If not capitalism then what exactly?

[vimothy]

people love to discredit anarcho primitivism and the noble savage. but consider the opposite: humans have ALWAYS lived the way we do now, what with the slavery and systematic oppression and heirarchy and power and subjugation and exploitation, even under drastically different conditions such as small population and abundance of resources, for (arguably) millions of years.

is that believable if you really think about it?

Can I just ask, when you say an "abundance of natural resources", what do you mean? Specifically, what natural resources are you refering to?

 

[IdleRich]

Can I just ask, when you say an "abundance of natural resources", what do you mean? Specifically, what natural resources are you refering to?

All resources, anything you can possibly imagine was present in overwhelming amounts. That was why people all got along in those days (four million years ago) and there was no leadership or war or anything. People spent a maximum of ten minutes a day providing for themselves (though I'm not sure why they even spent that long because eating is actually just an unnecessary addiction caused by capitalism). Because of this people were able to use their free brain power to levitate and perform other incredible feats that are now sadly impossible as we've forgotten how to access the right parts of our brains.

 

[zhao]

Can I just ask, when you say an "abundance of natural resources", what do you mean? Specifically, what natural resources are you refering to?

agriculture (and with it the myriad of new forms which we call civilization) started roughly 10,000 years ago, in response to, as a necessity created by, a drastic diminishing of natural vegetation and resources -- a result of the last ice-age. there is ample evidence that prior to that, earth was exponentially more lush and abundant a place compared to the earth that we know now.

EDIT: and idlerich, sorry but don't have time to dig up sources for my outlandish claims. i don't necessarily wholesale believe all of what the anarcho primitivists say either, but again, it is the opening up of possibilities that is important. the possibility that human potential is far wider and bigger than the system we happen to live in now would have us believe. the possibility of breaking from the molds and definitions of humanity imposed on us by the current world view (and by this i mean both "capitalist" as well as on a bigger scale -- the "civilized" world view that we have been under the spell of for the past 10,000 years).

when we look back at a few hundred years ago, we see that the way people perceive the world is very limited. well we are no different. we grow up in this climate and think it's always been like this... much like gold-fish that have 10 seconds of memory...

 

[vimothy]

‘for merely by virtue of their fortunate geographical location, and with scarcely any effort on their part’

sounds like almost every high income group on the planet today.

Not really - what "value-added" do resource-rich kleptocrats bring to their natural resources? What value-added do rich mining corporations or other rich MNCs bring?

 

[zhao]

That was why people all got along in those days (four million years ago)

no not 4 million just 10,000 - 15,000 give or take a few

 

[vimothy]

agriculture (and with it the myriad of new forms which we call civilization) started roughly 10,000 years ago, in response to, as a necessity created by, a drastic diminishing of natural vegetation and resources -- a result of the last ice-age. there is ample evidence that prior to that, earth was exponentially more lush and abundant a place compared to the earth that we know now.

What?!?!

Did stone tools evolve for similar reasons? And knapping both sides of the stone? Read Guns, Germs and Steel - the arrival of agriculture (and thus civilisation) was a bit more complicated. For one thing, it required the selective evolution of cash crops, which is not something that humans just decided to affect in response to a diminished pot of resources (whatever those resources were - I'm still not sure).

Or, can you link to some studies that show that agriculture was developed as a measured response, actively engaged in by humans to combat deteriorating environmental conditions? (How would they know?) So, for instance, you would need to point to natural disasters or loss of necessary food sources in the fertile crescent prior to the arrival of agriculture there.

 

[zhao]

How would they know?

um.... because the fruits they used to readily pick have become rare?

 

[vimothy]

um.... because the fruits they used to readily pick have become rare?

No, how would they know that they could selectivley breed crops to domesticate them, and how would they know that this domestication process would allow them to support larger populations?

[Also, did that happen in any case? Don't fruits "want" to be picked so that they can distribute their seeds?]

 

[zhao]

No, how would they know that they could selectivley breed crops to domesticate them, and how would they know that this domestication process would allow them to support larger populations?

it didn't happen over night did it?

[Also, did that happen in any case? Don't fruits "want" to be picked so that they can distribute their seeds?]

not sure what you mean by this...

but look, what are we arguing about? my version of the story advent of agriculture is the same as Jarred Diamond's. (because i partially got it from him)

 

[vimothy]

but look, what are we arguing about? my version of the story advent of agriculture is the same as Jarred Diamond's. (because i partially got it from him)

Your romanticism - there was no time of edenic pre-civilised abundance. I don't remember Diamond ever claiming thath there was, or that agriculture was developed as a response to environmental catastrophe.

it didn't happen over night did it?

Exactly

 

[Slothrop]

Your romanticism - there was no time of edenic pre-civilised abundance.

