere this made long term dependence on agriculture possible, both of which in turn make hierarchy much more possible by making criteria #1 possible – but these phenomena alone are not sufficient on their own to explain the explosion of hierarchy which happens when criteria #2 starts to get fulfilled more and more around the world, as we’ll discuss in the future.

Anyhow, the authors then tell us about the “rich” hunter-gather burials which we find across western Eurasia from the Dordogne to the Don, dating back from 34,000 years ago until 16,000 years ago. And the famous sites are Sunghir in northern Russia where there’s a corpse adorned with a garments made with fine beads that would have taken over 10,000 hours of labour to make and assemble, Dolní Věstonice which is in the modern Czechia, where you have a triple burial of three men with elaborate high ranking looking headdreses, you have a group of cave burials on the coast of Liguria near the border between italy and france, which includes one particularly lavish burial know as The Prince who has a staff and fancy accoutrements that others around him don’t have, and then the highly ornamented Lady of Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière burial in the Dorgogne area.

“Such findings have completely altered the specialist view of human societies in prehistory. The pendulum has swung so far away from the old notion of egalitarian bands that some archaeologists now argue that, thousands of years before the origins of farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power.

Now this is funny because since the beginning of the book they’ve been telling us that everyone today is still stuck in this egalitarian origins paradigm – but now they’re telling us that the pendulum has swung totally in the other direction and everyone today is arguing that the palaolithic was full of hierarchy?

Anyhow, the authors don’t mention this, but the burial sites that they listed, and that I listed here are basically all the examples that we have. So that’s four or five sites out of 200, over a 20k year time span. Surely we’ll find more things like this with time, but that’s not a lot of evidence, especially given that europe has been the most excavated place for the longest time of anywhere, and that those kinds of ornaments tend to survive better than graves of people who don’t have elaborate grave goods.

Again, discussion of these site did in fact make us revise some of our assumptions that we had in the 1960s and 70s about everyone being hyper egalitarian immediate return hunter gatherers until the holocene, but overall the picture is still basically the same and these finds make sense from a materialist perspective, given the extreme environment and difficult conditions that would be pushing people into unusual subsistence strategies.

The authors then go on to talk about monumental architecture in upper palaeolithic europe, but for some reason they start off by talking about Gobleki Tepe – which is a spectacular monumental architecture site in anatolia, and which is extra spectacular because it was probably built by semi-sedentary hunter gatherers, and archaeologists still can’t figure out exactly how they managed to do this.

But Gobleki Tepe has no place in this discussion – Goblecki tepe is about 11,500 years old, meaning that it was built in the holocene era, a couple of centuries after the climate had complete changed and stabilized, and not the pleistocene palaeolithic era where humanity emerged. So where the upper palaeolithic europe that the authors focus on tells us almost nothing about human origins, the early holocene tells us even less – it’s like being on a different planet. It’s like if you’re writing about traditional pre-european contact native american societies and you focus on all the amazing Casinos that you have on indian reservations today.

Also, as part of this discussion of monumental architecture, the authors talk about the mammoth houses in europe that were put together at some point between 25k and 12k years ago up in what was at the time an arctic type of environment spread across an area reaching from Kraków to Kiev.

Now as other critics have mentioned, calling this stuff monumental architecture is a huuuge stretch. Monumental architecture refers to giant constructions that take enormous amount of labour hours to build. Most mammoth houses were actually just like little cool looking igloo sized tents made from mammoth parts. There were some larger buildings that look like public assembly halls which the authors focus on, or else like multifamily homes – but these are similar to the types of structures that recent inuit populations had in winter which we’ll look next episode.

There is nothing at all like Gobleki Tepe, which has no analog whatsoever during the palaeolithic era, and the likes of which I think would have been impossible to achieve during the paleolithic.

The authors go on:

So what are we to make of all this evidence for stone temples, princely burials, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the Ice Age? … Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian Golden Age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandizement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution.

Again, no one has ever argued this as far as I know – the authors are just saying this to make themselves sound like even bigger wanna be rebels than they are. But anyhow they go on to say that this nonexistent theory isn’t right either, and then they reveal to us what I mentioned a few seconds ago:

“Evidence of institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place”

So after planting a wildly innacurate portrait of the european upper palaeolithic in your mind, now they finally tell us what I just told you, which is that all that stuff is actually quite exceptional.

And then later on in the chapter Graeber and Wengrow are going to point out that actually there’s a good chance that those hierarchical burials aren’t even very hierarchical at all, as they’re mostly individuals with really unusual physical characteristics and deformities – who often look like they were buried with those fancy ornaments because there was ritual significance placed on unusual people in many societies.

We’ll get back to that next time, but the next paragraph after the one i just read says

“after all, if any of these Ice Age ‘princes’ had behaved like, say, Bronze Age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralized power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling ‘states’.

Say What?? no one has ever talked about palaeolithic states or anything anywhere approaching that. At most people think that maybe some these societies might have looked a little like the Pacific Northwest Chiefdoms with social classes – which are the most hierarchical types of hunter gatherers that we know of. States would have been completely impossible in the palaeolithic, as would things like palaces with fortifications. Even long term full time sedentary settlements were likely extremely rare to non-existent. If there were chiefs or authority figures in upper paleolithic they wouldn’t have had the option to behave like bronze age or renaissance princes! Their population densities were so low and they would have had no way to marshal the necessary resources among many other reasons!

I don’t even understand why they’re talking about this stuff – except that it looks like authors are basically trying to position themselves above the fray of a non-existent debate. Dumdums on one side think were were egalitarian foragers while dumdums on the other side think there were medieval states all over palaeolithic europe – but we know better… So much of this book is predicated on having an audience that doesn’t know anything about the subject matter that the authors are talking about.

Basically what Graeber and Wengrow have done so far in this chapter, is they start with a false premise – that anthropologists believe that every single society on earth was the exact same kind of egalitarian nomadic hunting and gathering society – and then they show us a bunch of exceptional stuff to disprove this nonexistent false premise, and then they pull it back after already painting the idea in your head.

By talking about monumental architecture, and states – even to refute states, they make it sound as if this means there was certainly some dominance hierarchy beyond the family level and that things are not at all as mainstream anthropologists say they are – yet they present zero evidence for this. All they show us is that there were some semi sedentary foragers in the most extreme environment on earth who gave ritual significance to physically unusual people, though maybe there was some hierarchy.

Remember that what they’re doing here is they’re trying to refute the idea of egalitarian origins and replace it with the idea that inequality has no origins, we were always just everything at the same time – everything except stuck. So far their biggest argument against egalitarian origins that they’ve presented is that we can assume that there must have been as much diversity in terms of absence and presence of dominance hierarchies because hobbits.

I could easily make a much better case for hierarchy in the palaeolithic if I wanted to:

Like, the same way that every hyper egalitarian culture we know practices immediate return hunting and gathering, I think all of the the very hierarchical foragers that we know about, like the Pacific Northwest Coast cultures or the Calusa in Florida or the Ainu in northern japan are all people whose economies depend on fishing, and the relationship between fishing economies and hierarchical systems is pretty well established – so much so that some researchers made a new category for them “hunter-gatherer fishers” and we’ll talk about that when we do chapter 5. And so, people have argued that societies who relied on fish in the palaeolithic would also have been structured hierarchically. To which other’s will reply – yeah but we have zero evidence for any type of hierarchy like this before 6000 years ago. And then the pro hierarchy people will point out that the reason we don’t have any evidence for this is because the sea levels rose significantly 6000 years so that we don’t have access to coastal arhcaeologocal sites of fishing people older than 6000 years old – they’re all under water – but if we did, we would surely find all sorts of palaeolithic societies structured like the Haida with chiefs nobility, commoners and slaves.

And then others will reply that this isn’t likely, because like I said before, the climate would have been changing too fast for this type of hierarchy to really take root – but the authors could easily have used this type of argument and left out the climate stuff like they’ve been leaving out all the inconvenient facts and ideas that complicate their narrative so far – except that they can’t make this argument, or any real argument at all because every argument for or against egalitarian origins equates social structure with economic activity which is exactly what they don’t want us to think about! Again, their real argument is not about egalitarian origins – trying to refute egalitarian origins is just incidental to their real message about how social structure is some kind of conscious choice.

So they got nah-thing.

I’ll put a couple of articles by people who disagree with egalitarian origins in the bibliography so you can see some of these arguments for yourselves, but the authors can’t make any of those arguments – or any arguments at all – because any argument for or against egalitarian origins is based on material conditions and economic activities which give some people advantages over others – exactly what the authors don’t want us to think about because it doesn’t fit their nonsensical narrative about choosing social structure.

Anyhow, the authors go on:

To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about ‘primitive’ mentalities.”

and then they obnoxiously title the next section ‘IN WHICH WE DISPOSE OF LINGERING ASSUMPTIONS THAT ‘PRIMITIVE’ FOLK WERE SOMEHOW INCAPABLE OF CONSCIOUS REFLECTION, AND DRAW ATTENTION TO THE HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF ECCENTRICITY’

In the last chapter, we suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth-century Europeans, or at least we think we have, but it’s not unusual to find even very sophisticated contemporary thinkers who feel it’s more appropriate to compare ‘bands’ of hunter-gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they’d ever be likely to meet.

Oof. So every part of this makes my blood boil. Again, they’re basically pretending that anthropology is still in the 1950s and once again, this is a huge insult to everyone working in these fields.

I’m sorry, but the stupid savage is the legacy of colonialism and capitalism – not of Rousseau. And while that legacy is still very much part of the popular imagination, it’s long gone from anthropology.

The authors go on to cite Yuval Harari -who remember is not an anthropologist – as an example – and they shit on him for comparing prehistoric foragers’ potentially warlike or peaceful dispositions to chimps vs bonobos, instead of to human biker gangs vs hippies. And they suggest that Harari is doing this because he thinks that hunter gatherers, like bonobos and chimps have no agency, hinting that it’s racist to make these comparisons.

Now I’m not a big fan of Harari – I find a lot of what he says in his Sapiens book to be even more obnoxious than the stuff that I’m criticizing in this book – but jesus christ – if what you’re talking about is humans’ innate dispositions and propensity towards war or peace, or towards hierarchy or equality – then of course you’re going to compare us to our closest animal relatives – bonobos who are largely peaceful and more egalitarian, and chimps, who are much more aggressive and hierarchical – instead of to other humans like bikers and hippies – which makes no fucking sense because the whole point is to compare humans in our original state – hunting and gathering, a so-called “state of nature” – to other species in their natural states…

The question is: when humans are in our natural state – outside of the influence of recently invented institutions and conditions which probably have a huge effect on our behaviour and social structures – are we more like chimps or more like bonobos – meaning are we inherently more prone to violence or to cooperation? Or, are violence and peace more a function of conditions than about our innate propensities to begin with? These are completely legitimate and very important questions – and comparing us to biker gangs and hippies would defeat the whole purpose of the comparison – it’s the same reason we always compare ourselves to wild chimpanzee and wild bonobos, and not chimpanzees and bonobos who live in zoos – unless we’re trying to make a point about how artificial conditions change our social structures and behaviour.

Insinuating that this is somehow racist, or infantilizing or insulting to humans is such sanctimonious counterproductive bullshit. It’s also just incredibly ignorant – because bonobos and chimps and other animals do very much have political agency!

For example, the instinct to dominate and act aggressively is just one small element of chimp hierarchy. Much like humans, chimps can’t actually establish themselves on top of a dominance hierarchy just based on these dumdum instincts. To become an alpha you also need to deliberately and carefully cultivate and form coalitions in order to successfully dominate the rest of the group – otherwise people would unite and repel chase you off.

In an upcoming episode I’m going to use chimpanzee politics as an analogy to explain what happened in terms of labour relations when McDonalds came to Sweden in the 1980s and tried to break the unions there. Is that comparison racist against american CEOs and Swedish unionized workers? If anything we should be making more comparisons to chimpanzees not less. We should compare bikers and hippies to chimps and bonobos, not to hunter gatherers!

The authors then ask:

“Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’.

Yes I agree! What makes a political actor isn’t someone randomly making choices in a sensory deprivation tank virtual reality video game – it’s making choices under certain conditions that impose constraints and limitations on our choices, conditions that often make some choices much more likely than others, and sometimes almost certain as we’ll see when we do chapter 5.

OK, so that’s it for now – next time we’ll finish the rest of chapter 3 where they lecture us about the so-called primitive mentality – and then ironically, in order to counter the caricature that they paint of anthropologists as portraying traditional people as children with no agency, the authors end up painting a portrait of traditional people as superhuman schrooming space unicorns who have way more consciousness or agency than any human could possibly have.

And then if possible I’ll try to do chapters 4 and 5 in one episode because I can’t keep doing this book critique forever! But those are the most interesting chapters for me, so we’ll see what happens.

And even if you don’t have money – don’t feel guilty – but if you have the chance, please tell other people about this show, as it’s really hard to get the word out in this algorythm ruled, supersaturated podcast landcape. In particular if you’re in contact with any prominent-ish youtubespersonages or podcaststers and there’s an epsiode that’s relevant to them, please share it with them, it seems like a boost from someone like that is the only way to grow your audience – I mentioned Matt Christman, I think he’d really be into this – and if you don’t know him he’s on Chap Trap House which is great, but check out his Cush Vlogs or Grill Stream videos and podcasts, I think he’s really one of the greatest minds of our generation when it comes to political analysis and he has an incredible grasp of american and european history – and it’s extra awesome because he has no credentials and he looks like an insane drunken lunatic screaming on a milk crate in the park – meanwhile even his most in passing little blurts of ideas put all the big pundits and celebrated thinkers of our time to shame.

And check out Fight Like an Animal who recently reviewed Dawn of Everything on the episode ethnogenesis part 4, and check out Alpha to Omega podcast’s Understanding Class series and Fundamental Principles of Communism where they’re reading a couple of interesting and important books.

Bibliography / Suggested Readings

Graeber & Wengrow 2021 – The Dawn of Everything

Graeber 2010 – Communism

David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins 2017 – On Kings

David Graeber 2011 – Debt

Egalitarian Origins

Christopher Boehm 1999 – Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm 2012 – Moral Origins

Sarah Hrdy 2011 – Mothers and Others

Doron Shultziner et al 2009 – Causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial

Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan & Hilary Callan (eds) 2017 – Human Origins

Cooperative Eye

Harrod et al 2020 – Social Structure predicts eye contact tolerance in nonhuman primates

Kobayashi Hiromi & Kohshima Shiro 2001 – Unique morphology of the human eye and its adaptive meaning: comparative studies on external morphology of the primate eye. Journal of Human Evolution (40) (5): 419–435.

Hierarchy in Upper-palaeolithic Europe

Moreau (ed) 2020 – Social Inequality Before Farming?

(this is an anthology of papers from the latest big conference on this issue, several chapters are available online from the authors if you goorgle the title of the anthology and editor)

Anti Egalitarian Origins Scholars

Singh & Glowacki 2021 – Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene

Sassaman, K. 2004. Complex hunter-gatherers in evolution and history: a North American perspective.

Human Culture in the Middle Palaeolithic

Eleanor Scerri 2017, The North African Middle Stone Age and its place in recent human evolution, Evolutionary Anthropology 26

Stiner 2009 – Early Human Hunters Had Fewer Meat-sharing Rituals

Kuhn & Stiner 2006 – What’s a Mother To Do? The Division of Labor among Neandertals and Modern Humans in Eurasia

Stiner et al 2009 – Cooperative hunting and meat sharing 400–200 kya at Qesem Cave, Israel

Behar et al 2008 – The Dawn of Human Matrilineal Diversity

Ian Watts et al 2016 – Early Evidence for Brilliant Ritualized Display: Specularite Use in the Northern Cape (South Africa) between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago

Psychology Experiments

Obhi et al 2014 – Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others

Piff et al 2012 – Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior

Frank Marlowe 2004 – What Explains Hadza Food Sharing?

Frank Marlowe 2004 – Dictators and Ultimatum Games Among Hunter-Gatherers

Critique of Graeber and Wengrow’s Monumental Architecture Claims

Peter Turchin 2019 – An Anarchist View of Human Social Evolution

Critique of Graeber and Wengrow’s New Origin Myth

Arnold Schroeder 2021 – Fight Like an Animal Podcast ep. 38: Ethnogenesis pt. 4: Becoming a People in Terra Incognita

10.4 What Really Causes Seasonal Social and Political Structures? The Dawn of Everything Chapter 3

Apr 21, 2022

In this episode we cover the rest of chapter 3 of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything, and we investigate the authors’ claims that:

The seasonal social structures of the traditional Nambikwara, Lakota and Kwakiutl were the result of conscious choice, grand theatre, play and expedience.

That rich ice age burials were examples of ritually celebrated “freaks”rather than examples of hierarchy — but that they were also somehow examples of hierarchy at the same time (??).

In doing so we discover that:

Graeber & Wengrow seem to have invented a bunch of things that the authors that they cite didn’t actually say.

Graeber & Wengrow repeatedly claim that the authors that they cite attribute social phenomena to conscious choice when in reality their sources attribute them to material conditions.

Claude Levi-Strauss goofed up Nambikwara social organization.

And we look at materialist explanations for phenomena such as:

Inuit seasonal social structures, including seasonal gender hierarchy, settlement patterns and property rights.

The similarities between Nuer prophets and ancient Israelite prophets in the Old Testament.

Finally, we apply the authors’ logic about conscious choice and seasonal social structures to McDonalds employees and have a good a laugh.

https://youtu.be/UNr6XpdRHOk

For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Script

Hello fellow kids and welcome back to What is Politics.

In this episode we’ll be covering the rest of Chapter 3 from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything book, which is entitled Unfreezing the Ice Age.

In this part of the book, the authors try to argue that human societies used to shift back and forth from hierarchy to equality for fun, play and expedience, which leads them to the big thesis question of the book: if societies in the past used to shift back and forth from hierarchy to equality seemingly at will, then how is it that for the past several thousand years, most societies seem to be stuck in hierarchy.

Before we get in to the text, let’s do a little recap of some of the important theory points that we’ve been making in this series so we can understand what we’re reading, and also so that we can understand what’s going on in the world around us.

As discussed in earlier episodes, the word politics refers to decision making in groups – which includes the state, but also any group, the workplace, the family, your basketball team.

So, when we’re talking about hierarchy or equality in a political context, what were talking about is hierarchy or equality of decision making power. Does everyone have the same power, or do some people have more power than others – and if so, what’s the basis of the inequality of power, and what are the moral or intellectual justifications for it – because inequalities of power always come with justifications of some sort – efficiency, merit, superiority, human nature, divine providence, being the vanguard of the working class.

And whatever the justification is clearing out space for the master race, or creating the necessary conditions for socialism – any argument that justifies a political hierarchy is by definition a right wing argument.

Because in politics the left refers to the people who support equality of decision making power, and the right refers to those who support hierarchies of decision making power.

And last time, we looked at the difference between dominance hierarchy, where the hierarchy is benefits the people on the top of the hierarchy, and imposed by them, vs. a democratic hierarchy where the hierarchy is formed for the benefit of its members, and where the people on top, only get to be there insofar as they benefit the rest.

In the future and we’ll look at how democratic vs dominance hierarchy is a spectrum, and how democratic hierarchy can morph into dominance hierarchy in the right circumstances – or rather the wrong circumstances – but what we need to understand today, is that while people might choose to establish a democratic hierarchy in order to achieve shared goals for the sake of efficiency, the idea that a society as whole would choose to establish itself as a dominance hierarchy does not make any sense. Dominance hierarchies are chosen by people on top choose it, and imposed on the people on the bottom, who at best tolerate it for lack of better options. And the level of dominance hierarchy is determined by the relative bargaining power of the two parties of classes.

Now, because people don’t choose to be stuck in dominance hierarchy on purpose – the existence of a dominance hierarchy can only be explained by particular circumstances which give some people certain bargaining power advantages over others.

And we saw that there’s basically only one general recipe for all dominance hierarchies – 1^st, you need to have some people who are able to control access to resources that other people need – and 2^nd, you need for there to be no preferable alternatives to get those resources other than to subject yourself to the commands of the people who control those resources.

So, if we want to answer Graeber and Wengrow’s question of how we got stuck in hierarchy – meaning if you want to understand where a particular dominance hierarchy comes from and how to get rid of it, or how to reduce it’s severity, then first you need to ask “what are the conditions that are giving some people the ability to impose their choices on other people”. And then once you’ve identified those, the next thing you need to ask is “what can we do to change those conditions in a way that reduces or eliminates those advantages”.

Unfortunately, as Graeber and Wengrow will later tell us in Chapter 5, they explicitly don’t want to think about conditions or circumstances. Instead, they want to focus on conscious choice and “freedom”. And the reason for this, is because they mistakenly think that if conditions are what result in hierarchy or equality, then this means that we are truly stuck forever stuck in hierarchy today because of the conditions inherent to advanced industrial civilization. And they quote Jared Diamond and others to that effect in chapter 1.

But what the authors forget as they go down this dead-end path of seeing hierarchy as a random choice disconnected from conditions, is that one of the powers of human beings is that we have the power to choose to shape and change the conditions that we live in – at least sometimes – it all depends on the conditions!

Unfortunately, as a result of trying to avoid materialist answers, and of trying to focus on discombobulated conscious choices outside the context of the conditions in which those choices are made, not only are the authors unable to answer their own questions, but they routinely bury or ignore all of the parts of the sources that they discuss which actually do answer those questions, which we saw last time and which we’ll see more of today.

Materialism and agency are not opposed to eachother – materialism is simply the context in which freedom and choice are exercised. And without it we throw away our best tools for understanding why people make choices, or for predicting what choices they will make, which makes it impossible to design institutions and rules that will have the effect we want them to have.

OK, so now let’s get into the book, and let the cartoon, begin:

Chapter Three

So this part of the chapter starts off with some intellectual history:

The authors point out that in the ancient world – philosophers from greece to india to chiner took it for granted that we only really think when we dialogue with others, and that this is why so many philosophical works are written as dialorgs instead of just monolorgs. Individual consciousness on the other hand was something that was exceptional and the result of a life of contemplation and studying.

“Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation. What we’d now call political consciousness was always assumed to come first.

But then in europe with the enlightenment, intellectuals got all of this backwards. Because they saw europe as waking up out of 1000 years of lack of superstition and rigid religious dogma, european philosophers assumed that ordinary people could have individual consciousness but politically they would traditional people just blindly followed traditions and that political consciousness wasn’t possible until civilization and literature and enlightenment made it possible, and that it was only available to the educated and well read.

All this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman whose impact on European political thought we discussed in the previous chapter. Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.“

OK so far so good, as far as I know since I have no knowledge of this field – but then the authors come back to their condescending misrepresentations about the anthropology hunter gatherers:

“Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as ‘egalitarian’, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different ‘bands’ being different from each other – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness, or certainly anything we’d now call visionary politics, would have been impossible.”

As usual on this subject, the authors are arguing with scholars from the 1970s or before that. Scholars no longer write like that, unless they’re discussing the entire palaeolithic era in like 2 pages in order to make a larger point about something else, because you can’t make generalizations or discuss giant periods of time in any other way.

But then as they do so many times in this book, they try to have it both ways:

“Now, admittedly, there have always been exceptions to this rule. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.”

Newsflash: Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages is literally every cultural anthropologist with a PhD – that is how you get your PhD. The authors are trying to make it seem like there are these good anthropologists who humanize the subjects of their research, but then there are all these bad anthropologists who believe in egalitarian origins and make generalizations about cultures – but in the real world, these are usually the exact same anthropologist doing both of these things!

When you write an ethnography, you will tend to write a lot of individualized stories about all the people you lived with for the years you spent there. But then if you’re the exact same person and you go and write a book about anything involving about humanity as a whole – like human origins, or the evolution of violence, or the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture – you’re going to talk mostly in generalizations, and in ways that erase individuality because you can’t talk about these topics in any other way!

For the authors to chastise people for this is like getting mad at someone who takes a picture of the earth from outer space for erasing individual human identities – it’s just nonsense – and it’s crippling nonsense, preventing us from being able to actually do anything useful with anthropology.

It’s also extremely ironic because earlier the authors were chastizing anthropologists for not having the courage to make any generalizations! Apparently generalizations are only permitted if you make the types of generalizations that the authors like.

The authors then go on to point out that in many traditional societies, eccentric and nonconformist people are not punished for deviating from social norms, but instead they’re often revered or celebrated in different ways.

And they go on to talk about how in times of crisis, the Nuer pastoralists in southern Sudan will often elevate people who would be considered insane or schizophrenic, and follow them as prophets.

“a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion; even to be capable of inspiring new social movements among the youth or co-ordinating elders across Nuerland to put aside their differences and mobilize around some common goal; even, sometimes, to propose entirely different visions of what Nuer society might be like.”

Now this is correct, and super interesting – but what would have been more interesting and more useful would have been for them to talk about how these Nuer bipolar prophets aren’t just randomly proposing different visions of what Nuer society might look like. They’re fulfilling a specific social function, in response to particular conditions, as others have historically done in similar conditions.

The whole phenomenon of crazy prophets in Nuer society seems to be recent phenomenon – starting around the turn of the 20^th century. And according to E Evans-Pritchard who wrote the classic studies of the Nuer in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Nuer prophecy began as a response to war and aggression from the outside, which required the Nuer, who are a male egalitarian tribal society, with no political leaders and no formal organization beyond the tribal level, to organize massive coordinated responses to colonial invaders and other people encroaching on their territories.

So the reason that people suddenly started following anomalous weirdos who don’t conform to social norms, is because these people allowed the tribes to coordinate under leadership in ways that couldn’t otherwise have existed within the confines of their existing social structure. If you elevated a regular person to a special leadership status, it would disrupt the whole existing social order and create disruption and conflict. But you could elevate a weirdo person who was already outside the norms of the existing society and existing politics without threatening the fiercely egalitarian power balance between men in Nuer society.

Evans-Pritchard also noticed that the Nuer culture as a whole had many similarities to the ancient israelites in the early parts of the old testament, including the prophetic tradition. The ancient israelites were nomadic pastoralists just like the nuer with similar a social and political structure at that point in time, and the early biblical prophets emerged in similar circumstances: in order to unite independent competing tribes in order to fight wars in a system that allowed for no higher political authority beyond the male head of the family.

Monotheism is thought to have emerged for related reasons, as a locus to unite the different competing tribes with different identities into one political group versus others. And Evans-Pritchard noted that monotheistic ideas were gaining traction among the Nuer and spread by some of their recent prophets as well, apparently for similar reasons.

The authors are hinting at when they talk about prophets allowing the Nuer to imagine new forms of social organization, but I think they left out all of this context for a reason – because it highlights just how important conditions are – to the extent that people 5000 years apart in time, living in totally different worlds, from different racial, religious and ethnic groups, end up making very similar choices in similar circumstances.

Nambikwara

OK, so now the authors try to push their conscious choice theory by talking about three cultures that change their social structures seasonally – or do they?

First they talk about the Nambikwara, who are an amazonian people who according to Claude Levi-Strauss, do horticulture in the rainy season for about 5 months, and then do hunting and gathering in very difficult conditions for the rest of of the year.

And the first point that the authors try to make here is that the Nambikwara don’t fit into the supposedly rigid evolutionary models of behavioural ecologists / materialist anthropologists who divide people up into artificial categories like hunter gatherers and horticulturalists and pastoralists and sedentary farmers. Supposedly these anthropologists heads would just explode at the idea of a culture that goes from one mode of production to the other seasonally, and the authors seem to be implying that we should stop using these types of categories altogether.

As proof that these categories are useless as is all of materialist anthropology, the authors tell us that not only do the Nambikwara change economic activities from season to season, but that they also change their social structure, telling us that their chief has much more power and authority in the foraging season than he does in the horticulture season, which according to the authors is the opposite of what materialist behavioural ecology models tell us. Apparently in the 2 dimensional 1960s caricature that Graeber and Wengrow paint of modern anthropological theory, hunter gatherers are all supposed supposed to be egalitarian, and farmers are all supposed to be hierarchical – which of course is strawman nonsense, there are plenty of hierarchical foragers and plenty of relatively egalitarian horticulturalists which anthropologists have been discussing since the 19^th century – remember that Marx and Engels’ discussion of primitive communism was based on the Haudenosaunee horticulturalists.

And on top of that, the authors also tell us that Nambikwara chiefs act like modern welfare statesmen redistributing wealth to the poor just like we see in our big industrial civilizations. So Boom, there are no categories! Take that the stages of history theory, even though stages of history theories have already been dead for several decades already!

All of this is why anthropology has supposedly ignored the Nambikwara and all of the lessons they can teach us about agency and freedom and political consciousness blah blah blah.

Now there is such a mess going on here, that it’s hard to untangle it – and my head is still spinning from just how bad it was which sucked up an enormous amount of time out of my life as I kept getting sucked deeper and deeper into a swirling vortex of total nonsense and awful scholarship.

I was originally going to read the authors sources and then give materialist explanations for the seasonal differences in Nambikwara social and political structure – but that turned out to be impossible.

The authors tell us that:

“Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.”

But Levi-Strauss doesn’t say anything like this at all. According to Levi-Strauss the chief had no coercive authority and that his only power was persuasion – all year round. If anything you could read into Levi-Strauss that the chief had less authority in the hunting season because if he didn’t do a good job people would just leave and join a different band to the point where he could actually lose his position, but he doesn’t say anything specifically about changing levels of authority from season to season anywhere in his texts on the Nambikwara.

It seems like the authors just made this stuff up about the chief being authoritarian in the hunting season, in order to make it seem like the Nambikwara had two different political systems and that scarecrow strawman anthropologists are wrong about hunter gatherers always being egalitarian.

I’ll include the relevant parts of the Levi-Strauss text in the transcript, because I had originally included a whole section comparing the two Graeber & Wengrow texts to the Levi-Strauss text – but then just before recording, I found out the Nambikwara don’t actually even switch from hunting and gathering to farming to begin with!

David Price and Paul Aspelin who independently of each other each lived with the Nambikwara for years at a time in the 1970s, both confirm that the Nambikwara do not actually switch from nomadic foraging in one season to sedentary farming in the other season. And Aspelin found that this was also the case in Levi-Strauss’ time as well. Apparently Levi-Strauss only stayed with them during an extended hunting expedition and had misunderstood this to be the way of life for 7 months out of the year. And he had never even visited a village.

So while I can’t give materialist explanations for things that don’t exist, what I can do is point out that the authors’ war on categories is completely insane. It’s this very typical post-modern brain disease where you start with an important and valid critique – that categories are artificial constructs, not fixed realities – but then, instead translating that into constructive lessons they just go straight into throw the baby out with the bathwater mode – eliminate all categories – each individual tree is different! There are no species! Spruce trees are a social construct!!

And the result is that if you take this garbage seriously, it prevents you from being able to apply knowledge in any practical way. All categories of things that exist in the real world – even things like fruits vs vegetables, arms vs wrists, berries vs citrus fruits, or man vs woman as is topical nowadays – these categories are all imperfect and they break down at a certain point. But we use them anyways, because they are short cuts that prevent us from having to re-invent the wheel every single time we encounter things.

Like good luck figuring out which wood to use if you want to building a house if you don’t know the difference between a pine tree and a douglas fir! Or imagine trying to be a surgeon if you refuse to acknowledge that a heart and stomach are separate organs because there’s no exact way to tell where one ends and the other begins and all the organs are actually interconnected and work as one big system! It’d be like being paralyzed on mushrooms staring at the ceiling.

This is why academia has turned into a giant masturbation festival since post-modernist paradigms took over. Jizzle jizzle jam!

The reason that we create subsistence categories in anthropology – like foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists – immediate return vs delayed return foragers – is because those subsistence practices tend to create conditions which have important and specific consequences on culture and political structure and ideology etc.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, immediate return hunter gatherers are almost always hyper egalitarian – while hunter gatherers who focus primarily on fishing are usually very hierarchical.

And crucially to the authors’ thesis questions about how do we get stuck in hierarchy – having these kinds of categories helps you isolate the causes of patterns and similarities that you find within those categories. What is it about nomadic pastoralism that always results in male dominance and cultures with lots of blood feuds and honour codes? Why are people in horticultural societies so often obsessed with accusing eachother of witchcraft? Why is it that immediate return foragers never seem to care very much about witchcraft or to get caught up in blood feuds?

And we have a lot of very good answers to these types of questions, but you’ll never learn about them from Dawn of Everything, because the authors heads are buried too deep in their own bunguses, wanking on about freedom and choice totally out of context of the practical conditions that those choices are made under.

One of the main effects of post structuralist turn in academia – where you attack anyone who does any generalizing or who looks for materialist answers to things or who even uses categories – is that humanities academia is no longer oriented towards producing anything that can actually help anyone do anything to change society. You can’t even take the first step of asking why anything happens. You can ask who what where and when, but if you ask why, that inevitably leads to materialist inquiries, and suddenly everyone gets really uncomfortable like you made a big stinky and then they start accusing you of essentialism and objectifying people and whatever other nonsense.

What started as a well intentioned critique of anthropology’s role in helping powerful institutions destroy traditional cultures for profit, turned into a formula for utter paralysis. And this is one of the main reasons why postmodernism is so popular in elite academia – because it totally neutralized the threat to power that started to emerge in the 60s and 70s as working class people entered the university system because of the G.I. bill.

So where anthropologists in the 70s used to want to want to learn from different cultures in order to figure out how to make the world a better place, today if you have an anthropology degree, unless you up becoming a professional masturbator your most likely job prospect is helping advertisers figure out how to make women in Mauritaria feel like they’re too fat. “Hey Senegalese mom – does your baby suffer from premature baldness? Give your 2 month old a normal life and a full head of elvis hair, with ro-goo-goo-ga-ga-gaine”

And ironically, although Graeber was critical of post-modernism, and although he and Wengrow wrote this book because they want to encourage us to change our society, Dawn of Everything very much contributes to these awful trends.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber wrote “

“In many ways, anthropology seems a discipline terrified of its own potential. It is, for example, the only discipline in a position to make generalizations about humanity as a whole … yet it resolutely refuses to do so.

And that’s exactly right, but unfortunately, in this book they’re lobbing attacks that if taken seriously, would make it impossible to make generalizations!

Now, if we read the work of authors who actually lived with the Nambikwara, we can see that there are differences of power in chiefly authority – not between different seasons, but rather between different chiefs in different regions of nambikwara territory.

David Price did a study of 70 nambikwara leaders and in his article he found that 61 of the chiefs almost never told anyone what to do at all. They led entirely by example.

“The typical leader begins making a garden and other men join him; he announces his intention to hunt peccary and other men go along

The chief’s authority is so nonexistent that Price suggests that maybe he shouldn’t even be thought of as a chief, but more of as a respected elder brother member of his band, which he often literally is, of the type you often find in hyper-egalitarian immediate return societies.

Now the other 9 chiefs still had no enforcement power, but unlike the other chiefs they did actually issue commands and tell people what to do. And all of these more “authoritarian” style chiefs all lived in a northern area where the Nambikwara were frequently under attack which creates conditions which Price believes was the reason why people in those groups tolerated being given orders.

Anyways Graeber and Wengrow continue:

“What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was [the Nambikwara’s] political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again.

Ugh – so now the authors are pretending that we’re in not just stuck in the 1950s, but more like the 1850s. No one believes that foraging or farming are different “stages of development anymore”. They are different adaptations to different conditions. There are all sorts of examples of people who quit farming and become foragers, or pastoralists, or back and forth and around.

In the 19^th century you had the classic idea that Turgot first proposed, but was most famously articulated by Lewis Henry Morgan, that you had these stages of development where people moved from the worst, hardest form of economy – hunting and gathering, up to better and better ones, pastoralism and then horticulture and then farming and then awesome civilization – or as morgan put it savagery, barbarism and civilization, with different substages for each – lower savagery, middle savagery, higher savagery, etc.

Although Morgan actually had enormous respect for the native american people that he lived with, there was a clear implication in his scheme that societies were advancing up the ladder of progress to becoming awesome civilized gentlement with big sideburns, stiff upper lips and extreme constipation issues.

These theories fell out of favour after WWII and the rise of anti-colonialism and civil rights stuggles, but they revived in a very different form in the late 60s and 70s after the man the hunter conference, because people became interested again in how we went from equality to hierarchy. And so, you the birth of modern social evolution theory.

But in this version of social evolution is not about stages and progress from worse to better or from simple to complex, it’s about adaptation to conditions – just like biological evolution theory. And people don’t talk about this anymore, but it’s always been a staple of anthropology that the whole reason humans have such extensive cultures is precisely to adapt to our environment and our circumstances.

So cultural evolution could mean going from a simple social structure to a more complex one, because you can’t get to complexity without building from less complex stages – like you can’t build a car without first having invented wheels, and oil extraction and metalsmithing first – but it could also mean becoming more simple, like going from stratified agricultural society with hierarchy and specialization to a pastoralist or hunting and gathering society, which various societies have done, like the Lakota that we’ll talk about in a bit.

Any lingering ideas of social complexity equating with progress fell apart when we realized in the late 1970s that moving from hunting and gather agriculture almost always resulted in going down the ladder in terms of quality of life!

Mark Nathan Cohen found that most societies that adopted agriculture for the first time, did so out of desperation, and that health measures decreased drastically after the transition! And Marvin Harris one of the big Materialist anthropologists of the 70, 80s and 90s found that every major increase in technological and social complexity was actually adopted out of desperation, and that people’s lives at first got worse each time, and that it was only worth it because the alternatives were even worse.

And then the authors make some more stuff up:

“Although Lévi-Strauss went on to become the world’s most renowned anthropologist and perhaps the most famous intellectual in France, his early essay on Nambikwara leadership fell into almost instant obscurity. To this day, very few outside the field of Amazonian studies have heard of it.

David Price, on the other hand, writing in 1980 when social evolutionism was going strong, tells us that the exact same article has

“a central place in the literature of comparative politics. It has become a classic study in primitive leadership, assigned to students and cited in other articles whenever an example of the world’s simplest political institutions is called for.”

And he points out that the article had been reprinted in three different versions in Levi-Strauss books, plus in a major anthology on comparative political systems that came out in the late 1960s.

And the article is still cited in our times – for example, as I was trying to figure out what the story was with Nambikwara chiefs I found Levi-Strauss’ article referred to several times in an article on political leadership from 2015. And the psychology leadership was the focus of the article – not the stuff about the seasonal changes that he got wrong and that Graeber and Wengrow got double wrong in Dawn of Everything.

Anyhow, so here we get to one of the many parts of the book that make me vewy vewy angwy:

“One reason [for why Levi-Strauss’ article disappeared] is that in the post-war decades, Lévi-Strauss was moving in exactly the opposite direction to the rest of his discipline. Where he emphasized similarities between the lives of hunters, horticulturalists and modern industrial democracies, almost everyone else – and particularly everyone interested in foraging societies – was embracing new variations on Turgot, though with updated language and backed up by a flood of hard scientific data. Throwing away old-fashioned distinctions between ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, which were beginning to sound a little too condescending, they settled on a new sequence, which ran from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ to ‘chiefdoms’ to ‘states’.

“The culmination of this trend was the landmark Man the Hunter symposium, held at the University of Chicago in 1966. This framed hunter-gatherer studies in terms of a new discipline which its attendees proposed to call ‘behavioural ecology’, starting with rigorously quantified studies of African savannah and rainforest groups – the Kalahari San, Eastern Hadza and Mbuti Pygmies – including calorie counts, time allocation studies and all sorts of data that simply hadn’t been available to earlier researchers.

So for all those assholes on twitter and youtube screaming at me that the authors aren’t against materialism, and that I’m strawmanning them and that they’re only attacking popular writers, not real anthropologists – behavioural ecology IS materialist anthropology. It’s the people who try to explain the behaviour of human societies by understanding the environments and practical circumstances that we live in. It’s where you find any serious scholar who’s interested in figuring out what causes societies to be hierarchical or egalitarian or what causes just about anything that people. It’s exactly what the authors should be doing, yet it’s the target of their constant derision.

And like I’ve been talking about throughout these book critique episodes, Man the Hunter is the conference that introduced anthropology and the popular reading public to the fact that hyper egalitarian and free societies actually exist. Democratic, gender egalitarian, anarcho-communist societies without political authority or gerontocracy, and without organized warfare. Things that Graeber and Wengrow should be deeply interested in, but that they insist on ignoring, or else attacking and dismissing.

This conference happened right at the apex of the cold war, when we were being told that you can either have equality or freedom, but you can’t have both – and that equality is simply against human nature and that any attempt to create an equal world will result in the horrors of stalinism or the terror of the french revolution. These are ideas that are still deeply, deeply ingrained in our minds – like listen to any Jordan Peterson lecture where he’s freaking out about the left and the cultural marxists, or any Praeger U video – this is where they’re coming from.

This conference showed the world that not only can you have both equality and liberty, but that it was quite possible that most human beings were organized along libertarian and egalitarian lines for 90+% of our existence as a species – after all, human beings were all hunter gatherers until 12,000 years ago, most hunter gatherers are at least male egalitarian, and most foragers who practice the simplest type economy that our earliest ancestors probably practiced are hyper egalitarian with gender equality.

The political implications of this were enormous and left wing anthropologists jumped on it, while those inclined to the right had a tantrum and tried their best to dismiss and downplay it, much like Graeber and Wengrow do in this book, albeit for different reasons. Tellingly, the broader political left which was more interested in authoritarian types of socialism just ignored it, as did the broader political right and mainstream for obvious reasons – kind of like everyone just ignored what the anarchists accomplished in the spanish civil war until Noam Chomsky focused attention on it in the 1990s. And as a result, outside of a brief flash, knowledge of this stuff has never really filtered into the general culture or even our political culture which is something that I’m trying to correct with this series.

Whereas for left wing anthropologists stuff was a revelation, for Graeber and Wengrow this conference was just a giant festival of infantilizing hunter gatherers:

“The new studies overlapped with a sudden upswing of popular interest in just these same African societies: for instance, the famous short films about the Kalahari Bushmen by the Marshalls (an American family of anthropologists and film-makers), which became fixtures of introductory anthropology courses and educational television across the world, along with best-selling books like Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People.

Aha! … Colin Turnbull’s the Forest People. This is all just speculation, but to me this one book just might be the key to understanding Graeber’s lifelong demented attitude towards hyper egalitarian societies and his belief that the theory of egalitarian ancestors by definition implies infantilism.

The Forest People is a book written in 1961 for a popular audience about the Mbuti hunter gatherers of the Ituri rainforest in central africa. The Mbuti are one of those immediate return, hyper egalitarian, gender egalitarian societies – and even as hyperegalitarian societies go, they’re one of the most hyperegalitarian, where women hunt together with men and even older children often can make decisions that trump the will of the adults if it’s something that will affect the future of the group, when todays kids will be tomorrow’s adults.

