"Guns Germs and Steel"

[Rusty Shackleford]

So, i just watched the 3 part docu. on a book by Jarred Diamond. its thesis was that geography is pretty much the sole reason why areas developed differently. a theory i wholly accept. geographic location favored certain groups of humans more than others and led to the development of more complex societies.

at the root of this, agriculture was labeled as the foundation of society(!). with easily produced food, a division of labor was possible, and then all things were possible.

(!) This is where i want to go into Marxism.

Laid out in "Origin of the Family" class society pretty much began with the foundation of agriculture. this was also the beginning of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy.

If anyone has read the book "Guns Germs and Steel" and has a pretty good understanding of marxism could weigh in, how compatible are the two?

Its obvious that Marx and Engel's understanding of human history was inferior to today's(*), but does GG&S confirm marxist theory?


Also for an added bonus, is there a way to consolidate Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" into this?

these 3 works come at the subject form 3 different angles. 1: geographic and 'natural'. 2: economic, 3: social.

(*) Obviously as time progresses, more information is uncovered

[khad]

Jared Diamond is a sociobiologist by profession and his materialism is the vulgar materialism of fools.

Louis Proyect has written quite a bit about Diamond from a Marxist perspective:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/category/jared-diamond/

Why this racist imperialist lackey of big oil gets attention from leftists just shows the degree to which the Western left is weak and directionless.


While nobody but the unfortunate Professor Diamond could possibly explain the origins of the monumental work of fiction in the pages of the New Yorker Magazine under his byline, an article supposedly in pursuit of The Truth, one might surmise that he was driven to tailor the facts to a conclusion that he had worked out in advance, namely that under duress “modern state systems” devolve into bloody killing sprees such as the kind that Daniel Wemp supposedly took part in.

Even when modern state societies wage war, they are not nearly as bloodthirsty as indigenous peoples such as the ones that feuded in Papua New Guinea. Diamond states “the actual percentage of the population that died violently was on the average higher in traditional pre-state societies than it was even in Poland during the Second World War or Cambodia under Pol Pot.”

So brutal and inhumane were the Papuan tribesmen to each other that when the European colonizers arrived, they submitted to their own “pacification” happily. Finally, the blood feuds would be eliminated by the more civilized representatives of modern state societies. Despite Diamond’s carefully crafted image of himself as an enlightened “multiculturalist”, this analysis is not that different from the ones put forward during the Victorian era. The bloody natives had to be rescued from themselves.

The problem with Diamond’s case is that it rests on bogus history. He deploys Daniel Wemp as an expert witness in describing a savage tribal war that went on for years, when in fact the only fighting that took place in recent years was a rather tame affair described by Mako J. Kuwimb, one of Rhonda Shearer’s PNG consultants and a model of restraint in his debunking of Diamond’s version.

The “war” in question did not take three years and cost 29 lives, as Diamond asserts. It was instead a fight between two youths over a couple of dollars that went missing during a card game that got out of hand after one had his jaw broken. Fighting lasted for three months and only four men died. Daniel Wemp, who Diamond described as a warlord seeking revenge for his tribe, was not involved in this affair at all. Apparently, Diamond wove together some actual incidents and others that were cooked up, all the while exaggerating the severity of the conflict so as to turn the PNG highlands into something on a par with contemporary Congo. Meanwhile, Daniel Wemp and the other participants are described as having almost as much fun killing each other as if it were a sport.


Echoing the shady connections of his benefactors at PBS, who never met an oil company whose advertisements they would turn down (some refer to PBS as the Petroleum Broadcasting System), the conclusion to Collapse consists of praise to "enlightened capitalists" who are helping to preserve the environment, among whom Chevron ranks second to none. Since Chevron is a major donor to Diamond's World Wildlife Fund, it is no surprise that he would look benignly at them even though they are presently fighting with every means at their disposal to avoid paying damages to the mostly indigenous people of Ecuador whose water and land was contaminated by Texaco oil spills (Texaco was acquired by Chevron in 2001, including all its past liabilities.)

On December 5, 2009, Jared Diamond wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times titled Will Big Business Save the Earth? that answers the question in the affirmative, citing Chevron, Coca-Cola, and Walmart as companies whose executives have "embraced environmental concerns." Diamond has the brass to say, "Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea."

In my own series of articles on Collapse that did not hold back from "bashing" the UCLA professor [ed. See appended links], I took a somewhat different view of the company's presence in Papua New Guinea, which I cite in conclusion:

In an article titled Drilling Papua New Guinea: Chevron Comes to Lake Kutubu that appeared in the March 1996 Multinational Monitor, Project Underground executive director Danny Kennedy describes a less than beneficent impact of development on the local population.

According to Kennedy, a human blockade on the pipeline construction site was broken up by a riot squad flown into the area on company choppers on May 1992. Apparently Chevron is very resourceful when it comes to shuttling in troops on company assets. The indigenous people felt that they were not being properly compensated for Chevron's land grab. (Of course, the birds might have been less upset. This is in keeping with WWF's preference for virgin forest as opposed to pesky human beings.) Sasoro Hewago, a leader of the local Fasu clan, told The Wall Street Journal in June 1992 that "The people say problems have come here because Chevron has come here, and so it is Chevron that must take care of them. ... If we're not satisfied there will be no oil. We have pledged to die. ..."

Eighteen months later he seemed worn down by constant confrontations with the oil giant. He confessed, "You must chew before you swallow. My people have been exposed to Western civilization for five years, and are expected to deal with it. We are like we are in a dream and when, one day, we wake up it will be gone. We're choking."

The 5,000 supposed local beneficiaries of the project, members of the Fasu, Foe, and Kikori clans became increasingly unhappy after oil began being shipped in late 1992. In December 1993, 60 Foe men were arrested for protesting over inadequate royalty payments and were carried off in Chevron helicopters to a nearby jail. Once again Diamond's favorite capitalist corporation was relying on helicopters to deal with the restless natives.

In December 1995, confrontations deepened further. Indigenous people threatened to blow up the pipeline, prompting Chevron to remove non-essential staff. Although Chevron eventually placated them with handouts, there is little doubt that a culture of dependency was created. Few of them actually work for Chevron but rely on the dole. When Chevron exhausts the local oil supplies, it is doubtful that native Papuans will be able to fend for themselves.

According to Kennedy, "the mining and petroleum sector is based on the degradation of natural capital and produces few human-made assets for PNG. It employs less than 2 percent of the population and does not add value to the raw materials. And in those boom years, the national government ran up an enormous foreign debt, causing it to bow to the strictures of a major structural adjustment program administered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in conjunction with its old colonial master Australia, in order to avert a cash-flow crisis."
Finally we come to Europe. Most of the argument of Guns, Germs, and Steel is devoted to proving the primacy throughout history of midlatitude Eurasia, and within this region of Europe (supposed heir to the Fertile Crescent) and China. If the argument stopped there, we would have a sort of Eurasia-centrism, not Eurocentrism. But Diamond’s purpose is to explain “the broadest patterns of history,” and so he must answer this final question: Why did Europe, not Eurasia as a whole, or Europe and China in tandem, rise to become the dominant force in the world? Diamond’s answer is, predictably: the natural environment. The “ultimate” causes of Europe’s rise, relative to China, are a set of qualities that Europe’s environment possesses and China’s environment lacks, or China’s possesses but in lesser degree. The “ultimate” environmental causes then produce the “proximate” causes — which are cultural:

[The] proximate factors behind Europe’s rise [are] its development of a merchant class, capitalism, and patent protection for inventions, its failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation, and its Graeco-Judeo-Christian tradition of empirical inquiry (p. 410).

This is, of course, utterly conventional Eurocentric history. There is now a huge literature that systematically questions each of these economic, political, and intellectual explanations for the rise of Europe, much of this literature consisting of Eurocentric arguments of one sort attacking Eurocentric arguments of some other sort — yet Diamond ignores all this scholarship and simply announces that these (and a few other cultural things) are the true “proximate” causes of the rise of Europe. Evidently he views the matter as settled. The problem, for him, is to find the underlying environmental causes.

Topography is the key; or more precisely topographic relief and the shape of the coastline.

Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation…China’s coastline is much smoother…Europe is carved up…by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian border mountains), while China’s mountains east of the Tibetan Plateau are much less formidable barriers (p.414).

These somewhat inaccurate observations about physical geography lead into one of the truly classical arguments of Eurocentric world history: the theory of Oriental despotism.[9] This is the belief that the so-called “Oriental” civilizations — essentially China, India, and the Islamic Middle East — have always been despotic; that Europeans alone understand and enjoy true freedom; that Europe alone, therefore, has had the historical basis for intellectual innovation and social progress. Diamond invokes a pair of well-known environmentalistic theories, adding nothing new to them, about how physical geography is the main reason why Europe, not China, acquired the cultural attributes that gave it ultimate hegemony: “a merchant class, capitalism…patent protection for inventions…failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation,” and the rest. Here is how it works: China is not broken up topographically into isolated regions, because it does not have high mountains like the Alps and does not have a coastline sufficiently articulated to isolate nearby coastal regions from one another. This explains the fact that China became unified culturally and politically 2,000 years ago. Europe, on the other hand, could not be unified culturally and politically because of its indented coastline (its “capes and bays,” in the traditional theory) and because of its sharply differentiated topographic relief (its “many separate geographical cores” in the traditional theory). Europe therefore developed into a mosaic of separate cultures and states. China’s geographically determined unity led it to become a single state, an empire; and an empire must, by nature, be despotic. Why? Because a person cannot leave one state and emigrate to another to avoid oppression, since there is only the one state, the Chinese empire. Hence there is continued oppression of the populace and centralized manipulation of the economy. So: no freedom, little development of individualism, little incentive to invent and innovate (taxation, political control, etc.), no development of free markets, and no development of a polity resembling the modern democratic nation-state. These “harmful effects of unity” (p. 413) led China to, in essence, stagnate after the 14th or 15th century. Europe, by comparison, continued to forge ahead. Hence Europe triumphed.

[Devrim]

I think that 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' is an interesting book. I don't think there is anything spectacular there, but it is well written and well argued with good examples.

To take up a few of the points made in Khad's post:


Jared Diamond is a sociobiologist by profession and his materialism is the vulgar materialism of fools.

Actually he is a geography professor by profession, and his book does offer a materialist analysis. He is not in any way a communist, but that doesn't discredit everything his book says.


Why this racist imperialist lackey of big oil gets attention from leftists just shows the degree to which the Western left is weak and directionless.

I don't think that he in any way comes across as a racist. However, throwing the term around is a stable part of the rhetorical armory of the American left.


While nobody but the unfortunate Professor Diamond could possibly explain the origins of the monumental work of fiction in the pages of the New Yorker Magazine under his byline, an article supposedly in pursuit of The Truth, one might surmise that he was driven to tailor the facts to a conclusion that he had worked out in advance, namely that under duress “modern state systems” devolve into bloody killing sprees such as the kind that Daniel Wemp supposedly took part in.
...

It is possible than Diamond is wrong on this, and also possible that he "tailor[ed] the facts to a conclusion that he had worked out in advance". I think what it needs is real data based on more examples to base a conclusion on and throwing around the tag racist does not in any way help.


Echoing the shady connections of his benefactors at PBS, who never met an oil company whose advertisements they would turn down (some refer to PBS as the Petroleum Broadcasting System), the conclusion to Collapse consists of praise to "enlightened capitalists" who are helping to preserve the environment, among whom Chevron ranks second to none. Since Chevron is a major donor to Diamond's World Wildlife Fund, it is no surprise that he would look benignly at them even though they are presently fighting with every means at their disposal to avoid paying damages to the mostly indigenous people of Ecuador whose water and land was contaminated by Texaco oil spills (Texaco was acquired by Chevron in 2001, including all its past liabilities.)

On December 5, 2009, Jared Diamond wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times titled Will Big Business Save the Earth? that answers the question in the affirmative, citing Chevron, Coca-Cola, and Walmart as companies whose executives have "embraced environmental concerns." Diamond has the brass to say, "Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea."
...

Certainly Diamond's views are pro-big business, and he clearly thinks that the major corporations can save the environment rather than being the prime motors pushing us towards it. This in itself though does not discredit his historical views.


Finally we come to Europe. Most of the argument of Guns, Germs, and Steel is devoted to proving the primacy throughout history of midlatitude Eurasia, and within this region of Europe (supposed heir to the Fertile Crescent) and China. If the argument stopped there, we would have a sort of Eurasia-centrism, not Eurocentrism. But Diamond’s purpose is to explain “the broadest patterns of history,” and so he must answer this final question: Why did Europe, not Eurasia as a whole, or Europe and China in tandem, rise to become the dominant force in the world? Diamond’s answer is, predictably: the natural environment. The “ultimate” causes of Europe’s rise, relative to China, are a set of qualities that Europe’s environment possesses and China’s environment lacks, or China’s possesses but in lesser degree. The “ultimate” environmental causes then produce the “proximate” causes — which are cultural:
...

If we just look at one aspect, which is why the Middle East went from being one of the centres of world civilization with Europe being a backwater next door to today's situation, I would say that topographical causes had a lot to do with it, in particular the Atlantic seaboard and access to the 'new world'. It is not a totally unrealistic explanation though of course it is easy in hindsight to make the explanations fit your argument.

Devrim

[khad]

The issue is that it's your standard eurocentric history written through the (singular) pseudoscientific lens of geographic determinism. While you choose to critically engage with this vulgar materialism, I've already decided that I'm not going to rehash this debate for about the tenth time, because it's nothing more than a waste of my time.

The sociobiological work that Diamond does boiling human society down to genetic impulses like in his book The Third Chimpanzee does is nothing but an exercise in reactionary politics. For example, his claims that people do drugs out of a genetic desire to be edgy and desirable to mates (instead of say the crushing oppression and social alienation of capitalism) and that all art is merely an extension of the mating impulse demonstrate a profound misunderstanding anything socially constituted.