Surely the point of abundance is that it only lasts until people or animals have reproduced enough (and bear in mind that they've not got much else to do in the remaining 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day) that they've taken up the slack and whatever it is has become scarce again. And if they can't get that numerous because something other than food is the limiting factor, then they'll compete over whatever that limiting factor is.

 

[zhao]

there was no time of edenic pre-civilised abundance.

well that's that then. now that the authority on pre-history has spoken, all the conjecture and debate based on different interpretations of various archeological findings can now cease once and for all. now that it's all clear as an unmuddied lake, and there remains no more questions or mysteries regarding our ancestry we can all take a much needed nap.

gosh, thanks so much vimothy for putting an end to decades of divergent theories and relieving us from our unnecessary spinning of wheels!

 

[IdleRich]

"well that's that then. now that the authority on pre-history has spoken, all the conjecture and debate based on different interpretations of various archeological findings can now cease once and for all. now that it's all clear as an unmuddied lake, and there remains no more questions or mysteries regarding our ancestry we can all take a much needed nap."

Fair point Zhao....but why did you totally ignore the post I did yesterday which actually did attempt to argue with your interpretation of pre-history? And why didn't you post up any of this evidence and archeological findings despite my requests?

 

[vimothy]

well that's that then. now that the authority on pre-history has spoken, all the conjecture and debate based on different interpretations of various archeological findings can now cease once and for all. now that it's all clear as an unmuddied lake, and there remains no more questions or mysteries regarding our ancestry we can all take a much needed nap.

I though you were already taking your nap

Anyway, I'm talking about Diamond, not me. If you have links to thinkers who back up your claims (hint: not Zerzan), just post them. If you can cite papers, then do so. If you can advance an argument that would explain why this would have happened (for which you don't even need any evidence) - then bloody do it.

Otherwise, you're simply making pronouncements: "everything was great, then it went shit so we developed agriculture". What's the point? I'm not trying to shut down the debate. I won't to know why you think that these things happened, why you think your timeline makes sense. It doesn't even seem logical to me. Agriculture obviously developed accidently, over time, due to the confluence of favourable geographical factors. In no way does its existence lend support to the idea that pre-civilisation was a time of cornucopean abundance.

 

[zhao]

no but seriously, all kidding aside. thank you vimothy.

because you lead me to look into what exactly Mr. Diamond said about pre-history, and the rise of agriculture.

turns out he is MUCH more of an Anarcho Primitivist than i had known:

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and logest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. -- Jared Diamond

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops.

here is the complete article:

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

By Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School

Discover Magazine, May 1987

Pages 64-66

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
continued ---

 

[zhao]

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be iimproted from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on eperson per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandonded their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.

continued ---

 

[zhao]

At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and logest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?

damn this shit is so fucking good i should start its own thread...

 

[vimothy]

[sigh]

Does Mr Diamond say that pre-agricultural societies had greater access to natural resources? Does he say that environmental collapse lead to the adoption of agriculture by human societies? Does he prove it? We aren't talking about the same thing.

"The worst mistake in the history of the human race"? Puh-lease, how many people would a hunter-gatherer society support?

For instance - this doesn't seem that far fetched to me:

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.​

Of course agriculture would not have been a choice. It developed over a long period of time.

 

[Mr BoShambles]

Well, there's the rub. Like I said, I don't fervently desire the total downfall of capitalism because I find the excesses of the far left just as scary as the extreme right. However total unfettered free-market capitalism of the kind that you're proposing is far from ideal.

Am i really advocating 'unfettered' free market capitalism. Actually I'm suggesting that the processes of social change which accompany the transition from a pre-capitalist division of labour to that of capitalism, create the the environment for increasing demand amongst the masses to have their 'rights' recognised. Therefore IMHO, this constitutes a contradictory quality inherent in capitalism; these processes of social change which break down the old (feudal) restrictions on capitalisation have ultimately generated new restrictions in the form of demands for 'rights' (a welfare state) i.e. a minimum wage, a maximum working week, legislation governing working conditions, regulations governing the environmentally damaging impacts of companies, sick pay, holiday pay, government subsidised healthcare and education etc etc.

Are these things even ideal? Vimothy i expect you'll have something to say about that...

What i am saying though is that i don't honestly believe that the interests of capitalism fly in the face of concerns for human/labour rights. I agree that many business enterprises (big and small alike) would prefer to operate in a free environment with impunity, considering profit and nothing else. But in reality all states regulate economic activity and through social pressure workers rights become part of these regulations. Thus companies all over the world have to operate within frameworks which govern their behaviour. If you don't think the frameworks are restrictive enough - well this is hardly the fault of capitalism or of MNC's, but rather of weak individual states (and perhaps weak multilateral international agencies). So again for me the key thing to consider is: how can states/political elites be encouraged to conduct politico-legal reforms which make institutions more representative of the socio-economic realities/aspirations of their people?

This is really fundamental i think so has anyone got suggestions?

 

[zhao]

here is an easy PDF if anyone wants to print it out

http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf