Egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies and Historical Materialism

[Adi Shankara]

I understand that Marx believed that the world naturally progresses forward as related to Historical Materialism...but I'm wondering, where does that leave the egalitarian hunter gatherer societies like the Huli, the tribes of the amazon, etc.? Marx in his concept of primitive communism said that hunter gatherers live in "constant struggle for survival"...but that's not exactly true really, considering that Daniel Everett documented the Piraha tribe and said that they have a really simple life that is stress free, and that they actually rejected food aid and attempts to teach them to farm, because they thought it'd destroy their way of life. this was decided by the plurality by the tribe, because the tribe has no leaders.

also, the Khoisan people of South Africa. they have been offered social education, general education, free food, free housing, and job training for moving off their land...yet they remain in the Namib desert, happy with their life style.

can feudalism really be seen as an improvement over such societies? can feudalism really be seen as an improvement over Athenian democracy (as flawed as it was, feudalism has to be worse, much worse)

I don't really understand this concept too well in regards to this, so someone help?

[Kléber]

"Primitive communist" societies are/were classless but not egalitarian. While living socially without hereditary or production-based class divisions (aside from gender), individuals in such societies have private property and compete with each other for the best food, mates etc. Engels specifically dismissed any talk of primitive communist "equality" in Origin of the Family iirc.

The creation of the first slave societies on an agricultural basis was not an "improvement" in moral or egalitarian terms, but it was an unavoidable step in human evolution as some nasty but enterprising people enslaved other people to engage in the most primitive forms of accumulation. What was progressive about that system as opposed to the hunter-gatherer nomadic subsistence mode of production was not that people had been enslaved, but that the productivity of labor was increasing.

Athens was not a real "democracy" either, nor was it the first or only city-state with such a government; only the free landowning native-born Athenian males, a small minority, could vote and participate fully in politics. There was slavery and hereditary/religious obligatory labor in Athens too.

[Adi Shankara]

They were classless but not egalitarian. Engels specifically dismissed any talk of primitive "equality" in Origin of the Family iirc.

But you have to remember, Engels was looking at these societies with 19th century knowledge, and he had a typical white european view of these people...We didn't have the knowledge about such people as we do today. the Piraha people are really happy with their lifestyle, and according to Daniel Everett, the Piraha people are truly egalitarian.

What was progressive about that system as opposed to the hunter-gatherer nomadic subsistence mode of production was not that people had been enslaved, but that the productivity of labor was increasing.

you know what's funny is famine and disease have wiped out entire cities, entire nations, entire peoples...yet these hunter gatherers have been around thousands of years and still live today, and very few want to be "modernized".


Athens was not a real "democracy" either, nor was it the first or only city-state with such a government; only the free landowning native-born Athenian males, a small minority, could vote and participate fully in politics. There was slavery and hereditary/religious obligatory labor in Athens too.

But was feudalism really better?

I'm not a primativist as I don't think we should all adopt this lifestyle, but I don't see either what it does to force these people who have pretty harmonious lives in true democracies (no leaders, no tribal chiefs, communal ownership of everything, including personal items) to adopt the lifestyles of those who we think we know better. I think that all true revolution starts within and needs to be adopted by the people in question, not imposed.

[bailey_187]

you know what's funny is famine and disease have wiped out entire cities, entire nations, entire peoples...yet these hunter gatherers have been around thousands of years and still live today, and very few want to be "modernized".


THESE hunter gatherers may have, but what about the millions of others?

[Pavlov's House Party]

Humans have a generally conservative social consciousness. Not many people in industrial capitalism want to have socialism, so how can we say socialism is really better than capitalism then?

[Kléber]

you know what's funny is famine and disease have wiped out entire cities, entire nations, entire peoples...yet these hunter gatherers have been around thousands of years and still live today, and very few want to be "modernized".Of course, because the only people who want to "modernize" them have some ulterior motive (use them as cheap labor, steal and deplete their land/resources, etc.)

If I was in a primitive society and the slave-raiders or multinational developers came to destroy my way of life, I would fight back too. Anyone would.

Marx said that social progress did not come peacefully or happily, it only came by people being "dragged through the mud" by history - look at the economically-based religious wars of Europe in the 16th-17th Centuries, or the horrible, bloody industrial revolution of the 19th Century. The entire process of human development contained a lot of ugly episodes that couldn't have been avoided, in which good people were fated to lose, be enslaved, die horrible deaths etc. In the grand scheme of things though, morals mean nothing, the only objective measure of progress is the increasing productivity of human labor.


I'm not a primativist as I don't think we should all adopt this lifestyle, but I don't see either what it does to force these people who have pretty harmonious lives in true democracies (no leaders, no tribal chiefs, communal ownership of everything, including personal items) to adopt the lifestyles of those who we think we know better. I think that all true revolution starts within and needs to be adopted by the people in question, not imposed. Obviously I don't support the eviction or exploitation of indigenous peoples under attack by a dying, reactionary, earth-raping capitalist system. Obviously we should stand on the side of the oppressed throughout history, and all communists should support indigenous peoples' land claims and right to tax or expel corporations that use resources on their land.

But we should also recognize that history has created an industrial basis for socialism and a working class that is politically and economically mature to seize power of these advanced means of production and create a democratic, industrial communism.

You are wrong about primitive communist societies having communal ownership of everything and no "leaders." That's a utopian fantasy. Hunter-gatherers were/are "communist" in the sense they have no social classes, no master/slave, worker/boss, no hereditary aristocracy. But they do have private property - if you make something with your hands you are generally entitled to consume or trade it to some degree, depending on cultural peculiarities and agreed-upon divisions of labor (usually sex- and age-based). There are also leaders within hunting-gathering communities, but they are chosen by elections or merit, rather than wealth or aristocratic lineage. (With the exception of some Amazon indigenous peoples who are the only hunter-gatherers with a hereditary aristocracy, probably because they used to have a feudal society that collapsed in the 15th Century).

[maskerade]

People here should read "the original affluent society" by Sahlins, it deals with this from a social-anthropology perspective:
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

I think it's an interesting critique of capitalism, because it sort of shows a great example of another form of human organisation (not that I'm a primitivist) and that something different is possible, and exists.

[bcbm]

why do people always talk about gatherer-hunter groups in monolithic terms?

[Tavarisch_Mike]

why do people always talk about gatherer-hunter groups in monolithic terms?

Yeah i also think that this is problematic, fore example its true that the Khoisan are living in a very peaceful society, but if you look at New Guinea there are many violent tribes, that until very recentlie used to practice cannibalism, tribal wars and kidnapping women. The same for the people living in the Amazon rainforest, there are some livivng in peace and others wich are very violent.

I dont know how we should deal with the currently existing tribes, on one hand it does not feel right to denie them the progress humanity has taken (specially not the medical ones), on the other hand many tribes that takes contact with the outside world tend to be hardly exploited (as Kléber allready menthioned), many gets problem with handling the absolute chock of contacting the outside world, it gets to much frome living in a world that consist of like 200 people with stone age technology, to suddenly know that we are 6.8 billion(?) people and that the world is faaaar more bigger then they ever could imagine and it gots all this incredible things such as cars, air-plaines, computers, nuclear weapons and so on. Its just to much to handle.

Adi_Shankara, i recommend you to read National Geographic nr8/2003, wich has an article about how we should deal with this situation. In this article theyve followed the brazillian activist and explorer Sydney Possuelo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Possuelo
who used to have the task to conntact the most remmoted tribes, frome the Brazillian goverment, but after seeing the bad effects of this contacs he has changed his mind and now he just tries to survey them, in a way to protect them.