So I'll settle with Diamond the racist sociobiologist, funded by big oil, who should have stuck to his work cross-tabulating racial variations in testicle size.

[revolution inaction]

khad's "arguments" don't appear too have anything to do with the ideas presented.

[FreeFocus]

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel years ago and found it to be very interesting. I didn't find Diamond racist; in the book, he explicitly says that his ideas undercut racist logic used by Eurocentrists. Khad posted some useful critiques of Diamond's underlying logic that I don't think should be discounted. At the same time, I think Diamond made some useful observations about the divergent history of Europe and the rest of the world. If Europe consisted of less mountains and more plains, might it have been politically unified? Maybe. It's difficult to predict these types of things. But the determinacy of the environment is an important point. His points about the Americas lacking large, domesticable animals undoubtedly changed the material realities in the hemisphere (even if the horse had been present in the Americas for a more significant amount of time beyond the few thousand years around the Ice Age, things would have looked very, very different).

Also, to the OP, not all agricultural societies became patriarchal. Many in the Americas stayed matriarchal, for example.

[ComradeOm]

At its core Diamond's thesis is rather banal - the role of the environment in shaping societies is not going to shock anyone - and can be taken too far (particularly in Collapse). That said, GGS is well worth the read for an interesting take on history, particularly the larger questions and interaction between Eurasia and the Americas


Jared Diamond is a sociobiologist by profession and his materialism is the vulgar materialism of fools.

Louis Proyect has written quite a bit about Diamond from a Marxist perspective:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/category/jared-diamond/

Why this racist imperialist lackey of big oil gets attention from leftists just shows the degree to which the Western left is weak and directionless.The three extracts you have provided could be summed up as:

1) A factual inaccuracy that did not feature in the work in question

2) A complete digression that reveals the startling fact that Diamond is not a Marxist or even a socialist! Obviously since he does not possess the correct ideological orientation this gives us the right to rubbish everything he's ever written

3) A bog standard summary of one question that Diamond examined in GGS. At least we finally get to the book. Its where the criticism becomes particularly absurd however. Diamond is apparently to be condemned for Eurocentrism for suggesting that the development of European global hegemony may be traced back to factors in Europe. A shocker. He is then shoehorned into the 'Oriental despotism' argument, which I do not recall from the book, because he has the temerity to suggest that the existence of a Chinese unitary state may have ultimately stymied the development of this society. Tut tut

[khad]

Just because a right winger like Philip Bobbit is right every once in a while doesn't mean that I have to turn to the Shield of Achilles for cues on social theory.

What I am baffled by is why the left clings to someone like Diamond whose deterministic and sociobiological views (as well as conduct as a spokesman for big oil) are inimical to what the left is trying to accomplish.

[ComradeOm]

Who's "clinging" to anyone? :confused:

It should be possible to discuss a book without first evaluating the author's politics or lifestyle. These are only relevant insofar as they detract from, or cast suspicion on, the work's central thesis. Now I see no evidence that GGS is a cover for "Big Oil" so why does every one of your posts in this thread refer to this? How is it relevant to the book?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Who's "clinging" to anyone? :confused:

It should be possible to discuss a book without first evaluating the author's politics or lifestyle. Yeah I think the value of the book for the left is being missed if we are looking for ideological cues in it. I found it to be really interesting and most of all useful in giving some modern evidence for things that Engels argued... what, at that point it was mostly informed-speculation because there was very little hard evidence.

There are many weaknesses in his conclusions and assumptions... but yeah, he is not a Marxist or anarchist and so I think it's off the mark to essentially criticize him for not having that ideology. I think there's a difference between an academic who has misconceptions or draws strange conclusions due to the influence of capitalist ideology and academics who use science or sociology to push capitalist ideology and really (it's been a while since I read it) this book seems to be in the first category. For example, I remember he argues something about lack of a state causing more inter-personal violence in hunter-gathering societies and I think that's just the result of the influence of ideas of the sate as arbiter of social conflicts rather than as a tool of class rule.

At any rate I think it would be wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I'd recommend for any radical read this (critically) along with Engels. I can't remember what arguement he was making, but on the documentary of the book, there was one part that was really funny because he said, "I discovered that..." and I laughed because Engels made the same argument 100 years before his "discovery".

There's a lot of overlap with Marxist ideas about the development of societies in this book even though he draws different conclusions and is limited by his own ideology: organization of society becoming a fetter on the development of society; class divisions arising from surplus and management of surplus; lack of war in pre-calss societies; and so on.

Frankly being able to apply modern evidence to classical Marxist and radical theory gives more weight to our ideas and makes them harder to dismiss.