And much like Graeber and Wengrow are doing with Dawn of Everything, Turnbull wrote The Forest People for a popular audience with a particular message in mind – in Turnbull’s case, the message was that human equality and freedom are possible and that we have a lot to learn about these things from societies like the Mbuti.

And because Turnbull was trying to get that message across, and because the book was written for popular consumption and because it was 1961, the Forest People reads a bit like a fairy tale. And it doesn’t exactly ignore the various problems or difficulties of Mbuti life at the time, but it does portray mbuti society a bit like a happy harmonious smurf village.

So because of the romanticization, and also I guess becauase the Mbuti are a pygmy people, who are an average of 4’11” tall – a modern reader, might feel like the Forest People is infantilizing the Mbuti. And I can see why Graeber might react negatively to this book, and also to the annoying hippie professors and others who glommed onto it as an example of our inherent Rousseauian smurfy good nature, polluted by civilization etc.

To be honest, for it’s various flaws, the Forest People is what got me into anthropology and I think that Colin Turnbulls work is really amazing in terms of describing how the material circumstances of Mbuti life vs the circumstances of their patriarchal, witchcraft obsessed, horticultural neighbours really shape those societies and generate totally the starkly different values, and ideologies and relationships toward nature that you find in those cultures, which subsequent research has supported.

Anyhow, the authors continue:

“Before long, it was simply assumed by almost everyone that foragers represented a separate stage of social development, that they ‘live in small groups’, ‘move around a lot’, reject any social distinctions other than those of age and gender, and resolve conflicts by ‘fission’ rather than arbitration or violence.35”

And of course the authors neglect to mention just how egalitarian these societies are, including gender egalitarianism, and just how important of a revelation that was at the time, and still is.

“The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant. The image of tiny egalitarian bands corresponded perfectly to what those weaned on the legacy of Rousseau felt hunter-gatherers ought to have been like. Now there seemed to be hard, quantifiable scientific data (and also movies!) to back it up”

OK, now this is just shameful – remember how I mentioned earlier, that once the news about hyperegaltiarian socieites made it out into the word, the miserable cynics and right wingers who hate the idea that humans could ever be egalitarians flipped their lids and did everything they could to start attacking and downplaying everything about hunter gatherer egalitarianism?

Well that whole paragraph comes straight out of that anti-egalitarian miserable asshole talking points playbook!

The thing about hyperegalitarian foragers being refugees comes from the so called “Kalahari debate” from the late 80’s and early 90s where a group of scholars centred around Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow, tried to reject just about everything that anthropologists had been writing about the various Kalahari hyper egalitarian hunter gatherers since the Man the Hunter conference. According to these revisionist scholars, far from having anything to teach us in terms of how our ancestors lived, or in terms of the potential for human egalitarianism and liberty, the Kalahari bushmen were actually just a bunch of sad losers.

Not only were they not at all the “original affluent society” that hunter gather specialists had been depicting, who enjoyed both equality and freedom thanks to their ancient foraging economy, but they weren’t ancient, they weren’t egalitarian, they weren’t real foragers, and they weren’t even a real society!

According the revisionists, the only reason that bushmen were equal was that they were the equally oppressed lower loser classes of a larger society of pastoralists and farmers. And the only reason that they were foragers was because they had been forced to abandon pastoralism by stronger ethnic groups who had stolen all of their cattle and shoved them into a crappy wasteland. Far from being a society that we can learn from, both their hunting and gathering economy and their equality were signs of degradation and subjugation – something Turgot would have loooved. And all of this was being obscured by the evil sin of categories!

With a peculiar mix of self-righteousness and cynicism, these scholars portrayed themselves as advanced realists and anti-racists, crusading against the “essentialism” of the supposed fantasy world created by hunter gatherer specialists. And the underlying political message coming from these scholars was that categories are bad and that human equality is some kind of rare marginal phenomenon that didn’t play a big role in human history. In other words, hierarchy and exploitation and misery are the norm of the human species. Jordan Peterson and Praeger U can breathe a sigh of relief.

Unsurprisingly, most of these revisionist scholars have ended up on the wrong side of the more recent so-called “indigenous peoples’ debate” where they are not just rejecting the category of indigenous societies, but also have also been straight up supporting the eviction of kalahari bushmen and other peoples from their hunting lands, thereby supporting the destruction of these societies and their way of life in the in the name of progress development.

Now there is a ton of literature on the kalahari debating these claims back and and forth since the late 1980s – but some reason Graeber and Wengrow don’t cite anything to back up their statement about these people being refugees.

Maybe it’s because the people who see the bushmen as a real culture basically won that debate over time – a big chunk of the revisionist argument was based on Wilmsen misreading the word “onions” as “oxen” in an old diary which led him to mistakenly that the Bushmen used to have cattle until recent times – or maybe because it’s because if you read any of the back and forth you’ll see that this it looks like something of a left vs right debate between people who think that equality is impossible and those who think that it is possible, and the authors of Dawn of Everything are championing the politically wrong side of that argument… or maybe they just forgot, who knows.

Now, the whole thing about hunter gatherers living on territories that historically nobody else wants, like savannahs or rainforests or deserts is certainly true – hunter gatherers are generally militarily weaker than pastoralist or agricultural societies because their population densities are so low, so they get easily displaced. But just because a territory is unsuitable for farming or pastoralism, or agriculture, doesn’t mean that it’s not a good foraging habitat, and every book about these societies by experts will remark on how the forager groups are better fed and live a more enjoyable lifestyle than their farmer and pastoralist neighbours, even when they’re stressed for resources – right up until they get pushed out of foraging by capitalism or civil war or encroachment by militarily stronger societies – which is sadly the case now with the kalahari foragers, who are no longer full time foragers as of the past few ten years or so. And I’ll link to an article specifically addressing the quality of environment issue in the bibliographhy.

The authors continue:

“In this new reality, Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara were simply irrelevant. After all, in evolutionary terms they weren’t even really foragers, since they only roamed about in foraging bands for seven or eight months a year. So the apparent paradox that their larger village settlements were egalitarian while their foraging bands were anything but could be ignored, lest it tarnish this crisp new picture. The kind of political self-consciousness which seemed so self-evident in Nambikwara chiefs, let alone the wild improvisation expected of Nuer prophets, had no place in the revised framework of human social evolution.”

Another total garbage paragraph.

Even if Levi-Strauss hadnt messed up about the nambikwara having two separate modes of subsistence – there’s no reason why the Nambikwara be relevant to what our early ancestors were doing? Our early ancestors weren’t doing farming for 5 months of the year or any months of the year. There are dozens of other societies that we’d want to look at for insights into our origins before we looked at the Nambikwara. But then again, Graeber and Wengrow think that we can generalize about our african first ancestors from 300 000 years ago by going on about gobleki tepe and about the european ice age people who lived on the fringes of human habitability in totally different circumstances – so wheee anything goes.

So to summarize this section – while the Nambikwara are certainly interesting, the entire section on them in this book is just a giant waste of made up garbage on top of made up garbage on top of giant mistakes, and bullshit strawmen that don’t teach us anything about anything besides what really bad scholarship looks like. Please send me money to compensate me for all the time I wasted figuring this out!

Out Come the Freaks

Anyhow, from this complete waste of a section, the authors then go on to talk about societies that actually do change their social structures in terms of relative hierarchy or equality in different seasons, in particular the artcit inuit and the kwakiutl or kwakwakawakw as they’re properly called, of the pacific northwest coast.

Whereas earlier in the chapter, the authors tried to tell us that the rich burials of upper palaeolithic europe teach us that inequality has no origin – which implies that they are evidence of social hierarchy – in this part of the chapter, the authors tell us the opposite – that these burials actually are not evidence of hierarchy at all – they’re just ritually celebrated freaks with unusual bodies or birth defects who come from societies that had seasonal variations where people were dispersed into hunting groups part of the year, and then congregated en masse for another part of the year – like the fictionalized version of the Nambikwara that they just described.

“Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of ‘inequality’, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice – or, if they do, to attach much significance to the fact – that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings.

“The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall even by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries.

“All this seems very unlikely to be a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet given to dividing his time between hanging upside down and arranging and rearranging snail shells would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record.

“It seems extremely unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs.

“There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all.

So the authors see these rich burials not as evidence of hierarchy, but of something like Nuer prophets. Anomalous people that are given some kind of special status as a result of their strangeness.

And then they tie it in to seasonality:

“Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture

And rememeber that we saw last time that they just made this up – there are precisely ZERO ice age sites with monumental architecture!

“these sites – were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another.

Which we just saw isn’t true

This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs.

Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe.”

Which, remember was built in the holocene era that we live in now – not in the ice age. And then they talk about how stonehenge was built by people who abandoned farming to do foraging and pastoralism, which they act like that’s supposed to be some kind of game changing big deal, and how those people had a seasonal structure too – which OK, great – stonehenge was built 5000 years ago by neolithic pastoralists, so I have no idea what that has to do with anything.

If you read carefully, you see that just like the earlier part about paleolithic inequality, this whole section is a lot of smoke and mirrors – like what do nuer prophets or palaeolithic dwarves or albinos have anything to do with seasonal social structures?

The authors are painting a picture that suggests that during seasonal sedentary camps, people in the european ice age and throughout human history and prehistory engaged in rituals where we worshipped freaks and had play hierarchies – so we were always hierarchical and egalitarian on and off. And I say play hierarchies because this is how they characterize them towards the end of the chapter as we’ll see.

But Nuer prophets were totally unrelated to nuer seasonal patterns. kwakiutl and inuit had pronounced seasonal settlement and social patterns, but they didn’t have special seasonal leaders and they didn’t revere freaks.

The palaeolithic freaks theory might be valid, but there’s literally no connection whatsoever to the Nuer or the Inuit or Kwakiutl.

Anyways, then they connect the palaeolithic european societies to the Inuit and to the authors’ dumb thesis that social structure is a discombobulated conscious choice

Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply ‘given’, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention.

And of course Levi-Strauss says absolutely nothing of the sort – just like they did with Christopher Boehm last time, the authors are turning Levi-Strauss into a muppet and making him say things he never said.

And they continue:

“Writing in the midst of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss probably didn’t think he was saying anything all that extraordinary. For anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, it was common knowledge that societies doing a great deal of hunting, herding or foraging were often arranged in such a ‘double morphology’ (as Lévi-Strauss’s great predecessor Marcel Mauss put it).43 Lévi-Strauss was simply highlighting some of the political implications.”

that’s correct – he wasn’t saying anything super extraordinary, then or now, that article is only interesting in terms of the psychology of the chief, which is what it’s about.

“But these implications are important. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. It might be useful here to look back at this forgotten anthropological literature, with which Lévi-Strauss would have been intimately familiar, to get a sense of just how dramatic these seasonal differences might be”

So, where the authors were making shit up about the Nambikwara and wasting my life, here they do come up with actual examples of seasonal variations in the level of hierarchy and equality of a society, and there is a lot we can learn from this – if we focus on all of the things that Graeber and Wengrow choose to consistently ignore:

The key text here is Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s (1903) ‘Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo’. The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’.

“In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder.

“During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.4

OK, so most of this is accurate, except that I have no idea where they get the part about summer bands being organized around 20–30 people under a single male leader – it’s definitely not in the book they’re referencing, and I tried looking elsewhere but didn’t see anything but I wasted so much time on the nambikwara that I didn’t want to waste more time on this – so maybe it is true, or maybe they made it up, and if you know the answer feel free to let me know.

In any case what Mauss actually says about summer settlement size is that:

“From one end of the Eskimo area to the other, this group [meaning the settlement] consists of a family, defined in the narrowest sense of this word: a man and his wife (or, if there is room, his wives) plus their unmarried children … In exceptional cases, a tent may include an older relative, or a widow who has not remarried and her children, or a guest or two.

And these aren’t settlements made up of individual families, the settlements are just isolated individual families “located at a considerable distance from one another.”

but anyhow, the authors continue:

“Mauss thought the Inuit were an ideal case study because, living in the Arctic, they were facing some of the most extreme environmental constraints it was possible to endure.

“Yet even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations – availability of game, building materials and the like – explained at best 40 per cent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.

Ooh 40% – that’s a very specific number. It’d be interesting to see how Mauss got at that figure. Did he do some kind of data analysis, or was that just a sort of guesstimate? Let’s do a deep dive and find out…

So, if you read the book they’re referring to … drumroll …. Mauss never says anything about 40% of anything, ever! Just straight up making shit up, again. Hey Bert, I made up some numbers bert! 69 Bert!

Not only that, but more importantly, Mauss basically says the exact opposite of what the authors are saying here.

What Mauss actually says, sounding like a proto-behavioural ecologist, is that the seasonal differences between the Inuit’s social organization and cultural practices are almost entirely explained by material conditions – specifically the migration patterns of the animals that they hunt!

“We must look to the Eskimo way of life for the causes of this situation [meaning their dual settlement patterns and cultural social structure]. Indeed, this is not at all difficult to understand; it is, on the contrary, a remarkable application of the laws of biophysics and of the necessary symbiotic relation among animal species.

“European explorers have frequently insisted that, even with European equipment, there is no better diet nor better economic system in these regions than that adopted by the Eskimo. They are governed by environmental circumstances.

“In summary, summer opens up an almost unlimited area for hunting and fishing, while winter narrowly restrictsb this area.10 This alternation provides the rhythm of concentration and dispersion for the morphological organization of Eskimo society. The population congregates or scatters like the game. The movement that animates Eskimo society is synchronized with that of the surrounding life.

The only thing that Mauss points to that animal migration patterns don’t explain is why the Inuit choose to specifically live in multifamily igloos instead of living in separate houses in the winter, and why they build assembly houses, which the authors ludicrously called “monumental architecture” when referring to the palaeolithic versions of these types of small buildings.

“The natives could have placed their tents side by side .. or they could have constructed small houses instead of living in family groups under the same roof. One ought not to forget that the kashim, or men’s house, and the large house where several branches of the same family reside are not confined to the Eskimo. They are found among other peoples and, consequently, cannot be the result of special features unique to the organization of these northern societies.

“They have to be related, in part, to certain characteristics that Eskimo culture has in common with these other cultures.

And Mauss doesn’t say that other circumpolar people were organized quite differently. He does say that some Inuit had contact with Athabascans and Algonquins as trading partners and that the Inuit would have benefitted from adopting Athabascan snowshoes instead of the waterproof boots that they used, but that they refused to do so – schizmogenesis? But he doesn’t say anything about Algonquin or athabascan social organization one way or the other and the Algonquins don’t live in the artic at all, and athabastans lived in alaska in different circumstances, hunting different animals, with different seasonal rhythms, so again, all of this is just totally fake news.

So that’s 2 cultures out of 2 so far where Graeber and Wengrow seem to have just been making a bunch of shit up about.

Then the authors talk about the cultural and legal differences from summer to winter

“… many aspects of winter life … reversed the values of summer. In the summer, for instance, property rights were clearly asserted and sometimes physically inscribed onto personal objects, especially hunting weapons. But in the communalistic atmosphere of the winter house, generosity trumped accumulation as a route to personal prestige. The right of male patriarchs to coerce their sons (and indeed the group as a whole) was acknowledged only in the summer months. It had no place around the winter hearth, where the principles of Inuit leadership were turned on their head. Legitimate authority became a matter of charisma rather than birthright; persuasion instead of coercion.

And another important change from season to season that Mauss discusses, but that Graeber and Wengrow didn’t get into, is that the inuit barely had any religious life in the summer, and they don’t really observe many taboos or rituals. But in the winter they have a rich religious and ritual life with many rules to be observed.

So then the authors argue that all of these seasonal difference are because of conscious choice and awareness of different political possibilities, blah, blah, which of course Mauss doesn’t say anything at all about in his book.

So how can we better explain these important cultural differences from season to season, and what does Mauss have to say about them?

While Mauss tells us that the dual social structure of the Inuit is the result of the seasonal dispersal patterns of the animals that they hunt, he doesn’t give us any specific reasons for how that translates into patriarchy and private property in one season vs gender equality and communalism in the other season. So let’s use our materialist trained noggins to see what we can figure out.

So remember, that according to Mauss the inuit all congregate together in winter because the seals and walrus they hunt are all clustered in one area each year.

And in the summer they separate into individual families, because the animals that they hunt and the foods they gather are widely dispersed.

This give us the information that we need to figure out some pretty parsimonious answers as to what’s going on:

So for example property relations – why was there more private property in the summer vs more communal property in the winter:

Hunting and fishing in summer were mostly an individual affair. So you have your individual stuff, and there’s nobody to really share it with, except for your immediate family.

In the winter hunting is communal, so people depend on eachother and share their catches and use eachothers’ property. And that’s when they make all their social connections. And there are lots of people around who you want to maintain good relations with, and also who have leverage to pressure you into sharing with them – so there’s are many more reasons and incentives to share, and people to share with vs in the very isolated and lonely summer season.

What about religion?

While some religions like western protestantism are more of an individual affair, in most traditional societies religion is largely a communal affair, and it’s often more about establishing different kinds of social relations and ties, and values and boundaries than about actual beliefs.

You don’t really need as many practices and rituals if you’re just with your family. Anyone who’s done an elaborate 3 hour passover seder when a lot of different guests are present with songs, and readings, and spraying wine and throwing rubber frogs at everyone, vs the five minute version with just mom and dad and siblings knows what I’m talking about.

And how do inuit settlement patterns explain differences in gender relations?

The authors want us to believe that the inuit consciously understood that they had many social possibilities and that they chose patriarchy in the summer and equality in the winter, as opposed to us who are stuck.

Well, here’s a description of inuit gender relations from a book called Inuit Women by Janet Mancini Bilson and Kyra Mancici

“Life was hard for the Inuk woman, as one elder recalls: “She was the first to rise and the last to sleep. Her husband was always right—she could be punished by her parents for not pleasing her husband.” In terms of power distribution, the husband was clearly the head of the family: “He had the final word, and that’s just the way it was.” The Inuit tended to accept the principle of ultimate male authority, as an elder recalls: “The man was the boss ... all the men.”

Now this sounds to me like women were actually pretty stuck in gender hierarchy during the summer.

Did women consciously choose this situation over and over every single summer because it’s some fun and kinky SM game to play subservient wife, or because of some random Inuit values that just emerge from the mysterious extraterrestrial inuit mind?

Obviously not – men imposed this on women, and women tolerated it. So what are the conditions that gave men the advantage to be able to impose this on women in the summer but not in winter?

Remember the two criteria for hierarchy: control over resources and having no better alternatives to access those resources.

Well, in the summer, women are in single family units where they are almost entirely dependent for survival on father and brothers who do all the hunting. And father and brothers are probably physically stronger than they are on top of that, and they’re hoarding their hunting weapons as private property not to he shared with their wives. Private property in this case is most likely a concommitant of gender hierarchy!

Meanwhile tents are a large distance from one another in summer, so it’s hard to escape and there isn’t really any great place to escape to. Since everyone is busy feeding their immediate families and chasing very dispersed resources, it’s a significant imposition to suddenly show up at your brother’s house and be another mouth to feed, so that everyone gets 15–20% less food thanks to you.

In other words, the conditions inherent to the economic activities of summer put men at a general bargaining power advantage vis à vis women.

Now, women still had a decent amount of bargaining power and Bilson and Mancini point out that men could not survive without female labour either. So if need be, a woman could play a dangerous game of brinksmanship to get concessions out of men – but a lot of cultural norms specifically exist to avoid these chaotic and dangerous power struggles which can end in catastrophe for the winners as well as the losers.

That’s why a woman’s parents would punish her for being disobedient – because in the long run it could mean death for her and her kids and her husband as well.

If there’s a physical fight, the man will likely win. But it’s extremely dangerous to ever let it get anywhere near that point when you’re all alone for several months with only your immediate family. That’s why inuit culture is famously extremely averse to any expressions of anger, even moreso than other hunter gathers many of whom share that same cultural trait. See Jane Briggs book Never in Anger.

And contrary to the idea of conscious choice, the whole point of cultural rules is usually to avoid conscious choices, to avoid individuals making calculations that might seem like they’re in your short term interest, but that will doom you or the wider group in the long run.

Think about Kosher laws against eating swine. Marvin Harris noticed that laws against eating swine exist not in the middle east among Jews and Muslims, but also in other regions around the world. And what these cultures share in common is that in those areas, it’s only possible to feed pigs with the same foods that humans eat.

If only some people raise pigs, or if it’s a good harvest year, raising pigs is a great idea to improve your farmer diet. But but once everyone starts to do it, or when harvests are bad, suddenly you end up with massive food shortages, and starvation and class war between pig owners and non pig owners and chaos and social collapse.

If you depend on peoples’ individual rational choices, then everyone will want to raise pigs, even even they know that it might kill them in the long run. So it’s more effective to make it a deeply ingrained religious and social taboo where the actual cause is obscured and people just don’t even consider it in the first place because the whole idea of eating pigs just makes you supernaturally horrified.

So after a few rounds of pig caused famines, people in these areas developed these taboos. Just like Inuit must have developed patriarchal values after repeated power struggles causing chaos. Over time, as a result of some of these battles, the values of the society end up reflecting the balance of power of the society, determining the winner in advance in order to avoid constant battles.

Meanwhile, in the winter, the inuit lived in multifamily homes in large settlements with many homes close together. This means that both men and women had their relatives around – and women in particular had male relatives around. This means that if anyone tried to bully a women, her brothers and father and uncles would have something to say about it. Also any woman will likely have close relatives and friends around that she can move in with if she wants to get a way from her husband or divorce him.

I think that these explanations are much more parsimonious and insightful than decontextualized “conscious choice” and “experimenting with social possibilities”.

Lakota Bufflo Hunt

Now the authors move south from the arctic to the great plains of north america

“Plains nations were one-time farmers who had largely abandoned cereal agriculture, after re-domesticating escaped Spanish horses and adopting a largely nomadic mode of life.

The authors continue, discussing the observations of early 20^th century anthropologist Robert Lowie

“In late summer and early autumn, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet, as Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis. Once the hunting season – and the collective Sun Dance rituals that followed – were complete, such authoritarianism gave way to what he called ‘anarchic’ forms of organization, society splitting once again into small, mobile bands. Lowie’s observations are startling:

[and here they quote Lowie]

“”In order to ensure a maximum kill, a police force – either coinciding with a military club, or appointed ad hoc, or serving by virtue of clan affiliation – issued orders and restrained the disobedient. In most of the tribes they not only confiscated game clandestinely procured, but whipped the offender, destroyed his property, and, in case of resistance, killed him. The very same organisation which in a murder case would merely use moral suasion turned into an inexorable State agency during a buffalo drive. However … coercive measures extended considerably beyond the hunt: the soldiers also forcibly restrained braves intent on starting war parties that were deemed inopportune by the chief; directed mass migrations; supervised the crowds at a major festival; and might otherwise maintain law and order.46

Back to Graeber and Wengrow:

“During a large part of the year,’ Lowie continued, ‘the tribe simply did not exist as such; and the families or minor unions of familiars that jointly sought a living required no special disciplinary organization. The soldiers were thus a concomitant of numerically strong aggregations, hence functioned intermittently rather than continuously.’ But the soldiers’ sovereignty, he stressed, was no less real for its temporary nature. As a result, Lowie insisted that Plains Indians did in fact know something of state power, even though they never actually developed a state.

In other words the reason you had a police force part of the year, but then no enforcement of even murder for the rest of the year is not because of random conscious choices about political possibilities, but because during the buffalo hunt, you aggregated in big enough numbers to actually have a force capable of enforcing rules. As lowie says – the tribe simply did not exist for much of the rest of the year as people were dispersed into small groups to pursue seasonally dispersed resources – somewhat similar to the inuit but with larger small bands not just isolated families.

I’m suspicious of Lowie saying that small bands didn’t require disciplinary organization – the fact that Lowie talks about a murder case being dealt with moral suasion suggests to me that they did need discipline, but that you had no one to enforce it. In a small band setting, it becomes really dangerous to punish or kill someone, even a murderer, because it can turn into a feud and destroy your ability to survive. This is why most hunting and gathering societies have strict rules about anger and violence. People would like to control murderers during the off season, but they can’t do it effectively.

In his article Lowie compares this seasonal change to the season changes of the inuit as described by Mauss, and like Mauss, Lowie attributes social change to economic and logistical factors, and not Graebgrow’s shroom hyper consciousness.

The authors continue, writing as if this stuff breaks the mold of strawman anthropology:

“It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories.

“The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew.

Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards. A hundred years ago, most social scientists understood that those who live mainly from wild resources were not normally restricted to tiny ‘bands’. As we’ve seen, the assumption that they were only gained ground in the 1960s.

Ugh – There are zillions of articles discussing all the different types of hunter gatherers with different kinds of social organiztion – see Robert Kelley’s book The Foraging Spectrum originally written in 1995 and last updated in 2014 – and articles debating the implications of hierarchical vs egalitarian hunter gatherers, on what life was like for our early ancestors. It’s a huge literature that Graeber and Wengrow seem to have no curiosity about.

It is true that in the 1960s people paid less attention to non egalitarian foragers or less egalitarian foragers, because everyone was so excited about discovering the existence of hyper-egalitarian foragers, and by the very hopeful and inspiring possibility that humanity may have egalitarian origins and that we might be best suited to live in egalitarian societies.

The authors continue:

Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.

Again, what’s silly is pretending that anthropologists from the 1960s and 70s were time-warped from the 1860s and 70s. A social evolutionist would not be freaked out by the lakota police, they’d be interested in thinking about whether or not that type of institution might eventually get “stuck” and turn into an authoritarian system and, they’d be wondering if some authoritarian chieftainships we’ve seen in recent times might have had their origins in this type of institution in the past, and Lowie actually talks about this briefly.

And legitimite use of coercive force is not a « new evolutionist » definition, it’s Max Weber from 1919. Social evolutionists and anthropologists and archaeologists are always trying to come up with a better definition of the state – it’s one of those worbs that no one agrees on exactly what it means that I really need to do an episode on.

Anyhow, they go on:

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of ‘complexity’ – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population.

No that doesn’t through anything into disarray at all – I don’t like the simple vs complex categories – but the term “Complex” hunter gatherers was specifically invented to describe the Pacific Northwestcoast people like the Kwakiutl who switched social structures back and forth seasonally, and much more dramatically than the inuit or the fake nambikwara did. And these seasonal cultures don’t consciously choose to brush aside those institutions, those institutions evaporate as the society moves on to an economic activity that’s incompatible with maintaining those institutions, even when it would be preferable to do so.

The authors continue:

Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognize that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgement has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

So here I sort of agree with them, in that the categories that we have are not well developed, and good alternatives or rather, elaborations on the categories that we’ve been using are in order. I’ll talk about these categories and the problems with them another time because I think it’s useful, and I have a lot to say about it, but what’s relevant here is that instead of developing better categories, the authors seem to want to just throw away all categories and lie on the carpet schrooming about the oneness of everything, leaving us unable to understand anything about being stuck in hierarchy.

Ok, so now the authors bring it all back home, and they link all the cultures they’re been talking about back to the upper palaeolithic european burials from the beginning of the chapter.

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments [not true] and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them [None of those cultures did this, except the Lakota] all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable.

So at the beginning of the chapter they use the rich burials of upper palaeolithic europe to suggest that inequality has no origin, but then five minutes ago they tell us that they’re not actually signs of inequality at all, but rather just reverence of freaks, but now they’re telling us that they were in fact building authoritarian structures – so i guess they are signs of inequality? They don’t give any other reason to think paleolithic europeans were building authoritarian structures.

And notice how if you take this seriously, that it implies that people are saying “ok, it’s winter, let’s do patriarchy – it’s summer, let’s do gender equality! It’s the dry season, let’s not punish murderers, but now it’s the buffalo season, we should police murderers!” Really?

And it’s completely incorrect to say that these societies did all of these shifts “on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable” – because their social orders were about as fixed and immutable as our own. Every single winter the inuit had patriachy. Every single summer they had more gender equality. Every single year the plains tribes had a hard time punishing murders and other disturbances – but every single buffalo season they could enforce those rules.

If these social systems were just random choice, or about some kind of mysterious internal cultural logic that the authors and the sources that they cite all forgot to tell us about, then why is it always the men who dominate in inuit summer instead of taking turns with the women?

Why doesn’t any culture ever have a different system every season, or every year? Or why didn’t they cycle through 15 different seasons with 15 different social structures? Why are they always they just stuck with the same two over and over…

It’s because in different seasons, different environmental and economic conditions which mostly repeat every single year, change the balance of powers of various actors, which results in different social structures and different institutions and practices.

These are the sorts of things we need to think about and understand if we want to identify the and modify the causes of hierarchy in our society and these are the sorts of things the authors insist on de-emphasizing and ignoring and inventing things about over and over.

OK so now, at the end of the 3^rd chapter of the book the authors pose their big thesis question in this section titled

Why the Real Question is Not ‘What Are the Origins of Social Inequality?’ but ‘How Did We Get Stuck?’

and they tell us that

“If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound.

and what were they doing for the first 200,000 years before that though? Don’t think about it Bert!

“For one thing, it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so

OK, that I can totally get behind – yes, people in smaller scale traditional societies have to be more politically conscious than we are, because they have direct involvement in their political systems. Traditional people very often are their political system – they are the government – i.e. the people who make and enforce rules – or else they at least have continual direct contract with the people who do, be it the chiefs or their husbands or parents or clan mothers.

We on the other hand, who vote once every few years, can live our lives having no contact with our political decision makers and no idea how they actually do things. And even if we spend all day researching it, we still might have no actual experience engaging with it. And where we do constantly engage with politics and government – in the family, the workplace, and school – the common definition of the word politics and government are commonly defined in such a way that we don’t even conceived of any of this stuff is politics and so we sleepwalk right through it.

This why people think that donald trump and vladimir putin are rescuing the world from the lizard people new word order pedophiles Agenda 69 bill gates biolabs or the whatever nonsense of the day is.

I’d also say that traditional people are not only more politically conscious than we are, but that they are also often more conscious of the material conditions that generate their cultural practices.

Like if you ask any peasant in rural china they’ll tell you that patrilocal residence is the cause of male dominance in their society, or if you ask an central african forager or their farmer neighbours about why their cultures and values are so differerent, they’ll point out to you that it has a lot to do with their economic actives, as per Colin Turnbull.

And speaking of categories, a Bilo farmer in central african speaking to Jerome Lewis, spontaneously explained the differences between his culture and the neighbouring egalitarian Mbjendjele in terms of immediate vs delayed return categories that hunter gatherer specialists use.

These people certainly have a way better understanding of what causes hierarchy in their societies than the two PhD scholars who wrote Dawn of Everything do!

Kwakiutl

And here the authors switch to the Kwakiutl who call themselves Kwakwakawakw – and they’re one of the famous Pacific Northwest Coast societies that I’ve discussed a few times who were hunter gatherers, but who had an elaborate hierarchy, with chiefs and different social classes, commoners, nobility and slaves. And they also had a seasonal social structure.

And this time the authors are basing themselves on the work of Franz Boaz, who lived with and wrote about the Kwakiutl at the turn of the century.

Here, Boas discovered, it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year

and then they ask why did scholars ignore this phenomenon, even the anarchist clastres? kind of like i always ask why did anarchist graeber totally ignore all the gender egalitarian anarcho communist societies his whole life…

“The answer is probably a simple one: seasonality was confusing. In fact, it’s kind of a wild card. The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings.

what??? the authors literally just said that the reason the nambikwara dispersed into small bands was “as a way of asserting political authority”! Like not – oh we need to obey a leader in order to be efficient hunters and survive the dangers of this season – but instead they want us to think that the nambikwara were thinking “gee, all this equality is so boring – why don’t we ditch our productive farms and split up into small groups chasing snakes and small animals on the edge of starvation for 7 months (which is how Levi-Strauss describes the hunting season, in his articles) just so that we can play fun hierarchy and obey our chief more!” This is what I mean by this book makes its readers stupid.

And they continue:

“Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away.

By the way, if you’re inuit and you wanted to have sex outside of marriage in the summer, the main options you had would have been to have sex with your mom or dad or your brothers and sisters or if you were lucky your aunt – because there was no one else nearby … like gee i wonder why they didn’t do that…

Anyhow back to why seasonality is confusing to anthropologists:

The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial (the ‘bear dancers’ and ‘fool dancers’) that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders. Many Central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.51 (knight 1991)

In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question.

No patterns! No categories! Nothing happens for any reasons except choice and free will because we exist entirely in our minds and not the real world!

As always this is all upside down, moishe kapoyel.

Like I pointed out in the last episode, the relevant conditions to hierarchy or equality are not about winter vs summer, or forest vs savannah – but about what activities you do in those environments and what balance of powers results from it.

Many cultures, like the Inuit, disperse in summer and aggregate in winter. Why? It’s not because of random choices and shroom consciousness, and it’s not because « summer causes dispersal » whatever that means – but because in a lot of places food is more sparse in hotter weather as animals disperse and there are less concentrations of things like fruits or edible insects.

And whereas for the Inuit the time of congregating together was a time of more equality for the reasons we looked at, for the Kwakiutl the village was where class hierarchy was most important. And the simple reason for this was because that’s when the chief would be redistributing food in potlatch feasts, according to class. The higher your rank, the more you got.

So you end up with opposite pattern of the inuit but that’s precisely because of material realities, not in spite of them like Graeber and Wengrow want us to believe.

Again, the kwakiutl were as stuck as anyone, with the same structures repeating every year.

So yes there is one single pattern – and it’s the material conditions shape social structure and customs.

And the things about the “african forager societies” where they’re egalitarian all year round, but men alternate in dominating the ritual order every new moon, that’s referring to the Mbendjele of central africa – and the authors attribute this to Chris Knight, but it’s actually the work of Morna Finnegan’s and her writing on communism in motion, which I’ll link to, and I’ll talk about it another time because it’s super important in terms of how equality is maintained in a society with potentially competing groups like men vs women.

OK, now we get to the big question of the whole book, which the authors never answer because they’re so dedicated to not understanding where hierarchy comes from:

“If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?

Boom – so there it is right in the authors thesis statement. To the authors, the hierarchy that they’ve been describing to us is grand theatre, playing game and expedience. Inuit women are subservient and Kwakiutl lower classes eat less food, and slaves do all the dirty work, because they’re “just playing games” or somehow it’s expedient – for whom? And the reason that we’re stuck in hierarchy today isn’t because of material conditions, it’s because we all became morons and we “forgot” that we were playing these awesome super fun hierarchy video games.

Now the idea of temporary expedience as a reason for seasonal hierarchy which the authors mention along with play and theatre – that would makes sense if we were talking about democratic hierarchies, like the Nambikwara chieftainship. But the hierarchies that we’re stuck in today are dominance hierarchies, so that doesn’t help us – unless we want to explore the different ways that a democratic hierarchy can slide into dominance hierarchy in the right circumstances – and there’s a whole literature on that that’s super interesting, but of course the authors won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because it would mean looking at circumstances. So instead we get 700 pages of doggerel about nothing.

It’s really easy to get confused by ridiculous explanations for the practices of people in traditional cultures because we tend to think of these people as foreign and exotic, especially the way the authors describe their practices totally out of context from the circumstances they take place in. But just imagine if someone was making these sort claims about our society:

No society demonstrates the power of political consciousness more than the members of the McDonalds tribe who shift from hierarchy to equality every week and even every day!

Workers and managers and franchise owners and corporate executives all form a chain of command of extreme political inequality. The low ranking workers have to obey dictates on how to dress and how to act and what they can and can’t say, and if they disobey, they are at the mercy of their manages who can eject from the tribe and leave them to fend for themselves, facing eviction from their homes and starvation. But then, every weekend and at the end of every shift, outside of the grounds of the holy MacDonalds monumental architecture, even the godlike CEO chief has no power over the lowliest janitor. If they see eachother at the grocery store or going for a walk in the hills, they greet eachother as equal citizens.

What’s happening here is that McDonald workers understand different political possibilities, and they’re assembling and dismantling hierarchies for games and grand theatre, and expedience, on a weekly and even daily basis.

That is how stupid this chapter is. But we buy it because we don’t know enough about the cultures they describe and because they don’t give us any context.

And then the authors finally conclude this shit show of a chapter with the following:

We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. [diificult choice!] Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.

The stinking hypocrisy of this – the chapter is full of insults to anthropologists for supposedly infantilizing indigenous cultures or our ancestors by doing things like using categories, or comparing human hierarchies to animal hierarchies or for the heinous crime insisting that we might have egalitarian origins – meanwhile the authors are the ones turning indigenous people into barney the purple shrooming hyperconscious neoliberal social structure choosing caricature cartoon dinosaurs.

The authors portray indigenous people and our palaeolithic ancestors the way that cavemen or fictional indigenous people are portrayed in bad movies and TV shows. They do freaky deaky things for no reason and with no context – because it looks cool – they choose hierarchy and male dominance and slavery for fun and grand seasonal theatre – so mysterious – and they have superhuman powers of mystical wisdom, unlike us, they can just magically morph their social structure to one form or another for some magical reason that never gets explained in this book.

It’s like when educated liberals think they’re sooo much more advanced than racist conservatives because liberals treat brown people like they’re objects of worship and self flagellation and guilt and put them on a weird pedastal that’s almost as dehumanizing and racist as old school conservative racist stereotypes.

And the authors conclude:

“If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns? Should we be looking for a moment in time like the one Rousseau envisaged, when somebody first enclosed a tract of land, declaring: ‘This is mine and always will be!’ Or is that another fool’s errand?

“These are the questions to which we now turn.

And those are questions that that I give them enormous props for asking, but which they have rendered themselves utterly incapable of answering, because they insist on ignoring or insulting and slandering all of the scholarship that could actually explain those things.

Next time we’ll see how the authors weird attitudes and prejudices cause them to miss the answers to some of these questions when they finally investigate an actual egalitarian anarcho communist society – and decide to dismiss and insult them instead of learning anything from them.

Oof that one was a doozy, if you want to know more about all the stuff I talked about today, a link to the bibliography for this episode should be up soon in the show notes and video notes, and you can also find link to written transcripts that you can share with people who are more into reading.

Also, I’ve been doing a fun series of talks with Derrick Varn – (hey varn!) about anthropology and politics – If you don’t already know him Varn is walking enyclopedia of intellectual history in general and he knows about everything and it’s grandmother when it comes to socialist intellectual history so check out his Varn Vlog youtube show / podcast to see us having some fun talks, plus check out his other stuff, he’s a regular on the This is Revolution show which is an excellent materialist political talk show, and he’s doing Mortal Science with Ezri from Swampside Chats where they question and re-evaluate the ins and outs of Marxism. So check’em’er out as Blezz Beats says.

And I finally did another interview with Arnold on the Fight Like an Animal show – the first interview we did the audio was too messed up, so he never released it, but this one is a lot of fun, so check it out and check out his show in general if you haven’t already, it’s maybe my #1 favourite political podcast.

And I have an art history correction to do, but I’ll do it next time because this episode is just so damned long!

And finally – if you can – gimme money. it takes me more than a month full time to make these critique videos and it blows a real hole in my already extremely modest income and I’ve been doing this non-stop since august without a break so that I can finish this before people lose interest in the book – so if what I’m doing is valuable to you and you have disposable income, please subscribe to my patreon.

I don’t monetize my channel even though I’m eligible for it, because I don’t want to gunk up your life with more stupid advertisements that you’re already subjected to, and I don’t do paywalled content because that defeats the whole purpose of doing a show geared at spreading knowledge and skills. So your subscriptions are not purchasing a commodity, they’re solidarity payments, because you’re someone ho can afford it and you want the show to keep going. And note that I charge per episode not per months because it takes so long to actually make these and sometimes I need to take breaks and work on different project, and I don’t want to be stuck cranking out stuff just for the sake of cranking out stuff.

Addendum: Levi-strauss Meshugas

This is part of the script I had written before I discovered that Levi-Strauss was wrong about the seasonal settlement patterns of the nambikwara. N.B. that almost every nomadic culture has seasonal settlement patterns, usually more dispersed in the hot season and more condensed in the wet season, but sometimes it’s the opposite depending on the resources they depend on. Even though he got the Nambikwara wrong, many cultures shift to different subsistence activities by season – for example the Nuer actually do pastoralism for most of the year and then do farming for a couple of months, much like the ancient Israelites did. Many societies who end up being forced to abandon hunting and gathering begin by doing agriculture part of the year like this, and then relying on it more and more as populations increase and surrounding territories are cut off from them.

…the interesting thing for us in terms of politics, is explaining the change in the Nambikwara’s social structure in terms of having greater or lesser authority in different seasons.

Except there’s a huuuge problem – and that is that Levi-Strauss does not actually say anything about the Nambikwara chief’s level of authority changing from season to season!

Like maybe the authors got this from some other authors and forgot to cite them – or maybe they’re remembering the Levi-Strauss article that they cite incorrectly from having read them 20 years ago, and not bothering to re-read them again which would be typical – but I kind of think they’re just making it up!

What’s giving me this impression is that in Dawn of Everything the authors seem to be saying the opposite of what they said about the chief’s authority in their Farewell to the Childhood of Man article from 2015.

In that article which is a bit like a combination of chapters 1 & 3 of Dawn of Everything, the authors talk about the Nambikwara chief’s varying levels of authority this way:

Chiefs made or lost their reputations by offering guidance during ‘the nomadic adventures of the dry season’. And with the greater abundance of the wet season, a chief who had performed this task well could attract large numbers of followers to settle in villages, where he directed the construction of houses and tending of gardens.5

And I emphasize those words, because when I read that passage, those words give me the impression that the chief had more authority in gardening season than in the foraging season.

And when I first read Farewell to the Childhood of Man a few years ago, I went to look at the Levi-Strauss article that they cited, and he says that during the foraging season, if the chief doesn’t do a good job, his followers will eventually ditch him and he could lose his position as chief entirely if he doesn’t have a large enough band to be viable. And he says that conversely a chief who was successful in the foraging season has his position cemented for the gardening season.

So that, along with my knowledge of other cultures, seemed to reinforce my initial understanding, that during the foraging season when the Nambikwara were nomadic, the chief’s authority was lower because people had the option to leave, and he had please his followers in order to keep them, and then in the gardening season where people can’t just leave, his authority was stronger.

Like think about your job – if there’s a labour shortage and you can just pick up and get a similar job anywhere, your boss has less authority over you. If you show up late one day, he’ll think twice about firing you or punishing you because he needs you there. THat’s like the nambikwara in the foraging season.

But if there’s a job shortage and you’re stuck in that job, your boss authority is much higher and you have to be on your toes and make sure to always smile and laugh at his stupid jokes. And that’s more like the rainy season where people are stuck on their plots of land and with their Chief.

But then in Dawn of Everything, the authors are saying the exact opposite of what they said in 2015 – here they say:

Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.”

So when I read that I was like wait what – oh shit, did I read wrong the first time in the 2015 article?

At first I got really embarassed thinking that I must have misread the 2015 article and the Levi-Strauss article. So I reread the 2015 article, and then I went back and re-read the Levi-Strauss article, and then I also went and read a book that Levi-Strauss wrote about the Nambikwara – and then I realized – wait a second – although it’s a reasonable inference to think that the chief has less authority when people can just leave, and more when they’re stuck in the same place – Levi-Strauss doesn’t actually specifically say anything about the chief having different levels of authority in different seasons!

Levi-Strauss does talk about how the chief has no coercive authority, and how his only actual power is persuasion and example – which by the way means that the Nambikwara chiefdom is actually a democratic hierarchy, not a dominance hierarchy – but he talks about this as being the the case all year ‘round, not about in one season or another.

The following quote is the bulk of what the Levi-Strauss says about the chief’s level of authority in the article that the authors cite, and it’s more or less the same thing that he says in his other writings about the Nambikwara:

During the dry season, the Nambikuara live in nomadic bands, each one under the leadership of a chief, who, during the sedentary life of the rainy months, may be either a village chief or a person of position…

Each year, at the end of the rainy season, that is, in April or in early May, the semi-permanent dwellings laid in the vicinity of the gallery-forest where the gardens are cleared and tilled, are abandoned and the population splits into several bands formed on a free choice basis…

Personal prestige and the ability to inspire confidence are … the foundations of leadership in Nambikuara society... both are necessary in the man who will become the guide of … the nomadic life of the dry season. For six or seven months, the chief will be entirely responsible for the management of his band. It is he who orders the start of the wandering period, selects the routes, chooses the stopping points and the duration of the stay at each of them, whether a few days or several weeks. He also orders and organizes the hunting, fishing, collecting and gathering expeditions, and determines the conduct of the band in relation to neighboring groups.

When the band’s chief is, at the same time, a village chief [meaning when they’re in the farming season] … his duties do not stop there. He will determine the moment when, and the place where, the group will settle; he will also direct the gardening and decide what plants are to be cultivated; and, generally speaking, he will organize the occupations according to the seasons’ needs and possibilities.

Seasons s apostrophe, meaning both seasons.

Then then he goes back to talking about the nomadic season:

If the chief’s authority appears too exacting, if he keeps too many women for himself … or if he does not satisfactorily solve the food problem in times of scarcity, discontent will very likely appear. Then, individuals, or families, will separate from the group and join another band believed to be better managed. … The day will come when the chief finds himself heading a group too small to face the problems of daily life, and to protect his women from the covetousness of other bands. In such cases, he will have no alternative but to give up his command and to rally, together with his last followers, a happier faction. Therefore, Nambikuara social structure appears continuously on the move.

And that’s about it when it comes to the chief’s level of authority.

Like maybe the chief does have more authority in the hunting season – if you know something I don’t please let me know – but there’s nothing about it in Levi-Strauss one way or the other.

If it’s true that the chief has more authority in the hunting season, I’d guess that it’s related to the fact that the foraging season is very precarious. Levi-Strauss keeps talking about how inhospitable the enviornment is and how they have to eat spiders and snakes and the hunting is mostly of small animals and catches are few and far between – so you might need strict group cohesion – Levi-Strauss talks about how the Nambikwara in general seem very passive about decisions and always want to defer to the chief. And even in hyperegalotarian immediate retrurn hunter gathererers you have hunting party leaders for the duration of the hunt, but I’m really just guessing.

Bibliography / Suggested Readings

Graeber & Wengrow 2021 – The Dawn of Everything

Graeber & Wengrow 2015 — Farewell to the Childhood of Man

Nambikwara

Paul Aspelin 1976 — Nambicuara economic dualism

David Price 1981 — Nambiquara leadership

Levi-Strauss 1944 — The Social and Psychological Aspect of Chieftainship in a Primitive Tribe: the Nambikuara of Northwestern Mato Grosso

Levi-Strauss 1948 — La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara

Nuer

E. Evans-Pritchard 1940 - The Nuer

E. Evans-Pritchard 1957 — Nuer Religion

Sharon Hutchison & Naomi Pendle 2015 — Violence, legitimacy and prophecy: Nuer struggles with uncertainty in South Sudan

Inuit

Marcel Mauss & Henri Beuchat 1904 — Seasonal variations of the Eskimo : a study in social morphology

Janet Mancini Billson & Kyra Mancini Lanham 2007 — Inuit Women

Lakota

Lowie 1948 — Some Aspects of Political Organization Among the American Aborigines (Lakota Police)

Paleolithic Burials

Moreau (ed) 2020 — Social Inequality Before Farming? [this is an anthology of papers from the latest big conference on this issue, several chapters are available online from the authors if you goorgle them]

Peter Turchin 2019 — An Anarchist View of Human Social Evolution [palaeolithic “monumental architecture]

Formicola 2007 — From the Sunghir Children to the Romito Dwarf

Pacific Northwest Coast People (Kwakwakawakw / Kwakiutl)

Franz Boas 1967 (posthumous) — Kwakiutl Ethnography

Graeber & Wengrow 2018 — Many Seasons Ago (see debates in American Anthropologist)

Hunter Gatherer Categories, Etc

Peter Jordan 2009 — Hunters and Gatherers, from Bentley, Mascher & Chippendale 2009 — Handbook of Archaeological Theories

Robert Kelley 1995/2014 — The Foraging Spectrum

Colin Turnbull 1961 — The Forest People

Jerome Lewis 2014 — Egalitarian Social Organization Among Hunter-Gatherers (immediate return vs delayed return)

Richard Lee & Irving Devore (eds) 1968 — Man the Hunter

The Kalahari and Indigenous Peoples’ Debates

Alan Barnard 1992 — The Kalahari debate A bibliographical essay

Alan Barnard 2006 — Kalahari revisionism, Vienna, and the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate

Edwin Wilmsen 1989 — Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari

Edwin Wilmsen & James Denbow 1990 — Paradigmatic History of San-Speaking Peoples and Current Attempts at Revision

Wilmsen 2010 — The See Ourselves as We Need to See Us: ethnography’s primitive turn in the early cold war years (with reply by Alan Barnard)

Richard Lee 1990 — Foragers, Genuine or Spurious?

Richard Lee & Mattias Guenther 1991 — Oxen or Onions? The Search for Trade and Truth in the Kalahari

Grauer 2007 — New perspectives on the Kalahari debate, a tale of two genomes (music)

Renée Sylvain 2015 — Foragers and fictions in the Kalahari, Indigenous identities and the politics of deconstruction

Kosher Laws / Food Taboos

Marvin Harris 1997 — The Abominable Pig, in Couninan (Ed.) 2008 Food and Culture: A Reader

Marvin Harris 1974 - Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches

Marvin Harris 1985 — Cultural Materialism

Agriculture and Decline

Mark Nathan Cohen 1977 — The Food Crisis in Prehistory

Mark Nathan Cohen et al 2009 — Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture (see debates)

Marvin Harris 1974 - Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches

Marvin Harris 1985 — Cultural Materialism

Marvin Harris 1977 — Cannibals and Kings

Social Evolution

Sanderson 2001 — Social Evolution: Overview

Sanderson 1992 — Social Evolution, A Critical History

Lewis Henry Morgan 1977 — Ancient Society

11. Why are Communist countries all one-party dictatorships?

Nov 1, 2022

Why has every communist country so far been a dictatorship?

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.

Is it something inherent to Marxism? Is human nature incompatible with political equality? Has “true” communism never been tried yet? If so, then why not?

https://youtu.be/3D4l_l1MedQ

For the audio podcast version click here on a mobile device.

Script

Hello fellow kids!

Welcome back to What is Politics

Today I want to give a very simple answer to a question that gets asked all the time, and that for some reason almost no one on the left seems to be able to give a coherent answer to – and that is: why is it that every communist country is always a dictatorship?

Even some of the biggest names on the left give really terrible answers to this questions. Most Recently I heard Dr. Richard Wolff who’s a popular Marxist Professor / youtube personality completely flubbing this question on the Lex Fridman podcast – which is what motivated me to make this video!

Fridman – who was born in the soviet union – asked Wolff if there was something inherent to trying to create an egalitarian society out of naturally hierarchical humans, that inevitably leads to dictatorship. And Wolff responded by babbling on and on about how civilization is all about doing all sorts of things that are against our nature, and he talked about Freud’s theory that civilization inevitably means that we are forced to do things that are against our nature, and that this causes all kinds of traumas but that that’s the only other alternative is to be wild animals murdering eachother all day.

And wow, that is just a really terrible answer on so many levels. Nevermind how outdated that theory is, but it’s basically like saying, ‘sure socialism would suck, but it’s better’n’it wud’.. kind of like D-Pants – which you can look up for your entertainment or horror.

And Wolf’s inability to answer this question is really surprising – both because Wolff must have been asked this question hundreds of times in his life and also because the correct answer is just really, really simple.

Now, if you want a good explanation for why it’s not against human nature to organize on egalitarian lines, then check out all of my anthropology episodes and my ongoing dawn of everything critique – but for now, let’s stick to why every communist country is always a dictatorship.

Before I get to the EZ obvious reason for why communist countries are always dictatorships, I should point out that there are coherent explanations for this coming from the right – people like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, or more recently Peter Boettke. One is that if you try to control the free market – for example by imposing rent control – it creates unintended consequences – like landlords harassing tenants and neglecting their buildings – that require more and more regulations and agencies to police – like anti harassment laws, and special tenant protections, special penalties for violating these rules and special housing courts – so that you eventually end up with total government control of everything. And there are related arguments like the “calculation problem” that tell us that a centralized command economy necessarily leads to economic failure because you can’t price things correctly without the zillions of inputs that a decentralized market gives you, and how these inevitable failures incentivize corruption and dictatorship – and you can look up those authors to get a sense of those arguments – I’ll make a video debating these arguments another time, but for now, I want to point out that these arguments are besides the point.

First of all, central planning without a market, is not an inherent feature of socialism. While some models for socialism involve eliminating markets and central planning, historically many socialists were quite enthusiastic about markets. Until the era of the soviet union and the other communist countries, the defining feature of socialism was that it sought to abolishing dependence relationships. Most crucially the employee employer relationship – but also things like male dominance, ethnic or religious dominance, slavery, and imperialism – which is dominance of some countries by other countries.

Also, given today’s computing technology, there is good reason to believe that you could have a decentralized economy even without a market. You can look up cybernetic planning in chile and bulgaria or OGAS in the USSR or books like the peoples’ republic of walmart or red plenty or the general intellect unit podcast for more about that stuff – but for now, we’re going to leave this fascinating stuff for another episode and instead look at a the very simple and obvious reason why all communist countries are dictatorships which everyone seems to ignore:

Every communist country thus far has been a dictatorship because all of them except for one, started on purpose as dictatorships. You had one communist revolution in russia in 1917 which was supposed to be deeply democratic – but within a few years, that revolution failed at socialism and at democracy, and degenerated into a one party top down dictatorship with a bureaucratic ruling elite class – and it was that model which every other so-called communist country explicitly emulated on purpose.

Now why would all of these countries copy a failed model on purpose?

There are several reason, but three main ones:

First of all, the Soviet Union model was attractive to these countries because while the Soviet Union completely failed at communism and at democracy, it did succeed at rapid industrialization – Russia went from being a very poor country with 85% of the population as peasants, to an advanced industrialized world power in 20 years. This is something that took the first capitalist countries about 200 years to do. And it was actually this rapid industrialization that enabled russia to win WWII.

Another thing that the soviet union succeeded at was at escaping economic and military domination by the powerful capitalist countries – i.e. imperialism. And most socialist revolutions were also nationalist revolutions, seeking national independence.

If you compare communist countries to similarly underdeveloped capitalist countries, but that were not dominated by outside powers – like russia and finland – capitalist finland does a lot better because it had access to world markets. But if you compare communist countries – whose markets were generally blockaded by the rich capitalist countries – to similarly underdeveloped countries that were dominated by powerful countries – like costa rica vs china – the communist countries develop and the capitalist ones don’t.

And finally the Soviet model also succeeded at getting rid of the previous elite class, and in allowing formerly poor and low status people to rise up in the ranks of all the powerful positions in the state. So for the first few decades, you would find large numbers of people from worker and peasants backgrounds, at all levels of Soviet government and industrial management, including the head of state.

Also, he fact that the USSR industrialized so quickly is what enabled them to win WWII.

So people in all of these poor countries all around the world who wanted independence and development for their societies, were looking at all this thinking like wow I’ll have what she’s having!

And it’s not surprising that every country that had a native communist revolution that emulated the soviet system was a poor country. The only wealthier countries that had communist governments were the eastern european countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia where communism was basically imposed on them by the Soviet Union after World War II with the consent of the US and the UK at the Yalta conference.

And it’s very important to point out that although it was only poor countries that ever had communist revolutions, most socialists, including Karl Marx and his followers – and including the leaders of the russian revolution itself – thought that communism wasn’t even possible in poor countries.

Another important reason that poor countries emulated the soviet model and not other democratic models of socialism, was that the Soviet Union purposefully trained, recruited and funded revolutionaries in poor countries, and it tried to control socialist movements and parties everywhere around the world in order to mold them after their own image, and also so that they would serve the soviet union’s interests.

So if you were a nationalist anti imperialist 3^rd world revolutionary, you could go to a school is Moscow and learn how to lead a successful revolution, and get money for your cause and a blueprint for what to do and how to start industrializing your country.

Meanwhile if you were an international socialist or a libertarian socialist, you had no one helping you, and you probably had soviet agents trying to undermine you or even assassinate you on top of the united states trying to overthrow and assassinate you.

Ironically the two countries in the 20^th century where there were successful socialist revolutions that were free and democratic and economically functional while they lasted – had their revolutions crushed by the Soviet Union! And those are Spain where the libertarian socialists aka anarchists carried out a successful socialist revolution in much of the country during the spanish civil war from 1936–1939, and the Ukraine where the western part of the country was in anarchist hands from 1918–1921.

Meanwhile in Chile, the one wealthier country that elected a government that was serious about transitioning to a parliamentary form of socialism, had its government overthrown by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by a free market oriented dictatorship.

The New Class

So that’s the short Tink Tonk version answer – there was one failed communist revolution in russia, everyone else copied that on purpose because they wanted to industrialize and remain independent – while at the same time, the USSR and the USA made sure to crush any kind of democratic socialism in the bud the few times that it appeared.

Now as simple as this answer is, you’ve probably never heard it before, and a lot of the things that I just said probably seem confusing or like they contradict a lot of what you’ve learned – like that the russian revolution failed, or that communism is supposed to be democratic or some socialists were very enthusiastic about the market – so let’s get into the long version for everyone who’s head is spinning or exploding.

But before I get into the details, I want to point out that I did not make this particular theory up – the idea that all the communist revolutions were primarily a means to industrialize poor countries and achieve national independence was first articulated in a book from 1957 called the New Class by Milovan Djilas. Djilas had been a top Communist Official in Yugoslavia and before that he had been one of the partisan fighters who liberated Belgrade from the Nazis and established communism in Yugoslavia in the first place.

And just before writing the New Class, Djilas had been stripped of his position and expelled from the communist party for criticizing corruption among other top Yugoslav officials and for calling for and end to one party rule, in favour of a socialist multiparty democracy. And soon after that he was thrown jail for criticizing the government of Yugoslavia in the foreign press.

And this is a really interesting book if you’re interested in the history of communism, and it’s almost a forgotten book at this point for some reason.

More recently, Branko Milanovic articualtes more or less the same idea in chapter 3 of his 2019 book Capitalism Alone.

Socialism and Communism Definitions

So – why do I say that Russia failed at communism when the soviet unions is always described in pro and anti-communist sources alike as the most important communist country in the world for 80 years? And what do I mean when I say that the leaders of the Russian revolution didn’t think that communism was possible in a poor country like Russia? Why would they undertake a communist revolution if they didn’t think communism was possible in the first place?

Before we can make sense of any of this, we first need some kind of definition of socialism or communism – and to do that we need to look at the history of socialism.

Like all political terms, the words socialism and communism are words that most people use them without really knowing what they mean. Everyone kind of just “feels” what they mean, having inferred their meanings from journalists and academics and youtube brodudes who also have no idea what these words mean.

And whenever we just “feel” the definitions of words without knowing what they mean, that’s a big red flag – pun intended – that we’re being manipulated. And socialism are communism are terms whose meaning a lot of powerful people have been interested in distorting and manipulating.

Wealthy people and the governments who represent them in capitalist countries have defined these words in ways that manipulate us into hating certain things that we might otherwise love – like the idea of workers directly running the government and their workplaces – which historically were the core tenets of socialism.

Meanwhile the leaders of former and current communist countries have defined the words socialism and communism in ways that manipulate us into loving or excusing things that we might otherwise hate – like a dictatorship over the workers by and for bureaucrats. And we’ll see in a few minutes how this starts with Lenin, the founder and head of what became the Soviet Union.

In mainstream corporate journalism and academia the word socialism tends to mean government control over the most important sectors of the economy, and the word communism is used to describe a one party dictatorship and a centralized command economy.

Since Bernie Sanders’ presidential runs in United States, a lot of people now use the word socialism to refer to a capitalist economy but with an advanced welfare state, like the Scandinavian countries.

Hilariously, in american right wing media and especially right wing alternative and social media you’ll often hear the word “socialism” used to describe a system where rich and powerful zillionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates use government power in order to prevent potential competitors from ever being able to threaten their wealth. And I say hilariously because when socialism started out this was basically the socialists’ definition of the world “capitalism!”

Meanwhile among people who admire the so called communist countries, the word socialism is used to describe a transition period between capitalism and communism where the government takes control of major industries, and the population becomes employees of the state, while the word communism means a stateless society where workers directly control the economy and the government.

Note how contradictory these all of these definitions are!

So let’s iron out what was historically meant by socialism and communism, so that we can understand where the leaders of the russian revolution are coming from and what they were trying to do when they hit the scene in the early 20^th century and how they became the model for 3^rd world national liberation movements.

What is Socialism

The word Socialism was the name given to a broad range of ideas which emerged in the first decades of the 1800s. What these ideas had in common is that they rejected the economic and political system that was emerging at the time, which the socialists called “capitalism”. And the word “capitalism” was actually a slur word invented by those early socialists in order to describe a system where the owners of capital – meaning productive property – used their control of the state and their market power to enrich themselves and entrench their power over the rest of the population, and their employees in particular.

And in capitalism, the more capital you have the more power that you have.

And that power is economic power, but it’s also political power

It’s political power in because capital and money give you the power to tell people what to do. Remember that the word politics refers to decision making in groups.

In capitalism the owner of capital has the power to boss around the people who depend on his capital. That’s why the owner of a company tells his employees what to do and not the other way around, even though the owner might be just one person and the employees might be 1000 people – in the private sphere, capitalism is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship of the owner. The person who owns the property gets to tell those people who depend on his property what to do.

And the only power that iyou have is whatever your bargaining power accords you – ultimately that means you just have the power to refuse to serve the employer or rent the landlord’s apartment. And realistically you only have that power to the extent that you have better options.

And the more capital you have the more people there will be who are dependent on your property – whether it’s as tenants, as employees or as consumers of your products.

So if you own the all the water sources or the food sources for your town, you will rule that town – which is how many ancient kingdoms got all of their power. Capitalism is only different from previous systems in terms of the forms that this dependency takes, based on property rights, and contracts and employer employee relationships rather than things like divine right or tribal affiliation or other traditions.

The other form of political power that you get from being an owner of a lot of capital is what we normally think of when we hear the word politics, and that’s power over the state. In modern representative democracies, all citizens are supposed to have equal political power through one person one vote. But in reality, the more capital you have, the more you dominate the political system beyond your tiny vote. And this happens in a whole variety of ways.

The most obvious one is through campaign donations, where you get to choose which politicians can afford to be seen and heard by voters and which don’t. And then there’s ownership of the media and internet companies – where you get to choose which politicians get to be seen and heard and which don’t and which ideas get to be seen and heard and which don’t. And then there are donations to universities where you get to influence what research scientists do, and what elites and professionals think and what theories are popular in economics, politics, medicine and every other discipline.

Even if you live in a country that has strict campaign finance laws and publicly funded universities – the big corporations and multibillionaires still have enormous power over the political system, both through ownership of the media, and the leverage they have over jobs and investment – but also because they have the money to hire lobbyists who work 24–7 exposing politicians to the capital owner’s point of view:

Oh you can’t raise the minimum wage, that reduces employment! and you can’t raise taxes on rich people because that takes away their incentive to innovate! and you can’t have rent control, that just reduces housing supply. So legislators are being fed these ideas day in and day out And in the US, corporate think tanks commonly go so far as to write the laws that their wind up monkey doll politicians then go off and rubber stamp in congress and the senate.

Meanwhile there are very few people or organization exposing politicians to ordinary peoples’ points of view, or writing draft legislation in favour of tenants or employees. And the overwhelming majority of people don’t belong to these underfunded understaffed and often idiotically inefficient organizations.

Most people only know how to vote and maybe write an email once in a while or give an angry incoherent speech at a town hall meeting where you don’t even know what you’re talking about. [mcrib video]

And the power of the wealthy over the state was much more blatant in the early 19^th century, where in most countries that had elected parliaments, you needed to have a certain amount of property just to have the right to vote.

So a socialist was someone who wanted to replace this system where the more capital you have, the more power you have – with something where everyone has relatively equal power, and where the economy and the political system exist in order to benefit the entire society not just people who own a lot of capital.

Early on, there were some authoritarian visions of socialism, like Saint-Simoneanism, where a wise elite would run things for the benefit of the rest – a bit like in Plato’s republic – but as the 19^th century went on, and the workers movement became an important driver of socialist ideas, those kinds of authoritarian visions of socialism largely faded out in favour popular hyperdemocratic visions of socialism.

And these ideas were either directly democratic where workers should directly control the government and their workplaces, like in Anarchism, or Marxism or via their unions, like in syndicalism – or at via elected state representatives like what was called at the time Lassalism, and which I call “parliamentary socialism” to avoid jargon.

One of the main aims of the socialist movement at this point, was to abolish the employer-employee relationship and the landlord tenant relationship. These relationships were seen as the next step up on the ladder of oppressive relationships after the master-slave relationship, and the lord-serf relationship. Wage labour was better than slavery or serfdom – sometimes – because slaves and serfs were often treated better than the lowest wage earners, and although wage earners technically had more freedom, they often had to work such long hours in such atrocious conditions just to survive that they couldn’t exercise any of their freedoms – but they were similar in the sense that there was a relationship of servitude based on one person controlling property that the other depended on.

And remember that the word “employee”, means human tool. I employ a shovel to help me dig a ditch. I employ a worker and let him use my shovel so that he dig a ditch so that I don’t have to. I own a slave, but I rent a worker. Better, but still servitude.

Different socialists had different ideas about how politics and property should be managed – like should people be able to own their own plots of land and trade their products on the market, or should everything be owned collectively and exchanged according to need or to some plan – but all of the main strains of socialism agreed that wage labour should be abolished, and that any property that many people depended on, needed to be controlled by the people who depended on it – workers and consumers – whether as a cooperative or a commune, or through state representatives. It should under no circumstances be controlled by an outside force like a private owner or a non-democratic government.

In the words of Eugene Debs, the most prominent socialist in the United States in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century:

“What is it that socialism proposes? Simply that the tools workingmen made and use and upon which their very lives depend shall be owned by themselves that they may fully produce the things that are required to keep themselves and their families in comfort and health.”

All this to say that the main tenets of socialism were democracy and individual freedom.

Freedom from servitude to a king, a master, a government, a business owner or a husband. Freedom to make the decisions that affect you, via direct democracy in the workplace, direct democratic control over collective property, and direct or representative democratic over the broader decision making institutions, whether that be a state government or else a confederation of communes and cooperatives.

In the words of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’ partner in organizing and theorizing, the communist revolution will “establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” and the proletarian means wage workers who don’t own significant property.

Marx saw real democracy and communism as basically one and the same thing, and to quote a paraphrase of Marx’ early terrible writing

to Marx ‘What makes democracy ‘true’ is not the equal opportunity of every citizen to devote himself to public lifeas something special, but the “immediate participation of all in deliberating and deciding” on political matters. There should be no professional bureaucrats, no professional politicians, no professional police, etc.

…‘political’ deliberation and administration would be the work of everyone, on apart-time or short-term basis; it would not be sufficient to have only a chance to serve. The chance of every Catholic to become a priest, Marx remarked, does not produce the priesthood of all

Vladimir Lenin, who started the Communist revolution in Russia and who was head of state of russia from 1917 until he died in 1924 tells us that “Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.”

Leon Trotsky, another leading figure in the russian revolution, tells us that “Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.” [CANT FIND SOURCE]

Communism

OK so socialism and communism are supposed to be democratic. But what’s the difference between communism and socialism?

The short answer is nothing – these are terms that were often used interchangeably by predecessors of Marx on until 1917.

The long answer is that although the terms were used interchangeably, the word communism was sometimes used by Marx and Engels and the parties influenced by them, to distinguish themselves from other kinds of socialists, the main distinction being that the communists were generally against private property and market relations and believed in Marx’ so-called “scientific socialism” which is a fancy way of saying that they think about ideas and political systems in their material context, which we’ll talk about in a bit, as opposed to ideas and political systems just forming randomly out of peoples’ minds.

Nevertheless you can read Marx and Engels using the terms socialism and communism interchangeably and synonymously for their entire lives, as well as other more descriptive terms like “the free association of the producers”

Other socialists like Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, who’s one of the early leading anarchist thinkers, and whose philosophy inspired the Paris communards – were big fans of the free market and they were ok with people owning property so long as you couldn’t own the property that others depended on, and so long as labour couldn’t be rented. In other words, they were pro market but against a market for labour and against the employee employer relationship, which again was one of the main objectives of socialism in general once you get to the mid 19^th century.

Socialism and State

Most people have it in their heads that socialism or communism means the state controls everything and manages a planned economy in the name of the workers – which is what you saw in all of the so-called communist countries until vietnam and china took a turn towards capitalism. And in Vietnam and China that state still carefully keeps the private sector under its thumb so that it doesn’t turn into a political competitor.

But was the actual socialist and communist attitude towards the state in Marx’ time and until the early years of the russian revolution into the 1920s.

Whereas one popular branch of 19^th century socialism called Lassalism – envisioned a democratic state controlling the economy – the two most popular forms of socialism – marxism, and anarchism – were expressly against the state even existing, nevermind controlling anything. Both the anarchists, and Karl Marx and his followers believed that that state is by definition an instrument that was used by one class of people to oppress and exploit the rest of the population.

In slave societies the state reinforces the master’s rights, in feudalism the state enforces the rights of the nobility to extract surplus from the serfs, and in capitalism the state enforces a version of property rights that ensures that people who have lots of capital get to command people who don’t have capital, who have to rent themselves out as employees to those people who do have it, and protect people with lots of property from losing it in all sorts of ways.

Therefore, in a communist, classless society, there could be no state, because no one would be controlling anyone else and there would just be no purpose for it. Once the revolution happened, and the workers took power in their own hands “the administration of people would become the administration of things” and the state would wither away since there would no longer be any need to dominate anyone.

Keep in mind that in this era there was no welfare state as we know it – the state was largely just institutions of coercion – courts, armies, police, prisons and sometimes poorhouses and asylums, which were a lot like prisons, keeping undesirables out of the eyes of rich people.

Marx and Engels tell us that state is “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests” and the Modern state “is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt … for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.”

Marx tells us that

“the working class cannot simply lay hold on the ready made State machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.”

Engels tells us that

“The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.”

and that after the revolution

“the interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction … of production. The state is not “abolished”, it atrophies.”

Marx writes,

“The ‘police’, the ‘judiciary’, and the ‘administration’ are not the representatives of a civil society which administers its own universal interests … through them; they are the representatives of the state and their task is to administer the state against civil society.”5

Where Marxists differed from anarchist communists was that anarchists thought that you needed to destroy the state right away as part of the socialist revolution, whereas the marxists thought that the workers needed to temporarily seize the state as part of the revolution in order to prevent owners from taking back power. And the workers would hold on to the state until the former owners became assimilated into the working class. And Marx and Engels called this temporary seizure of power, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Marx and Engels’ ideas about the form and duration of the dictatorship of the proletariat changed at different points in Marx’ life but the important thing to know about that term is that dictatorship in the mid 19^th century was not so much the concept of one man rule or lack of democracy the way that it is understood today – it described a temporary state of emergency. It had connotations of the ancient Roman instution of the dictatura, where in times of war and other emergencies, the Roman Constitution allowed for the senate to elect a leader with limited powers who could rule without the senate or having to deliberate or approve of his actions. And this period ended with the end of the crisis.

Marx basically used the term “dictatorship” to mean “dominance” – so a representative democratic parliament is the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” meaning the dominance of the business class, even though workers and peasants might be able to vote in some countries. And that’s why he uses phrases like “the dictatorship of the democracy” or “democratic dictatorship” which sound like self-contradictory nonsense to 21^st century or even 20^th century ears.

In the 1850s Marx and Engels spoke as if the dictatorship of the proletariat was about seizing control of the state as it exists with its various institutions, and this is the version that’s more well known because it’s from the Communist Manifesto which is easy to read and which became well known in the 20^th century 100 years after it was published as an obscure pamphlet.

Now even in this version, which is the more statist version, the dictatorship of the proletariat was still supposed to be totally democratic – for workers. It’s only the owning class that would be subject to state rule without elected representation, until they assimilated into the working class, a which point the state no longer has any reason to exist because it’s not suppressing anyone.

The anarchists thought that this was wishful thinking at best, and opportunist deception at worst. In the famous words of Mikahail Bakunin who was the leading thinker of the anarchist movement, and Marx’ biggest rival for the leadership of the international workingmen’s association, the first big international socialist organization:

If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable.

What does it mean that the proletariat will be elevated to a ruling class? Is it possible for the whole proletariat to stand at the head of the government? …

The Marxist theory solves this dilemma very simply. By the people’s rule, they mean the rule of a small number of representatives elected by the people… This is a lie, behind which lurks the despotism of the ruling minority, a lie all the more dangerous in that it appears to express the so-called will of the people.

The Marxists say that this minority will consist of workers. Yes, possibly of former workers, who, as soon as they become the rulers of the representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State; they will no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their claims to rulership over the people. Those who doubt this know very little about human nature.

The fundamental difference between a monarchy and even the most democratic republic is that in the monarchy the bureaucrats oppress and rob the people for the benefit of the privileged in the name of the King, and to fill their own coffers; while in the republic the people are robbed and oppressed … in the name of “the will of the people” (and to fill the coffers of the democratic bureaucrats)… But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled “the people’s stick.”

and you can read this whole section and see just how prescient it is when it comes to the Russian revolution and the other communist countries that copied it’s model.

But, also note that here Bakunin is criticizing Marx and Engels’ early vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In 1870, 20 years or so after the communist manifesto, there was a workers’ revolution led by anarchists and other non-marxist socialists in Paris which established the Paris Commune. This was a communist society which lasted about 2 months until is was crushed by the military.

After the Commune happened, Marx and Engels declared that the Paris Commune was in fact what the dictatorship of the proletariat would look like, which is to say a very democratic network of assemblies, with the no professional army or state police or professional bureaucracy, just armed citizens directly governing themselves and defending the revolution. And Marx and Engels noted that the revolutionaries did the right thing in basically dismantling the state from the getgo.

And at this point Engels tells us

“the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.

And although Engels talks about the Paris Commune as if it’s a form of state, the Paris commune was built in part by anarchists, and most anarchists considered the Paris Commune as an example of an anarchist-communist society and as a model of organization for an anarchist commune – so although the two camps continued to critique each other and accentuate their differences, they’re actually very close at this point anyhow.

And a few years later in 1874 Marx wrote a mostly forgotten point by point response to Bakunin’s state and anarchy book.

So where Bakunin says

What does it mean that the proletariat will be elevated to a ruling class? … Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”28

Marx responds

“Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”29

And i’ll put a link to that and everything else I’m discussing in the bibliography for this episode.

By the time we get to the 20^th century, as marxist political parties gain success in many european countries – both in terms of pushing non socialist governments to adopt socialists’ demands, but also in terms of actually winning elections – marxists start becoming much friendlier to the state. So in 1902 Karl Kautsky in theorizes that the modern state is the right mechanism with which to organize the communes and cooperatives of the future. And a whole branch of marxism led by Eduard Bernstein, abandons violent revolution entirely and adopts a parliamentary socialist type of ideology kind of like Lassalism where you just keep passing better and better laws in the existing state system until you eventally get to socialism, except keeping in mind Marx’ theoretical outlook on understanding capitalism and the supposed laws of history.

But nonetheless, at the time of the russian revolution, the full spectrum of socialists from Anarchists, to revolutionary Marxists, to parliamentary Marxists you still had a very democratic vision of what socialism and communism were supposed to look like.

No Communism for Poor Countries

OK so that’s a little intro to socialism and communism – movements that were supposed to bring about direct democracy and the abolition of relations of dominance, such as the employer employee relationship and the state, but also things like patriarchy – but why did Marx, and his followers right up until the Russian revolution, including the leaders of that revolution, think that socialism was only possible in rich countries?

One of the big things about Marx that set him apart from other socialists at the time – though marxists exaggerate this somewhat – is that Marx looked at politics and history with a special emphasis on the context of the practical conditions which shape and constrain the range of human choices, and which influence their ideas. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.“ That’s his famous quote from his 18^th Brumaire.

Marxists talk about this in terms of “material conditions” but I like to talk about it more in term of context, and “practical conditions”, because i think the term “material conditions” gives some misleading connotations about the physical environment determining peoples’ ideas, and it also has associations with weird marxist robot gibberish that I want to avoid and that we wont get into right here. To give you some modern examples of how materialism is applied today, check out my anthropology and dawn of everything episodes.

Basically, Marx’ point was that whereas other socialists spoke as though establishing socialism was just a matter of convincing enough people to agree with you and then just making it happen, Marx pointed out that that free will only becomes an important factor when practical conditions are such that it’s actually materially possible to achieve your goals.

He and Engels dismissed other socialists as “utopians” and dubbed their own ideas as “scientific socialism” which made it weird and contributed to the cultlike mentality which afflicted many of his followers – but at it’s core it’s just common sense.

Like if you really want to build a big flying machine so you can fly in the air like a bird, it doesn’t matter how bad you want to fly, if your society hasn’t developed light metals and fossil fuels and glass and industrial production, it’s not going to happen until those conditions are met.

So in Marx view, socialism wasn’t just going to happen because socialists were going to convince enough people to make it happen via their amazing arguments. It was going to happen because it was being made possible and maybe even inevitable by some practical realities generated by capitalism itself. “Capitalism makes its own gravediggers” was one of Marx’ many famous phrases.

And more and more people were going to be convinced by socialist arguments not because of the increasing quality of socialist orators or Marx theories, but because capitalism was going to push more and more people into a class position that inherently made socialist ideas more compelling to them – the same way that rent control is much more popular in a city full of renters than in a city full of landlords and homeowners.

So on the one hand, capitalism’s internal dynamics were going to generate its own economic destruction – including periodic economic crises and massive crashes and depressions, which were quite frequent and severe in Marx time, and also by the tendency of profits decrease over the long terms as competition increased – so that eventually it would be almost impossible to generate profits by normal market mechanisms. (TOM)

And on the other hand he saw that capitalism was also generating the conditions for its own political overthrow. There were larger and larger numbers of formerly independent peasants being pushed off of their lands by a combination of state imposed laws and market forces.

And these people were concentrating in larger and larger numbers in wretched urban slums working and living in deplorable conditions for barely subsistence wages, when they were lucky enough to be employed. And they were being abused and exploited by bosses at work and then being ripped off by landlords at home, all leading to ferocious resentment and discontent, such that even many middle and upper class people, liberals and conservatives alike were appalled at all the chaos and squalor and wanted social change of some sort.

Meanwhile the fact that urban workers were concentrated into huge numbers both in crowded slums, but also at work in large factories, meant that workers were socializing and getting to know eachother and to beginning to understand their common struggles and interests, as well as their numerical strength. And in the 19^th century workers were beginning to organize and fight back, forming illegal labour unions and going on strikes and taking other peaceful and violent actions to defend their interests and achieve their goals.

Marx called these urban workers the proletariat – named after the class of ancient roman citizens who were too poor to buy weapons to serve in the army and who only had their offspring to provide to the military> Proletarius means producer of offspring. Someone who owns nothing but their own children – in the Roman case, you gave your children to the military, in the capitalist case, you gave your children to the factory owner.

So Marx saw that as capitalism would keep on doing its thing, the proletariat would grow and grow, and that naturally this proletariat would eventually come to understand that they’d be better off just getting rid of the capitalists entirely, and putting the factories under the control of the people who worked in them, so that they could run them for their own benefit and that of their communities.

Basically, capitalism was building the economic wealth and the natural infrastructure and the political base for a socialist economy. And unlike farming or small artisinal production, capitalist factories were already communal – they involved large numbers of people working together – the only problem was that all the power was in the owner while the workers were just tools to be used and exploited. All that needed to happen was for that power to be distributed evenly.

In Marx’ words:

[capitalism] begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; … it has itself created the elements of a new economic order… capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property.

And it’s only a matter of time before conditions are such that workers realize that they should and that they have the power to make this happen.

So it’s practical conditions that will generate socialist consciousness. In the words of Trotsky:

Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology.

And once capitalism had developed to the point that most of the economy was in the hands of proletarian employees – they would be in a position to do just that – all they had to do was be organized so they could strike all at once, and the whole economy would grind to a halt, and then workers could take control of the economy that’s already in their hands in the first place. And this presumably large majority of the population would be allied with dissatisfied downwardly mobile artisans whose livelihoods were being destroyed by mass production, and peasants and the occasional dissident middle class or bourgeois intellectual, which would comprise an overwhelmingly large majority of the population. And that’s when you’d start to see communist revolutions happening in the most highly industrialized societies with the biggest proletariats.

Meanwhile, when it came to peasants, Marx didn’t see them as reliable supporters of socialism. While on the one hand they strongly desired to be rid of exploitation by landlords and lenders, what they most wanted was their own plot of land to work on and improve. And therefore they would be less attracted to his vision of socialism, which was a highly technological society that required the abolition of markets and trading and the establishment of large scale industry including large scale agricultural cooperatives and communes. More-over due to being more spread out and more isolated geographically from eachother, or organized into patriarchal villages, peasants were less likely to interact and become aware of their common interests as a class, than crowded urban proletarians.

And here’s Marx explaining about why the peasants ended up supporting dictator Napoleon III over democracy in 1848 in France.

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse… Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly producing most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.

…the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

To Marx, peasants were like tiny poor capitalists. He called them Petit Bourgeois – little business owners. Not only were they unlikely to connect with eachother and revolt but they were often liable to ally themselves with dictators or even larger landlowners. And his disdain for peasants was amplified by his followers as we’ll see later.

Later, after the Paris commune, Marx’ thought more favourably about the potential for peasants to ally with workers, but hostility and suspicion towards peasants and people without education remained a strong tendency among Marx’ followers.

So when marxists talk about the working class – they’re not usually talking about “people who work” – they’re usually referring to the proletariat – about people who are employees, and who also don’t own anything significant. And sometimes they’re not so much interested in them for moral reasons, like because they’re especially oppressed and it’s so unfair how their being exploited etc – which is just as true of many peasants – but because they’re the group of people that are supposed to make socialism actually happen.

The role of the communist intellectual or activist in achieving socialism was supposed to be teach people about the idea of socialism, and help them organize themselves, so that when the inevitable collapse came, that the workers could make socialism happen versus it just resulting in chaos and destruction, or some awful new order imposed by the wealthy – like fascism, which hadn’t yet been invented, but which fits the bill.

In the words of Karl Kautsky in 1892, who was the leading marxist after Marx and Engels died:

“As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”

Another job of the socialist organizer was to form political parties to push for workers interests and their rights, and maybe under special conditions in very richest and most, advanced countries like the united states, england, or netherlands – to take power via elections rather than via a violent revolution. And keep in mind that when these parties started, most of them weren’t running in elections, because there were no elections for most people!

So these parties at first were more associations for organizing, and were often illegal until workers started winning the right to universal suffrage for men the last decades of the 19^th century in some countries, while in others, like in Russia, they remained mostly illegal until WWI was over or in the case of Russia, until the revolution broke out.

Why Communism is for Rich Countries According to Marx

And that’s why the famous leaders of the Russian Revolution like Lenin and Trotsky, did not think it would be possible for communist revolution to succeed in poor countries like Russia.

It was in the rich countries where the process of the peasants being pushed off of their land and and out churned out into a concentrated proletariat was the most advanced. And it was in the rich countries that the crises of capitalist chaotic market crashes and declining profits were the most pronounced and most destructive.

In poor countries at this time, the overwhelming number of people were still peasants – petit bourgeois sacks of potatoes with no education and no awareness outside of their own tiny plot of land or village. These countries, might have revolutions, but they wouldn’t be socialist revolutions, they would be “bourgeois” revolutions, meaning revolutions that would be like the french revolution, which would eliminate monarchy traditional feudal relations, and start either a capitalist democratic republic, or a capitalist non-democratic dictatorship.

Also, the Marxist vision of socialism was about large scale industry, and mass production, generating enough wealth for everyone to be able to enjoy. They couldn’t imagine a version of socialism based on small scale agricultural or urban production. So for large scale industry to happen, you needed capitalism first, in order to turn peasants into urban workers.

And actually Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident who I mentioned earlier, noted that given how the communist dictatorships ended up performing the same tasks as capitalism had in terms or urbanizing and industrializing, that they were in fact setting the stage for true democratic communism, which would first require the overthrow of the communist dictatorships.

Anyhow, in Marx’ view, it was the most developed capitalist countries – england, netherlands, italy, germany – is where you would have the big socialist revolutions. Only then could you have socialism come to poor countries, because once countries stopped competing with eachother and exploiting eachother, the rich countries would share their knowledge and technology with the poor countries, and at that point peasants would be interested in moving to urban centres on purpose because it would mean greater standard of living for them.

So poor countries could only have socialism after the revolution had already come to the rich countries.

Late in his life, Marx had some thoughts that maybe you could have some kind of peasant socialism in countries like russia where you had a tradition of peasant communes and village democracy – but … the traditional marxist view was that communist revolution in a poor country would inevitably fail. And this was of course true for Russia, where 85% of its population were peasants at the time of the russian revolution and where there was no capitalist industry besides peasant trading outside of two cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

That’s why Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the communist revolution in russia said in 1906 that

“without the direct State support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialist dictatorship. Of this there cannot for one moment be any doubt … Left to its own resources the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it.”

And here Trotsky is using the term “socialist dictatorship” he means “dictatorship of the proletariat” that state of emergency, where there’s democracy for workers, but not owners – he doesn’t mean a country run by a socialist strongman dictator.

Meanwhile many marxists, believed that if revolutionaries in a poor country would manage to seize power and then somehow managed to maintain it in the absence of a european revolution, that it would just end up turning into a horrible dictatorship in the strongman dictator sense.

In 1885 communist Gyorgy Plekhanov was one of the first people to articulate this. He said that in the event that a revolution in russia happened before capitalism had done its work of industrializing the country, that

“there will not be any self-government by the people, and the revolution … may lead to a political monster similar to the ancient Chinese or Peruvian empires, i.e., to a renewal of tsarist despotism with a communist lining.

and he quotes Engels to say that

“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents,

Plekhanov’s believed that after a revolution, independant peasant villages might start out equally – but over time, the natural workings of the peasant market economy would generate inequality, so that you’d kind of end up with classes of owners, and indebted dependants and landless farm labourers, and capitalist relations and hierarchies would emerge all over again.

And the only way to stop this would be for the government to turn into a big tyrannical state to preventing trade and confiscate any excess wealth from the peasants, and supress them from fighting back.

Another argument was that without capitalism pushing peasants into debt and bankruptcy and forcing them to sell their products to the cities for low prices, and to immigrate to the cities in search of work, that this slow down industrialization to a halt. And it would also keep prices for farm products high, which would impoverish the cities and even cause food shortages. And this would undermine the quality of life of the proletarians who are the base of the socialist party. The only way to reverse that would be to do industrialization by force – confiscate more surplus from the peasants by high taxes, or just plain seizures, which would meet resistance and need violent enforcement, which means the peasants wouldn’t support the government, which means you either give up power in an election, or else end up with a dictatorship over a huge part of your population.

And we’ll see that this is exactly what eventually happened after the russian revolution.

Because of this, as far back as the 1870s, non-marxist socialists in russia were making fun of marxists like Plekhanov for actually being in favour of capitalism, and for being in favour of throwing peasants into urban poverty. A playwright even made a satirical character based on this idea in 1879. Isn’t the whole point of socialism to stop capitalism and urban poverty? What kind of socialist wants to make capitalism happen? A marxist socialist, with his “scientific socialism” that’s who!

And this is still what every marxist socialist including the leaders of the russian revolution, believed right up until the early 1920s – already a few years into the russian bolshevik revolution.

Mensheviks vs Bolsheviks

So why did Lenin and Trotsky and Bukharin and the rest carry out the russian revolution when they understood that it was doomed to fail? And what’s the point of a having a marxist socialist party in this first place if you’re in a country that can’t do socialism? And what changed their minds? And why did it take several years into the actual revolution to change their minds?

ALL THIS AND MORE, ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF WHAT IS POLITICS!

Next time, we’ll answer all these questions and we’ll also look at why the russian revolution failed and turned into a dictatorship. Was it doomed in advance, because Russia wasn’t industrialized enough as per the orthodox marxist theories we talked about today? Or was it because socialism is just incompatible with human beings like Lex Fridman was suggesting? Or was it because the leaders of the russian revolution just made bad choices?

And we’ll also see how Lenin cleverly redefined the word socialism in order to justify a regime that would become decidedly not socialist in the traditional sense of a society governed by its workers.

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If you want to know more about all the stuff I talked about today, a link to the bibliography for this episode should be up soon in the show notes and video notes, and you can also find link to written transcripts that you can share with people who are more into reading.

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Bibliography

GENERAL

David Priestland 2009 — The Red Flag, A History of Communism

Lex Fridman Podcast ep. 295 — Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism 2022-06-17

“Communism” as Fulfilling the Role of Capitalism

Milovan Djilas 1957 — The New Class

Branko Milanovic 2018 — Capitalism Alone, Chapter 3

Marxism vs. Peasants

Esther Kingston-Mann 1983 — Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS!)

Esther Kingston Mann 2003 — A Russian Marxist Path Not Taken

Plekhanov on Dictatorship

GM Hamburg (ed) 2010 — A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930, chapter 15, Russian Marxism. by Andrzej Walicki

S H Baron 1963 — Plekhanov, Utopian Socialism, and the Russian Revolution

Gyorgy Plekhanov 1883 — Socialism and the Political Struggle

Gyorgy Plekhanov 1885 — Our Differences

Gyorgy Plelhanov 1895 — The Monist View of History (see footnote 4 about the satirical play)

Quotes and Original Sources

Karl Marx 1852 — The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Karl Marx 1867 — Capital Vol. I

Karl Marx 1872 — Speech to International Workingmen’s Association

Karl Marx 1874 — Notes on Bakunin’s Statehood and Anarchy

Karl Marx 1877 — Letter to Engels on Russia’s Path to Socialism

Karl Marx 1871 — The Civil War in France

Marx and Engels 1846 — The German Ideology

Marx and Engels 1848 — The Communist Manifesto

Marx and Engels 1894 — Capital Vol III

Friedrich Engels 1845 — The Condition of the Working Class in England

Friedrich Engels 1846 — The Principles of Communism

Friedrich Engels 1891 — Introduction to Marx’ Civil War in France

Friedrich Engels 1884 — The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State

Mikhail Bakunin 1873 — Statehood and Anarchy

Karl Kautsky 1982 — The Class Struggle (the Erfurt Program)

Vladimir Lenin 1916 — State and Revolution

Leon Trotsky 1906 — Results and Prospects

Eugene Debs 1905 — What the Parties Stand For

Marxism and Democracy

Robert Mayer 1993 — The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin

Hal Draper 1986 — Karl Marx’ Theory of Revolution, Vol. III, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (see chapter 1 for context of the term “dictatorship”)

Joseph Femia 1993 — Marxism and Democracy

David Adam 2010 — Karl Marx and the State

Capitalist Libertarian Arguments

Friedrich Hayek 1944 — The Road to Serfdom

Peter Boettke 1997 — Soviet Venality: A Rent-Seeking Model of the Communist State (paywall)

Peter Boettke and Rosolino Candela 2018 — Lessons on Economics and Political Economy from the Soviet Tragedy

Ludwig von Mises 1920 — Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth

Ludwig von Mises 1951 — Socialism

Left Wing Responses to the Calculation Problem

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski 2019 — The Peoples’ Republic of Walmart

Francis Spufford 2012 — Red Plenty

Cockshott 2008 — Calculation in Natura from Neurath to Kantorovich

Paul Cockshott 2010 — Von Mises, Kantorovich and in-natura calculation

11.1 Why The Russian Revolution Failed

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

Instead the revolutions resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Union: an authoritarian state where the government became the sole employer and boss at work and outside of work. 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?

Script

Hello fellow kids!

And welcome back to What is Politics!

Recap

Last time we took a look at a frequently asked question – “why are communist countries always dictatorships”? Is it because communism is inherently flawed? Is communism just incompatible with human nature? Is it because all of the communist countries just didn’t do communism right?

And we saw that the reason that communist countries have all been dictatorships, is actually really boring and simple – they’ve all been dictatorships because they chose to be dictatorships on purpose – they all based themselves on the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist model. And the Soviet Union which was based in Russia, was the first time that a group of communists took power and held it for longer than a few months.

And they all chose to emulate that model because while it failed at delivering the freedom and worker control of industry that were the main promises of socialism – and remember that the words communism and socialism were more or less synonymous until the russian revolution – while the soviet union failed at socialism, it did succeed in other important ways.

It succeeded at industrializing a formerly poor peasant country and making it a world superpower. It succeeded at educating its population, and in providing them with services, material security and with a “2^nd world” middle income country standard of living.

It succeeded in allowing the soviet union to maintain its national independence from the rich countries and avoid the country becoming a banana republic. And, even though workers in the soviet union couldn’t choose or elect the top leadership of the country, the doors were open for workers and peasants to rise through the party and government bureaucracies and to gain access to middle class positions and even topmost elite positions of power in the country.

These were very important and impressive achievements to the people in the poor countries who carried out all of the successful communist revolutions around the world. And the only communist countries that weren’t originally poor countries were some of the eastern bloc countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia where the governments were basically installed by the Soviet Union after World War II.

But that brings us back to our original question. Why did the Soviet Union fail at socialism and become a dictatorship in the first place?

The people who established the Soviet Union did not set out to create an authoritarian dictatorship. Their goal was to establish a socialist society which was supposed to end all forms of domination relationships between human beings. And remember that the words communism and socialism meant more or less the same thing before the russian revolution.

First and foremost, socialists wanted to get rid of the employer employee relationship, where unlimited property rights give owners the dictatorial power to order around workers all day long, because the workers depend on the owner’s property to live. So socialism aimed to replace the dictatorship of the owner, with the democracy of the workers, with workers directly managing their own workplaces – electing a manager, voting on the various policies of the workplace. Similar to how a cooperative works today, except that an enterprise would also be responsible to its consumers and other stakeholders in the community.

And socialism was also supposed to eliminate the undemocratic rule of the government by the wealthy – whether it’s the wealthy aristocracy who rules via the monarchical state or whether it’s the wealthy business class who dominate elected governments because their wealth lets them pay for campaign contributions, and armies of lobbyists, and control over the media – on top of all the bargaining power that they have vis a vis the state via their control of all the jobs and factories and other important resources the everyone depends on.

So socialists wanted replace this dictatorship of the business class, or in the case of the russian communists – the aristocratic class – with worker control of the government. And for many socialists, including the people who founded the soviet union, worker control of government meant the immediate or eventual elimination of the state itself – because a state was seen a machine that allows a minority of people to dominate the majority of people.

But instead of eliminating wage labour the Soviet Union just turned all workers into employees of the state. Subject to the dictatorship of the party appointed factory manager instead of the private owner. And instead of abolishing the state, the soviet union built up an all powerful state that controlled the workers instead of the other way around – and their election system did not allow the workers – or even rank and file members of the ruling communist party – to choose the leadership of the state.

Why did this happen?

Is it because there’s something inherently flawed about the goals of socialism that necessarily lead to dictatorship? Is it incompatible with human nature? Was there something inherent to the conditions of Russia that made socialisms failure inevitable? Did the people who carried out the russian revolution have evil, non-socialist, dictatorial intentions from the getgo? Did they have good intentions, but just royally screw up in some way? Or was it the threat of outside capitalist forces who forced them into adopting more and more authoritarian measures to survive?

And that’s the question that we’re going to answer today and in the next episode.

Today, we’re going to set the scene for the two russian revolutions of february and october of 1917 which resulted in the establishment of the soviet union. So we’ll be looking at the competing socialist ideas of the various people who became key players in those revolutions, their theories and strategies and ideologies, and their practical realities – their material and class backgrounds and interests – and at the same time we’ll be putting these competing ideas into context by looking at the practical, material and social conditions of russia at the time, in particular by taking a look at the material and social conditions and the ideology of the peasants of russia, who comprised the overwhelming majority of the population – 85% at the time of the revolution.

And then, in the next episode, we’ll look at what happened when the rubber hits the road and the various socialist theories and ideas and strategies smash head on into the reality of the actual conditions of Russia – particularly it’s peasant majority. And how the theories of the leading actors of he revolution – but also their class and cultural backgrounds shaped their reactions to the events happening all around them – and how that all of that eventually comes together and results in the Marxist Leninist one party authoritarian system that characterizes all of the longer lasting communist states of the 20^th and now 21^st centuries.

Preface

Now I imagine many of you have already read a lot about the russian revolution, and some of you are walking encyclopedias of communism. And if you’re read a lot you know that you tend to have 3 or 4 different takes on why the russian revolution became a dictatorship, and that these takes tend to reflect ideology – the point is always to blame your ideological enemies and make excuses for the historical figures that you idenitfy with. It’s the fault of communism, it the capitalist countries’ fault, it’s stalin’s fault, it’s lenin and trotsky’s fault, it’s the peasants fault, it’s nobody’s fault, just a big sad inevitable tragedy.

Well if you’re familliar with this show, you know that I don’t suck up 3 months of my life into making these episodes just to regurgitate ideas and takes that you can get elsewhere.

The purpose of this, like all my episodes to help you – and me – become more efficient and intelligent political actors – to make you better at being able to achieve your political goals, and less likely to pursue tactics and to support people and groups that are harmful to your goals.

So we’re not going to cheerlead and make excuses for my favourite side in the russian revolution and then to wank you off on which good guys you should identify with or bad guys you should hate as part the stupid socialism as identity politics overgrown teenage idiot festival that the internet turns everything into. And identity politics are toxic enough on their own – turning socialism into identity politics is almost satirically stupid. So one of the things that I want to do with these episodes is get you to divorce your identity from your ideology.

Instead of seeing your identity as I’m an anarchist, I’m a marxist leninist, i’m a liberatarian capitalist or whatever other juvenile nonsense is in your head – think of yourself and you – a human being, who believes in anarchist ideas, or leninist ideas, or capitalist ideas or whatever else, because you think that those ideas will produce the best results.

As a human who HAS ideas, you can change your ideas over time if you learn new things or have new experience that are compelling enough. But as a person whose identity IS your ideology, then you become a religious lunatic who can’t be critical of your beliefs without destroying your whole personality and identity.

And I’ll be doing episodes on the psychology and evolution of identity and politics in the future, but right now, the point of me doing episodes on the russian revolution is to learn from the very real failures of ALL of the sides of the russian revolution, and to apply the lessons of those failures to today and to the future – because we don’t keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again – which is exactly what people are setting themselves up to do when you’re still clinging to political ideologies and identities from factions of the russian revolution that happened more than 100 years ago.

And as we go along I’m going you’ll recognize certain elements of the history that resemble things from today, and I’ll be emphasizing those points on purpose. And one of the big mistakes we’ll see is mindlessly clinging to ideas from a different time and place that don’t actually apply to your situation. hint hint.

Another of the things that we’ll learn from this story is that system-changing or world changing crises can happen all of a sudden when no one was really expecting them – and when this happens a huge window can open for major political changes. And those can be horrible changes, or wonderful changes, or the window can be closed shut before anything much changes at all – like in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash.

And whichever of those things happens – horrible change, wonderful change or no change – very much depends on two things: 1^st – the kinds of common sense ideas are that floating out there in the minds of the general public – and 2^nd, who out there is organized and ready to take advantage of the situation and of the ideas floating around in the heads of their potential supporters.

And one of the delusionally ambitious goals I had in mind when i started this show is to reshape those common sense ideas that people have – because so many of those ideas are just confused garbage when it comes to politics – and not just in the mainstream normal world of people who think about politics casually , but also very much in academia and among people who are very politically engaged and informed and active.

But beyond ideas, regardless of what’s in peoples’ heads, if no one out there is organized enough to take advantage of a pivotal crisis situation, then the powers that be will shut that window as quickly as possible so that nothing changes.

OK so let’s get to it and let the cartoon begin…

Last Time Recap

So last time where we left off, we saw that Karl Marx and his followers, including Lenin, Trostky and Stalin and the other eventual leaders of the russian revolution, thought that socialism was not possible in poor countries with majority peasant populations – like Russia.

According to Karl Marx and his writing partner Freddie Engels, you could only have socialism in rich countries where capitalism was highly advanced, like England and Germany.

First of all, you needed capitalism to develop the advanced technologies and big factories and mass production that you needed for Marx’ vision of high tech socialism to be economically viable.

And at the same time capitalism takes a population made up largely of peasants or independent farmers and then puts them out of business and pushes them into the cities to become a giant mass of physically concentrated workers who don’t own any property and who can barely make a living on the job market in very difficult conditions. And it’s these workers, which Marx called the proletariat – people who own only their children – it’s the proletariat who will make socialism politically viable once they become a significant enough majority of the population.

The factories at the heart of the economic engine of capitalism already required communal operation by large numbers of people – it’s just that they were currently operated in an undemocratic manner, with the owners controlling all of the power and taking all of the profit. All the workers had to do was join together, and overthrow the owners and run the factories democratically – though in order to do that they also had take overthrow and smash the state powers which artificially kept the capitalists in power by enforcing unlimited property rights. And having nothing to lose but their chains in the famous words of the communist manifesto, they could be expected to do just that, if they were properly organized.

But – in poor countries, like in Russia in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, where capitalism had only just begun the process of industrialization, you didn’t have the technology necessary to make socialism economically viable, nor did you have the concentrated proletariat necessary to make socialism politically viable.

What you did have, was a country made up of 85% peasants with the rest being aristocratic landlords or bureaucrats and middle class professionals, plus a teeny tiny proletariat. And according to Marx, and also to most urban intellectuals of his day, the peasants were just too ignorant and isolated to be capable of intelligent political acton. They were unable to imagine politics on a scale beyond their little isolated villages, and all they cared about was having more land for their own little family and having to pay less taxes or feudal dues.

And as property owners, they would be expected have a tendency to think like little capitalists businessowners – they would want to protect private property against attempts to control it communally. And they were so ignorant that they they were liable to support monarchs and dictators like napolean and louis bonaparte, even when doing so was against their own interests.

And we saw that Marx’ and Engels and their followers, like Gyorgy Plekhanov, the first prominent russian marxist, believed that if socialists somehow did manage to seize and retain power in a poor country like russia, that they’d up creating an authoritarian dictatorship with an urban socialist minority ruling over a giant rural peasant majority against their will and against their interests – totally defeating the purpose of socialism, which is supposed to be the “free association of the producers” in Marx’s words – meaning worker control of industry and government, not government control over producers and industry.

So we left off with a bunch of questions:

First, if all the marxists at the time thought that you couldn’t have socialism in a poor country, then why did Lenin and Trotsky and the other leaders of the russian revolution carry out the communist revolution in the first place?

And next, what’s the point of a even having a marxist socialist party if you’re in a country that isn’t capable of establishing a socialist economy?

To answer these questions and to see why the russian revolution ultimately failed, we need to understand the history of socialism in russia, and the marxism in particular, and who marxism appealed to vs other versions of socialism.

Socialism Comes to Russia

So in Europe in the 19^th century, socialism had the support of millions of industrial workers and artisans as well as among intellectuals, and it was the workers movement which many ways the heart of the socialist movement there.

But in russia at the time, you barely had any working class in the sense of the proletariat, and meanwhile the vast peasant majority of the country tended to be illiterate, and isolated from the intellectual trends of europe and of russia itself.

So socialism when socialism comes to Russia’ in the middle of the 1800s, it’s almost exlusively popular among intellectuals. And these intellectuals were the urban middle class, but also the rural middle class and there were also many aristocratic socialist intellectuals. And the line between upper middle class and aristocracy was blurry in this period as many aristocrats were middle class and even impoverished, and you could gain aristocratic status by getting certain middle class jobs. For example Lenin who was the leader of the october revolution and founder of the Soviet Union – his father became a hereditary aristocrat by becoming a director of schools in his district.

And we see that some of the most important socialist thinkers in Russia – Plekhanov the father of Marxism, Lenin the founder of the Soviet Union, and Bakunin and Kropotkin the leading anarchists – and many others very often came from aristocratic families of one sort or another.

And these intellectuals, despite coming from more fortunate classes, were interested in socialism because they were frustrated by the lack of freedoms and civil liberties in Russia under the extremely heavy handed and oppressive monarchy. And they were also motivated by wanting to be a cultural part of Europe, which they were cut off from in various ways, both economically but also due to government censorship. And the middle class intellectuals in particular were frustrated by their inability to find advancement in the Tsarist monarchy – and the Tsar of course was the name for the Russian King, and the word Tzar comes from the Latin Caesar.

And given how oppressive the Tsarist regime was, the feeling of hatred against the regime was really intense and widespread among all classes.

And among young people from these middle and aristocratic classes, there was of course a sense of idealism but also a lot of guilt – especially from the aristocratic class because these were kids reading european socialist literature about the exploitation of the working class and the peasants, while their own families were the ones directly doing the exploiting – the literal bad guys they were reading about.

Plekhanov’s family for example – and like I said Plekhanov was the first important russian marxist – his family actually owned serfs.

And you’ll notice that you have a lot of the same dynamics today in the United States – you have really expensive ivy league schools, where many of the socialists and various activists and supposed radical types you’ll find there are actually rich kids and trust fund children like everyone else in those schools and they spend their college years reading about how horrible capitalism is while their parents are all CEOs and corporate lawyers and while they themselves are in training to go work for those big corporations as lawyers or accountants or software developers.

Orlando Figes author of the very long but very readable book “The Peoples’ Tragedy” tells us:

Guilt was the psychological inspiration of the revolution. Nearly all of these radical intellectuals were acutely conscious of their wealth and privilege. … As the children of noblemen brought up by serf domestics on the estate, many of them felt a special personal sense of guilt, since, … these ‘little masters’ had usually been allowed to treat their serf nannies and ‘uncles’ (whose job it had been to play with them) with cruel contempt.*

And if you know any rich people today you’ll notice that a lot of their parents encourage their kids to treat their filipino or latino nannies who raise them like shit – because the nannies are the ones raising their kids for them and the parents don’t want the kids to love the nanny more than the parents so they make sure that they’re regularly degraded and humiliated. And they’re also training their kids to be little employers and landlords and CEOs who are often better at making money without any silly guilt getting in the way, if they can see their employees as beneath them, and less deserving of wealth than they are.

And Figes goes on in that section to point out that 19^th century RUssian literature was “dominated by the theme of repentance for the sin of privilege,” and he gives examples from Tolstoy and other important novels.

Hmm, which annoying rich college kid trends political trends from today does the sin of privilege remind you of? And Figes was writing this in the 1990s so he wasn’t trying to make the connection with modern privilege discourse that’s been popular over the past 10 years.

But of course just because you’re a trust fund kid, or a literal prince like the great anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin was, doesn’t mean that you can’t be a sincere socialist – and today were do have some decent trust fund socialist kids coming from elite colleges who are doing important organizing work or writing for socialist magazines – but coming from these rich kid backgrounds very often creates various issues among even the most sincere revolutionaries in terms of what socialism actually means to them and why they want it, which we’ll look at more in a bit.

So in this period, the 1860s to 1905 basically, you have a very small, but growing proletariat who as we’ll see later are angry at their working and living conditions, somewhat similar to the much larger working classes in western europe in the early period of industrialization, and then you have very angry and frustrated middle and aristocratic classes who are also overrun with guilt at the same time – and then you have the overwhelming mass of the population who were peasants who are barely aware of any of the political currents of the day, and they’re mostly focused on their own immediate exploitation, and their increasingly desperate and deteriorating conditions, which we’ll get back to in a bit.

Now middle class people in Russia at the time, tended to be employed or dependent in some way on the tsarist bureaucracy – either as actual bureaucrats, or else as the professionals who served them, like lawyers, doctors, teachers and merchants. And you find these people in urban areas, but also many of them in rural areas in administrative towns. And these intellectuals who weren’t directly employed by the government were called the “third element” meaning people who were neither government employees, nor the traditional medieval aristocratic, peasant or clergy classes. And it was this “third element” class which was the hotbed of revolutionary ideas.

And whereas you had different socialist trends and ideas among these socialist intellectuals, the most important one at this time were the “narodnik” socialists meaning the populist agrarian socialists – narod means the people and the people in russia were mostly peasants.

And the term populist is a little misleading here – populism usually refers to a left wing anti-elite sentiment coming from lower classes – basically people with less powerful coming together to defend their interests against people with more wealth and power. Like in the US in the 19^th century, populists were usually farmers and working class people who were rising up against economic and governmental elites. But in Russia the populists were middle class and aristocratic people, championing the cause of peasants who barely knew that these champions or their ideas even existed.

The populists had a mishmash of ideas, but what they had in common was that they believed in a socialism based in liberty and representative democracy, and that they shared an adoration of the peasants and peasant culture as both the embodiment of the true ideals of Russia, but also as the future material foundation for socialism in russia.

In complete contrast to Marx and Engels’ writings of this period, the narodniks very much believed that because of its peasant charater, and especially the communistic nature of Russia’s peasantry which we’ll talk about in a minute – is what would propel Russia into socialism. And in their view Russia would follow a very different path to development and socialism than europe would.

Specifically, Russia would not have to go through the brutal capitalist industrialization phase that europe had been undergoing for the past century, and which Marx and Engels insisted was essential to the foundation of socialism.

Now something very striking in this period is that even though Russia was overwhelmingly made up of peasants, and the core of the narodnik agrarian populist ideology was based on the social structure and values of the russian peasant – the narodnik intellectuals didn’t actually know very much about the peasants.

Even though a lot of the narodniks were rural intellectuals who lived geographically much closer to the peasants, they lived in rural administrative towns where they only socialized with other rural middle class and wealthier people. The interactions they had with the peasants tended to be brief and superficial and on unequal terms.

So like buying things from them in markets or else interacting with them clients – like when a peasant goes to see the doctor or has to register something at a bureaucratic office. Or else extremely hierarchical class relationships with peasants as nannies and servants in the case of the aristocratic classes.

The exception to this was some rural teachers who tended to have more of an in-depth relationship with their students and their families.

And so, the ideas that the narodnik populist intellectuals had about the peasant majority was often a bunch of common stereotypes and fantasies that urban people have about peasants or indigenous people. And while many middle class and rich people had negative stereotypes of peasants as stupid violent ignoramuses, these were populist socialist intellectuals – so their heads were full of positive stereotypes – or else what i call liberal unicorn zoo animal fetish object stereotypes, which are positive but are also infantilizing and dehumanizing at the same time. Like you’re treating people like fairy tale magical creatures.

And of course we see a lot of this today in our era of infantile rich kid identity politics. Like I have a friend who’s a black musician and she’s always been interested in political causes – but she hasn’t been involved that much in the local activist community because when she would get invited to participate or speak at events by people related to the local music community that we’re part of, she would always be grossed out because the activist kids were treating her with a creepy worshipful reverence for being a real live black person – like oooh, the holy oppressed BIPOC stands before us, and we grovel before your lived experience – please expunge us with our shameful privileges and let us defer all of our opinons and judgment to you – unless you have opinions that diverge from our bible of correct stereotype opinions that you’re supposed to have. So she never went back to that shit and now just does political music projects of her own design and direction.

Anyhow, in 19^th century russia, the narodniks imagined the peasants as hard working, honest, noble, simple inherently good and wise folk, who embody the spirit of true russia and connection to the soil.

Now you can imagine something similar in the US if you had like a big trend based on the idea of building socialism on traditional native american social structures – and actually that could be really interesting in a lot of ways – but think of how completely idiotic and obnoxious this ideology would get once it got into the hands of rich elite college kids who end up dominating all the discourse – like the explosion of all the creepy liberal stereotypes that you’d get about native american people as magical people with infinite wisdom perfectly in tune with the environment, and worshipping them and publicly flagellating themselves for being white settler colonialist allies or whatever. Like it’s better than just hateful racism, but it’s still dehumanizing and as we’ll see in a bit, this kind of fetish object worship can easily flip into hate and racism on a dime when the objects of your worship don’t fulfil the fantasy role that you set out for them. And that’s not super surprising if you understand that those positive dehumanizing stereotypes fulfil the same function as negative racist stereotypes – the ultimate object is to enhance your own power.

Anyhow – in russia, you had this worship of the peasant which was better than the usual stererotypes of peasants and drunken violent retarded imbeciles, but still not based on an intrumental fantasy as the peasants being the ticket to socialism for the intellectual classes.

And the populists had good reasons to believe this – most importantly because in Russia, unlike in most of western europe, the peasant wasn’t the petit bourgeois mom n pop capitalist landowner described in Marx’ 18^th Brumaire or Capital – most of the peasants of russia were already actual real communists, living on communes! They regularly redistributed their plots of land equally, and they shared various resources, and made communal decisions via patriarchal direct democracy of their communal assemblies. And this was stuff that the intellectuals did know about the peasants.

So according to the narodnik populists, if you had some peasant literacy and communications technology to connect the peasants to the urban culture, and some improved agricultural techniques you could have a socialist society of peasant communes connected together by a democratic state staffed by the intellectual class.

And so, given that the peasants were already communists, and that they were horribly exploited by the existing system, the narodniks believed that all the peasants needed was to be taught about socialism by the middle class and aristocratic socialist kids – and then they would surely rise up in revolt and conveniently do all the dangerous work of overthrowing the monarchy, after which the middle class and aristocratic intellectuals would of course get to occupy most of the top positions in a new socialist government.

And always do a little thought exercise in you’re mind when you’re assessing radical intellectuals – ask yourself “where does this person see themselves in their ideal society that they’re advocating for”. Are they going to be just one of the people, or will they be in some special position of power. Very often it’s the second type of person. And those type of people very often just see “the people” as a giant horsie or tidal wave to ride into their beautiful iron throne on – or their ergonomic iron government bureaucrat job chair or academic intellectual overlord robes.

And people who come from social backgrounds where your wealth is based on using other people for your own benefit – like business owners and aristocrats and people who hire nannies to raise their kids for them – often tend to think of other people – particularly less wealthy people, and “the people” in a very instrumental way – as tools for enhancing their power and status – and instrumental means using something – or in this case someone – as an instrument to accomplish something.

And keep in mind when I’m comparing radicals and activists today with their russian counterparts in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, that it’s kind of unfair to the russians. For all of their very real flaws, the russian radicals tended to be rather brave people – even the rich kid aristocrats faced serious consequences for their beliefs and actions and words, and those of them who joined labour organizations or socialist organizations put themselves at tremendous risk. But I’m focusing on the negatives here and the parallels because I want us to learn lessons and avoid their mistakes.

Going to the People

Anyhow, in order to make their vision of peasant-intellectual socialism reality, a movement developed among the populist socialists – particularly among college kids called “going to the people” – where kids would go out into the rural peasant areas and try to convert the peasants to socialism, and they would also try to get them to rebel against the tsarist monarchy. And this peaked in summer school break of 1874, when thousands of college kids went to the people to preach the gospels of socialism and atone for their privileges and pay their dues by going to get jobs as farmhands and learning what that peasant lyfe was all about.

Now again I’m talking shit about the socialist intellectuals, but going out and making contact with the vast majority of the population is one of the best ideas ever. Its exactly what you need to do – then as now. And it’s really amazing to me how almost no one is doing this today. And, as we’ll see, there was every reason for the peasants to be very, very interested in socialism, so the narodnik kids were 100% on the right track.

However, like we just talked about, these kids knew very little about the peasants aside from their fantasy stereotypes and what they were reading in novels. And as a result, many of them approached their going to the people task like a bunch of self absorbed idiotic rich kids. They would try to dress like peasants and talk and act like peasants – and part of it was just thinking that this would make the peasants like them more, and part of it was because pretending to be a peasant was cool – like when rich suburban kids want to be poor black ghetto rappers, without any of the poverty.

So like imagine the equivalent today – like some harvard or yale students whose parents make like 500,000 or a million dollars a year, and they go out into the poor black and latino areas surrounding the school – cause a lot of these ivy schools are right near poor neighbourhoods – and they’re like “hello fello negroes and latinx! my rap name is MC Scronch, and my pronouns is they/them, but i also accept he/him and she/her pronouns, and as a fellow marginalized identity, i understand how hard it is to be black and oppressed. I make mixed tape trap raps about it in my dad’s 2 million dollar studio from the record company he owns, but i hate him because he be wiggety wiggety wack! F capitalism yo – YT knowutimsayin? Would you like some xanax that I stole from my mom’s pharmaceutical corporation that she’s the CEO of? Socialism yo, it’s really dope, you gotta try it, it’s bussin. It’s the rebolution! So whaddaya say, you wanna overthrow the government for me so i can become secretary of anti-racism?

Now again – I’m being a little unfair because a lot of these college kids weren’t really rich – many were more like struggling downwardly mobile grad students today – and that’s a whole miserable class we need to talk about at some point – but a lot of the going to the people kids were wealthy, and either way, the peasants were decidedly not particularly impressed with them.

Aside from the foolishness of many of these kids, the peasants had very good reason to be suspicious of them no matter how they presented themselves. In general, most outsiders that the peasants dealt with were bureaucrats, landlords and moneylenders who were try to exploit them or get something out of them in various ways, so they were suspicious of these outsider kids even when they weren’t total cosplay clowns.

And so the going to the people movement didn’t have the immediate impact that the kids had expected. Outside of one area where one going to the people kid managed to incite a peasant rebellion against the monarchy by distributing fake manifestos from the Tsar, these going to the people efforts did not result in immediate revolution and overthrow of the monarchy that many of these kids had thought would be imminent.

One student [S.M. Kravchinsky] remarked that:

‘Socialism’ … ‘bounced off the peasants like peas from a wall. They listened to our people as they do to the priest — respectfully but without the slightest effect on their thinking or their actions.’

Another disillusioned radical youth declared that

“We cannot change the thinking of even one in six hundred peasants, let alone of one in sixty”

And that kid I just quoted, named Sergey Stepniak gave up on the peasants entirely at this point and became a terrorist, like many of his peers did at that point – and a few years later he actually managed to assassinate the head of the secret police. …

But, some of these populist missionaries, usually young women teachers who actually had some prior relationship with peasants, or just had a better idea of how to genuinely connect with human beings, did have some real success in reaching them and gaining their trust and friendship.

These more successful efforts involved helping peasants to get information and skills that they actually wanted, versus trying to shove ideas down their throats. And this involved helping to teach them how to read, which peasants were very interested in. These kids organized mobile libraries, which the peasants voraciously gobbled up despite their reputation for being ignorant and stupid – though to the disappointment of the narodnik kids, the peasants were a lot more interested in fictional novels and reading about the french revolution than in reading about socialism and the future socialist revolution.

And those efforts bore fruit over time. Over the subsequent 20 years or so, the areas where the narodnik kids had been the most active ended up being the areas where peasants later organized strikes and formed peasant associations and populist groups in reaction to government and landlord oppression. And the going to the people movement also coincided with a massive enrolment of peasants into rural schools, which peasants had to scrape together their meagre commune funds to collectively pay for.

So this was definitely the way to go and we can only imagine what kind of amazing results this could have had over time had people learned from the more successful efforts and tried to build on them.

But, trying to instigate the immediate overthrow of the Monarchy was obviously illegal – and most of the young radicals ended up being rounded up by police and often punished harshly, even executed.

The ones that managed to persist and avoid the police were usually the ones who the peasants came to trust, and they survived in large part because the peasants hid them and protected them from the police.

But these were the exceptions. On the whole, given the risks involved, and how badly humiliated many of the kids were from being rejected by the peasants, most of them just gave up on this strategy, and the whole going to the people movement was nipped in the bud.

Now this is a bit of a stretch because the russian kids were risking their lives, but it kind of reminds me of how all the socialist and left wing kids in the US had a tantrum and decided to give up entirely on politics after they lost with bernie in 2020. Waaain, we tried two whole times to elect a president against the organized power of the most entrenched elites and powerful corporations in the entire world and the party leaders and wealthy donors who have a zillion times more money than we have and who have all the connections and knowledge and experience, and they manipulated the rules to win, so theyre’s no point of ever trying anything ever again – even though we almost won against all those odds without barely knowing what the fuck we were doing because we only had 4 years experience.

I went out and knocked on doors once, for 6 hours! Im never doing that again! Waain!

Or AOC and Ilhan Omar don’t always vote courageously, and even though we keep electing more and more people who don’t take corporate money each cycle, the12 ones we have so far are not even running the whole government yet so I’m going to completely give up and just let corporations run 100% of congress, waaain.

Like i don’t think electoralism is necessarily the best way to invest your energy – and it makes a lot more sense usually to start off building something at the local level and then move up to higher levels as your movement builds experience and support and power – but nevertheless in 2016 and 2020 people with no money or power or experience, managed to get really exceptional results in just 5 years of trying – and it created a whole new socialist movement overnight that hadn’t existed since the 1960s and now a majority of young people like socialism better than capitalism, even though they probably don’t know what either of those words really mean, but like jaysoos, it takes decades to build movements, you’re getting better results each time, and then you quit because you almost two times and the other side which is the most powerful people on earth plays dirty tricks? Have fun making more podcasts and whining to your snarky friends on twitter for the rest of your life.

And of course in the US you wouldn’t get round up and hanged or shipped off to siberia for losing the election, you just lost the election. Like try again – or try some local politics and get some rent control passed or something. So the narodniks did deserve credit for bravery and they had way more of an excuse to quit.

Marxism Comes to Russia

Anyhow – by the late 1870s you end up with different two major reactions to the defeat of the going to the people movement, and these reactions end up forming the main strains of Russian socialism from that point on.

On the one hand you had a majority who continued to believe that foundation for Russian Socialism was going to be the Russian peasants and their communes.

The lesson that they drew from the failure of the going to the people movement was that the peasants were too oppressed to revolt on their own. So now they believed that socialism could only happen if you overthrew the monarchy and liberated the peasants first, and then you would go ahead and establish a democratic republic and connect that with the peasant communes. And it was the intellectuals who were going to have to do this instead of the peasants doing it for them. And many of these populists turned to terrorism and other violent anti government activity with that goal in mind.

And they weren’t the only ones doing terrorism – with no legal avenues to express themselves or to organize, terrorism was an extremely popular choice for frustrated young activists who didn’t have the patience or experience to do underground organizing. More than 17,000 people were killed by terrorism in the last 20 years of the monarchy before the socialist revolution – and it wasn’t just populists, it was anarchists and blanquistes and nihilists and all sorts of other frustrated intellectuals that we’ll talk about as we go. And while there were some high level assassinations like the head of secret police and even the tsar got merked in 1881 – a lot of it was just nonsense, blowing up cafés and just killing random rich people and middle class people and often their working class employees.

And most of it just resulted in worse and worse government repression. Like tsar Alexander II gets assassinated, and then literally the same day, his much more right wing conservative son Alexander III takes power and ramps up the repression and reverses his dads liberal reforms.

Anyhow that populist socialist branch of socialism that wants a revolution to establish a socialist democratic republic based on peasant socialism becomes the Socialist Revolutionary party or the SR’s. And not all of the SRs were in favour of terrorism, but they all agreed that you needed a revolution to overthrow the monarchy and replace it with a democratic republic before you could move to peasant based socialism.

Marxism Comes to Russia

Another group of socialists, particularly those going to the people kids who got rejected by the peasants, learned a different lesson from the failure of their movement. And when rich kids – and adults – don’t get they want they often get weally, weally upset and have a big tantrum.

So these former kids now lil adults, decided that the reason that they failed so badly was not because they were just inexperienced kids who didn’t know what they were doing yet, or because they didn’t put in the time and effort to get it right in difficult conditions – no, the reason that they failed was because the peasants were just too stupid and ignorant to know what’s good for them.

Because the peasants didn’t fulfil the role that they had layed out for them in their fantasies, they switched on a dime from their liberal zoo unicorn positive stereotypes to the old fashioned racist style stereotypes and decided that peasants were a useless class that had no role in the socialist future and that they were in fact an obstacle to that wonderful future.

And these angree rejected narodnik kids, found a perfect affirmation of their hatred of the peasants in the works of … you guessed it, big daddy papa smurf himself Karl Marx and Freddie Engels. Not only did Marx’s writings portray peasants as stupid obstacles to socialism – which the narodniki nudniki had experienced first hand – but they were also inspired by Marx and Engels’ confident belief that the peasants’ backwards and idiotic way of life was doomed to be swept away from history by the progressive forces of capitalism, and that their disappearance was in fact the only path to socialism.

And just like when hillary clinton’s people blamed her election loss on the russians and james comey and racist unemployed pill addicted rust belt workers whose lives bill clinton destroyed with NAFTA instead of blaming the clintons and 40 years of democrats and republicans looting and pillaging all the gains the american working class had made since the new deal, the narodnik kids found in Marxim the perfect excuse to avoid having to look in the mirror for the source of their failure to connect the the peasants.

And thus the first generation of Russian Marxists were born. And they were led by Gyorgy Plekhanov, whose parents owned had serfs and who was an OG disillusioned going to the people reject extraordaire. And he hated the peasants with a passion for the rest of his life.

These kids remind me of Martin Luther who started the protestant reformation – at one point he decided that he would go preach his amazing christianity to the jews of europe, and then he went it there, like hello fellow kids, will you accept the lord jesus christ in whose name you keep getting lynched and banned from most occupations as your personal saviour? And they chased him out of town, which he reacted to by becoming a huge jew hating anti-semite.

But back to russian marxism.

Although socialist activity was illegal, and texts promoting socialist activity were supposed to be censored, government censors considered Marx and Engels’ work to be “harmless abstract speculation” as opposed to the rabble rousing calls to action of the populists, and as a result most if it was allowed to be freely published and distributed.

Again, not a perfect analogy but it makes me think of the postmodernism in academia – in the 1960s and 1970s there was a big was of student radicalism as working class people entered universities on a mass scale for the first time. And this radicalism had a very practical edge to it, and a lot of students were involved in research and ideas that would have practical applications for a more egalitarian world, and they were also engaging real world activism and organizing – often inspired by 3^rd world Marxism actually.

And this petrified university and government and business authorities in the US and other rich countries. And one of the reasons that US tuition is so absurdly high today was as a deliberate strategy to bog down working class students in so much debt that they wouldn’t have the time to do any activism. And it would also prevent them from doing low paying public interest activist jobs and force them to do evil corporate jobs to pay their debts.

And then fast forward to the 1990s, and all the activism and often marxism had been replaced with the radical posturing of postmodernism – except it’s all gibberish that no one can understand, and it’s main practical application is to make people too afraid to do any activism or radical social science research because foucault teaches you that any time you try to do anything to challenge power, you just mysteriously replicate oppressive power structures for no comprehensible reason. Just voodoo.

And the background for this is actually the soviet union and the other marxist leninist countries – there was these huge revolutions, russia and china – that were supposed to overthrow ancient power structures and replace them with freedom and equality. But instead they replaced the old hierarchies with new ones, because magic. That was foucault’s big contribution. And i’m showing you in these videos that it’s not magic, it’s just bread and butter practical material issues that you can actually do something about.

And the authorities were perfectly comfortable with this postmodern nonsense because it was a bunch of theoretical excuses for not actually doing anything. And that same postmodernist phony radical culture sneered at the pracitcal activism of the 60s and 70s as naive and childish and vulgar – a bit like how David Graeber points out in Bullshit jobs that people with high paying miserable useless jobs hate people who actually do useful work for a living. It was much more sophisticated to wank around about how everything just replicates power no matter what you do, and that categories don’t exist and that nothing exists and all you could do was wank yourself off to your own gibberish and gossip about your academic competitors and then try to cancel them 30 years later when that gets invented.

Anyhow in russia at first, marxism was kind of the postmodernism of its day – non threatening radicalism – and the authorities at first were quite comfortable with it versus the rabble rousing radical populism which they feared – and that might sound crazy given how radical marx was, but you’ll see what i mean in a few seconds.

Very quickly Marx and Engels’ writing had a huge impact on the Russian intelligentisa – but not in ways that you might expect.

Among the intellectuals who first became enamoured with Marx, particularly after Capital Volume 1 was translated into Russian, was not just the peasant hating going to the people rejects, but also the pro-capitalist economists and the big wealthy industrialists!

If you know Marx’s writings, you know that Marx criticizes capitalism and wants it to end, but he also portrays it as a progressive force – until it’s not. The capitalists methods are brutal and exploitative, but they generate innovations and major improvements in production of goods and agricultural techniques, and the business class which orchestrates them tends to favour civil liberties which benefit everyone. Meanwhile the economics of capitalism tear apart backwards social superstitions and conventions and cultural hierarchies, and they force unproductive peasants to become productive proletarians or productive large scale agricultural entrepreneurs. And of course, according to Marx’ writings at the time, you can’t get to socialism, without going through capitalism first. It’s capitalism that develops the infrastructure and creates the necessary economic and social conditions for socialism according to Marx and Engels.

So in russia, which was still basically governed by a monarch with a quasi-feudal landowning aristocracy, and where capitalism was just getting started, the capitalists and liberal intellectuals were waving around Das Kapital to show how progressive they were, and why you needed to let them pay low wages and why you needed to resist the growing call for restrictions on factory labour hours and safer working conditions!

Whether you’re a communist or a liberal, you’ll never get those liberal values that the upper classes long for, nor will you get to socialism which all those disaffected middle class and aristocratic intelligentsia desire so passionately without our wonderful ruthless exploitative capitalism and it’s horrid labour practices!

To quote Esther Kingston-Mann, from her book Lenin and the Problem of Peasant Socialism:

“Among academic economists and industrialists, there were those who found in [Marx’] Capital a source of powerful arguments for the brutally progressive virtues of free enterprise and long working hours… Moscow factory owners sponsored lectures on the Marxist “proof” that unfettered capitalist initiative represented a step forward in Russia’s historical development.”

Of course Marx’ and Engels’ work was also extremely critical of capitalism, so their work was also popular among the Populist socialists we’ve been talking about.

For example in 1870, when a Russian factory owner claimed that restrictions on child labor delayed civilizational advances of capitalism that would eventually benefit the factory workers, a populist narodnik socialist refuted his arguments using the descriptions of child labor the he got from das Kapital.

But if the russian populist socialists appreciated marx’ and engels’ analysis and critiques of capitalism, they were disgusted by their attitude towards the peasants. And they thought that the marxist idea that you had to just sit on your ass and wait 100 years for capitalism to do it’s dirty work for you was both cruel and cowardly.

So for example one Russian socialist, Pyotr Tkachev who was a big inflience on Lenin, had a bitter debate with Engels about the possibility of socialism in Russia – and Tkachev was just horrified at what he considered Engels’ heartless and cowardly insistence that Russia would just have to be stuck with all the evils and horrors of capitalism for the next century or so.

this does not disturb them [them meaning the marxists] … they will just wait. They do not lack patience!

The people’s grief, the people’s tears are not their grief, their tears! Why should they compromise themselves in risky enterprises [meaning revolutionary activity]? They want to act only when it is a sure thing.

[But] it is impossible to act now and to be certain. We, all the revolutionaries, understand this very well, and they [the marxists] understand it better than we. But we are not afraid of the risk. Neither we, nor the people have anything to regret, anything to lose!

And the populists also found the russian marxists to be much too friendly to the bourgeoisie and to capitalism.

For example, Plekhanov the father of russian marxism was running around chastizing the proletariat for not being supportive enough of the bourgeoisie’s social and legislative goals because in his mind advancing the goals of the bourgeoisie was the only way to eventually achieve the workers’ goals, as well as his own goals.

It’s like today when you have all these comfortable self satisfied dorks telling you that you can’t have rent control, you need let landlords evict your entire neighbourhood because that will incentivize more housing which will eventually benefit all renters with lower rents in 200 years. Meanwhile until then you’re working 60 hours a week just so that you can live under your mom’s bed until you die.

Pyotor Struve who started out as am important Marxist, loved the bourgeoisie / business class so much, that he bought the company – and by that I mean that he ended up founding Russia’s main liberal business class party – the constitutional democrats or Kadets for short. And they’ll play a big role in the russian revolution as we’ll see next time.

Later in his life Struve pointed out that the Russian Marxists of this period were actually playing the same role that the bourgeois liberal intellectuals had played in western europe in the early years of capitalism, in the sense that they were arguing for and providing intellectual justifications for the goals of the business class – like turning the peasants into landless prolatarians, and the establishment a representative democracy that will be dominated by the business class.

And he pointed out that in general, the marxists in russia were more interested in attacking people who defended the peasants and their communes than they were in attacking the business class!

Ironically the marxists were on the same side as the monarchy in this respect – in the early 1900s peasant unrest was growing and the monarchy introduced capitalist reforms specifically to destroy the peasant communes and to turn the communist peasants into the petit bourgeois entrepreneur type peasants that existed in western europe and the united states. The government hoped that this would make the peasants more conservative and interested in defending private property and in siding with the government.

Many marxists supported those government reforms because the faster the peasants could be ripped away from their communes and then turfed out into bankruptcy and into the cities, the more their proletarian base would grow and the faster their socialist future would come.

For example, Nikolai Ziber, the first big russian marxist economist insisted that russian peasants needed to be “cooked up in the industrial boiler” until they became proletarians for russia was to have any future.

And Vladimir Lenin, the future leader of the communist revolution thought along those same lines when he was a young man. There was a serious famine 1891 in rural areas, and at that time Lenin was against the idea of humanitarian aid to the peasants. Why was the future leader of 3^rd world communist against helping peasants avoid startvation? Because the famine would force millions of peasants to escape to the cities and become proletarians, which would is what you need for socialism according to his hero Karl Marx. If you helped the peasants not starve to death, and if you try to help them remain on their communists communes, then you’re just slowing down the forward march of progress and history and communism!

Again, ask yourself – why does this person want socialism? Does this person really have deep empathic feelings for the liberation of the oppressed groups of humanity, or is it something else?

And frankly this is a very human trait – we often view people in terms of how they can benefit us, but when it’s divorced from actual connections with real human beings and it becomes abstractions, it can reach really horrid proportions of psychopathy. And it’s worse when you’re young and don’t have as much experience with people and also all your empathy neurons haven’t grown into your brain yet…

And speaking of little rich shits as the core of socialism in Russia and trust fund socialists in the US today – during that same 1891 peasant famine when Lenin is advocating for letting peasants be destroyed by famine, he sued his own peasant neighbours for causing damage to the family estate. Meanwhile he would be writing scathing articles against “gentry capitalism” while all of his income was from rents and interest derived from the sale of his mother’s estate.

So at this time, the populist socialists were sharply criticizing the marxists for being cheerleaders of the bourgeoisie and cheerleaders for capitalism, and cheerleaders for the inhumane destruction of the peasants and their communes.

Parties

In 1898, the Marxists decided to organize, and they form a political party called the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which is what most socialist parties in most countries at that time we called.

And today we think of the word “social democratic” as meaning basically a capitalist state with welfare programs, like Sweden or Denmark. But that’s a legacy of the fact that it was socialist parties called social democrats who introduced all of those social programs into capitalism in the early 1900s before they ended up giving up on socialism in later decades, especially the 1980s and 90s.

And this brings us back to one of our big questions asked at the beginning – if karl marx and marxists in general didn’t believe that you could have socialism in a peasant country like Russia, then why on earth would they start a Marxist Social Democratic Labour Party in Russia to begin with?

So the idea behind the marxist party in russia, was that as capitalism would progress, the party would help organize the growing number of proletarian workers who would be thrown out of peasant life and into the cities. The party would help organize them into unions, and help them organize to overthrow of the tzar together with the business class.

And keep in mind that socialist political parties are illegal during most of this period, and there’s no democratically elected parliament or anything except for a couple of years after an attempted revolution in 1905, so all of these political parties are underground activist organizations for most of their existence until we get to the revolution of 1917 – they weren’t boring had social climber corruption engine political parties the way we think of them today. They were more like the Black Panthers or like Hizbullah or something before they became an electoral party – they were organizing outside of the state but with the goal to eventually take over the state or at least participate in it.

And of course since socialism was impossible in Russia, the marxists expected that the first revolution – the one which would overthrow the Tzar and the aristocracty – would be a bourgeois capitalist revolution, which would result in a democratic capitalist republic like what we have today in europe, with power in the hands of the big business class.

And the socialists could then be a legitimate legal political party with nice jobs in the legislature, representing the factory workers, and advancing their rights and advocating for them to have the best possible conditions that labourers could have in capitalism – an 8 hour work day, the right to unionize, an end to child labour, rights for women etc – maybe even some old age insurance or injury insurance. And then after a hundred years or so, when the workers would be a large enough majority the party would lead the workers through another revolution, this time to usher in socialism.

Unsurprisingly, given their ideology, the marxists had very little support outside of the big urban areas. And the support that they did have was limited mostly to intellectuals and the small, but growing number of proletarian factory workers – and even among them they were mostly only popular with those workers who were more skilled and more literate than most, rather than the majority of workers who had just come from the farm recently, and many of them were still members of their communes, going back the farm every harvest season to help out the family and the commune.

ANARCHISM

Now at the same time as you had Populism which was the vast majority of the socialist movement, and Marxism which was a small minority, you also had an anarchist movement in Russia. And like we went over last time, the anarchists were socialists who believed that you absolutely need to abolish the state from the getgo for any kind of real socialism to happen. For the anarchists, the state is not a neutral tool that can be good or bad depending on who’s running it. It’s an institution, which can only exist to prop up the ruling class, whether that class be the monarchy, the capitalists or socialist intellectuals. It can’t be used by the people for the people, because once people get into office, they become a ruling class with different material interests from the people who elected them.

And the anarchists saw all the politcal parties, whether the marxists or the socialist revolutionaries as mainly vehicles for middle class and aristocratic intellectuals to advance their own insterests in the name of the people – whether it be the peasants in the case of the populist socialist revolutionaries, or whether it be the proletarians in the case of the marxist social democrats. The peasants and the proletariat are the horsies that will ride the socialist intellectuals into the iron throne or whatever.

And in this sense the anarchists were more marxist than marx himself – and what I mean by this is that marx was very keen to identify different classes of people as behaving according to their material interests – and the whole point of dividing people up into different class categories is to predict how they’ll be likely to act in terms of them being allies or enemies on the road to socialism – yet Marx had this huge blind spot when it came to the idea that intellectuals, or state representatives might have different material interests than the people that they claimed to represent. Last time I quoted Bakunin’s famous predictions about this, and next time we’ll see how this blind spot in Marxism expands to galactic proportions when we get to Marx’ russian followers in the period of and after the russian revolution.

Now where Marx and his followers felt like their socialism was unique in that it had science and the supposed laws of history behind it – and Engels obnoxiously called Marxism “scientific socialism” – the russian anarchists, many of whom were followers of Pyotr Kropotkin who was a biologist, also felt like they had science and the trajectory of history and material conditions on their side. They just had a different assessment of how things were going to play out and the balance of material forces than Marx did.

Kropotkin noticed that social animals could only live by working together and helping eachother, and that humans were more social than most. And Kropotkin noted that the intensifying autocracy and absolutism of the past couple of hundred of years looked like a temporary aberration in human history. In the middle ages, and in indigenous societies, just as among the russian peasantry of his day, humans prospered by forming voluntary associations and working together, and they tended more often than not to live communally. This was the natural state of humanity for Kropotkin and it had only been temporarily usurped in recent centuries by absolutist monarchs. And the natual spirit of mutual aid and decentralized cooperation was reasserting itself in part via movements to overthrow autocracy and establish democracy and then socialism over the previous 100 years or so.

Unlike the marxists, but like the populists, the anarchists believed that a peasant country was no obstacle to socialism. Peasants would be convinced to adopt socialism because it was in their own interest to do so. And given that Kropotkin’s vision of socialism was based on small scale production, and it did not necessitate the giant advanced industry or the proletarianization of the peasants the way that Marxism did, this wasn’t an unreasonable expectation.

But what’s really interesting about the anarchists is just how not popular they were in Russia.

Aside for a couple of years around the 1905 attempted revolution anarchism was almost non existent in russia until the revolutions of 1917. They had zero adherents among the peasants, and barely had any in the intellectual circles either. Like you’ll read histories of anarchism and the author is like ‘anarchist societies flourished in the lead up to the february revolution of 1917 – they had 100 members in Petrograd and 70 in moscow – cities with a million people in a country with 100 million people.

And this is really remarkable for two big reasons. For one, arguably the top two anarchist thinkers ever, Bakunin and Kropotkin were russian. Yet anarchism had no traction outside of the revolutionary periods of 1905 and then 1917 and its aftermath. Bakunin and Kropotkin’s ideas became popular and inspired important long lasting social movements and huge organizations of anarchist peasants and factory workers in southern italy and france and especially in spain – but in russia crickets.

And maybe it’s not so surprising that anarchism wasn’t so popular among the middle class and aristocratic intelligentsia – after all the intellectual class doesn’t really play any special role in anarchism. They need to like get a job and participate in the economy like everyone else. There’s no horsie to ride to power on. And also, you might have to change your lifestyle in unfamilliar ways vs other types of socialism where you’d still get to be a bourgeois lifestyle intellectual after the revolution.

But it is really remarkable that anarchism made no inroads in the giant peasant population of russia. And the reason that this is so remarkable is because anarchism is in many ways the perfect the ideology for peasants in general, and for Russian peasants in particular.

You see aspirations that resemble anarchism in peasant movements throughout history around the world. The english peasants revolt of 1381 that i’ve talked about before aspired to a stateless christian commonwealth, the Zapata rebellion in Mexico in the early 20^th century and then again in the 1990s had similar aims. And anarchism was popular among peasants in italy and spain, where in the 1930s the peasant and urban anarchists together managed to make a revolution for two years or so.

But Russia in particular had a history of all sorts of peasant religious sects, and peasant uprisings which had aims similar to anarchism over the centuries.

For example the Dukhobor sect, which are sort of like Russian amish people – one Dukhobor speaking from prison in 1791 told his captors:

“The children of God have no need either of tsars or ruling powers or of any human laws whatsoever.

Peasants tended to conceive of land as something that could only belong to God, or to nobody, or to the state – and they tended to imagine the state as a giant commune of communes – similar to the anarchist federation ideal.

In the lead up to the almost revolution which happened in 1905, a peasant represantative of the national peasants union which the peasants had formed declared that

“Land is the mother of us all. It is not the product of human hands, but of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it must not be bought and sold.”

And a majority of the assembled delegates supported abolition of private land ownership and their transfer of existing landholding to the population on the basis of family size.

And the great 19^th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was famously a sort of christian anarchist and his ideas did have many adherents in Russia and around the world, though it wasn’t a revolutionary political type of anarchism that planned to overthrow the government and give power to the peasants – it was a pacfist spiritual movement that was much less of a threat to authority, even though they rejected both the state and the orthodox church.

According to Paul Avrich one of the leading historians of anarchism:

“Leo Tolstoy and his followers … began to form anarchistic groups during the 1880’s in Tula, Orel, and Samara provinces, and in the city of Moscow. By the turn of the century, Tolstoyan missionaries had spread the gospel of Christian anarchism with considerable effect ,throughout 1 the black-earth provinces

Yet, despite all of this, avrich continues:

Notwithstanding this rich legacy left by the peasant revolts, the religious sects and Tolstoyan groups, the Petrashevtsy and Slavophiles, and Alexander Herzen, no revolutionary anarchist movement arose in Russia before the twentieth century—not even in the heyday of Bakunin during the late 1860’s and early 1870’s.

And we see that when anarchism does come to the Russian empire, it’s most powerful impact is among peasants from the south of Ukraine, and some of the urban workers and sailors in moscow and saint petersburg, but not among the giant majority of central russian peasants. ANd that is an incredible failure of the russian anarchist movement.

Who Are the Peasants?

Now to understand why anarchism is such a natural fit for peasants around the world, and to understand why socialist anarchism never got anywhere in Russia, we need to understand a bit about who peasants are in general and who the russian peasants were in particular, and then we need to understand who the russian anarchists were.

First of all, what the hell is a peasant?

A peasant is a lot like an indigenous subsistence farmer – and peasants and indigenous subsistence farmers have a lot in common – they are small communities of people who live from their agricultural labour – but there are two main things that separate them. First of all, what makes a peasant a peasant and not an indigenous subsistence farmer is that the peasant community has been conquered by a more powerful force and then gets exploited by them.

Where the indigenous farmer works to provide food for their family and their community and their cultural and religious activities, and often for trade – the peasant has to do all of those things but also has to give a significant portion of their produce to the conquering power. And these conquering powers usually organize themselves into a state precisely in order to effectively maintain their relations of exploitation and domination over the peasants.

The classic example of an early state is when a group of pastoralist raiders would conquer local farmers. Patoralists are nomadic people who live from their animal herds, like the mongolians with their horses, or the Nuer with their cattle or the beduin with their camels. And pastoralists are usually great warriors, because they have to constantly defend their herds from other pastoralists, and they’re constantly trying to steal animals from their neighbours to increase their herds. And they’re good at conquering peasants because peasants are stuck on their plots of land, while pastoralists are nomadic and free to go anywhere with grasses to graze.

Now when pastoralists unite together into large groups – often under a great religious leader who can unite the factious warring tribes – they become a fearsome conquering army. And they often figure out that instead of living a precarious life doing pastoralism plus agriculture, it’s a lot easier for them to just conquer a bunch of sedentary farmers who are stuck in one place all year and then just live from the peasants labour. So once they unite, they can end up conquering vast territories of helpless subsistence farmers very easily – think of the mongol empire or the great arab expansion over huge continents. And if the conquest is of a large enough scale, they’ll form a state and even a vast empire to manage their exploitation of the peasants.

And then their descendants end up being lazy corrupt shit heads and fancy lads and lassies who live entirely from exploitation and who’ve never done a day of work in their life, like most ruling classes.

This is why Marx and many socialists in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries thought that the state existed exclusively for the exploitation of one class by another. Because that’s exactly why most states came into existence for most of human history. And before the era of universal suffrage and mass democracy where people actually started getting services from their governments, states were just very obvious exploitation machines – using your taxes to maintain the ruling class’ exploitation of you.

And as a result, most peasants around the world have historically hated the state. Before the era of mass democracy and social programs, all the state did was take a giant chunk of their labour to enrich the ruling class, while supplying nothing in return. The state judged them in courts run by and for the ruling classes and subjected them to police who enforced the rules that exploited them for the ruling class. And once the ruling class would become too rich and lazy to do any actual fighting, the state would start to conscript the peasants sons into the army and force them to fight and die for faraway causes and wars that only benefited their rulers.

And peasants tend not to have any interest in wars because there’s often barely any difference in being in conquered by one state versus another state – one year you’re subjects of the austro hungarian empire, the next year the germans, the next year russian tsar, and not much changes.

And before the era of mass literacy and mass media, peasants had no sense of nationalism or national identity. National identity and nationalism – the idea of your identity being connected to people you’ll never meet and territories that you’ll never visit – are very much products of the imagination, which are made possible by literacy and mass media – in the 19^th century that was newspapers, novels – to put those imaginary ideas in your head – and they tend to be an urban phenomenon, promoted by ruling classes who aspire to control and unite larger territories under their rule.

Today we’re plugged in to mass media all day long which expands our social horizons in real and fictional ways, and we get our identities from media and live half of our lives as part of real and imaginary social communities – but the world of the historic pre-democracy peasant was limited to the real world, plus their religions and gossip – and their real worlds tended to be quite small.

They’d be stuck on a plot of land and spend most of their lives in the same village aside from festivals and markets without much connection or information about the outside world besides gossip and conversations had at those special occasions. As a result, their collective identity was often just with their village or their commune, or sometimes their region. The only time they would meet outsiders besides festivals and markets was landlords and tax collectors, or be if they got conscripted into a war, or if the were forced to work part of the year in an urban factory.

And that brings us to the other great division between peasants and indigenous agriculturalists. And that is religion. Indigenous subsistence farmers usually have their own belief system which is adapted to their social and environmental worlds and their local indigenous social hierarchies or lack thererof. But peasants are usually subject to the religion of the ruling class, which is one of the main ways that ruling classes maintain control over their peasants – and in this way they’re culturally integrated them into the broader hierarchy of the exploitation state.

But peasants don’t usually just accept the religion that’s handed to them by elite clergy of the ruling class – religion and ideology have to make sense and fit within the material and practical conditions of peoples’ lives in order for them to take it seriously long term. So peasant versions of religion will often be a really a interesting mix of the official state religion transformed by their own previous indigenous customs and their value system – it’s called “syncretism” in anthropology – and we have classic examples this in latin america where you have ancient mayan rituals practiced but with catholic saint imagery and icons all blended in.

And that’s typical of peasant religion. And the word “pagan” or paganus in latin means a person from the country! In the first centuries of christian expansion, the true christian religion was thought to exist in the cities and monasteries, and the peasants were seen as impure corrupters of the religion. Religion in states was always a tool of empire but of the city over the peasant.

And among peasants where there are no traces of the indigenous religion left – like in 19^th century russia, you’ll still have very distinct changes to the religion among peasants to make it fit with in with the values which are derived from their every day lives, and economy. So like when we looked at the english peasants of 1381, we saw that although the peasants were devout christians, their version of christian values were in total opposition to the state’s version. The state religion placed the king above the nobility who were above the peasants as the natural order of the world. But the peasants understood the bible in a way that rejected the nobility and saw them as parasites and ungodly people who don’t do any labour. When Adam Delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman? went the refrain – meaning when adam plowed the fields and even spun yarn, there were no social classes, no nobility, everyone worked for a living as equals. That’s God’s way.

But while the english peasants rejected the nobility, whom they knew from experience to be parasites, they they still revered the king – who they didn’t have any contact with, and who was just this figure of imagination that they could fill up with any ideals that they wanted to – and they saw him as legitimately appointed by God and as a sort of religious leader. And we saw how that belief ended up destroying the peasant’s revolt in the end.

Who Are the Russian Peasants?

So what are the conditions and beliefs and ideals of the peasants in Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which is when the different types socialism are picking up steam and gaining traction among the urban and rural intelligentsia?

In terms of beliefs, most of the peasants of Russia had that sort of natural christian quasi anarchism that we saw with the peasants of 1381 and that we see so often with peasants. They believed that landlords, and moneylenders, and police, and bureaucrats and aristocrats and private land ownership should not exist. And their ideal world is one where everyone makes an honest living by working the land in their communes, which are divided up equally so everyone gets an equal piece of land – which was also the vision of the far left in the french revolution of 1789 incidentally. And you’d also have crafts and people trading in markets for things that they need that they don’t make locally.

They believed that decision making should be communal and democratic, though it would be also be patriarchal – which is how decisionmaking was made in russian peasant communes. And their idea for russia as a whole is that it would be one giant commune of communes, and the federal government would be like one big direct democratic peasant assembly. The only major ways that they really differed from general ideas of anarchist socialism was the patriarchy and that they were were deeply in religious and they thought the Tsar was their Little Father, appointed by god to be a sort of non-authoritarian symbolic embodiment of all of their values. And that sounds incompatible with anarchism, but we’ll see later that when the tsar and the church don’t act according to their values, the peasants were very quick to ditch both of them. And surprisingly, we’ll see later than when the peasants started forming revolutionary assemblies they often insisted on women’s right to vote in them.

In terms of social structure, like I mentioned earlier, the peasants lived on communes, which had communal property but also private property, and separate plots of land for each family, though care was taken to make sure that each plot was always equal.

To quote from the sociologist of peasants Teodor Shanin from his book Late Marx:

each household held unconditionally only a small plot of land, i.e. house and garden plus its livestock and equipment. The use of arable land was assigned to a family on a long-term basis by its commune, the meadows were reassigned annually and often worked collectively, the pastures and forest were in common use. … Many vital services were run collectively by the commune: a village shepherd, the local guards, the welfare of the orphans, and often a school, a church, a mill, etc. An assembly of heads of the households controlled and represented communal interests : decided about the services, elected its own officers, and collected its informal taxes or dues … the assembly also periodically redivided the arable lands in accordance with some egalitarian principle, usually in relation to the changing size of the families involved.

There was some economic inequality on the commune, and the Marxists tried to make a lot of this in order to argue that peasants were little capitalists at heart and the commune wasn’t really communist – but this was almost entirely a factor of which part of their life cycle a family was in. When an adult son got married and had children, the commune would give him a small plot of land and they would be poor relative to the rest of the commune. But as the kids grew up and contributed to the economy, they gained more land and wealth and they’d be rich relative the the commune, until it was time to divide up their land again as the kids got married. And if you had more kids doing more productive labour you’d be more rich, but then you’d end up poorer as there was more land to be divided. So from generation to generation the poorest families became the richest ones and vice versa. Even though peasants participated in and were in favour of the market economy, there was no way for great wealth inequality to build because of the mechanics of the commune system kept redistributing the wealth, thereby eliminating the worst aspect of the market economy and keeping its benefits.

And there were some families who employed wage labour – but it wasn’t the richest families, which is what the Marxists thought – it was people whose kids had gone to war or were sick or died or had to leave the village to look for work so they needed help to do the basic work needed to survive. And usually wage labour was temporary labour. The only people who employed wage labour for profit were aristocratic landowners, or entrepreneurs. The capitalist peasant that we’ll see Lenin and later Stalin talking so much about, who was exploiting all of his neighbours barely existed in most of russia, aside from the aristocratic landlord class who were not peasants. Economic inequality existed between communes but was mostly the result of geography. And aside from peasants who were closer to the urban centres, most of russias peasants were extremely poor and their conditions were getting worse.

In terms of material conditions, russia was a huge empire with different conditions in different places, but for the vast majority of the ethnically russian peasants of this period there was an extreme and increasingly worse land shortage and overpopulation crisis. I didn’t see this indicated in any of the stuff I’ve been reading, but I would imagine that this crisis was in part related to medical advancements of the 19^th century which were reducing infant mortality and changing demographics across europe at the time. Whatever the reason, you just had too many peasants and not enough land – and specifically not enough land to support people according to the extremely primitive agricultural techniques that the peasants were still using at the time, and they way behind other parts of the world.

Serfdom 2.0

Ironically this land shortage was made worse by the end of serfdom which happened in russia by decree in 1861.

Supposedly, the Tsar justified the end of serfdom saying

“There are rumors that I want to announce the emancipation of the peasants. I will not say to you that I am completely against this. We live in such an age that this has to happen in time. I think that you agree with me. Therefore, it is much better that this business be carried out from above, rather than from below.”

As is always the case where you get liberation from above rather than below, freedom from serfdom was almost as bad as serfdom itself – or maybe even worse, as the emancipated peasants were forced to compensate the their poor boo boo landlords for the loss of “their” lands – even though they had been basically stealing from the peasants for centuries. And those compensation payments were either huge massive amounts of cash – often double what the land was actually worth on the market – which often left the tenant in debt to the landlord for life – or else the payment would be made by giving the landlord a big chunk of the land which you had formerly used to cultivate to feed yourself and your landlord.

And what the peasant had leftover for himself usually wasn’t enough to survive on, so of course they had to borrow from money lenders in order to survive – and their former landlords who had plenty of cash sloshing around were happy to start new careers as money lenders. So you still had almost the exact same dependence and exploitation relationship after “emancipation” as you had before.

As a result of this new debt serfdom, each administrative region had a small number of moneylenders and merchants who took advantage of the peasants desperation to exploit them even further. Merchants for example would buy the peasants grain cheap in the fall when the peasants needed to pay tax and debt obligations – and then they would sell them back the exact same grain for double the price in spring when the peasants ran out of grain to feed themselves with.

And the peasants called this class of vampire squid moneylenders and merchants kulaks – meaning closed fists, ruthless money grubbers.

And as the overpopulation crisis increased the moneylenders and merchants became ever more ruthless, causing more and more peasants to have to go to give up their land as payment, and then go off to look for work and hired help for peasant families or landlord families, or more often to the cities. And once you lost your connection to your commune you couldn’t just go establish yourself somewhere else, you basically lost your entire social network and financial support and you were completely adrift and subject to the whims of the labour market.

And as a result of this, the peasants were increasingly ready to revolt. And their number one desire was to take their land back from the parasite aristocrat landlords, and also from the church – and to redistribute it equally amongst themselves.

And while the Peasants had a traditional belief that the Tsar was their little father and protector, this belief was seriously frayed by the Emancipation decree.

When state officials read out the decree to the peasants and it was clear that this would leave them enslaved to their landlords by debt, in many areas, the peasants thought that the officials who were reading it were lying. Like the peasants of 1381, the peasants believed that their little father Tsar surely wanted to give them all of their land.

So there were over 2000 revolts as a reaction to being “freed” from serfdom, into debt bondage.

And of course the Tsars armies were called in to put down these revolts by bloody force. So the Peasants monarchist beliefs were deeply shaken in many places, though in many others the Peasants continued to believe that this was all the doings of the landlords and the nobles, and the Tsar was still a good guy.

So in terms of their social structure, their desperate material conditions and their belief system, the peasants were just perfect material for some kind of revolutionary socialism, and especially some kind of libertarian, anti authoritarian, anti-state socialism, aka anarchism.

Now in 1905 you have whats called the revolution of 1905 – which wasn’t really a revolution because the monarchy remained firmly in place by the end of it, though for a couple of years it allowed a democratically elected parliament to operate. And during that revolution, peasant unrest played a big role, and the peasants started self organizing and connecting with the urban and rural socialist intellectuals – which very much scared the shit out of the rural aristocracy and also the monarchy.

And the lesson the ruling classes learned was that the peasant commune was a dangerous locus of rebellion which needed to be eliminated. And so the prime minister at the time, Stolypin, instituted a bunch of reforms which we call the Stolypin reforms, which were aimed at doing just that. And the idea was to incentivize the peasants to break up their communes into independent family farms like in western europe where market forces would turn the communist peasants into petit bourgeois entrepreneurs who would be concerned with increasing their wealth and protecting private property instead of with having solidarity with their neighbours and trying to form peasant brigades to take land away from the landlords by armed rebellion.

And the Stolypin reforms were mostly a big failure on that front. There was almost no incentive for peasants to break up their communes in that way, and almost no one did, aside from a small number of families in more prosperous areas, closer to the cities.

But although the reforms were a failure, the government did what governments often do – especially non democratic governments who can control the media – they lied – and the press would regularly report about how these wonderful modernizing reforms were turning stupid backwards communist peasants into smart savvy industrious little capitalist entrepreneurs. And this had a really awful effect on the socialist intellectuals as we’ll see because they tended to believe this propaganda.

The Parties and the Peasants

So back to the anarchists: how is it that anarchism never took off among the peasants despite how well suited it was to peasant ideology and peasant discontent?

The number one reason is that the anarchists like all the other socialists were generally urban people or rural intelligentsia from the administrative towns – and they just never put in any serious efforts to actually go out and connect to the peasants. There was no going to the people anarchist movement.

In spain, where you had anarchist missionaries going from village to village preaching their ideas, you ended up with a huge anarchist movement and even an anarchist revolution in the 1930s – but in Russia, the closest you got to the peasants was some rural intelligentsia circle jekrs on kropotkin’s estate.

One factor was that there just weren’t even enough urban anarchists to form a proper going to the people movement. And I mentioned before that maybe one reason anarchism wasn’t big in among the intellectuals was because it didn’t promise them any special positions in government after the revolution.

But maybe an even more important reason why the anarchists weren’t very popular even among the intelligentsia was because the majority of anarchists during this period belonged to insane terrorist organizations who just ran around blowing up cafes and killing as many people as possible. I think killing random people is always morally wrong, but sometimes terrorism can maybe achieve political goals. But in this case, none of it accomplished anything except attracting more psychos to the movement, and increasing government repression and helping the media around the world associate anarchism with mindless murders and terrorism. Many anarchists were of course against terrorism, but they were a bit less than half of the anarchists in russia at this time, and the terrorist ones of course got 100x more attention.

Marxism vs Marx

OK, so the anarchists are not really important on the russian scene until we get to the revolution itself – so let’s get back to the Marxists who are the ones who lead the revolution and who do take power.

As we’ve seen, the Marxists at this point are so busy having their heads up their asses and mindlessly following Marx’ writings like a bunch of braindead cult losers, that they are completely oblivious to the socialist potential of this giant mass of angry desperate peasant communists staring them straight in the face. And while the peasants are just waiting to revolt and to be connected to an urban movement to help them achieve their goals, the Marxists are cheering on the advance of capitalism and the destruction of the peasant commune and attacking anyone who wants to protect it.

As inherently ridiculous and shameful as this was, what’s even more ridiculous and shameful about it, is that the Marxists kept believing this stuff even though Karl Marx himself had changed his opinions on the peasants at this point, and had come to adopt a point of view similar to the populist socialists!

Marx 2.0

Around 1870 the time of the Paris Commune, Marx became acquainted with the work of Nikolai Danielsson, a Russian socialist who had translated Das Kapital into Russian, and who had been compiling the latest statistics and quantitative data about the russian peasants that had not previously been available, and writing popular language books on the subject.

Marx was particularly fascinated by this new body of scientific research which argued that contrary to popular belief, the russian peasant communes were not actually disintegrating under market forces. Rather, despite the deplorable conditions of most of the peasants, the peasant commune was in fact alive and well and was apparently quite resistant to market forces and to attempts by the monarchy to push the peasants into more individualized western capitalist forms of land holding.

Marx was so interested in this, and in the idea that these communes could be a potential alternative path to socialism, that he learned how to read Russian just so that he could read the relevant literature first hand. He became pen pals with Danielsson, and corresponded with him extensively for the rest of his life. Marx accumulated a library of over 200 russian language books many of them provided to him by Danielsson, and Marx wrote and theorized extensively about the Russian commune and its implications for an alternative path to socialism in russia in his voluminous notes – lots and lots of notes people.

In the first edition of Capital Vol I which was first published in 1867, Marx shits on people for defending the russian peasant commune. But in the 1873 second edition, he deleted those parts and instead he flipped them around, and critiqued the class interests and the motivations of those socialists who were critics the Russian commune!

Teodor Shanin, the sociologist of peasantry writes about Marx’ shift on the issue of peasants in his book Late Marx

“…Marx came to see the decline of the peasant commune in Western Europe and its crisis, in Russia, not as a law of social sciences – a spontaneous economic process – but as the result of an assault on the majority of the people, which could and should be fought

The main limitation of the rural commune, i.e. their isolation … could be overcome by the popular insurrection and the consequent supplementing of the state … by ‘assemblies elected by the communes – an economic and administrative body serving their own interest’. That is … peasants running their own affairs, within and as a part of socialist society.

Moreover, that may make some chiefly peasant countries ‘supreme in that sense to the societies where capitalism rules’. That is, indeed, why ‘the Western precedent would prove here nothing at all. ‘”

In other words, Marx not only thought that peasant socialism possible, but that it might be a better bet than advanced industrial socialism!

In 1872, Marx told Danielson that he planned to devote a whole section of Capital Vol. III to the topic of Russian property.

But unfortunately, despite this, Marx never ended up publishing anything on the issue besides a short preface to the 1882 edition of the communist manifesto.

And that passage itself is rather reserved:

“Now the question is: can the Russian commune … a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or … must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West … the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development”.

In other words if events in russia like the overthrow of the monarchsy inspire revolution in the west, then the communist west can help russia build socialism on a peasant economy.

It’s hard to know why Marx never wrote anything on the subject despite devoting so much time and energy learning and thinking about it, but although he wrote 30,000 pages of notes from 1871 until his death in 1883, he barely published anything at all on any subject at all aside from various letters.

The reasons for his relative silence in the last phase of his life are subject to debate, and there are some interesting theories on this for another time.

But, when it comes to the potential for peasant socialism, I get the sense from reading some of his correspondence on the subject, and from the manifesto preface, that Marx was afraid to be too bold and that he kept toning down his more enthusiastic thoughts. He was shifting his opinions on a lot of things in this era, and quietly backtracking on some of the brash self confident positions he’d been making for much of his life, so maybe he lost his nerve a little and was afraid to contradict himself too obviously.

For example in 1881 Marx had corresponded with a young Russian Marxist and disciple of Plekhanov named Vera Zasulich. Zasulich asks Marx if there is any hope of socialism in russia without having to go through an extended capitalist phase,

Zasulich writes

“the personal destiny of our revolutionary socialists depends on what you have to say on this question. One of two things: either this rural commune … is capable of developing along the socialist path… In this case the revolutionary socialist must sacrifice all his strength to the liberation of the commune and to its development.

If, on the contrary, the commune is doomed to perish, there remains nothing for the socialist, as such, to do but devote himself to more or less arbitrary calculations in order to learn in how many decades the land of the Russian peasant will pass out of his hands and into those of the bourgeoisie, in how many centuries, perhaps, capitalism will reach in Russia the development it has attained in Western Europe.

They will then have to conduct propaganda only among the workers of the towns who will be continually swamped in the mass of peasants who, as a result of the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on the streets of the big cities in the search of hire.

In recent times we often hear it said that the rural commune is an archaic form which history, scientific socialism, in a word, everything that is beyond dispute, has condemned to doom. The people who preach this call themselves your preeminent disciples: “Marxists.” Their strongest argument is often: “Marx says so.”

And Marx reply is really interesting because he writes four drafts. And you can see his hesitance to assert anything too forcefully by the progression of the drafts – he starts with a long several pages response, and then ends up with a short response about a page long. I’ll link to all the versions in the bibliography – in one of the drafts he says

“in Russia, thanks to a singular combination of circumstances, the rural commune, still established on a national scale, can gradually extricate itself from its primitive characteristics and develop directly as an element of collective production on a national scale.

the common ownership of the land permits it to transform piecemeal and individualistic agriculture directly and gradually into collective agriculture, and the Russian peasants already practice it …; the physical configuration of its soil invites mechanized exploitation on a vast scale; the familiarity of the peasant with the artel contract facilitates for him the transition from piecemeal to cooperative work, and finally Russian society which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the advances necessary for such a transition.

And an artel contract was a cooperative organization that you established to form some kind of collective activity like mining, or a rural urban trade cooperative. And Marx continues:

On the other hand, the contemporary existence of Western production, which dominates the world market, permits Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions elaborated by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine forks.

And that’s a reference to a famous Roman battle where the Romans had to surrender without even fighting because they were just trapped – the idea is that the market forces of capitalism conquers people without having to use weapons. So it seems here like Marx really sees a lot of potential for the russian commune to be the foundation of socialism in russia.

Marx continues

If the revolution takes place at an opportune time, if it concentrates all its force to assure the free upswing of the rural commune, the latter will soon develop as a regenerating element of Russian society and as an element of superiority over the countries enthralled by the capitalist regime

Weirdly he leaves most of this out in his final response, in which tells Vera Zasulich that:

the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.

So basically Marx is adopting the general position of the populist socialists in Russia that we’ve been talking about. The commune can be the foundation for socialism in russia, but first the monarchy and the landlords have to be overthrown.

But Marx seems hesitant to really make strong pronouncements on this, and he totally tones down his own enthusiastic letter. Maybe he was afraid of contradicting himself, or maybe he felt like he just didn’t understand the material well enough to have a strong opinion.

Either way, note that even his totally toned down response is still the exact opposite of what the so-called Marxists like Plekhanov were arguing! They were saying that russians have to sit on their asses for a hundred years before they can even think of socialism!

And it was during this period and in reaction to the mindless followship of the Plekhanov types that Marx famously quipped “I am not a Marxist”.

According to Esther Kingston Mann

Marx advised his Russian admirers to carry out their own economic investigations of the Russian scene instead of relying on Capital, or on the lessons of England’s experience. Marx’s own investigations of the Russian data led him to question whether peasantries were inevitably doomed, or whether peasant and non-peasant societies might in fact coexist – like consecutive geological strata in the earth’s surface. Like many of Russia’s leading professional economists and statisticians, Marx had become an agnostic rather than a true believer in the unique historical mission of the bour- geoisie in the modern world.

And elsewhere Marx points out that

‘the English system is completely incapable of fulfilling the conditions on which the development of Russia’s agriculture depends’ (Kingston-Mann, 1999: 132).

So Marx is basically telling his Russian followers that the european road to socialism is not really compatible with Russia’s material conditions, and that he sees a lot of potential for socialism in Russia to be based on the peasant commune but that his followers should make efforts to find out what they can learn for themselves about all of this so that they can develop the appropriate strategies based on the realities of the situation, which they’re in a better position to do than he is.

And go learn what you can about the situation before deciding what to do is always the best policy for people who want major long term revolutionary changes!

But instead of doing that, Marx Russian followers just ignored him, and then tried to suppress any of his thoughts on the subject! Peasant-hating Plekhanov made sure that none of Marx correspondence on these issues was published in Russia.

In Teodor Shanin’s words

“Already in Marx’s own generation there were marxists who knew better than Marx what marxism is and were prepared to censor him on the sly, for his own sake.

And next time we’ll see that after the russian revolution when the soviet government does publish some of Marx’s letters on the subject, they attribute his opinions to Marx becoming senile!

Now as a result of this censorship, the young generation of up and coming marxists, including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the future leaders of the Russian revolution that we’ll talk a lot about next time – they never learn about Marx’ change of opinion on peasant socialism, and they never take the time to investigate the issue in depth. And even though Lenin and Trostky are more flexible and creative thinkers than Plekhanov and they understand that conditions are different in russia than in europe, and that the peasants are ready to revolt and it would be crazy to just sleep on that and wait around for 100 years, they continue to base all of their theories and strategies on outdated and factually incorrect ideas about the russian peasantry which they got from earlier Marx, from urban stereotypes, and from the fake news spread by the Russian government. And the consequences of this are going to be a spectacular earth shaking disaster as we’ll see next time…

Bibliography

Esther Kingston-Mann 1983 — Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (see review of this book here)

Esther Kingston-Mann 2003 — A Russian Marxist Past Not Taken

Esther Kingston-Mann 1972 — Lenin and the Beginnings of Marxist Peasant Revolution

Esther Kingston-Mann 1979 — Lenin and the Challenge of Peasant Militance, 1905

Teodor Shanin 1983 — Late Marx and the Russian Road

Teodor Shanin 1972 — Peasants: The Awkward Class

David Mitrany 1951 — Marx Against the Peasant

Karl Marx / Vera Zasulich 1891 — Correspondence on peasant socialism in Russia

Eric Wolfe 1966 — Peasants

Peter Coy 1972 — Social Anarchism: An Atavistic Ideology of the Peasant

Orlando Figes 1997 — A Peoples’ Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1881–1924

Dave Pretty 1998 — Review of Figes, A Peoples’ Tragedy

Paul Avrich 1968 — The Russian Anarchists

McKinsey 1979 — From City Workers to Peasantry: The Beginning of the Russian Movement To the People

Scott Seregny 1988 — A Different Type of Peasant Movement: The Peasant Unions in the Russian Revolution of 1905

Mark O’Brien 2004 — When Adam Delved and Eve Span

Benedict Anderson 1983 — Imagined Communities

People have been asking about the part where Yung Lenin comes out against famine relief for peasants in 1891:

It’s from the Figes book, but interestingly, Figes doesn’t provide a citation for Lenin saying this thing about the peasant famine despite having a zillion footnotes in the book and mentioning it twice!

However, it is properly cited here:

“[Lenin in 1891 –92] spoke out sharply and definitely against feeding the starving. His position, to the extent that I can now remember it, and I remember it well since I frequently argued with him about it, was as follows. The famine is the direct result of a definite social system. While that system exists such famines are inevitable. To eliminate famines is possible, but only by destroying this system. Being in this sense inevitable, the current famine is playing the role of a progressive factor. By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat and facilitates the industrialisation of the region, which is progressive.

Furthermore the famine can and should be a progressive factor not only economically. It will force the peasant to reflect on the bases of the capitalist system, demolish faith in the tsar and tsarism, and consequently in due course make the victory of the revolution easier...

Psychologically all this talk about feeding the starving and so on essentially reflects the usual sugary sentimentality of our intelligentsia.

V.Vodovozov (1925)”

Vodovozov was a Trudovik (a peasant-labour alliance populist party) and if you google him you see Lenin would criticize but also praise him on occasion.

In the notes for that quote the author Ellman says:

“Vodovozov knew Lenin personally in 1891– 92, but was writing more than 30 years after the event in an émigré journal. A heavily edited version of Vodovozov’s account of Lenin’s attitude to the famine and the anti-famine NGO was included in the booklet published by the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, Lenin v Samare 1889–1893 (Moscow, 1933), pp. 98 –101.

The editor argued (pp.98– 99) that Vodovozov’s account had ‘a particularly tendentious character’ and was quite misleading. According to the editor, Lenin did not oppose bourgeois-liberal elements feeding the hungry, organising public works etc., but did oppose seeing these activities as suitable for political exiles and revolutionary youth, as a contribution to the revolution and the overthrow of the autocracy. Lenin, according to the editor, saw these activities as a distraction from the revolution and advantageous for the ruling class since they lessened peasant dissatisfaction and despair.

However, even this publication agrees that Lenin thought that feeding the starving was not appropriate for him and his comrades and was politically harmful. According to Belyakov, who did not know Lenin personally and was writing in a Soviet book in the Khrushchev era, it was not the famine which Lenin regarded as progressive but the consequences of the famine.

‘Vladimir Ilich had the bravery to declare that the consequences of the famine [of 1891– 92]—the growth of an industrial proletariat, this gravedigger of the bourgeois system—were progressive, because they facilitated Russian industry and brought us to our final goal, to socialism via capitalism... The famine, in destroying the peasant economy, simultaneously destroys faith not only in the Tsar but also in God and in time without doubt pushes the peasants on the path of revolution and makes thevictory of the revolution easier’. (A. Belyakov, Yunost’ vozhdya (Moscow, 1960), pp. 78– 79).”

So basically, even according to official Soviet sources, Lenin’s position was that the famine would be a good thing politically.

12: From “Never Again” to “There are No Uninvolved Civilians”: The ABC’s of the Israel/Palestine Conflict

Feb 29, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLr_VCqnId0

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.

Script

Prelude

Hello fellow kids, and welcome back to What Is Politics?. In this episode I’ll be talking about how conflicts that are on the surface about identity groups, particularly when it comes to national identity groups. But these types of national conflicts typically hide conflicts within those identity groups where the people who claim to speak and act for their national group are often screwing their own people in the name of their own people. Propagating lies and myths in order to perpetuate conflict and S. Cooperation between the different identity groups for their own advantage. And the Israel Palestine conflict is a really stark example of this in ways that are rarely explored or understood.

I’m recording this in early 2024, when Israel has been carrying out a nonstop massacre for months. Which is an exceptionally atrocious example of this phenomenon, and to me, this Horror Story is very much the culmination of more than 100 years of manipulation by nationalist elites. And as you’ll see next time, this has been going on both sides from the beginning.

This might be surprising to people who are new to this conflict, especially if your first introduction to it is watching Israel annihilate Gaza and listening to the demented, genocidal ravings of its morally degenerate and absolutely stupid government and military leaders. Or if your first introduction to this conflict was watching Hamas fighters going on their murder, rape horror movie rampage on October. 7^th If these were your introductions to this conflict, it might be surprising for you to learn that the majority of people on both sides of this conflict tend to think that these atrocities are forms of morally justified self-defense. And part of this is just social media BU. Like where? If you’re Arab or Muslim or in or from the third world, you’re seeing non-stop mass death on innocent people and children in Gaza, on your social media feeds. And if you’re in a Jewish pro Israel bubble, you’re still seeing interviews with freed Israeli hostages and. 7^th rescuers about the horror stories that Hamas carried out and both sides are hearing that the worst atrocities or numbers from their side are just fake news. But beyond social media, the idea that this is self-defense on my side against aggression on your side is the result of two quite coherent, logical, conflicting sets of historical narratives on either side of the conflict, which long predate the existence of social media, and which paint the. As a whole, as my side engaging in legitimate self-defense against the aggression of your side in a conflict that your side started. It’s not like people are thinking we are superior. We are the colonizers, or we are the terrorists, and we want your land. We’re going to take it. It’s you started this conflict and we’re just defending ourselves. From you and we have the moral higher ground, even as they’re committing the worst atrocities imaginable. Like what happened on October 7^th and like what’s been happening ever since October 7^th, and I’m recording this in February after 10s of thousands have been killed and more than a million people made homeless and countless others starving and dying of disease. Gaza and if you’re not in that social media bubble, look it up. If we want to understand what’s happening right now, we need to understand these narratives and how they motivate people to carry out and support these atrocities. Like, how did we get from? Never again, which was the slogan after the Holocaust to there are no innocent civilians over the age of four, which is something that you’re hearing more and more in Israel. But first, in this episode, I’m going to present the basic facts of the conflict that most historians would agree on, regardless of their politics, in order to give you guys the basic picture of what’s going on. So that everyone will be up to speed for the next episode where I tear the Israeli and Palestinian nationalist narratives into pieces, and I get into some very underexplored and ignored facts, looking at them through the perspectives that we’ve been talking about on this show from the begin. Anthropology class conflict, evolution, materialism and verbs. And once we do that, we can begin to unveil a version of the history of this conflict that most of you have, probably. Heard before? And it places the blame for this conflict where it belongs, on particular individuals and classes of people, and not on the entire amorphous identity groups that these people pretend to represent. And that is what you need. If people are ever going to accept the type of compromises that are necessary in order to achieve a just peace. And my presentation will surely disappoint everyone, especially when your blood is boiling because of what’s going on right now. Because it’s sympathetic to both narratives and I genuinely am sympathetic to both narratives, even if I know that they’re both full of shit in so many ways. And I poke a little bit at each of them, but I don’t really challenge either of them in any fundamental ways. Think of it as like a one-on-one university course where the teacher just sort of soft pills everything because he doesn’t want to get cancelled or. With the administration, which will be for next time after the teacher gets divorced and has a midlife crisis and goes on a rampage. But first I’m recording this little intro after having finished the episode because I’m finishing this as this insane massacre is currently happening and has been going on for more than 140 days now. And this massacre is something which can be stopped. Particularly by pressure from people inside of the United States whose military funding makes this Horror Story possible. You can help stop this and I want to point out that this massacre happening in Gaza is not only morally monstrous, but it’s also just completely and utterly unnecessary. Even if you believe that the Arabs started the entire conflict and everything is their fault, and even if you believe that every Arab in Gaza is a 1980s cartoon character that just. To murder all the Israelis and the only thing stopping them from doing that is force. Even if you believe that there is still no reason to support this slaughter and it is completely insane for you to do that and against your own self-interest. People on the Israeli side asked me over and over again. What else are we supposed to do? How else can we prevent October 7^th from happening again and again? Well, let me tell you what you can do. And it’s not complicated at all if you just think about it for 2 minutes. Number one, when Qatar and Egypt were going to stop funding Hamas in 2020, Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, begged them to continue because he wanted to keep the Palestinians divided. If not for that, Hamas wouldn’t have been able to carry out October 7^th. So #1 is stop fucking funding Hamas. Number 2, when October 7^th happened, it took the Israeli Army 8 hours to respond, which is unbelievable. You can literally walk across Israel at a leisurely pace from east to West in some parts in three hours. So why did it take so? Where were all the troops who were supposed to be stationed at the border with a hostile? Where supposedly every child over the age of 4 is a threat to Israel. Well, in a large part it was because the army had moved its soldiers away from the Gaza border and into the West Bank to support these maniacal price tag revenge gangs where Jewish settlers burn. And beat up old men as collective punishment for various attacks by Palestinians. If not for that, then the Israeli army could have stopped the Hamas fighters before they even crossed the fence. And Israeli generals have even said as much. So #2 is have the army do its fucking job instead of helping psychotic maniacs do pogroms in the West Bank. And #3 Israeli intelligence agents were warning about this attack for months, and begging, this appears to pay attention to it. Yet they didn’t. And I don’t know if it’s because they’re just complete arrogant imbeciles, which they are. And they just wouldn’t take the young women intelligence agents seriously. Or if it’s because they let it happen on purpose as an excuse to depopulate Gaza, which the right wing have been dreaming up. Decades now. But either way, all you have to do to stop more October 7^th is stop funding Hamas. Stop using the military to help revenge gangs. And if you insist on keeping up the blockade on Gaza forever, then expect more attempts to attack Israel and then listen to your fucking intelligence agents when they tell you that a big one is about to happen soon. There is zero reason for this slaughter, except to keep Israelis enraged and afraid so that Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty gang of gremlins in his cabinet can stay in power for just a little bit longer. And so that Netanyahu stays out of jail just a little bit longer on all this corruption charges. I understand. Your blood is boiling and I’m somebody who believes in revenge. But whoever supports this monstrous massacre should be ashamed of themselves, ashamed of supporting this completely unnecessary mass death of innocent people, and ashamed for letting the disgusting, stupid little monsters in power Rob you of your humanity. And this isn’t even to mention the political solutions to this conflict, which we can start to talk about once we understand the basic history and the narratives of how this conflict started and why it never ends, and why it’s going to require a massive deep brainwashing campaign in. For peace ever to occur. And now on to the episode that I spent the last 4 1/2 months working on.

Episode Begins

Hello fellow kids and hopefully a few adults. Welcome. To what is. Where we try to make sense of the political nonsense that we learn in media and academia so that we can become more empowered and effective political actors. Today we’re going to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Or rather, we’re going to make sense of it from a very different angle to how people normally look at it, which in my opinion at least, makes a solution to the conflict much more conceivable than it has been for a long time, or even ever. And in order to do that, we need to do 2 things. 1^st in any conflict, they’re conflicting versions of history. Conflicting sets of facts or stories put together from the same facts, and these stories or narratives as political theorists and historians like to call them, usually include a lot of myths and fake news which justify the objectives and actions of the various actors on different sides of the. And this is just as true in a messy divorce as it is in an international, or intercommunal conflict, like the Israel Palestine conflict. So first we need to get a general grasp of what the conflicting versions of history are so that we can understand the behavior and psychology of the different actors on the different sides of the conflict. And then we want to see if we can compare these versions of history with. Actual facts. And there’s actually more consensus on the facts than people realize about these sorts of things. Among professional historians, even historians who have different political points of view. Versus in popular folk versions of history that float around in the public imagination and which are much more based on myths and fake stories which had been debunked by historians decades ago. And where we compare the facts to the historical narratives and we find important fabrications or important emissions from those narratives, we want to look at who’s been in charge of disseminating these false stories and to what end? For what purpose? Because unlike a divorce where there are just two people fighting it out, each seeking to advance their own interests, whether it’s material or financial or logical and emotional in inter communal conflicts, you usually have various classes of people and the people who have the power to disseminate inform. To other members of a society are very often manipulating the general public for their own ends. And this is a huge aspect of the Israel Palestine conflict, in my opinion, if not for misrepresentation of facts by leaders, this entire conflict might have been resolved a long time ago. And we’ll talk about all this in depth later, but first. One important aspect of knowing the different historical narratives is to understand how these conflicting versions of history create more conflict on their own. From the get go. Like, imagine if we’re having a conversation about someone. Robin. But the Robin that I’m talking about is a 7 year old girl and she’s really great and does a lot of volunteering in her community. And you’re talking about someone called Robin, who’s a 50 year old Neo Nazi serial killer who just escaped prison. And I say I just love Robin so much. Everything Robin does is so great. And you’re like what? You sick? How can you say? What kind of monster are you? And that’s it. End of conversation in five seconds and lots of mutual antagonism. And if you’ve ever tried talking about the Israel Palestinian conflict outside of your own political bubble, you’ll have seen this dynamic happen over and over again. One side says Zionism is racism and the other side. Like. How can you think that it’s anti Zionism? That’s racism. Or one side thinks from the river to the sea means freedom and equality for everyone. What can be more moral than that? And the other side thinks that from the river to the sea is an obvious call to genocide. Both parties to the discussion are not operating on the same definitions or factual backgrounds, and so every new event that happens in the conflict is interpreted through a lifetime of historical narratives and personal experiences that each person has in their head, so that even when people have the. Same facts in front of them and even when they have the exact same kind of moral framework. What’s right and what’s wrong in the world? The common facts are interpreted in completely different ways. So when the 2500 or so Hamas and Allied militants escaped Gaza into Israel and massacred 800 civilians and 400 military personnel, often in extremely brutal ways out of a horror movie. One side the people more sympathetic to Palestinians were interpreting this as the obvious and inevitable outcome of what happens when you keep people trapped and oppressed for 75. Years on the other side, people more sympathetic to Israel saw it as yet another example of unprovoked belligerent hatred by people who would rather kill and be killed than accept a just and peaceful solution to the conflict, or to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the. Of the Arab world. Some of this is just the dynamics of identity. We explored a bit in the previous episode, and we’ll look at it more in future episodes. That when people see themselves as part of a collective identity, even based on the most flimsy and ridiculous invented identities like you take a room full of strangers and you randomly tell every second person you’re in Group A, you’re in Group B, you’re in Group A, you’re in. B. As soon as people get an identity, the members of each group start to discriminate against the people of the other. Group inferring malicious motives to them while at the same time people quickly start to become biased in favor of the people of their own group making excuses for them, assuming that they have good motives and that they’re trustworthy and all this is based on absolutely nothing, just ar. Letter groups. This is clearly some kind of evolved mechanism and I’m going to do an episode all about how the whole purpose of collective identity in evolution is genocide and exploitation, or else self-defense from genocide and exploitation. And while these kinds of dynamics obviously play a huge role in. Conflict, like the Israeli Palestinian conflict, these kinds of dynamics can actually be circumvented easily than the chaos dynamics caused by conflicting historical narratives can even for Jews and Arabs who have been raised since childhood with stories about this conflict as a central part of their identity. Yes. For example, there’s a film called Encounter Point from 2006, which is. A. Group for Israelis and Palestinians who’ve lost family members to the conflict and the dialogue group is called the Bereaved Families Forum. And this is real stuff, like the Israeli parents of a victim of a suicide bombing. Sit down with the parents of the suicide bomber and they share their experiences and tears and become friends. And it’s incredible to see people connect on a human level despite suffering these kinds of losses, and despite being on different sides of the seemingly impossible divide. But in that film, you don’t see anyone at any point discussing politics or history. The film had a screening in my city and the directors of the film were present, and after the screening, when I asked one of the forum leaders why the four members never talk about history or politics in the movie and what happens at their meetings when people do. About that stuff. His answer was we fight. So group identification can be bypassed by common universal humanity. But historical narratives can’t. Basically, people have an easier time bonding with and becoming personal friends with the parents of the person who killed their child than they do talking about the politics or the history of Israeli Palestinian conflict. To bypass the tensions and chaos caused by conflicting stories and historical narratives, you need a new common story. Some agreed upon set of facts, no matter how open minded and open hearted you are, you can’t really have a conversation until you understand the factual framework that the other. Has in their head at the very least. Otherwise, it’s like talking two different languages, except it’s worse, because when you’re talking two different languages, you know that you can’t understand what the other person is saying. In this case, you think that you’re talking the same language, and you think that you understand what they’re saying. Once you understand who the other person thinks Robin is, then you still might think that they’re completely wrong about everything. But at least you can understand why they think what they think without thinking that they’re insane. Monsters. Every time they open their mouths. And then once you understand each other, you can actually start having the real argument that can lead to a resolution of the conflict. The one about the actual facts, the one that tells us who, Robin. In other words, you can actually establish a historical narrative that assigns responsibility to where it belongs. And once you’ve done that, you have room for each side to make some obvious, morally legitimate compromises. And you can expect a lot more willingness on the part of people on either side to make those compromises and to agree on what those compromises should be. At least you can expect that from the general populations on both sides, maybe not among the elites, meaning the people who make the decisions that everyone else is subject to, because elites tend to want and tend to feel entitled to more power for themselves. Regardless of what’s morally. And they’ll just make up reasons why it’s morally legitimate, and we all kind of do that. That elites are in a position to actually make it happen, and the rest of us. Weren’t. And when it comes to inter communal conflicts, it requires not just looking at the actions of the Jews and the Palestinians as if all the Israelis are one person and all the Palestinians are another person. We need to look at the various classes and fractions within those groups who have conflicting interests, especially those people in a position to make decisions for everyone else and in everyone else’s name. And once we do that, once we go back to the early years of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the 1880s until 1948, and once we put some class analysis back into the story and by class, I don’t mean capitalists and proletarians, I mean a more fund. Type of class. Meaning the class of people who make decisions versus the class of people who has to suffer the consequences of those decisions. Once we do that, then the conflict which at first glance is seemingly all about identity politics becomes a conflict about something very different. Instead of a story about Jews and Arabs fighting each other, the story becomes one about Jewish elites and Arab elites competing to see who gets to be the administrative elite of a new state. Using identity politics to portray themselves as a representative of their respective identity groups while. They’re actually needlessly putting their own population in harm’s way, lying to them, exploiting them and generating conflict where there could have been peace and cooperation had it been left up to the majorities of the people on both sides. And this applies right from the beginnings of the conflict, when you have the first series of clashes between Arab villagers and Jewish immigrant settlers, right up until today, where you have this hellscape war on Gaza. So in the series, we’ll be focusing on two time periods. First, we’ll be looking at how the conflict started, which means we’ll be looking at the period when Zionists start immigrating to Palestine in the 1880s. Until the State of Israel is born in 1948, nineteen 40. Because everyone interprets everything that happens today or at any point based on who they think started the conflict and why. And the dynamics are quite clear. When we really look at this period in depth and then in a later episode, we’re going to look at the failure of what’s called the Oslo process when Israel and the Palestinians were supposed to be on track to A2 state Sol. Conflict with an independent Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side. A solution which had majorities of people on both sides basically agreeing on the same solutions, yet somehow it ended up turning into a complete disaster. To day. Both sides are more antagonistic towards each other than they’ve ever been. An aggressive right wing elements have taken control over both societies. And we’ll be focusing on offlow because the turn to the extreme right on both sides and the enormity of mutual mistrust and antagonism that exists today is based on how each side interprets and understands why and how the Oslo process failed. But as seen through the lens of who started the conflict and why? So those are the two major periods we need to understand. Now underneath all of the arguments that you’ll hear about every single event that happens today, there are two underlying unspoken versions of why the conflict started in the Pro Israel version of history. The main culprit is Arab intolerance of Jews. According to this narrative, the Jews immigrated to Palestine lawfully and acquired land by ethical and legal means. And they became the majority, and therefore they had and still have the right to self determination in the form of a state, the state of. Israel. But since the beginning, the Arabs could not tolerate the idea of Jews having a state or being in control of Arab or Muslim. So they’ve been attacking the Jews and trying to prevent the State of Israel from coming into existence from day one. And then after the State of Israel was actually established, they’ve been trying to destroy it from that time until now. And no matter how ethically Israel conducts itself, no matter how many times it offers the Arabs a just an equitable peace, no matter how many times it offers the Palestinians a state of their own. The Arabs always reject it and they choose war and violence because they value the destruction of Israel more than they value their own quality of life. And the crown jewel of this narrative is the failure of the Oslo process, where, according to the Pro Israel version, Israel basically offered the Palestinians almost everything that they said they wanted, but they still refused it. And instead of making counter offers or to negotiate a mutually accept. Settlement. They chose to walk out on the whole process and to start a violent rebellion with the intent of wiping Israel off the map. And this proved once and for all that there’s no point of trying to have a peace process with the Arabs because they don’t actually want peace at all. The only thing that they want, and that they’ll accept is to wipe Israel off the map and most of its Jewish inhabitants off the map as well. And this extends from the leadership of the Palestinians to the general population of the Palestinians, who keep electing those types leaders. And this explains a lot of the mentality of what’s going on in Gaza today, where the entire civilian population is seen by many, many people. On the Israeli side as the enemy. And from this point of view, any atrocities or brutalities committed by Israel, the occupation of the West Bank, the current flattening of Gaza, the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the displacement of 700,000 or so civilians in the 1948 war, these are. Legitimate actions taken in self-defense or for preemptive self-defense or else. They’re. Or I’ll conceived excesses undertaken in a conflict that is fundamentally the other side’s fault. If you want to hear a very convincing version of this narrative, you can listen to Michaela Peterson’s interview with author and corporate lawyer David Brog. And Brog has a book called Reclaiming Israel’s History from 2017. So according to this version of history, the current plight of the Palestinians in West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps in the neighboring Arab countries. Their plight is all the result of endless Arab violence against Israel and against Jews. Which forces Israel to do awful things to defend itself, like to keep up this 75 year occupation that they wish they didn’t have to waste money and lives on. And if you have the Israeli narrative as the background framework in your head, you immediately saw the October attacks against Israel not as something that can be explained in relation to anything that Israel does or has done, but rather as yet another example of the genocidal intentions and. Not only of Hamas, but of the majority of Palestinian Arabs. And that’s how Barry Weiss, for example, described the events and also the protests and statements in solidarity with the Palestinians that came out right after the attacks. If you follow these types of writers and speakers, you’ll often hear the expression that if the Arab militants would lay down their arms, there would be peace and prosperity for both sides. But if Israel laid down her arms, then there’d be genocide of all the Jews inside of Israel. And in the same vein, in regards to violence carried out by Israel, you’ll often hear people quote the former Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, from her 1973 autobiography. Where she wrote quote. When peace comes, we will perhaps in time, be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons. It’ll be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. And when Jews hear this, they solemnly nod their heads at how tragic the situation is and how endlessly bloodthirsty the Arabs are. And when Arabs hear this, they think this is the most racist, psychotic, demented thing I’ve ever heard. And that’s because the Palestinian version of history is something of a mere image of the Jewish version. And here it’s the Zionists and Zionism that have been the aggressors since the beginning. And we’ll talk more about Zionism in a bit. But Zionism is generally the idea that Jews should have the right to establish a homeland where Israel is now and where Palestine was before and which was the site of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in biblical times and in the. Version Arab possibility has always mostly been a function of not wanting to be disenfranchised and kicked. Of their land. Ends the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state by its very nature required the expulsion of huge numbers of Arabs out of Palestine. And this was the plan of the early Zionists and the founders of Israel. And that’s exactly what they did when they got the chance. That’s why Zionism is a dirty word in the Arab world or in some leftist college activist circles like fascism or Nazism. In this understanding of history, Zionism implies that Jewish life is more important than Arab life. And that it was fair to build Israel at the expense of the native Arabs. As a member of the Palestinian elite told the British Empire’s King Crane Commission in 1919, quote we will push the Zionists into the sea or else they will send us back into the desert UN quote. So in this view, the aggressive stance of the Arabs is and always has been self-defense. Even if you’re horrified by Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians like the dozens of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians on buses and public places throughout the 1990s, or else the Hamas rampage on October 7^th, 2023, what do you expect when people have been pushed off of? Land for 75 years and are still being pushed off of their lands to day in 1000. Always a bit like the Nat Turner Rebellion was a gruesome event, but it was only understandable as a reaction to the injustice of slavery, and this is what Norman Finkelstein wrote about the October 7^th attacks, right after they happened or Columbia. Joseph Massad of Princeton, a Palestinian Christian. He described the October 7^th of. Horrific, but he also describes them as resistance to Israeli oppression and as retaliation for various Israeli crimes and abuses. In this version of history, Zionism is basically a typical racist 19^th century colonialist movement with a few unique quarks, which inherently required and still requires to day the displacement or disenfranchisement of the native Arab population in order to achieve its aims of having and maintaining a Jewish state. And if you want a very convincing view of this perspective, read Rashid Khalid’s the 100 years War on Palestine, 1917 to 2017. And as always, there’s a full bibliography in the show. With all the texts and videos and interviews that I mentioned or read to prepare this video. So at the end of the day, in both of these narratives, each side sees the violence perpetrated by its own identity group as self defence or preemptive self defence, or at worst, exaggerated emotional responses to the endless onslaught of almost a century of violence or threats of viol. Them. And the two narratives can basically be boiled down to. Is racism on the Palestinian side and anti Zionism? Is racism on the Israeli side? Side these narratives see one nationalism as legitimate and the other as illegitimate. The Palestinians see Jewish nationalism, AK Zionism as illegitimate, because it implies taking someone elses land out from under them, and because it involves Europeans from Ukraine and Russia and Lithuania taking land that their ancestors hadn’t lived in for 3000 years away from Arabs who had been living. For the last 1000 years. And the Zionists see Palestinian nationalism as illegitimate because they see it as mostly invented in order to fight Israel, like the Arabs of Palestine previously saw themselves as part of the broad Arab nation, or part of a Greater Syrian cultural area, until they made-up Palestinian nationalism in. 1930s to fight off the birth of Israel and Palestinian only became a definitive identity group after the birth of Israel. And there’s also a third type of narrative, which you see in a lot of history books, especially those written by left wing Zionist scholars. And this narrative sees both nationalisms as legitimate and sees the conflict as just the inevitable and unfortunate result of two legitimate nationalist movements fight. Out over the same piece of territory. And the results were. But what happened has happened, and it’s now in the past and today we just need to recognize the legitimacy of the aspirations on both sides and have a just two state solution. And there’s often a bit of subtext to that narrative which says that, well, the Arabs already have 22 states. So Jewish nationalism is maybe a little bit more legitimate than Palestinian nationalism, because don’t we deserve at least one little state? The world. And while I’m actually sympathetic to the 22 states versus one state situation, this is actually my least favorite type of narrative. Because I think that nationalism is almost entirely idiotic and makes everyone stupid. And the whole narrative about dueling nationalisms has rotted everyone’s brains and prevented everyone from understanding this conflict. For the past 120 years. Aspirations for independence and democracy and cultural development are real and legitimate. But nationalism is a brain fog that gives cover to elites to use their supposed nations as cannon fodder in pursuit of personal and class power. And hopefully you’ll see what I mean when we do the class analysis segment. Now when it comes to the Pro Israel versus the pro Palestine narratives, each side’s story has what I call ethical pillars, which hold up the belief system that justifies or excuses the actions of their particular side and condemns those of the other. The ethical pillar of the Palestinian story is that their violence is self-defense against expropriation and displacement, which are the original sins of Zionism, and the ethical pillar of the Zionist narrative is that Zionist violence is self-defense against racist and genocidal intolerance of the Arabs, which is. Original sin of Palestinian nationalism in that narrative. Meanwhile, the dueling legitimate nationalisms narrative sort of presupposes that nationalism is always legitimate and that everyone deserves a state and the ethical pillar of that narrative is being totally oblivious to the fact that nationalisms are usually the tools of elites used to corral support and legitimacy for their. Personal ambitions from a general public, often in conflict of interest to those elites. Nationalism is all about erasing the conflict of interest between the leaders or aspiring leaders of the supposed nation, and the rest of the nation. We’ll see that very clearly when I get into the class analysis of this conflict. Now if we want to figure out the truth, the ethical pillars of these narratives are kind of pretty easy to test out. There have been violent clashes between Arabs and immigrant Jews in Palestine since Zionists started immigrating there in the 1880s, and these clashes continued and intensified right up until Israel’s independence in 1948.

What were these clashes about? Was it mostly about Arabs resisting domination, displacement and expropriation by Zionists? Or were these attacks mostly xenophobic, anti immigrant violence by Arabs against innocent immigrant Jews? And how did designers acquire their land in Palestine in the first place? It ethical or not? What’s particularly fascinating about doing this exercise of trying to test the ethical pillars of each narrative is that when you read Zionist or Palestinian histories of the conflict, it seems like no one else is actually asking these totally obvious and fundamental questions. And no one is taking a really serious look at these early clashes and that these Zionist land acquisition practices. Typically on both sides, historians will barely even mention this stuff or also just gloss over it or discuss it in passing without really focusing on what seems to me to be a central core issue. And the ultimate way to prove the legitimacy of one or the other NAR. And in law, which I practice, when you see that your opponent seems to be avoiding what should be their own strongest argument, you realize that they’re hiding something. And that’s exactly what’s going on here. But on both sides, and both sides are ignoring the same period of time and the same facts. And there’s only one book that I. Of. Talks about these violent clashes in depth. The early violent clashes between Arab peasants and Jewish immigrants. And this book was only published in 2019, and it’s called Ottoman Palestine 1881 to 1917 by Alan Doughty. And while it’s really interesting and worth reading, it’s also completely brain poisoned by the whole dueling nationalisms framework. And it sees all of these attacks as related to Arab. Even though the author himself acknowledges that there was no nationalist ideology or sentiment among the peasants who are engaged in these attacks and look at all this in depth later, like why people need to inject nationalism into episodes where they know there wasn’t any nationalism. The only writing that you’ll find about early Arab Jewish clashes and Zionist land acquisition, it isn’t poisoned by nationalist brain rot, is in super specialized academic journals and books. Are in the micro domain of land acquisition in Palestine 1882 to 1939, which no one reads besides other scholars in that field. Whenever you look at conflicts through the lens of dueling nationalisms, what you’re actually doing is looking at the clash of interest between the elites in charge of the different societies and ignoring the relationship of those elites to the majority of the populations that they pretend to represent N. Always covers up class. That’s almost the whole point of nationalism to erase class conflict in order to legitimize the rulers or spiriling rulers of the nation state, and to hide their role as exploiters of the rest of the population. And that’s why all the histories about the Israeli Palestine conflict ignore these pivotal events surrounding Zionist land acquisition and early Arab Jewish violence. Because when we investigate early Arab Jewish violence and Zionist land acquisition policies, we inevitably end up pulling back the veil of these stupid stories of competing. And instead we discover a story of Arab urban elites versus rural Arab peasants versus Arab pastoral snow meds. As wealth and almost completely ignored history of Zionist elites and Zionist leaders of various Zionist agencies versus Zionist and Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution. And we also unveiled stories of cooperation between Jewish immigrants and Arab peasants and Jewish and Arab wage laborers. And we see how this cooperation with sabotage by both Zionist and Arab elites because it undermined their nationalist goals. So this is. We’re really going to go in depth in the. Episode, but first for. Episode I’m going to do something unusual for this program. What I’m going to do is do just a basic ABC history of the Israeli Palestine conflict, all those people out there which I think is the majority of people who just don’t really have a good grasp on it, skipping over big controversies and sticking to what most histor. Would agree to, regardless of their politics. So there’s going to be a lot of passive voice going on here and I’ll be presenting the events with a lot of the moral context purposely removed. But then afterwards in the next episode, we’re going to go back to the beginning and inject class analysis into the story and see how the conventional narratives transform into something completely different. Once you do that. And so let the cartoon begin.

Hello.

The area that’s now called Israel and West Bank and Gaza was home to various nomadic and settled tribes and kingdoms and empires over the last several 1000 years.

I’m not sure.

And the first known ancestors of what are today called the Jewish people appear in some recognizable proto Jewish form in the archaeological and historical. Record as Israelite tribes a bit more than 3200 years ago, and while there’s been a continuous Jewish or proto Jewish presence in the area since that time, almost all of the Jews were expelled from or left that region in two great forced exiles in eight. BC and 600 BC. And then in a subsequent long slow continuous wave of immigration that started in Roman times after the Romans crushed a big Jewish revolt in 136 AD called the Bar Kachba Revolt. And from then on, most Jews have been living in what’s called a diaspora, or the exile or galote in the Jewish tradition, with communities spread out across the world, Europe, North and South America. Modern day Iraq, Persia, and Northern Africa, Central Asia and more. Where Jewish people adopted local languages and customs but kept similar variations of the same religion. Meanwhile, a small community had always remained in what came to be called Palestine and the name Palestine or Palestine in Arabic is a variation of what that region has been called on and off by various empires since about 1200 BC and after the Romans put down the. Revolt that I mentioned a couple of seconds earlier. The Emperor Hadrian renamed the region from Judea to Palestine in order to stamp out Jewish urgent sentiment and aspirations to independent statehood, and from that time until Israel became an independent state in 1948, the region was called Palestine continuously. But it wasn’t officially called. The whole time, for example in the Ottoman Empire, period before the British take over, most of it is called the province of Beirut and the District of Jerusalem and Palestine was just an unofficial regional name, like Appalachia or the Midwest or New England in the US by the. 1800s in the age of European nationalism, when Zionist ideas start emerging. The Jewish community of Palestine was generally poor and religious and concentrated in a few towns and cities of biblical significance, especially in Jerusalem, which had at that point a Jewish majority. The modern Palestinians of today are descendants of a broad mix of people. In part, they’re descended from the same collection of ancient tribes that the Jews emerged from, as well as from nomadic pastoralist tribes from all around the Arabian Peninsula, who passed through that area of Palestine for centuries up until the 20^th century. Some of whom eventually settled down in Palestine at different points, becoming farmers and turning into peasants at different points, while others remained nomads in that general region. And a peasant is a subsistence farmer who is dominated by a state and who has to give part of his yield to that state and is exploited in various ways. The exploitation is what separates a peasant from a traditional subsistence farmer. That’s part of the definition of peasant. And peasants are called fellaheen in Arabic. In the 9^th century BC we start to have first records of people being referred to as Arabs, which is the name that the Assyrians gave to the nomadic pastoralist tribes of what we call today the Arabian Peninsula. And that would have been the ancestors of today’s Bedouin. With the Arab expansion and Muslim conquests of the 7^th century AD, the Arabs became the ruling class of the Levant area, which today includes Palestine and Israel, and Syria, and Lebanon and Jordan, and a bit more. And over time the region becomes culturally Arab, starting with the El. And the merchant classes, but then going down to the entire population. And the population of this area has always been racially mixed with ethnic Arab tribes mixing in with people from Greek, Phoenician, Turkmen, Egyptian, Kurdish, Jewish and Samarian backgrounds. And then you add the Europeans during the Crusades, starting in the 11^th century. So today, people who call themselves Palestinian Muslim Arabs might look like they’re black from East Africa. All the way to looking like they have white pale skin with red hair and blue eyes. Before the conquests, Palestine was majority Christian with predominantly Greek and Aramaic speakers, and then the population finally becomes majority Muslim after the 11^th century AD. And today you have a small but influential Christian minority and a smaller Druze minority, and the Druze are an Arab people who practise an interesting religion that’s an offshoot of Islam mixed with Hindu and Greek influences. And of course, some of the Arab Christian communities of today are. Oldest Christian communities in the world. Now, in the late 18^th century to the late 19^th century, you have the haskella, the Jewish Enlightenment in Central and Eastern Europe, which also effects Jews in Western Europe and in the Arab world. And it’s a movement of cultural modernization, education, liberalism, learning of secular subjects. And while it favored the integration of Jews into societies, it was against the assimilation of Jews away from Jewish identity. But in the 19 century, as nationalist ideas sweep across Europe, Jews get systematically excluded from their home national identities. And they also get excluded from the upward mobility of the middle classes, which accompanies the democratization of the societies. And in reaction to this, the Jewish Enlightenment starts to transform into the Zionist movement, which is basically Jewish nationalism, seeking a way for the Jews to advance and participate in modernization and self determination, despite the obstacles placed on them by the nations of. Nationalism is always invented and used to unite people that often have little in common. And the idea of Jewish nationalism might seem crazier than other types of nationalism, because the supposed nation of Jews is spread all across the world, speaking different, mutually unintelligible languages, having completely different cultures, often values and identities. A 19^th century Jew in Morocco would be almost as different to a Jew in Ukraine as an Arab Muslim in Rocca would have been to an Orthodox Christian Ukrainian. Except that Jews were united by a common religion, a common religious language, Hebrew and a minority status. But at this time where Zionism was conceived of as a nationalism for all the Jews of the world, it was mostly of interest to the various European Jews who were undergoing the specific exclusions happening there at the time, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. And we’ll talk about Zionism in a bit more detail later, but there are basically 2 strains of Zionism at this time. One strain, which is called political Zionism, wanted to have a nation state for Jews as their priority. And it could be in Palestine or anywhere else in the world that would be convenient, and it would be a place where all of the Jews of the world could or would want to emigrate to. And then you. Another branch of Zionism called Cultural Zionism. What they wanted was a Jewish Cultural Center, specifically in Palestine, and that Jewish Cultural Center would be a place that Jews around the world could look up to for intellectual and spiritual leadership. And that Cultural Center or national home could be a nation state. Or it could just be an autonomous area that would be part of the Ottoman Empire, which is what Palestine was a part of at that time. Zionism becomes particularly popular in Eastern Europe, where the conditions of Jews are especially bad, with these communities being subject to regular state sponsored race murder riots basically, which become an institutionalized way for the ruling class to deflect popular unrest unto Jewish scapegoats, which is an age-old Europe. Dating back to the Middle Ages. And as a result of Zionism and a worsening conditions for Jews in Eastern Europe, you start to get explicitly Zionist Jewish immigration to Palestine that starts in the 1880s. When Zionist immigration begins, at that time, Palestine was a region of the Ottoman. And if you’re watching this on video, you can see that the Ottoman Empire in the late 1880s covers Turkey and Greece and Egypt and into what was Palestine and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and the more populated parts of what’s now called Saudi Arabia in World War I. Ottoman Empire joins the losing side along with Germany, and the result of that is that after World War One meaning 1918 and after the Ottoman Empire disappears and everything except for Turkey basically gets carved up by the various European imperial powers. And as part of that imperialist feeding frenzy, the former Ottoman province of Palestine ends up under the control of the British Empire, along with what are now called Iraq and Jordan. While France gets modern Syria and Lebanon. And just like you had the Jewish enlightenment in Europe and the Arab world, you have what’s called the Nahda, the Arab Enlightenment. This was a movement of secular religious and political modernization, democratization, anti colonialism, liberalism, and there’s some feminist currents in there as. And just like with the Jewish Enlightenment, the Arab Enlightenment also makes a shift towards nationalism as it evolves, and where the nationalism of the Jews of Europe is motivated by exclusion. The Arab nationalist movement is in part a reaction against Western imperialism. And one of the big questions being debated was why has the Arab world and the Muslim world fallen behind the West? Arab nationalism begins a bit later than European nationalism and starts gaining some traction in the early 1900s. After what’s called the Young Turk Revolution in. But it doesn’t really take off until the post World War. I take over of much of the Arab world now. The Arab world is enormous, spanning from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, with different traditions and customs and languages, and even the Arabic language, like Moroccan Arabic is. A different language from Palestinian Arabic, which is different from Saudi, Arabic, et cetera. And you have urbanites, nomadic pastoralists, peasants and tribes and religions and sects and subdivisions within the religions. So collective identity is a real web of overlapping affiliations, and even within a fixed territory, you’d understand your identity very differently. As an urban elite versus as a nearby peasant or nomad tribal, religious and class identities were generally more important than territorial identities. And territorial identities were usually very local for peasants, regional for nomads according to their range of travel, and much broader for elites who are connected to each other by education and printed media in ways that, especially peasants, who are kind of stuck in the same place, weren’t. So specific identity connected to the territory called Palestine exists for some extent for some of the urban elite at this time the late 19^th century, but doesn’t really touch the peasant class. Until well until the. And we’ll look at how and why that happens at that specific time in a bit. And Palestinian doesn’t really become a primary identity, unifying people of all classes until after Israel is created in 1948. So before 1948, we’ll usually refer to the population as Arabs and then after that we usually hear them referred to as Palestinians, depending on who we’re talking about, because even today it’s not even the primary identity for a significant number of Arabs in and from that. In particular, the Bedouin who prioritized tribal identity and also a significant portion of the Arab citizens of. Israel, some of whom think of themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, while others see themselves as Arab citizens of Israel or even Israeli Arabs, which is how the government likes to describe. Now, in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, there are different versions of Arab nationalism. Palestine you had a Pan Arab vision of having one big homeland that would include, ideally a big nation state with a whole outer world in it. And there were different visions for what this would look like, secular versus Islamic. And the Arab Christians are very much into the secular version of this because, of course, it would increase their relative to what it would be in an Islamic version or what it was in the. Identified Ottoman Empire. And there are also more regional ideas of Arab nationalism where you’d see states based on the lines of cultural, religious, linguistic and political variations of the Arab world. So in the different nationalist imaginaries, Palestine was often conceived of as being part of a larger Syrian state that would include modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, part of Turkey, most of Iraq and northern Syria. And the Syrian region shared cultural similarities and a mutually comprehensible version of Arabic. So often you’ll see Palestine, referred to as S Syria in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. But when the Brits and French take over different parts of the Arab world. It’s clear that they’re going to be separate Arab States and that these states are going to be carved up according to the plans and interests of the European powers. And there’s not going to be 1 big unified Arab state and the states that are going to exist are not going to reflect the natural, cultural, religious or linguistic regions of the Arab world. So while the idea of a specific Palestinian state had not been part of any previous Arab concept of how the Arab world should be organized, the elite classes of the various Arab countries at this time want to become the elite classes of the new states which are going. Be emerging in these areas. And they start adjusting their nationalisms to reflect the new British imposed reality. So Palestine. Start to get at least the idea of a specific Arab state in Palestine, though intellectually Pan Arabism is still the dominant concept of nationalism, and the idea that you should have these separate states for Lebanon and Palestine, Jordan, Syria, etc. Was seen by almost everyone as artificial medals from Western imperialism being imposed on the Arab world by force. Now in Palestine. Very soon after the British take over the British issue, what’s called the Balfour Declaration, where they promise Palestine as a quote national home for the Jews. And that’s named after Lord Balfour, who issued the. Who was also a big supporter of law, restricting Jewish immigration to England, and no one is exactly sure what was meant by a national home, and the official British line on what that meant kept changing because the elites got really ****** *** that they might not be the. Get to be in charge of an eventual state. So due to pressure from Arab elite, the British then promised Palestine as an Arab state, and then they kind of go back and forth, promising both Jews and Arabs, independent States and entities in Palestine and redefining what that means, and then allowing lots of Jewish immigration and land. To Jews one year and then restricting it and banning them the next year. Sometimes enforcing bans, sometimes not often saying contradictory things to different people at different times or at the same time based on the interest of Britain at the moment, depending on whether they needed Jewish support or Arab support. Or often just to shut people up and to tamp down the unrest that was getting worse and worse among both Arabs and Jews in the area. As time went on, for reasons that I’ll explain in a bit and unlike some of the other Arab territories that Britain, man. Shape in its own interest to varying degrees, like what became Iraq and Jordan when it comes to Palestine, the Brits realized that they had created a shit show that was just costing them resources and not really bringing them any of the benefits that they had hoped for. Now, Jews had been immigrating slowly from the 1880s until the 1930s. And much of the time, there were as many Jews leaving Palestine as coming there. So the population grew very slowly in those first 50 years, but then Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933. And the prelude to world. Two starts ramping. And then World War 2 breaks out and you have the Holocaust, which Exterminates 2/3 of Europe’s Jews. And which destroys most of the centuries old Jewish neighborhoods and towns and communities across Europe forever, and as a result of all this, even though the vast majority of Jews are going to places like the US and Canada, you start to get a massive increase of Jewish immig. To Palestine. So the Jewish community in Palestine as a whole hovers around 10% for several decades. Once Zionism gets started. And it grows slowly and then in small bursts whenever there’s some kind of anti-Semitic riot in Eastern Europe. And after 50 years of immigration, the Jewish population is only at about 15 to 17%. But then from the time that the Nazis take over in Germany to the end of World War 2, the Jewish population basically double S. So you end up with about 30 to 40% of the population of Palestine being Jewish by the end of the war, and this generates further ad hostility from all classes, which we’ll look at in a bit. Now, from the 1880s to the 1920s, most Arab Jewish violence happens in rural settlements. But by the 1920s, you start to have urban anti Jewish riots, particularly in 1920 and 1929. And we’ll look at the differences between the rural and urban violence next time, as it’s very illuminating to see what’s going on in Palestine between Jews and different classes of Arabs and. And then from 1936 to 1939, you get what’s called the Great Arab Revolt, which is extremely. But it’s also very overlooked and misunderstood, and we’ll see why that is next time. But for now, we’ll just say that where the Arab revolt is usually described as being a nationalist revolt against British imperialism and Zionism, it would much better as a class war with the P/E. War not only on the British and the Zionists, but often the main focus of their violence is against the Arab upper classes. During the reort the British hastily come up with the first ever partition plan and two state solution to the Arab Zionist conflict for both an Arab and a Jewish state in Palestine and a neutral territory made-up of the Holy Places common to the Abrahamic religions, Jud. Christianity and Islam and the Jews accept it and the Arabs are split, with some accepting it and others rejecting it. But the majority faction rejects it, and the Arab revolt rages. And it’s so intense that the British have to import a battalion away from Europe, where World War 2 is getting started in order to put it down. And in putting it down, they end up arresting, killing and wounding 10 per cent of the Arab male population. And also to help put it down, the British make the Jewish military force, which is called the Hagana, an officially recognized allied force, and they help arm them, which gives the Palestine Jewish community one of the many advantages. Later, when it comes to the big War that results. The creation of the State of Israel. And the Palestinian Jewish community is called the Yash. By the end of the revolt, the Brits have gained the hostility not only of the majority of the Arabs, but also of the majority of the Jews in Palestine, because after the revolt is put down, just as the Holocaust is gearing up, and just as Jews in Europe. A place to escape to the most. The British promised to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine entirely in order to satisfy the Arabs and prevent a continuation of. Big revolt. And not only is that a disaster for Jewish refugees, given all of the other countries that were closing their doors to Jewish refugees at a time, but it also means that you’ll never have a Jewish state in Palestine because although the Jewish population doubled in a short period. Jews are still only a minority of about 30 to 40% of the population from then, although legal immigration is still strictly curtailed, you still get a lot of illegal immigration with Jews being smuggled in in all sorts of ways and doing anything to escape the Hol. And the whole time, tensions between Jews and Arabs is mounting. And starting in the 1930s, you have a couple of right wing Jewish terrorist organizations that emerge the Yogun and Leahy, both of which were attacking Arab civilians, and one of which Leahy the much smaller one, is also an enemy of the British. And then in the after. Of World War Two countries all over the world are figuring out what to do with all these Jewish refugees from destroyed towns and uprooted Jewish communities across Europe. And with all the people being freed from concentration camps and death camps and all the people who’d been fighting in the mountains and underground with partisan militias but with no homes to return to because their towns and villages have been raised or their properties occupied by and partly in response to this big refugee crisis, you have another partition plan made-up by the United Nations in 1947. And you can see the map if you’re watching the video. It’s a very discombobulated map for a small area like Palestine, and the territory is carved up into four chunks, basically like a weird checkerboard. Based on where there are majority Jewish and Arab populations, and then Jerusalem, which both the Arabs and the Jews want as their capital, would be run by the United Nations as some kind of international capital of the Abrahamic religion. And when that plan is announced in 1947, Palestinian Arab militias organized by the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the British appointed high cleric of Jerusalem and the most prominent anti Zionist Arab nationalist in Palestine. These militias begin strikes and attacks on Jewish institutions aimed at preventing them from forming a Jewish state, and this turns into a civil war between Jewish and Palestinian Arab forces. And keep in mind here that from the Zionist historical narrative, the Zionists immigrated here fair and square and aren’t displacing any one. And a partition plan that creates a Jewish state in Jewish majority areas is just fair. And the Arab story is that the Zionists were planning to kick out the Arabs from the get go and the partition plan is just the first step larger expansion plan. So this is. Self-defense as well. And two weeks into that civil war, the British are like I we’re out of here. They announced that they’ll be leaving in the middle of May. 8 so the Civil War in Palestine between Jews and Arabs keeps going until the British skipped town on May 14^th, 1948, and on that day the State of Israel is born as the official Jewish community in Palestine declares its independence based on the discombobulated 1940. United Nation borders partition plan that we just looked at and that which triggered the civil war in the first place. And in part because the Jewish Yeshua was armed by the British, the Palestinian Arab forces are no match whatsoever for the Jewish forces, but also for other reasons that we’ll look at next time having to do with class. But shortly after Israel declares its independence, all the neigh. Countries modern day Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, along with some forces from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, they all come in and join the local Palestinian Arab forces against Israel. And they all have different motives for joining in. But basically no one except for the leader of the Palestinian forces wanted a separate Palestinian state to exist. The biggest reason that the Arab countries had for joining the war was that they wanted to prevent a flood of refugees from coming into their own countries. Because at that point you had already had about 350,000 Arab refugees who had fled or been expelled from Palestine during the Arab Jewish Civil War. In general, no one wanted a Western allied state in the middle of the Arab world, and several of them, like the rulers of Egypt and Trans Jordan, wanted to take chunks of Palestine for themselves. The King of Trans Jordan apparently was actually fine to have a Jewish state in Palestine, so long as he got to take the parts that had been demarcated to be an Arab country, and he had an unwritten agreement with the Zionist leadership to that effect. Regardless of their actual intentions and goals, the Arab League, which was and still is to day the official organization representing all of the Arab states, issued a declaration to the United Nations where they put forth that they wanted a single democratic state as the fair solution to the. Which would mean an Arab dominant state, since Jews were a minority in the former British Mandate of Palestine. By the end of the 1948 war, so in 1949, Israel wins and ends up with a significantly larger state than the one that they had originally declared based on the United Nations Partition plan. The new borders take up 60% of the land that. Been proposed for the Palestinian Arab state. Leaving 2 Arab chunks, one on the east, which we call the West Bank because it’s on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even though it’s on the east of Israel and that gets taken over by Trans Jordan and on the West side, there’s the Gaza Strip, which is taken over by Egypt. So the independent Arab Palestinian state that was supposed to come out of this never happens. And very importantly, you end up with 700,000 or so Arab refugees who fled or who are expelled by Jewish forces about half during the Civil War and half after all of the Arab states had joined in. Now until the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was consensus on the Pro Israel side that the 1948 refugees were the result of Arab forces ordering Arabs to evacuate so that they could attack more ferociously and on the Arab side, it was always claim. That the Israelis expelled every one on purpose, according to a premeditated plan. But then in the late 1980s, Israeli archives were opened after the 50 year rolling blackout period, and historians got to access Israeli documents from 1948. And they found that Israeli forces deliberately expelled certain villages but left others alone deliberately. And there were orders in some areas by Arab commanders for civilians to vacate in order to advance Arab war aims. But that a big chunk of the refugees in flight was just regular fear of war. To day the debate among historians is about how much of the expulsions by the Jewish forces were premeditated and how much were just a real time reaction to what was going on in the war, like clearing out villages that were attacking Israel versus those that weren’t. And we’ll get more into the details of this later when we explore class divisions among the Arab population. Who exactly was doing the fighting and who wasn’t and why? And remember that the Israeli narrative here is we did everything morally. We immigrated here like normal people and all you did is riots and programs against. And then you started the Civil War, and then all the Arab armies invaded to kill us. Unprovoked. So it’s the Arabs fault that all the refugees were created because the Arabs were the aggressors and the Israelis clear them out because they were a threat to the existence of Israel and to its Jewish inhabitants. And the Arab narrative here is we attack you preemptively to stop you from kicking us out, which is exactly what you did when you got the chance. And we’ll see how much of this is true next time. Controversies aside, about half of these refugees were expelled by Jewish forces and half fled or evacuated. But by the end of it, 80% of the Arabs that had lived in the territory that became modern Israel were gone, and half of the Arabs who had been living in what had been previously called Palestine were displaced either to the West Bank and Gaza or else. The surrounding Arab countries. Some of these refugees get absorbed into becoming residents of Jordan or the West Bank and Gaza. But a huge number of people, usually the poorest ones, end up in permanent refugee camps living in Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. And all of those countries, except for Jordan, refused to let them become citizens. And Israel won’t let them back in either. So these people have been living in these permanent refugee slums, living largely on charity for 75 to 80 years now, several generations. So well, May 14^th is celebrating Israel as Israeli Independence Day. The Palestinians mark it as a commemoration of the Napa, the great catastrophe where half of their population became displaced and their seemingly interminable refugee and statelessness crisis was born. And of course, the Arab countries blame Israel for creating the refugees and not letting them. And Israel blames the Arab countries for attacking Israel and for not letting the refugees immigrate to the Arab countries where they been living for the past 80 years. And of course, everybody is right.

So by the end of the 1948 war. There were 650,000 Jews living inside of what became Israel, plus 155,000 or so Arabs, most of whom immediately become citizens of Israel. And this was part of the Zionist political vision from the beginning to have a Liberal Democratic state with equal rights for minority citizens and Theodore Herzl, one of the main founders of political he had written a utopian novel about his dream state called. Old new land and the main story is about how in the new Jewish state, there’s a racist rabbi running for election who wants to restrict rights in the Jewish state to be exclusively for Jewish people. And he’s eventually defeated by a coalition of liberal progressive forces. Including Jews and Arabs and other minorities who preserve the free and democratic character of the Jewish. State, except in real life, Israel wasn’t exactly so liberal for Arabs until 1966. So for 18 years, Arab citizens of Israel were in a weird position of being able to vote and be elected to office. And you’ve had Arab members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, since the very first elections in Israel in 1949. But at the same time, as they were getting elected, Arab citizens were subject to martial law in Arab majority areas. They were not at all equal citizens. But in 1966, martial law is dropped and Arabs are given full de jure equal rights so that from then on, Arab citizens of Israel ironically have more rights in Israel than they do in most Arab identified countries. However, although rights have been equal on paper, Arabs in Arab majority towns and municipalities in Israel don’t get the same level of resources allocated to them as Jews. To and a new Arab, municipalities often don’t get efficiently recognized, and Arabs complain about other forms of discrimination, official and interpersonal, which have intensified enormously after the massive attack on October 7^th 2023, where people are getting harassed and detained for tweeting things considered by the govern. To be disloyal. Though this also effects the tiny minority of left wing Jews remaining in Israel as well. But people are getting arrested for saying things like I cry for the citizens of Gaza and innocuous things like that. And most of the residents of East Jerusalem, which is an Arab neighborhood, do not have Israeli citizenship or full rights, even though Israel basically annexed E Jerusalem into Israel in 1980. So you have official second class citizens there. They can travel freely in Israel and they can vote in municipal elections, but they can’t vote in national elections and if they leave Jerusalem for can you lose their right? At all, and Israel actually offered citizenship to the residents of East Jerusalem in 1967 when they first took it over. But most of them declined and we’ll see why that is later. So today, the population of Israel is about 80% Jewish and 20% Arab, and the Arab population are 82% Muslim, 9% Christian and 9% Jews, and about 16% of the Muslims are also Bedouin. And the Bedouin, of course, are traditionally a nom. Animal herding. Culture for a few years after the 1948 war, you get this sad phenomenon where there are mainly peasant Arabs who had been expelled from or fled Israel in the. And they would cross the border back into Israel from West Bank or Gaza and try to go back to their old houses, or else they try to go harvest their crops. And the Israeli army would go and kill them as, which were portrayed by Israeli media as some. Dangerous threat, which wasn’t true at the time. And Israel killed almost 5000 of these people from 1949 to 1950. But by around 1953 you start to get organized attacks from Arab militants or firing mainly from the refugee. And they would come in from the West Bank and Gaza to attack Israelis and to destroy Israeli infrastructure, unlike the peasant infiltrators, the Fetain were a real threat. And from 1954, the Egyptian government, under the Arab nationalist leader Abdelgan Al Nasser, is helping to organize these raids. And then in response, Israel starts going into towns and camps where these raids are coming from to retaliate and punish them and prevent further attack. Tax and this keeps going on back and forth until 1967 when there’s another important war between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries. This time, Egypt and Jordan. In the past, this world was described as a war instigated by the Arab countries, or else, as a Israeli preemptive attack, because Egypt and Jordan were getting ready to attack them first. More recently, historians have started seeing this war as a misunderstanding. On the Israeli side, who made misinterpretations based on the hostile rhetoric of President Nasser and of his moving some troops around, and also more recently, you have some who are starting to argue that Israel was using this. A pretext to attack first. And I honestly have no idea which version of this is true, as almost every major event in the history of the conflict has these types of contentious debates. And it just wasn’t worth it for me to do a deep dive into this particular issue because it’s not important for this episode. But I did just want to mention it so that you can get an idea of how contentious so much of this stuff is and how much. A deep dive you need to do in order to get your. Straight now the reason I’m talking about this war at all, and what makes it so important, is not who started it or why, but that at the end of it, six days later, and it’s often referred to as the six day war or the 1967 war. Israel wins again, but this time it ends up in control of the West Bank and Gaza, where you have most of the original Palestinians and most of the Refu fled. Or who got expelled from what became Israel in the 1947 to 49 war, and Israel also takes what are called the Golan Heights from Syria and the. Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. And unlike in 1948, Israel doesn’t incorporate those territories as part of Israel. Instead, it militarily occupies them, which means Israel controls those territories under martial law. But the people living there don’t have any of the rights that Israeli Jewish and Arab citizens have. And Israelis justification for taking those lands is self-defense. To prevent all these feta UN attacks, which have been coming from these areas for the past 15 years. But despite the Israeli occupation, the Fetting raids don’t stop. Instead, the various fetting groups start merging together loosely under the umbrella of the PLO. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which was put together by the Arab League in 1964, and at this time the PLO is run largely by educated middle class Palestinians whose families had left PAL. In the 1948 war, such as Yasser Arafat, who grew up in Cairo and who was a leader of the PLO from a couple of years after its formation until he died in 2001. And the PLO at that time has a third world socialist orientation and the various feren groups that comprise the PLO are all different shades of Arab nationalist Social Democrats, Arab nationalist socialists, Maoists, Stalinists groups like Fatah, the most popular one, which has or had at least a social. Orientation, but also groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic front for the Liberation of Palestine, which had Stalinist and Maoist politics. And the PLO was part political party, part militia, and its general goal was to replace Israel with a secular, democratic or socialist Palestinian state and to allow the return of all the Arab refugees to that state. Something worth mentioning is that it was the policy of the P. The time that all Jews who immigrated to Palestine since the advent of Zionism had to be deported back to where they came from. In 1967, the first leader of the PLO, Ahmad Al Shukaari, gave an interview on Lebanese radio where he was asked what would happen to the Jewish citizens of Israel if the Arab side would win. What seemed to be an upcoming war. The six day war, which would actually start two days after the interview, and Shukla answered quote. We will endeavor to assist them and facilitate their departure by sea to their countries of origin. UN quote and about Israeli born Jews, he replied. Quote whoever survives. Stay in Philistine, but in my opinion, no one will remain alive UN quote. Few months later, in November 1967, in a special broadcast called to the Jews of Israel, which was broadcast in Hebrew by PLO radio, Shacketti said quote return to your countries of origin. Return to the places that you came from. Immigrate to a place where you will find a quiet life. 100,000 Arabs around you. They will not leave Israel alone and allow it to exist. Search for peace and prosperity outside of Philistine, the Balfour Declaration that created a catastrophe brought on the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The catastrophe will end by immigration from Palestine. UN quote and I bring this up because there’s been a recent controversy about people chanting from the river to the sea at Palestine solidarity protests. And the reason that this is controversial is because from the river to the sea was a slogan from 1960s when getting rid. All the European Jews was part of the PLO ideology, but by the end of the 1980’s the PLO changed their charter in that regard, and nowadays most of the kids singing that chant are probably thinking about a democratic one state solution with all of the Jew. The Arabs remaining there and staying together in a democratic state. But sadly, today in the West Bank and Gaza, the idea of deporting all of the Israelis back to where their parents or grandparents came from is once again gaining popularity, especially with a generation that grew up since the failure of the Oslo Accords, which we’ll talk about later. And the same is true for Israelis, where support for extreme solutions to the conflict, like expulsion of all the Palestinians from Gaza and West Bank, or for a straight up apartheid state. And even for the expulsion of all the Israeli Arab citizens from Israel has also increased significantly in recent years. Like with the Palestinians, that increase is especially pronounced among the post Oslo generation. And we shouldn’t forget that the Israeli right wing has also explicitly been using the phrase from the river to the sea since the 1970s to describe what they want, which is a Jewish state from the river to the sea. And the river is the Jordan River on. East to the Mediterranean Sea in the northwest. So in the original Likud party platform and the Likud is the main right wing party in Israel that Netanyahu has been in charge of for decades now. It stated, quote between the sea and the Jordan, there will only be Israeli sovereignty, UN quote. Is that while the large majority of Zionists came from Europe, there was always a small but significant minority that came from the Arab world from the very beginning. In the 1880s on from Morocco to Syria to Yemen, as well as Jews native to Palestine.

Though, as we’ll see next time, the Zionist Jews from the Arab world had a very different vision. For what Zionism should look like than their European counterparts did. In general, though, Zionism was not a mass phenomenon among the Jews of the Arab world, the way that it was in Europe, but then starting in 1949 until the early 1970s, you had a mass. Of immigration of Jews out of the Arab world and into Israel, and also to other countries, mostly Canada, France and the United States. By the early 1970’s, the vast majority of all the Jews from the Arab world, almost 99% of a population of some 900,000 people, fled or were forced out of the countries that they’d been living in. Sometimes for 2000 years or so since. Exiles that I described earlier. Ancient communities in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and many of them had been there long before there were any Arabs there since Pagan times. Baghdad, for example, was 40% Jewish and most of the Jews there initially had very little interest in Zionism, as they were totally integrated into Arab culture, and they saw and described themselves as Arab Jews, much like the Arab Christians see themselves in various countries today. Or, like Jewish Canadians or Americans see themselves. But then, in World War 2IN reaction to what was going on in Palestine and often inspired by the Nazis, you start to get anti Jewish violence in some of those countries. And then after the establishment of Israel, anger against the expulsion of the Palestinians and the Jew. Of the Muslim holy lands and the idea that the Jews are all traitors and agents of Western imperialism fueled a wave of ugly nationalist anti Jewish hysteria which swept across the Arab world, accompanied by mounting anti Jewish violence, often spurred on by the Arab nationalist head of. State and by the 1970s, almost all of the Jews, not only from the Arab world but also the Muslim world, places like Iran and Afghanistan, almost all of them had fled or were pushed out of those countries. And these ancient communities, from Morocco to Egypt to Afghan. Were almost entirely gone. And Israel tried to encourage as many of these people as possible to immigrate there. And Israel was so interested in this, primarily because they needed laborers, and because they wanted to increase their Jewish majority of the country as much as possible. And when they got to Israel, they were treated like shit, kind of like the Arabs were, except a little bit. They were pushed into the depopulated rural Arab areas and poor urban areas, often the Arab neighborhoods of various cities, and they were looked down on by the European establishment and expected to be cheap laborers and to assimilate away their languages and religious practices and culture in favor of. Culture and practices, which partially happened, but in many ways. It never happened. And there was even a black Panthers movement of Moroccan Jews against their economic and political situation, and the discrimination that they were subject to in the 1970s. And we’ll talk about this movement more next time because the Black Panthers start to ally with the Arabs in Israel, which completely freaked out the establishment. And it’s one of the many examples throughout the conflict, when nationalist leaders on either side sabotage cooperation between Jews and Arabs and encouraged racism and nationalism. Today, more than 50% of the Jews in Israel originally came from the Arab world. And interestingly, these communities became the bedrock of the Israeli right wing in Israel. And to day, they’re often the most fierce and proud Zionists of them all. On one hand, this is because their experiences with Arab nationalism and Muslim domination pushed them to be fiercely suspicious of Palestinian nationalism and protective of the idea of a Jewish state where they can’t be pushed out. And also because it was the left wing socialist Ashkenazi establishment and Ashkenazi means European Jews, it was a left wing Ashkenazi establishment that had been the ones in charge of the discriminatory practices against them, which pushed them into the arms of the right wing parties which gladly accept. Them. Now by 1971, it looks like the Israeli occupation is finally working. From Israel’s point of view, because they basically crushed the fetaining inside of Gaza.

In the West Bank, however, it’s Jordan and not Israel, who ends up crushing the fatahim in a bloody civil war in 1970 known as Black September, in which 3 to 4000 Palestinians were killed, as were about 1200. Jordanians and Syrians and three passenger planes were. Jordan hated the Palestinian militants because they were afraid of starting another war with Israel and also because the PLO groups were forming a state inside of a state in Jordan. And you had the Milton left wing factions of the PLO calling for the overthrow of the monarchy of Jordan, and of all of the other Arab monarchies. So Jordan wanted to nip all of this in the bud. After the fetane groups get crushed in the West Bank and Gaza, the PLO militants move from Gaza and West Bank to southern Lebanon, which they basically run at that point. And from there they start doing attacks back and forth into Israel as before. And this is one of the catalysts for the Lebanon Civil War, which starts out as being between Christians and Muslims, and which goes on from 19 five until 1990. And I mention this because Israelis will often point to that civil war as an example of what will happen in Israel if there’s ever a single democratic state shared by all of the Jews and the Arabs from the river to the sea. After the 1967 war, you now have the State of Israel controlling these territories that aren’t part of Israel and Gaza and West Bank are the important ones because that’s where you have the bulk of the Palestinians still living under Israeli occupation.

Today, and these are the territories which are supposed to form the Palestinian state in all the two state solution schemes that we’ll talk about shortly. The other territories that Israel takes in the war don’t really matter that much today in terms of understanding the ongoing conflict. Sinai, which is mostly desert and populated by nomadic Bedouin and a bunch of tourist resorts, was returned to Egypt in 1982 as part of a peace agreement where Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel as a legitimate state and the Golan Heights in the. Which were taken from Syria. Were annexed into Israel in 1981. And we don’t hear very much about the Golan Heights anymore, even though Syria still wants them back because the refugees that were created there in 1967 by Israel were absorbed back into Syria, unlike all the Palestinian refugees from 1948 and then 1967. Who are still living in refugee camps 3 generations later, because the Arab states don’t want to absorb, and neither does Israel. So since 1967, Israel has had control over Gaza and West Bank, which are populated mainly by Palestinian Arabs, and these are often referred to today as the occupied territories, though since 1967 Israel has been calling the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, which refers to. The North and South of the West Bank were called in biblical times. Another reason that the 1967 war is important is because after that war, the United States decides to adopt Israel as a client state. The Americans are impressed at how much Arab *** the Israelis can kick all by itself, and they realize that if they can make. Bffs with Israel, they can have an easier time keeping all of the other Arab States and Iran under control of not being a threat to global oil distribution. A lot of the governments of the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, are allied with the United States. The populations of those countries hate the United States and often hate their governments. They could be overthrown at any minute by a nationalist anti American government. That would jeopardize oil distribution. But if you have Israel there as sort of the watchdog of the United States, it’s like having a permanent military force there, which can deal with hostile Arab states. So since that time, the United States has been giving Israel enormous sums of money, and today United States money makes up about 1/5 of Israeli military budget, and in many ways the US calls the shots when it comes to the boundaries of Israeli policies, basically by threat. To remove that funding, they can tell Israel what to do or what not to do. The United States gives a similar but somewhat lesser amount to Egypt as. And they’ve been doing that since 1978, when Egypt entered into an accord to make permanent peace with Israel. And they give that money to Egypt to keep them allied with Israel in order to help the US control the Middle East. Another important thing about the 1967 war is that since Israeli victory, Israel started the. Of what are called Jewish settlements inside of the occupied territories, though in most other languages they’re called colonies. The governments of Israel have been mostly secular until recently, and they are mostly Social Democratic and socialist oriented. Until the late 1970s. But the people moving into these settlements are usually religious fundamentalists who want to reclaim the biblical land of Israel. So why did the socialist, secular Government of Israel fund religious fundamentalists to move into the West Bank? Well, when Israel took over those territories, there was a split in the ruling Labor Party about what to do with them. All factions in the Israeli Labour Party wanted settlements and wanted to annex parts of the West Bank for security reasons in order to make it harder for future militants or feta in to attack Israel. The disagreement between the factions was where those settlements should be and how much of the West Bank should be. The idea was either to bargain away the parts that they didn’t annex, or to remove some or most of the settlements. Someday, as part of some peace deal. And then you had the right wing, Likud and other right wing parties that wanted settlements everywhere in order to make. Impossible to give back any part of the West Bank to anyone. Whether it be Jordan or some future Palestinian state. So Israel overtime built settlements in strategic locations, especially all around E Jerusalem, to make it harder to ever give back Jerusalem to Jordan or to in a future Palestinian state. And later they expanded the settlements into different blocks inside the West Bank, which helped divide up the West Bank into areas that are easier for Israel to control and surveil. So when you hear people talk about Israel as an apartheid state, this is what they’re usually talking about, the occupied territories. Now. They mean people who know what they’re talking about is that in the West Bank you have all of these Jewish settlers in these well funded neighborhoods, which have great services and full Israeli citizenship and rights and protection of the army, and they’re living in the midst of all. Palestinian Arabs, who have no citizen rights, who have crappy services, subject to military control. Or alternately, if somebody’s talking about apartheid, they might be talking about how within the territory that Israel now essentially controls meaning Israel, West Bank and Gaza, you have all these people in Gaza and West Bank that don’t have equal rights to the citizens of Israel but that. Isn’t great in my opinion, because the Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel who do have full citizenship rights despite various kinds of discrimination.

Until the Oslo Accords that we’ll talk about in a second, the occupied territories were entirely under Israeli martial law and the Israeli army would carry out collective punishments if someone was found to be part of a militant organization that calls for the end of Israel or that car. Attacks into Israel, for example Israel, would bulldoze the home that the militant lived in as a punishment. And because the streets are super narrow and much of the Palestinian territories, this giant bulldozer would sometimes RIP up the walls of all the buildings on the block on its way to the target building. So the occupation is totally hated for this and for many other reasons. You can look at the organization called Breaking the Silence, which is Israeli soldiers who are whistleblowers about the way the army treats Palestinians in the occupied. And of course, there’s been a ton of reporting on this from Palestinian sources for decades, and it’s gotten much worse in recent years as Israeli soldiers sent to be much more supportive of the various abuses carried out by the Jewish settlers against the Palestinian. And as Jewish Israeli society becomes more and more hostile to Arab society because of the aftermath of Oslo, now still in 1967, after the six day war, the United Nations Security Council issues what’s called Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw from all. Occupied territories and for all of the Arab countries to recognize Israel as a legitimate state. As per the borders, it won after the 1948. War and I mention this because people often cite this resolution as where the borders for the two state solution are supposed to be. So you’ll hear people talk about the 1967 borders and basically they mean the borders of Israel before Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza now in 1977. Likud, the main right wing party in Israel, which Netanyahu today is the. Ahead of or. She was when I recorded this. It’ll be gone soon in 1977. The crew gets elected for the first time after 30 years of Social Democratic and socialist coalition parties and part of Likud ideology is that they want all of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea to be part of Israel proper. So when they’re in power, they push the settlements further with that goal in mind, and they do this every time they re elected. Add more settlements, let more people move into the settlements, expand the existing settlements. In the past, the Jewish settlers were kind of widely seen as maniacs by much of the rest of the population. But since the collapse of the Oslo Accords that we’ll talk about shortly, the Israeli population has veered far to the right, much closer to the ideology of these settlers. So that their ideas are mainstreamed to day now, I’m going to skip over a bunch of important things like the 1973 war started by Syria and Egypt. Then there’s a war with a PLO in South Lebanon. And then there’s the occupation of South Lebanon. And Israel only pulls out in 2. 1000 but we’re going to. All. That, and we’re going to Fast forward to 1987 when there’s a big uprising in the Palestinian territories against the Israeli occupation. This big uprising is called the Intifada, which means uprising or shaking off. And this uprising really puts the world’s attention on the occupation and the conditions of life for the Palestinians living under it. So the intifada lasts for six years and during which the Israeli army kills about 1200 Palestinians, including two to 300 children, and somewhere between 60 to 120,000 Palestinians were arrested and around 200 Israelis were killed. And 3100 suffered injuries, about half of them soldiers, half of them civilians. By the end of it, in 1993, the Palestinians had gotten a lot of sympathy from around the world, and also a certain amount of sympathy from inside of Israel itself, who was also watching what was going on inside the Palestinian territories. And there was growing public support inside of Israel for ending the occupation, which many Israelis were against from the very beginning. And it was a big tenant for a lot of Israelis and Jews around the world that Israel was supposed to be a place where Jews can escape oppression, not just another country like other countries that oppresses other people. So the occupation was seen as a great shame. And on the Palestinian side, you also get something new, which is that you have people starting to call for A2 state solution to the conflict as opposed to the expulsion of all the Jews, which was the PLO original position or as opposed to the single democratic state. With all the Israelis and Palestinians in it, which became the position of some of the socialist factions of the PLO. So in 1988 the PLO makes a declaration where they basically accept the United Nations Resolution 242 that I mentioned a minute. Ago and what that means is if the PLO accepts to recognize Israel according to its post 1949 borders after the War of Independence, and they call for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But they were also calling for all of the refugees who. Fled or been expelled from what became Israel to be able to come back to Israel, which would in practical terms mean that Israel would end up with around 50% Arabs and 50% Jews, which in practical terms means that there would be no more Israel as. Jewish state. So many Israelis and supporters of Israel were not impressed with this as a sign of progress. They saw it and still see it as a disingenuous public relations. Though other side as a huge leap from the pillow’s early positions and they assume that the right of return for Palestinian refugees was a statement of principle that in practice would be bargained away at some point now during the intifada period, you also have the formation of. Militia groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And these militias stood out in stark contrast to all the secular socialist PLO factions that had emerged in the 1960s and which had been dominant ever since. And people think of the rigid Islamic fundamentalists of groups like Hamas or Al Qaeda as an ancient traditional phenomenon. But it’s actually quite modern. It starts in the late 1800s as a reaction to industrialization and also Western colonialism. And it picks up in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, where it really spreads across the Islamic world. And ironically, one of the big reasons for why it’s spread in 1980s was that the United States was funding fundamentalist jihadis to fight the Soviets in. And they were encouraging Saudi Arabia to fund and promote these kinds of ideas all across the Muslim world as part of that. Effort and fun fact, which we’ll talk about more later. Israel actually supported Hamas and help them get off the ground right from the start. At that time, like I just mentioned, the Palestinian cause was gaining global sympathy because of the Intifada. And the PLO is becoming more moderate in its messaging and it was unifying all of these. Of political society to a new degree. So. Israel didn’t trust the Plo’s turn to moderation or its call for A2 state solution for a second, and they believe that the Palestinians goal was still the destruction of Israel, whether it be via terrorism or else by diplomacy or both. And so the Israeli Government supported the rise of Hamas in order to sabotage the PLO and Palestinian unity. And the Palestinian cause, in the eyes of the world. In terms of PR, Hamas as an extreme right wing religious faction was highly antagonistic to the socialist secular PLO factions and the violent religious fanaticism of Hamas put an ugly face on the Palestinian cause versus the sympathetic image of poor Arab teenagers facing Israeli tanks with slingshots that. Had emerged during the Intifada. And this PR was crucial to Israel because it depends so much on aid from the United States and from donations from Jews around the world. So the fact that Jews around the world, especially the United States, were starting to sympathize with the Palestinian cause was seen by the Israeli establishment as a mortal danger. And infamously, this support for Hamas helped fund the most recent Hamas attacks in Israel. On October 7^th, 2020. 3B Netanyahu the right wing, Prime Minister of Israel. Who’d been in power on and off since 1990. His deliberate policy, which he’d been bragging about to his own party as late as 2019, has been to support and fund Hamas in order to keep the Palestinians divided and to make the Palestinians look bad in the world’s eyes. With the ultimate goal of making sure that A2 state solution never happens. You can see his speech on that linked on the show notes. So in 2020, Qatar, which funds Hamas? Was ****** *** with them and was going to cut their funding, and Netanyahu hears about this and he flips out and sends an envoy to push Qatar to make sure that they keep funding Hamas without interruption. So Qatar goes back to funding Hamas and Hamas spends the next three years taking that money and preparing for the October 7^th murder rampage. Sounds like a conspiracy. But it’s been all over Israeli media and the people there are ******. But the people are letting him keep charge of the country as part of this national unity war effort. And Netanyahu could be charged with all kinds of criminal. So he’s just like staying in power and keeping the war going as long as possible so that he doesn’t get kicked out of power and doesn’t have going to jail. Back to 1991, when the Intifada is still going on, Israel starts negotiating directly with the PLO for the first time ever and in 1993. Once the Intifada is finally over, Israel and the PLO enter what are called the Oslo Accords. And they’re called that because they’re signed in Oslo, Norway. And the idea behind the Oslo Accords is that there will be some kind of two state solution based on that UN resolution 242 that I’ve been talking about, meaning that it will look something like Israeli border did after the 1948 war, but where G. West Bank will become a single Palestinian state, joined by some kind of Hwy. or bridge instead of belonging to Jordan as they had before. And Israel will end the military occupation of West Bank and Gaza, and the PLO will become the democratically elected government of Palestine and the PLO and the new Palestinian State will recognize Israel as a legitimate state and the other Arab countries will follow suit. And the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab Israeli conflict will finally be over. And in the interim period, while they workout the details, Israel hands over control over parts of the West Bank and Gaza. What would be called the Palestinian Authority or the PA? Which at first would be just the Plo’s political wing, basically. But eventually there be democratic elections, with different factions represented. Eventually, the Pennsylvania would be the government of an independent state of Palestine. So in this interim period, the Palestinian Authority would control the cities and towns, and Israel would control everything in between. And despite the fact that most people on either side of the conflict think that the whole conflict is the other side’s fault. This two state Oslo concept has majority support on both sides and there’s a lot of cautious optimism around it, even though there’s a lot of skepticism all around as well. The whole concept, of course, is vigorously opposed by the right wing elements in Israel and among the Palestinians. On the Israeli side. Like I said, the right wing was always against the two state solution from the beginning. But the extreme religious parties, and especially the settlers, were VE. Opposed. Not only because they have to give up their claims to Judea and Samaria, but also because most of the settlers would have to be forcibly removed from their settlements and relocated back to Israel, or else face being a Jewish minority in a Palestinian state. State and on the Arab side you had fierce opposition from the right wing. Milton groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad who wanted to wipe out Israel and establish a theocratic dictatorship, and also from the Socialist PFLP who rejected 2 States and insisted on a single democratic state. And this opposition to Oslo and the two state solution was often very. Violent. So for example, Itzhak Arabian, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Oslo Accords, gets assassinated in 1995, two years later by a right wing, Israeli for being a traitor. And during the years of the Oslo process, Hamas would try to derail any progress by sending. Young men to do suicide bomb attacks against Israeli citizens inside of Israel themselves up on buses and in other public places. Now, while there’s a broad public consensus on what the two state solution should look like, there are still some contentious issues like Israel wants all of Jerusalem, but the Palestinians want the air part of Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine. There are issues about who will control the big water aquifers in Palestinian territory that both Israelis and Palestinians depend on. And how many of the Palestinians or their descendants who are expelled or fled in the 1948 and 1967 wars would be able to return to Israel? Millions of Palestinians were still stuck in refugee camp neighborhoods decades later, and they would want to return to Israel, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish majority state in the long term. But most people talking about the conflict expected that both sides would eventually agree. To a limited number, a few 100,000 and then the rest would be expected to return to the new Palestinian state as, or maybe finally be absorbed into the other Arab states where they been living as refugees for the past. Years. And then there’s the issue of how many of the Jewish settlements would Israel remove from West Bank? Would it remove all of them like the UN 242 resolution demands? Or would it keep a bunch of them and annex them into Israel as the Israeli establishment had originally intended when they started building the settlements after 1967? And how much would Israel annex and how much would it give back to the Palestinians? So there are important issues to workout, but there is broad acceptance of the main idea now, despite so much initial hope and optimism and goodwill on both sides, Oslo implodes and implodes spectacularly. If you want to understand the current situation, why both Israel and Gaza have been run? Right wing extreme maniacs for the past 20 years, with Hamas carrying out bloody massacres. And Israel flattening Gaza, making it uninhabitable and making 2 million people homeless. Why the West Bank hasn’t had legislative elections since 2000. Or why only a minority on either side now of Arabs and Jews in Israel believe a peaceful conflict to the resolution is even possible. Answer to how things got so bad today? Lies in how people on either side of the conflict understand the failure of Oslo in the context of how they understand who started the conflict. Now the conflicting narratives around what happened during Oslo and why it failed are so important that I think they’ll need a whole episode to themselves. But if we want to understand what’s happening right now, what matters is the story that was told to both the Palestinian and the Israeli populations about why Oslo failed side was basically told a mirror image version of the same story. Each side was told that the other side. Just lying the whole time of the Oslo Accords and the Oslo process and that they had no intention of actually agreeing to a real 2 state solution. And they were just using the year spent in negotiation to advance their plans of basically conquering all of the land from the river to the sea. The thing you’ll most often hear if you talk to Israelis and supporters of Israel is that Israel offered the Palestinians almost everything that they said they wanted a full state in Gaza and West Bank, and instead of accepting it or negotiating, the Arabs just walked away and said. To everything. Without even negotiating or making counter offers. Yet again, the Arabs chose violence. And they started the Second Intifada, which we’ll talk about in a second in order to destroy Israel and the whole time of the Oslo process, the Arabs were stockpiling weapons for that purpose. And we can’t have a 2 state solution because they don’t want one. They want everything and they never have and never will accept Israel as a legitimate state because they hate Jews and can’t accept the existence of Israel on their holy lands. And that’s how it’s been since the very beginning, when they oppose Zionism, and the idea of a Jewish state out of racism and intol. And on the Arab side, you’ll also hear that the Oslo process was a big sham from the get go. A ruse to conquer the Palestinians forever and you’ll hear people say stuff like well before the Oslo process. The occupation was bad, but you could still go from Jerusalem to Gaza without much hassle and you could travel from one part of the West Bank to the other and. So complicated to go work inside of Israel, but once Oslo starts all of our freedom of movement. Away the Israelis started putting up all of these checkpoints everywhere and intensifying. The existing checkpoints so that now it will take hours to pass. If you wanted to go from your village to the nearby town, which would normally take 15 minutes. It took six hours. It was much harder to go in and out of Israel to work, and while we’re supposed to be negotiating for our independent state, the Israeli Government keeps allowing the Jewish fundamentalist settlements inside of West Bank to keep growing and growing. And they even build new ones. And thus Israel was just using Oslo as an excuse to steal more and more land. It’s like negotiating over a pizza while one side keeps eating the pizza. And thus Israel was just using Oslo as an excuse to steal more and more of our land. They had no intention of giving us a real state. Just wanted to give us a version of the occupation where the Palestinian Government controls garbage collection and Israel controls everything else. And they wanted to be able to call it a Palestinian state, just like South Africa created what were called Bantu stands, which independent Black Run states but which were ultimately controlled by White South African. So in this version of the story, it’s Israel that rejected a justice peace from the beginning. The Zionist project was to take all of historic Palestine. They stole 77% of Palestine in 1948 and now they want to steal the other 22% that they’re pretending to offer us. So despite all the hope and quasi consensus, you end up with this total catastrophe where we end up where we are today with neither side having the slightest bit of trust in the other side or any hope for peace.

