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.

***

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.

In the meantime, if this podcast makes you feel more creases forming in your formerly smooth brain, please, 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, it takes five seconds and helps enormously with the holy algorithm of podcast fate. 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 that I can 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.

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.

Also, rate and review it on itunes, it takes five seconds and helps enormously with the evil algorithm of podcast fate. 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 I almost always take the time to give detailed responses, and also if you have the money to spare, please send me some of it via patreon money so that I can keep doing this, it really helps and now that I’m doing live video, I have some equipment I need to buy to make it less torture to put these together for you!

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

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

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

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

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. [52] 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). [53]

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 [62]. 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. [63] 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!