Wolf Larson

Right on. Oakland is changing. Becoming more gentrified. I'm stuck renting and want to move up north to Oregon or Washington. I'm seriously thinking about homesteading. The pirate life is hurting my liver.

Caral is a great argument against the so called human nature to be at constant war. Not only was Caral at peace for 1,000 years BUT it was at peace because they were a society based on mutual aid in lieu of competition. The bourgeois have used Darwin to say we are all in fierce competition/ man against man for survival. The capitalists say it's not only human nature but the nature of all beings to be motivated by self interest and competition. Kropotkin attacked this early on and attempted to show Darwin had been misused. Caral helps Kropotkin's overall point in showing it is not human nature to be at constant war nor is it human nature to be in fierce competition for survival. Mutual aid, as Kropotkin rightly shows, was driven from man by the figureheads of western civilization by sword and fire. The bourgeois claim to be representing human nature and they say communism goes against human nature. Caral helps refute that.

I'm both writing a brief socialist critique and helping a friend with a doc he's doing on mutual aid/civilization from a socialist perspective. I haven't been able to find much of relevance outside of the work of Jonathon Haas and Ruth Shady Solis. There had been agriculture and trade between farmers inland and fishermen at the coast. The question concerning the formation of the labor force, thus far, [Hass is thinking] centers on a religion based central government which brought them together to build the pyramids. It wasn't just Caral but their civilization was connected as far out as out as the Amazon and down into Bolivia up into Columbia. Haas seems to think they formed a central government headed by elders and religious leaders- Caral being the capitol so to speak[there's no way to figure out how decisions were made].

It was in fact a mutual aid culture, this we know. The people voluntarily worked for the common good - which is even more important if you take into account the fact they lived in peace for 1,000 years and Caral wasn't the sole city in what was a larger society based on trade and mutual aid. The workers weren't slaves or coerced to work....etc. Just the basics. I'll post a detailed critique from a socialist perspective but much of the information I have is available to all online. I'll mostly be focusing on what subsequently turned some regions further north into slave making/warfare cultures. I think the 1,000 years of peace was obviously due to the general abundance they achieved through mutual aid trade between farmers and fishermen. Take abundance away, introduce scarcity via a drought or lack of protein/fish/meat and slave making/warfare societies will pop up. This alone is a great empirical argument against the false scarcity capitalism creates.

Hi, you seem to know a lot about the Caral civilisation and you mentioned how it counters the bourgeois notion of "human nature". For the Counter-Reactionary Claims index that some forum members are creating, could you possibly write a paragraph explaining how Caral refutes the idea that "human nature" is incompatible with Socialism (include sources were possible too please)?
Write it here, if you do, please
http://www.revleft.com/vb/index-reac...283/index.html

Me? No. Although Carson rightly explains some of the exploitative tenants of capitalism I'm not a mutualist. They seem to flirt with capitalism and wish away some of the exploitative tenants of wage labor. The people who tend to flock around them are also simplly right wing American libertarians at heart and cherry pick Tucker, Spooner and Stirner. I don't like the "anarcho" capitalists, "Agorists" or many of the people who claim to be mutualists. They even warp Proudhon in defense of wage labor, interest , property and rent. They're so stupid many of them [not necessarily Carson or Wibur] don't understand what Proudhon meant when he said property is liberty.

I've been debating these people for 6 months and it's driving me mad. I should leave it alone but it's become persoanl at this point.