Now rewind. Right before the big failure of Oslo. There’s this big hyped up summit at Camp David in 2000, hosted by Bill Clinton, where the expectation is that the Big Deal might be made then and there. But Arafat, the head of the PLO, walks out, rejecting the Israeli offer without making a counter propos. The American and Israeli media report that Arafat rejected what he said he wanted from the beginning, and Bill Clinton presents the same story, while the Arab media report that Arafat walked out because the Camp David proposal was an insult, it wasn’t a real state at all. It would. A bantustan state. Israel would still basically be in control of Palestine, but it would be called a sovereign state for global PR purposes only. And at this delicate moment, when there’s still hope for peace. But major disappointment on both sides, you have Ariel Sharon, who is the leader of Israel’s. Right wing Likud party, which as we noted earlier was always against A2 state solution from the beginning. And Sharon is also known as a war criminal to Arabs for a civilian massacre that happened in the Lebanon war in the Beirut neighborhood of Sabra and in the Palestinian refugee camp near by called Shatila. Now Sharon goes and he stages a deliberately provocative visit to a holy site that’s shared by Jews and Muslims, called the Temple Mount. Which is the holiest site to? The remains of the ancient temple, that’s the center of ritual in the Old Testament. And then the Romans tore down that temple. And then in the 7^th century, in the Muslim conquest, the Muslims built the Dome of the Rock on top of the remains of that temple. So Sharon goes to pray at the Temple Mount, surrounded by riot cops, and that erupts into protests and rock throwing by Arabs and then retaliation by Israeli riot police. And it escalates and degenerates into another protracted intifada. But this second Intifada is a much more bloody uprising than the first one on both sides. Israeli police shoot protesters with live bullets. Hamas and other Palestinian militants execute a spate of suicide bombings targeting civilians. Many Arab neighborhoods get bulldozed. 10s of thousands are imprisoned and, as usual, the death toll is like 10 times more Arabs killed than Israelis. The Israeli Prime Minister at that time, in 2000, Ehud Barack, who presided over the failed Oslo negotiations, comes off looking like a loser to the Israeli public for having failed and the left in general looks like fools for having convinced the country that the Arabs could be. And that this peace process ever had any chance of succeeding. And on the Palestinian side, Arafat, who had been looking more and more like a sellout during the Oslo process, comes off as looking strong and heroic for having rejected a terrible, unfair deal under pressure from the United States. Soon after their elections in Israel and the Labour Party, which had dominated Israeli politics since 1949, is almost totally wiped out and never recovers and chaun the right winger who triggered the Second Intifada, is elected Prime Minister. Now, since that time, more than 20 years ago, this is in 2001, elections in Israel have been competitions to form coalition governments between the center, right, the right and the extreme right. And the word leftist is a derogatory slur that means a mix between trader and naive idiot. The whole idea that you can ever make peace with Arabs is now seen as a fairy tale that only crazy communists on kibbutz’s and old people still believe in. Most of the people who used to believe in A2 state solution now think that they were duped and that the right wingers had been correct all along and things got much worse for the Palestinians and West Bank and Gaza. From that point on, to punish them for. Bombs and the Intifada, and rejecting the Oslo offers and to prevent more attackers from entering the country. Israel basically shut down most of the work permits into Israel, which had been a huge chunk of the Palestinian economy, which half the population had depended on, and instead they started bringing in people from Sudan and other parts of Africa for their labor needs. And since then, the Israeli media no longer reports much on what’s going on in West Bank and Gaza. So Israelis sort of forget about them, except once every year or two when Hamas starts shooting rockets into Israel. There some other conflagration. The fact that you had a big music rave. Just three miles away from the border, where those people got massacred on October 7^th is a sign of how distant the lives of people in Gaza and West Bank are from the popular mind in Israel. In 2005, Israel withdrew all of its troops and removed all of the Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip. And they did this for strategic reasons. Basically, it’s less costly and less of a. Blunder to contain Gaza from the outside than from the inside. And according to the statements of various leaders of Israel at the time, they were worried about Israel looking like an apartheid state, especially if the population of people in the territories that it controlled in the West Bank and Gaza started to outnumber the population of Israel. So get rid of half of that population by withdrawing from Gaza. And there’s a debate as to whether or not it’s actually technically occupied or not, because there are no Israeli troops on the ground. At least there weren’t before the October 7^th war. But regardless of that debate, it’s generally not considered to be an independent state of any kind, because Israel still controls Gaza water, electricity, telecommunications and Israel and Egypt together control what? In and out of Gaza and the borders and Israel also controls the air and maritime space, and they also maintain a number man’s buffer zone inside of Gaza itself. Since Hamas took over power in Gaza in 2007, which we’ll discuss shortly, Gaza has been under a very severe blockade from Israel. It’s supposed to be for security reasons, but since the beginning there have been chronic shortages of basic medical supplies and there been food short. And much of that is the blockade and part of it is also Hamas focuses their budget on their military and on benefits for their own members instead of things like feeding its population or even defending them from Israeli attacks and retaliations. And all of this has led to widespread dissatisfaction with Hamas’s rule among the residents of Gaza over the years. Most of the population of Gaza has never been outside of Gaza and in their entire lives because at this point the borders have been closed and work permits into Israel have been minimal since the Second Intifada more than 20 years ago and half the population is younger than. Years old. At first, Gaza was controlled by the same Palestinian Authority as the West Bank, but in 2006 the Palestinians held legislative elections, and Hamas narrowly beat Fatah, which is the biggest party of the PLO, 44 per cent to 41 per cent. Polls show that 2/3 of the Palestinians who voted believe that Hamas should change its policy of rejecting Israel’s right to exist, and that most supported A2 state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And the polls indicated that Hamas victory was due largely to Palestinians des. Corruption government rather than specific support for Hamas as a theocratic Islamist political organization. And Hamas ran under the name of the change and Reform Party for that reason. Regardless of this, Hamas and Fatah ended up in a mini civil war where hundreds of people from either party are killed. And this splits Gaza off from the West Bank, with Hamas taking control of Gaza and the PLO, maintaining control over West Bank. And the irony of this is that it was the United States who pushed for the Palestinians to have these elections, and who also pushed for Hamas to be allowed to field candidates. But when Hamas actually won, which was a huge surprise for every one, including Hamas, it was also the United States that insisted that Fatah, the party that lost the election, refused to concede power, which triggered the Civil war. And people often say that Hamas taking over Gaza was a coup, but it’s actually Fatah that did the coup in the West Bank stay in power because if they. And there haven’t been any elections in Gaza since that time 17 years ago. And in West Bank, they’ve only held municipal elections with the president and legislature being the same for the last 17 years. Israelis and Palestinians have been living in this reality ever since. No serious peace prospects. A couple of peace offers made since then that went nowhere. A tightened occupation with no prospects of ever loosening. Every year or so, you have episodes of Hamas and Islamic Jihad shooting rockets into Israel from Gaza, with massive retaliations from Israel and in the West Bank you have an escalating cycle of violence and death where so-called price tag gangs of Jewish settlers burned down the homes. Innocent Palestinians and carry out collective punishments any time an Arab attacks or kills, which leads to more and more attacks, and nowadays the Israeli army just backs up the settlers instead of curbing their abuses. The current Israeli minister in charge of West Bank, when I’m recording this Basel Smotrich, is a settler himself and the government keeps looking for more and more excuses to confiscate more and more Arab land. Every few years you have a more prolonged conflict with Gaza, but basically since. 14 When you had the last big conflagration between Gaza and Israel, the Israeli public has sort of forgotten about the Palestinians, as has the world. So after 80 years of conflict and of all the Arab countries staunchly rejecting Israel’s legitimacy, in 2020 Israel managed to start signing various agreements with Arab states, establishing diplomatic relations with them for the first time, with Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. And they. All quietly let go of their insistence on an end to the occupation as a prerequisite for normal relations with Israel. Polls taken in Gaza right up to October 7^th, 2023 show that the people in Gaza blamed Hamas more than they blamed Israel for their chronic lack of food. The population sees Hamas as corrupt, and at that time they barely had 18 per cent support. Fatah, the main PLO organization in charge of the Palestinian Authority and West Bank, were even less popular. And the leaders of both Hamas and Fatah would have lost elections by landslides that point. And then boom, on October 7^th, 2023, on the Jewish holiday of Simhatora, an alliance of Palestinian militant groups led by Hamas carried out a coordinated attack on Israel where 2500 or so fighters escaped from the Gaza Strip and entered into Israeli towns and cities. By paraglides motor boats and on foot they murdered more than 800 civilians and about 400 military personnel, with another 250 or so civilians and military taken as hostages. Most of the Milton’s had never been outside of Gaza in their lives, and some of the murders they committed were horror stories adapted to the social media age. Throwing grenades inside of bomb shelters, torture, and murders that were. And then broadcasted by the militants on the victims own Facebook and Instagram accounts on their phones so that their friends and families would see them on their feeds. And the Arab fighters ran around attacking and kidnapping people inside of Israel for several days before the Israeli forces could. Them, which is shocking given how powerful and well funded the Israeli army is supposed to be. It took several hours for Israeli forces to even appear, which is incomprehensible, given how small Israel is and how many warnings the government had that this was going to happen. The lag in response time of the Israeli army is explained by the fact that so many Israeli sold. Were deployed on the other side of Israel. In the West Bank, in order to back up settlers who had been attacking innocent civilians for weeks and then to defend them from violent responses from the Palestinians. On October 9^th, Israel’s Defense Minister Joab Galante announces a complete siege of Gaza in which he says that no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel would be allowed in, and a massive bombing campaign ensued, which goes on until to day. When I’m filming this in early. 24 and since Gallant’s announcement, Israeli officials and military commanders have been telling Western media that they are doing their best to prevent harming civilians while announcing over and over again in Israeli media and sometimes in Western media as well their intent to destroy Gaza to. It uninhabitable and to remove the population of Gaza to other countries. Israel’s ceremonial president, Ishq Herzog, speaking about the October 7^th attacks, told an audience quote it is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat UN quote. So you hear. Everyone who lives in dictatorships, if you have a bad government, it’s your fault for not organizing a coup d’etat. Then the defense minister you have Gallant tells an interviewer. Quote I have released all restraints. Gaza will never go back to what it was, UN quote, then, an unnamed defense official tells Israeli TV viewers. Quote Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings, UN quote Joaquin, an Israeli army Colonel and deputy head of the civil administration, says in an interview from Gaza quote. Whoever returns there, if they return hereafter will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future UN quote. Netanyahu, meanwhile, reminded Israeli soldiers of the biblical command to quote, remember what Amalek has done to you, and we will remember. Which is a reference to the ancient tribal arch enemy of the Israelites in the Old Testament, where the Prophet Samuel tells King Saul to quote utterly destroy all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. UN quote. Netanyahu then instructs the Minister of Strategic Planning to have a plan for Gaza after the bombing campaign. That quote enables a mass escape to European and African countries. UN quote Avi Dichter, Israeli Minister of Agriculture and Security cabinet member, says quote. We are now rolling out the Gaza nahpah, referring to the mass crisis of Arab refugees, which was created in the 1947 to 1949 war. Israeli newspapers also publish memos that the Israeli government had been floating around about how to push all of Gaza 2.3 million people into the Sinai desert in Egypt. Since the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks, Israel has rendered 2/3 of Gaza 2.3 million. Homeless. 80% are displaced with 60% of the buildings in Gaza destroyed and most of the north and much of southern Gaza are now uninhabitable due to the destruction plus unexploded ordnance. It’s hard to know actual statistics, but all the human rights and news organizations report almost 30,000 dead civilians in Gaza. Meanwhile, during the assault on Gaza, Israeli soldiers gunned down 3 Israeli hostages who had escaped from Hamas tunnels and who were running around shirtless, waving white flag. In Gaza, and that shows that they must be doing the same thing to innocent Palestinians basis and we just don’t hear about it. For example, an American Doctor Who volunteered to help at a Gaza hospital reports in the LA Times that among the endless tragedies that he witnessed there quote on one occasion a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8. Were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to their head UN quote. On top of all the mass death and destruction from bombing and snipers, it’s expected that disease will kill more people than the bombings because so many water treatment plants have been destroyed, as have most hospitals, while the hospitals that remain have almost no supplies. Meanwhile, there’s a medication resistant superfungus loose in Gaza, which has already killed an Israeli soldier and who knows how many Palestinians, because so many of the hospitals are destroyed and people are scrambling to survive and to find drinkable water and food. Giora Eland, a former head of Israel national security and IDF general, is considered to be on the center or center right in Israel, in an article wrote quote, severe epidemics in the South of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer. UN quote. And this guy no longer has any power, but it shows how the establishment thinks across the very narrow political spectrum in Israel. And on top of disease, there’s a famine crisis in Gaza, so that 80 per cent of the people in the world who are currently at. Most severe level of famine on the UN Famine scale currently live inside of Gaza. Before the October 7^th attacks, when the average resident of Gaza was already not properly nourished, an average of 500 trucks of food and goods were entering Gaza each day. Since the war started, you now have about 25 trucks per day on average, and most of them. Are concentrated on cease-fire days and it’s just been endless horror stories and tragedies every day as it is in every war, but especially one where you have extreme right wing fanatics in charge of both sides and where the side with the extreme overwhelming military advantage sees all. The civilians on the other side as the enemy. And where the leaders of the weaker side puts their own civilians in danger on purpose in order to maximize PR advantage in terms of strategy. On one hand, Israel has completely walked into Hamas’s trap. Whereas Israel initially had the sympathy of most of the world after the. 7^th attacks the unprecedented scope of the response has turned public opinion against Israel almost everywhere around the world, except in the US. In recent years, Israel had taken advantage of the relative media silence about the Palestinians and signed peace agreements and trade agreements with various Arab countries. And they are about to sign a historic one with Saudi Arabia after Israel S retaliation. These pending deals seem to be off the table, and the existing ones seem to be in jeopardy. Since 2014, the world had more or less forgotten about the situation the Palestinians today. Constantly in the news and all over social media, every day, on the other hand, Hamas is October. Attack can be seen as playing right into the hands of Israelis far right, who’ve been dreaming for decades for an excuse like this one to expel all the Palestinians out of West Bank and Gaza, and who seem to be doing what they can to take advantage of this. For example. The Israeli Finance Minister, Basel Smotrich, said to an Israeli army radio interviewer that regarding Gaza quote, if we act strategically, they will emigrate and we will live there. We won’t let 2 million stay with 100,000 or 200,000 in Gaza the day after. Will be different. They want to. They’ve been living in a 75 years UN quote. Meanwhile, he also told members of his religious Zionism party that quote, Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Israel’s Minister of National Security Itmar Benghazi told reporters that the Gaza war is, quote, an opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza. UN quote The Hebrew version of Israel Times. Zima Nisrail tells us that the man himself, Netanyahu, is conducting secret negotiations for accepting thousands of immigrants from Gaza to the Congo and other unspecified nations. Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel told reporters that quote voluntary migration is the best and most realistic program for the day after the fighting ends. UN quote gamliel also told the conference. That quote at. The end of the war Hamas rule will collapse. There are no municipal authorities. The civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work and 60 per cent of Gaza agricultural land will become security buffer zones. The world should support humanitarian emigration because that’s the only solution I know. The government of South Africa has made an application to the International Court of Justice against Israel for genocide, and you can read the 8 pages of genocidal statements by members of the Israeli Government and cabinet and military leadership in that application, starting on page 59, many of. I’ve quoted here until recently. I would have said that while what Israel is doing and planning is definitely ethnic cleansing, it doesn’t seem to be genocide because whatever the technical definition of genocide is, it should, to my mind, involve trying to kill off the majority of a. Piece. People for that word to have any meaning and they don’t like inflation of terms. But when you factor in the famine and disease and how these are predictable and being cited as positive benefits for Israel, I think that the genocide accusation starts to fit the bill more and. Outside of the level of killing and destruction and starvation, the poles done in the region are some of the saddest things about. This a. Poll in Israel in December 2023 showed that 81 per cent of Jewish Israelis say that Palestinian suffering should be. Very little or not at all in the current Gaza military. An earlier poll in November showed that 58% of Jews in Israel thought that Israel was using too little firepower in their attack on Gaza, and only 1.8% thought that they were using too much firepower. Meanwhile, in West Bank and Gaza, another poll from. Showed that 72% of the respondents supported the October 7^th attack on Israel and 60% think that violence is the best way of ending the occupation. Interestingly, people on both sides seem to be quite oblivious to the extent of the brutality of the military forces that they support. The overwhelming majority of Palestinian respondents did not know about or denied that Hamas fighters committed atrocities against civilians. On October 7^th. The thing you’ll typically hear is that Hamas fighters are, above all, religious people and Islam for business kind of atrocity. So they would never do anything like. That and people believe that stuff. 85% of the respondents said that they didn’t see any of the videos showing the violence of that day, and 90% said that they did not believe that what was in those videos was. True in Israel, among Jews you have the exact same phenomenon, where nine 1.5% of Israeli Jews think that their army is observing the rules of war and international law and media in Israel barely focus on the extent of destruction and death in Gaza on the. Population. Interestingly, 81% of Palestinians believe that Hamas main goal on October 7 was. A response to settler attacks on Al Aqsa Mosque and on Palestinian citizens and for the release of prisoners from Israeli prisons. UN quote, which is a main priority for the majority of Palestinians, whereas Israeli Jews see Hamas attacks as basically aimed at killing Jews for the sake of killing Jews and for the broader goal of destroying Israel.

OK. So now hopefully you have a basic understanding of the major events of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and some idea of the state of public opinion in the present. And if we want to understand how things got to where they are today and who’s responsible for this situation and. Interpretations of the conflict are so. We need to go back to the beginning of the story from the 1880s until the 194748. War and we need to retell it with a focus on the class dynamics of the Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine and inside of the Zionist movement, and this will open our eyes to a completely different perspective on the conflict which I think makes much more room for. Eventual peace. And it also opens our eyes to start thinking about all inter communal conflicts differently, especially conflicts involving competing nationalism. And that’s what we’ll be doing next time. Hey, hello. If you found this episode useful or enlightening and you have some discretionary income lying around, then by all means please give some of it to me. And also please consider giving money to some humanitarian relief for Gaza as well. Not much relief is getting into Gaza now, but doctors Without Borders has been trying to get medical supplies in, and the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund is an important humanitarian organization that’s also trying to carry out its work where it. 10 and for me, he had my needs for money. It usually takes me several months full time to make these episodes with the research, writing, and then video editing, and for some reason lately every episode just gets more and more complicated and labor intensive and time consuming. And during all that time I’m either working at the same. Time because I need to earn money. But like just enough to survive. Or else I’m not working and also not making any money and then I have to make it up afterwards and all this cause a giant hit to my income. Like I mentioned in the video and in previous videos, I’m a lawyer for tenants and because I basically work full time on this podcast, my annual income from lawyering is almost exactly what a full time minimum wage worker makes in Canada. And this year, it’s actually going to be a little bit less than that, though thankfully I’m starting to make some money from the podcast as well. Now I became a. Exactly so that I could work part time and I could afford to support working on projects like this, but holy crap, this is a lot of work and I can’t keep doing it at this pace without some income. Most of my podcast income comes from patron supporters who pay per. So I can go a long time without getting paid, even though I might be working on this the whole time. Though more and more people are sending me one time donations and subscribing for monthly donations on PayPal and Kofi, which I greatly appreciate. And Please note that I don’t monetize my channel even though I’m eligible for it because I don’t want to gunk up your life with more stupid advertisements than you’re already subjected to. And I’m not ever going to do any paywall content, because that defeats the whole purpose of doing a show geared at spreading knowledge and. Skills like I’ll soon be doing some bonus commentary episodes, but they will still be available to everyone. So your subscriptions are not purchasing a commodity. They are solidarity payments because you’re someone who can afford it and you want the show to keep going and you want me to keep going. If you don’t have money to spare, do not feel. There are a ton of things that I can’t support because I can’t afford it, and I still appreciate that you get something out of. There are options in the show notes to do per episode donations, or one time donations or monthly donations if you don’t mind the fact that it sometimes takes me three to four months about an episode episodes that I have in the works are the class conflict analysis of. Israeli palest. Conflict one called how socialism would solve all of Jordan Peterson’s problems, and another episode on why the purpose of identity politics is genocide. That’s about how humans evolve. The tendency for negative out group and positive in Group discrimination, and what that means for politics and how to deal with that in organizing and messaging. And an episode on why the Russian Revolution failed, which I started before, and this is going to be the continuation where we actually get to the Russian Revolution itself. And we look at what the founders of the Soviet Union were thinking and saying and doing when they set up that state. And what went wrong with it and how there might have been successful communist revolutions all over Europe after World War One if the founders of the Soviet Union had done things differently? I’m also very soon going to be doing Chapter 4 of the dawn of everything, and that should be interesting to you. Whether you know what that book is or not. We’re going to be looking at egalitar societies, especially hunter gatherer societies, why they exist and how they exist, how they managed to stay a Gallic. And what we can learn from that to apply to our own industrial civilizations? And I’m also going to finish up that episode about what happens when you inject class analysis into Kimberly Crenshaw famous article where she introduces intersectionality and it is actually quite shocking. As always, there’s a bibliography and a transcript. LinkedIn, the show notes. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can hear the audio podcast version on your podcast app. And if you’re listening on podcast, check out the youtubes, because there’s lots of fun pictures and memes and videos of my Unum. And if you like the music on the podcast. I make all the music, so check out my stuff that you can download for free. At star69alloneword.bandcamp.com and you can also send me money there too if you want. And please like and subscribe and also review the show on Apple Music helps the show pop up more readily on. And contact me with any corrections or suggestions on the YouTube comments or if necessary, at worldwide scrutiny. And until next time, see ya.

Bibliography

(Special thanks to Tanveer Sign for putting much of this together)

Narratives

Rashid Khalidi 2020 — The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

David Brog 2018 — Reclaiming Israel’s History: Roots, Rights, and the Struggle for Peace

Mikhaila Peterson 2023–10 — Israel/Palestine: The History and What’s Real? Opposing Views with Norman Finkelstein and David Brog, YouTube

Benny Morris 1999 — Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001

Walter Laqueur 1972 — A History of Zionism

Walid Khalidi 1976 — From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948.

UN News 2024–01 — War against Hamas in Gaza is act of self-defence, Israel tells world court

Hamas 2024–01 — Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

Rona Avni / Julia Bacha 2006 — Encounter Point (film)

Robert Rotberg (ed) 2006 — The Bridging Narrative Concept In Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix

Early Arab Zionist Conflict (Much Much More on This Next Time)

Alan Dowty 2019 — Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Two Worlds Collide

Gershon Shafir 1992 — Land Labour and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914

Kenneth W. Stein 1984 — The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939

Mahmoud Yazbak 2000 — From poverty to revolt: economic factors in the outbreak of the 1936 rebellion in Palestine, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 36:3

Raya Adler 1986 — Mandatory land policy, tenancy and the Wadi al‐Hawarith affair, 1929–1933, Studies in Zionism Vol 7:3

Early Zionist Thinkers

Leon Pinsker 1882 — Auto-Emancipation

Theodor Herzl 1896 — The Jewish State, An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Problem

Theodor Herzl 1902 — Altneuland / Old New Land

Ahad Ha-Am 1912, Selected Essays

Ahad Ha-Am 2015 — Words of Fire: Selected Essays

The Expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947–1949 and Beyond

Benny Morris 2004 — The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

Rosemarie M. Esber 2008 — Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians

Nur Masalha 1992 — Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948.

Walid Khalidi (ed) 1992 — All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948

Yossi Melman / Dan Raviv 1988 — Expelling Palestinians, Washington Post

Efraim Karsh 2000 — Were the Palestinians Expelled? Commentary

Avi Shlaim 1990 — Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine

Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim 2001 — The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948.

Arabs in Israel

As’ad Ghanem 2001 - The Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel, 1948–2000

Adam Raz, 2021 — How Israel Tormented Arabs in Its First Decades – and Tried to Cover It Up, Ha’aretz

Ayelet Bechar 2021 — “Be Strong and Faithful”: The Arab Pioneer Youth Movement in Jewish Kibbutzim, 1951–1965”, Revue d’histoire culturelle Vol 2

International Crisis Group 2004 — Identity Crisis: Israel and Its Arab Citizens

Alexander Bligh (ed) 2003 — The Israeli Palestinians

Dan Williams / Angus McSwan — 2023–11 — Israel’s Arab minority feels closer to country in war, poll finds, Reuters News

Agence France Presse 2023–10 — Arabs in Israel face reprisals over online solidarity with Gaza, The News International

The Ask Project 2014 — Arab Israelis: Do You Love Israel?, YouTube

The Ask Project 2014 — Arab Israelis: Is Israel and Apartheid State?, YouTube

The Ask Project 2014 — Arab Israelis: Will You Serve in the Israeli Army?, YouTube

Free Press 2024–02 — Interview With Lucy Ararish, YouTube

Hamas

Tareq Baconi 2018 — Hamas Contained

Meir Litvak 2007 — Palestinian nationalism and Islam: The case of Hamas, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics Vol. 2:4

Hamas 2024–01 — Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

Mehdi Hasan / Dina Sayedahmed 2018 — Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It, The Intercept

Adam Rasgon and David D. Kirkpatrick, 2023–10 — What was Hamas Thinking? One of the group’s senior political leaders explains its strategy, The New Yorker

Nelly Lahoud 2023–10 — A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?, Foreign Affairs

Ben Hubband / Maria Abi-Habib 2023–11 — Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War, New York Times

Adam Raz 2023–10 — A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance, Ha’aretz

Jeet Heer 2023–12 — Why Netanyahu Bolstered Hamas, The Nation

Ha’aretz 2020 — Mossad Chief Visited Doha, Urged Qatar to Continue Hamas Financial Aid

Nima Elbagir et al 2023–12 — Qatar sent millions to Gaza for years – with Israel’s backing. Here’s what we know about the controversial deal, CNN

Tal Schneider 2023–10 — For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces, Times of Israel

Israel’s Security Failures Leading to October 7^th

Ronen Bergman / Adam Goldman, 2023–11 — Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago, New York Times

Liz Scheltens 2023–10 — Israel-Hamas war: Where was the Israeli army on October 7?, Vox (video)

Amos Harel 2023–11 — Chilling Warnings Picked Up by Israeli Intelligence Months Before October 7 Massacre, Ha’aretz (paywall)

October 7

Agence France Presse 2023–12 — Israel social security data reveals true picture of Oct 7 deaths, France 24

Brigit Shwarz / Belkis Wille 2024–1 — Building the Evidence for Crimes Committed in Israel on October 7^th 2023, Human Rights Watch

Al Jazeera English 2024–03 — The Oct 7^th Investigations, YouTube

News 13 2023–12 — Interview with freed hostage Mia Shchem, YouTube

News 13 2024–01 — Interview with freed hostage Danielle Aloni, YouTube

Maureen Tkacik 2024–03 — What Really Happened on October 7^th, The American Prospect

Owen Jones 2023–11 — I Watched The Hamas Massacre Film. Here Are My Thoughts, YouTube

Owen Jones 2024–03 — October 7^th: The Whole Story Finally Revealed, YouTube

Noa Limone 2023–12 — If Israel Used a Controversial Procedure Against Its Citizens, We Need to Talk About It Now, Ha’aretz

Ha’aretz Editorial 2024–01 — The IDF Must Investigate the Kibbutz Be’eri Tank Fire Incident – Right Now

Urooba Jamal 2023–11 — What is Israel’s Hannibal Directive, Al-Jazeera

Yasha Levine 2023–10 — What do you expect?, Substack

David Benatar 2023–10 — It’s Not the Occupation, Quilette

Norman Finkelstein 2023–10 — Nat Turner in Gaza, San Francisco Bay View

Joseph Massad 2023–10 — Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?, Electronic Intifada

Us Patronage of Israel

William D. Hartung 2023–11 — Israel’s War in Gaza, Subsidized by the USA, The Nation

Noam Chomsky 1983 — The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians

Occupation / Jewish Settlement in the West Bank

Gershon Goremberg 2017 — Settlements, the real story, The American Prospect

Hamdan Mohammed Al-Huraini 2023–10 — Settler-soldier militias threaten Susiya with death and displacement, +972 Magazine

Tova Tzimuki 2015 — What is the price tag for Jewish terrorists?, Yediot Ahronot (YNet)

Eric Goldstein 2022 — Confiscating Palestinian Land for a Horse Farm, Human Rights Watch

Breaking the Silence 2010 — Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000–2010

WAFA 2023–07 — Israeli police to no longer confiscate guns from settlers who shoot Palestinians at orders from Ben-Gvir, Palestine News & Info Agency

Middle East Monitor 2023–12 — Israel confiscates Palestinian-owned land to build settler-only road near Bethlehem

Middle East Monitor 2020 — Israel to confiscate 3,000 acres of Palestinian land in occupied Jordan Valley

Oslo

Robert Malley / Hussein Agha 2001 — Camp David: the Tragedy of Errors, New York Review of Books

Akiva Eldar 2002 — The Peace That Nearly Was, at Taba, The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy

Dennis Ross 2004 — The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace

Benny Morris 2002 — Arafat didn’t negotiate — he just kept saying no, The Guardian

Paul Cainer 2023–07 — The Arafat I knew was undermining Oslo from the very start, The Jewish Chronicle

Osama al-Sharif 2023 — Thirty years on, the hoax of the Oslo Accords lingers, Arab News

Ines Abdel Razek 2023–09 — I am part of the Oslo Generation brought up on a lie about ‘peace’, Middle East Eye

Amnon Danker 2001 — The Oslo Agreements: The Big Scam, Ma’ariv (translated in MEMRI)

Omar Karmi 2018 — Palestinians were never at the table, Electronic Intifada

Colonel (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah 2023–08 — Was Rabin Fooled by Arafat when They Signed the Oslo Accords?, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Roane Carey 2008 — Dr Benny and Mr Morris, The National

Public Opinion

The Ask Project, YouTube Channel (on the street interviews with people in Israel, West Banks and Gaza)

Al-jazeera+ 2024–03 — [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myby8-55uwc][how Israeli Tv Sells Gaza’s Destruction]], Youtube

Marissa Newman 2016 — Nearly half of Jewish Israelis want to expel Arabs, survey shows, Times of Israel

AFP 2023–11 Rare survey details how Gazans wary of Hamas before Israel attack, France 24

Angela Stephens 2006 — Most Palestinians Believe Hamas Should Change its Position on Eliminating Israel, World Public Opinion

Richard Hardigan 2024–02 — Polls Show Broad Support in Israel for Gaza’s Destruction and Starvation, Truthout

Anna Gordon 2023–11 — What Israelis Think of the War With Hamas, Time

Ron Kampeas 2023–12 — A poll shows Palestinians overwhelmingly support Oct. 7. What does that mean?, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle

Danielle Greyman-Kennard 2023–01 — 67% of Arab world: October 7 was ‘legitimate resistance’ against Israel, Jerusalem Post

Gianluca Pacchiani 2024–01 — For most Palestinians, October 7’s savagery is literally unbelievable. Blame the TV news?, Times of Israel

“From the River to the Sea”

Moshe Shemesh 2003 — Did Shuqayri Call for “Throwing the Jews into the Sea”?, Israel Studies Vol 8:2 (paywall)

The Ask Project 2019 — Palestinians: What does “From the River to the Sea” Mean to You?, YouTube

Likud Party: Original Party Platform (1977)

The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council July 1–17, 1968

Bernard Lewis 1975 — The Palestinians and the PLO, Commentary

Reuters 1989 — PLO Charter Null and Void, Arafat Says : Tells Mitterrand 1964 Challenge to Israel’s Existence Is Invalid, LA Times

Gaza Disengagement

Daphna Baram 2005 — Disengagement and ethnic cleansing, The Guardian

Celeste Kmiotek 2023–08 — Israel claims it is no longer occupying the Gaza Strip. What does international law say?, Atlantic Council

IRIN News 2008 — “Buffer zone” reducing Palestinian agricultural land in Gaza, The New Humanitarian

Israeli Government and Military Post Oct 7

Matt Keeley 2023–10 — Israeli President Isaac Herzog says ‘entire nation’ of Palestine ‘responsible’ for attacks, Rawstory

Emanuel Fabian / Jacob Magid 2023–10 — Gallant: Israel moving to full offense, Gaza will never go back to what it once was, Times of Israel

Yaron Steinbuch 2023–10 — Israeli defense official says Gaza will be reduced to a ‘city of tents’ while a politician calls for nuclear bombs, New York Post

Middle East Eye 2023–12 — Netanyahu wants to ‘thin out’ Gaza by pushing population into the sea

Michael Hauser-Tov 2023–11 — ‘We’re Rolling Out Nakba 2023,’ Israeli Minister Says on Northern Gaza Strip Evacuation, Ha’aretz

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich 2023–11 — Health experts denounce retired general’s claim to let Gaza be destroyed, Jerusalem Post

Middle East Monitor 2024–02 — Former Mossad official: ‘Children in Gaza over 4 deserve to be starved’

Gaza Since Oct 7

Al-Jazeera 2024 — Israel-Gaza War in Maps and Charts

Tony Karon / Daniel Levy 2023–12 — Israel Is Losing This War, The Nation

Emanuel Fabian 2023–12 — Initial IDF probe: 3 hostages were shirtless, waving white flag when troops shot them, Times of Israel

Irfam Galaria 2024–02 — Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation, L.A. Times

Reuters 2023–12 — ‘Perfect storm for disease has begun’ in Gaza, overwhelmed doctors say, CBC News

Human Rights Watch 2023–12 — Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza

Sharon Zhang 2024–01 — 80 Percent of Global Famine Is Currently in Gaza, UN Expert Warns, Truthout

Allison Kaplan Sommer 2023–10 — ‘Alarming and Catastrophic’: This Is What Aid to Gaza Was Like Before the War, Ha’aretz

Clarissa Ward and Brent Swails 2024–03 At the edge of Gaza, Israelis try to stop aid trucks, CNN

Loveday Morris 2024–02 — Gaza Aid Delivery Hampered By Attacks on Police, Rising Chaos, Washington Post

Jeremy Loffredo 2024–03 — “Kill them All”: Inside the Israeli Blocade of Gaza Aid, Grayzone YouTube

Gaza Depopulation Plans

Shalom Yerushalmi 2024–01 — Israel in talks with Congo and other countries on Gaza ‘voluntary migration’ plan, Times of Israel

Amy Teibel 2023–10 — Israeli ministry ‘concept paper’ proposes transferring Gaza civilians to Egypt’s Sinai, with Canada as a possible final destination, CTV News

Ha’aretz 2023–12 — ‘100–200,000, Not Two Million’: Israel’s Finance Minister Envisions Depopulated Gaza

Sam Sokol 2024–01 — Far-right ministers call to ‘resettle’ Gaza’s Palestinians, build settlements in Strip, Times of Israel

Identity

Henri Tajfel 1981 — Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology

W. Peter Robinson (ed) 1998 — Social Groups And Identities

Various

Golda Meir 1973 — A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography

UN 2023–10 — Worsening Tension, Unspeakable Violence, Grave Suffering in Middle East Must End Now, General Assembly President Says, Resuming Tenth Emergency Special Session

Emma Graham-Harrison / Quique Kierszenbaum 2024–01 — ‘It is a time of witch hunts in Israel’: teacher held in solitary confinement for posting concern about Gaza deaths, The Guardian

Gianluca Pacchiani 2023–11 — IDF soldiers film themselves abusing, humiliating West Bank Palestinians, Times of Israel

South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice against Israel for Genocide

Aluf Benn 2024–03 — Israel’s Self-Destruction, Foreign Affairs

Al-Jazeera 2023–12 — Netanyahu’s corruption trial resumes amid Israeli war on Gaza. What to know, Al-Jazeera

Tzvi Joffre 2023–03 — ‘Leftist traitors’: Thousands protest in support of judicial reform, Jerusalem Post

Lord Arthur James Balfour 1917 — The Balfour Declaration

Tovah Lazaroff 2023–03 — Israel’s Smotrich: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, Jerusalem Post

Imad K. Harb 2023–05 — The Arab world has forsaken the Palestine cause, Al-Jazeera

Diana Hodali 2021 — Palestinians in Lebanon: ‘The world has forgotten us’, Deutsche Welle

Brainstorm: Israel/Palestine – Who Started It?

Apr 22, 2024

What was supposed to be an informal QnA about the “Israel/Palestine ABCs” episode, turned into a What is Politics “live” brainstorm session à la Matt Christman “grillstream,” where I discuss my arguments and readings on who and what started the Israel/Palestine conflict which will appear in more detail (and coherence) in the next scripted episode. At 5hrs long, I didn’t even get to the QnAs yet … oops!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=469ztC6UaQY

Script

0:00 intro: ‘why is everything so stupid and shitty?’ / the “alignment problem” of our society

12:46 the social function of academia and universities from pre-WWII to today

31:17 freedom of speech is to protect the weak

41:06 recent activism victories regarding the assault on gaza (Canada and USA)

49:10 why i’m doing “brainstorm” episodes in between scripted episodes

1:10:00 Israel Palestine disinformation in news and history

1:20:40 why the assault on gaza is pure sadistic revenge and does the opposite of its purported goal of protecting israelis

1:31:38 war and violence

1:36:00 what israel could have done in response to oct. 7

1:45:50 who started the israel/palestine conflict?

Bibliography / Texts Discussed

Gershon Shafir 1992 — Land Labour and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914

Abigail Jacobson 2011 — From Empire To Empire, Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule

Zachary Lockman 2012 — Land Labor and the Logic of Zionism, Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1

Ernest Mandel 1965 — Attempts at an Arab-Zionist entente 1913–1914, Middle Eastern Studies, v1:3

Samuel Dolbee & Shay Hazkani 2015 — “Impossible is not Ottoman,” Menashe Meirovitch and ‘Isa al-‘Isa and Imperial Citizenship in Palestine, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 47 [Filastin’s “Letters From a Peasant”]

Emanuel Beška 2018 — Filastin’s Changing Attitude Toward Zionism, Jerusalem Quarterly, 72

Kenneth W. Stein 1984 — The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939

Mahmoud Yazbak 2000 — From poverty to revolt: economic factors in the outbreak of the 1936 rebellion in Palestine, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 36:3

Raya Adler 1986 — Mandatory land policy, tenancy and the Wadi al‐Hawarith affair, 1929–1933, Studies in Zionism Vol 7:3

Ted Swedenburg 1983 — Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian Nationalist Past

Oren Kessler 2023 — Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict [this book is maybe the only book on the 1936–39 revolt besides Swedenburg’s, and it’s a good read, but it doesn’t even mention the growing landlessness crisis which was maybe the main motivator for the rebellion in the countryside!]

Rosemary Sayigh 1979 — Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries

Dmitry Shumsky 2018 — Beyond the Nation-State, The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion

Gil Rubin 2019 — Beyond the Zionist Nation-State, Tablet Magazine [Review of Shumsky, Beyond the Nation State]

Akiva Eldar 2002 — The Peace That Nearly Was at Taba (The Moritanos Paper)

Norman Finkelstein 2023 — I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come to It [he talks about WEB DuBois and freedom of speech among many other things — i mixed up DuBois with Frederick Douglass who he also talks about]

Q&A on the ABCs of Israel/Palestine

This is a Q&A where I respond to questions and critiques about episode 12: The ABC’s of Israel/Palestine (https://youtu.be/OLr_VCqnId0) and also go off on a whole bunch of related tangents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pKkXBsaSJo

0:00 intro

1:55 Rashid Khalidi on the Comedy Cellar Podcast

5:33 Why I Became a Lawyer

11:36 Israel’s assaulton Gaza is pointless

13:28 Hamas’ 2020 conference on what to do after victory

14:31 Oct 7 happened because the IDF was AWOL

15:56 israeli vs palestinian propaganda

18:12 Israelis unconsciously aware that the war is just for revenge

20:26 Mowing the lawn and keeping Gazans on a diet

22:12 Why I don’t cover current events
24:54 How hard it is to figure out what’s true with Israeli/Palestine history:
27:32 Did Zionists do terror against Jews in Baghdad to convince Jews to emigrate?
28:34 Did Israel steal Yemeni Jewish babies to give to holocaust survivors?

33:50 What I’m bringing to the table

36:15 Israeli views on Arab civilian casualties, 2002 vs 2024

43:09 Hamas isn’t nationalist
43:29 Hamas vs Fatah members’ teeth
44:01 Hamas did not “win by a landslide”

46:40 the Hannibal directive

51:52 victories for activism: forcing Israel to let more aid into gaza

55:22 BEGIN Q&A

55:56 left and right / the social psychology of voting

57:20 critique: i “both sidesed” the conflict
57:53 cancer eviction story
59:35 could we make a little interpersonal violence legal?
1:01:08 why present both sides?

1:09:58 cancel culture in pro-Israel politics
1:18:12 academia’s role in neutralizing activism
1:20:33 “you don’t understand the nuances” David Graeber critiques
1:22:47 pomo as poetry, not scholarship
1:27:20 back to cancel culture
1:28:48 Gina Carano

1:32:46 Cancel culture in palestinian activism:
972+ Project Lavender article
1:35:18 cancelling Norman Finkelstein

1:37:44 back to Q and A

1:38:23 why is the US so involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict?

1:46:26 why don’t i call it genocide?

2:13:58 The culpability of the original zionist settlers vs holocaust refugees and jews from the arab world

2:19:48 Atlantic article disputing that Israeli leaders made genocidal statements

2:33:29 Do Arabs in Israel really have equal rights?

2:43:51 75 years of occupation since 1967? Whose land is it?

2:48:39 college “leftist” activists supporting hamas uncritically

3:01:57 “we must support a liberation movement, no matter how reactionary it gets”?

3:04:26 Are American settler colonialists guilty 250 years later?

3:12:07 From authoritarian child rearing to children raising their parents: why do we always do everything idiotically?

3:17:45 One state, two states, no states

3:21:05 Should Israelis have to leave?

3:27:08 Reading Hamas’ 2024 “Our Narrative” pamphlet

3:41:59 outtro

This is a Q&A where I respond to questions and critiques about episode 12: The ABC’s of Israel/Palestine (https://youtu.be/OLr_VCqnId0) and also go off on a whole bunch of related tangents.

I recorded this the day after the previous one, so I haven’t integrated your comments/criticisms, but will do so next time.

Also, I discuss how i fell for the Hamas mass rape NYT article, but since I recorded this, I found some new reviews of Hamas rape allegations that were released just before, and I didn’t discuss them here, but the articles are below.

Bibliography / Texts Discussed

Hamas 2024–01 — Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

Tareq Baconi 2018 — Hamas Contained, The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance

Meir Litvak 2007 — Palestinian nationalism and Islam, the case of Hamas, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2:4

Nelly Lahoud 2023–10 — A Catastrophic Success for Hamas?, Foreign Affairs

Shlomi Eldar 2024–04 — Hamas Actually Believed It Would Conquer Israel, Ha’aretz

Ayelett Shani 2024–04 — ‘I Asked Sinwar, Is It Worth 10,000 Innocent Gazans Dying? He Said, Even 100,000 Is Worth It’, Haaretz

Yair Rosenberg 2024–01 — What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza?, The Atlantic

Gershon Shafir 1992 — Land Labour and the Origins of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914

Noa Limone 2023–12 — If Israel Used a Controversial Procedure Against Its Citizens, We Need to Talk About It Now, Ha’aretz

Ha’aretz Editorial 2024–01 — The IDF Must Investigate the Kibbutz Be’eri Tank Fire Incident – Right Now [on the Hannibal directive]

Urooba Jamal 2023–11 — What is Israel’s Hannibal Directive, Al-Jazeera

Yuval Abraham 2024 — ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, 972+ Magazine

Akiva Eldar 2002 — The Peace That Nearly Was at Taba (The Moritanos Paper) [Arafat’s team did indeed make serious counteroffers back and forth contrary to popular myths — this was the closest israel and the palestinians ever came to peace]

The Killing of Hind Rajab (wikipedia entry because for some reason none of the individual articles put the whole story together very clearly)

Irfam Galaria 2024–02 — Opinion: I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation, L.A. Times

Lina Alsaafin 2024–04 — Israel’s Brutality Is Increasing—and So Is Its Denialism, The Nation [Al-Shifa hospital massacre]

Liza Rozofsky 2024–04 — All the Evidence of Hamas Rape on October 7^th, Haaretz

Sarah Schulman 2017 — Conflict is Not Abuse, Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair [looks like I’m not the first person to make the connection between cancel cuture and Israel politics]