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Hunter-Gatherers and the Mythology of the Market - John Gowdy

Submitted by elf999 on Nov 2 2011 16:04

Marx claimed that "the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of ... modern capitalist societies." This claim has since been vindicated by numerous studies which are neatly summarised in this entry from the prestigious Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. As the Encyclopedia says: "Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans live this way."

An irony of modern life is that, in spite of spectacular increases in material abundance and centuries of technological progress, hunter-gatherers, people who have lived with almost no material possessions, have enjoyed lives in many ways as satisfying and rewarding as lives led in the industrial North.

How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways - Peter Gray

Submitted by elf999 on Nov 2 2011 15:24

Is it true that hunter-gatherers were peaceful egalitarians? The answer is yes.

If just one anthropologist had reported this, we might assume that he or she was a starry-eyed romantic who was seeing things that weren't really there, or was a liar. But many anthropologists, of all political stripes, regarding many different hunter-gatherer cultures, have told the same general story. ... One anthropologist after another has been amazed by the degree of equality, individual autonomy, indulgent treatment of children, cooperation, and sharing in the hunter-gatherer culture that he or she studied.

During the twentieth century, anthropologists discovered and studied dozens of different hunter-gatherer societies, in various remote parts of the world, who had been nearly untouched by modern influences. Wherever they were found - in Africa, Asia, South America, or elsewhere; in deserts or in jungles - these societies had many characteristics in common.

The Origins of Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism - Christopher Boehm

Submitted by elf999 on Nov 2 2011 15:08

Christopher Boehm's theory on how rebellions against alpha-male despotism created hunter-gatherer egalitarianism (primitive communism) which humans maintained for 100,000 years.

"Once a prehistoric hunting band institutionalized a successful and decisive rebellion, and did away with the alpha-male role permanently ... it is easy to see how this institution would have spread."

Christopher Boehm is Director of the Jane Goodall Research Institute.

Revolution and primitivism - Miguel Amoros

Transcript of a talk on primitivism given by Miguel Amorós in 2003 in which he distinguishes “between those who want to understand archaic societies in order to acquire conceptual weapons for confronting and transforming the world, and those who seek innocence and beatitude, lost in the passage of time, in primitive lifestyles” and compares the ideology of the latter—“vulgar” and “philistine” primitivists—to the bourgeois “idealization of nature” of the Enlightenment era.

Revolution and Primitivism – Miguel Amorós

“Why is it that, in our eyes/Any past time/Seems better?”

Psychoanalysis, Freud, Civilization and Capitalism

Is Freud right when he claimed that psychoanalysis is concerned with ‘social phenomenon’ including politics?

Sigmund Freud's seminal texts on psychoanalysis sealed his position as the unofficial father of modern psychology. Whilst not subscribing to any explicitly political weltanschauung – or world-view – the idea that the study of the individual psyche was inseparable from the social psychology of the group underpins his work.

Refusing the Syndicalist v. Primitivist Debate

Ex-Black Panther and ex-political prisoner Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin on being a Black Autonomist, and uninterested in the syndicalist v. primitivist debate.

I spoke in Eugene, Oregon on October, and now there is some “debate” over whether Lorenzo is a “primitivist”? And suddenly I am in the middle of “syndicalist v. primitivist” debate that I have no interest in at all.

This is certainly some manufactured bullshit.

From El Viejo Topo: interview on "curtailing economic growth" - Anselm Jappe

An interview with Anselm Jappe about "curtailing economic growth" ("decrecimiento" in Spanish), a tendency that is becoming increasingly popular in certain circles in Europe, which he characterizes as "a reformism that wants to be authentically radical" but which is doomed to failure unless it challenges the logic of commodity production.

From El Viejo Topo: Interview on “Curtailing Economic Growth” – Anselm Jappe

El Viejo Topo (VT): To what do you attribute the “boom” in the discussion about curtailing economic growth?

A discussion about primitivism and the future society

A letter exchange about primitivism between Green Anarchist and Steve from Hastings in response to an article in Subversion issue 22 (currently unavailable online) from 1997.

Anarcho-Primitivism - A letter from Green Anarchist

Dear Subversion,

From situationism to the abyss: a pamphlet against the harmful phenomena of the encyclopedia - Alpha Vingt

A libertarian Marxist/communist critique of the Encyclopedie des Nuisances, chronicling the group's evolution from situationist-inspired councilist activism during the 1970s, to its "abandonment of any kind of revolutionary perspective" during the early 1990s, until its final surrender to "passive contemplation of the catastrophe" and "apocalyptic defeatism" during the late 1990s. Includes critiques of Guy Debord's situationist theory and the Frankfurt School.

From Situationism to the Abyss:

A Pamphlet against
the Harmful Phenomena of the Encyclopedia – Alpha Vingt

I

Introduction

Greenwashing Agricultural Biotechnology

analysis by tom athanasiou

To generalize is to be an idiot.
--William Blake

A specter haunted the Third National Agricultural Biotechnology Conference (NABC-3), held earlier this year in Sacramento California -- the specter of ecology. One felt its presence almost immediately, when a more-or-less generic industry hack, Ralph W. Hardy, president of Boyce Thompson Institute, gave an obviously well-rehearsed rant against radical environmentalists.