Primitive communism and women's role in its emergence
Submitted by hedgehog on May 25 2013 17:56
How did human evolution give rise to a species whose very survival is based on mutual confidence and solidarity? More particularly, what was woman’s role in this process?
This is a review of Christophe Darmangeat's recent book, 'Primitive Communism is Not What it Was'.
Woman's Role in the Emergence of Human Culture (part 1)
A Review of Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?'
Submitted by Lyceum on Jan 7 2013 20:22
(First published in the Times Higher Education Supplement)
Primitivism and history - Miguel Amorós
An index of key quotations from the utopian and philosophical predecessors of today's primitivism, from Diogenes to Battaille, via the bagaudae, the Diggers, Bakunin and Morris, featuring passages from Henri Zisly’s Voyage to the Beautiful Country of Naturia (1900) and Pierre Quirole’s The American Anarchist City (1914), with commentary by the author, who concludes that “[t]he hunter-gatherer of the primitivists is nothing but an idealized reflection of the atomized and déclassé individual of mass society produced by late capitalism” and that only social revolution (“the highest form of potlatch”) can make “the reconciliation of man and the world” possible.
Primitivism and History – Miguel Amorós
1. The Sect of the Dog
Engels was Right: Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal
Submitted by hedgehog on Sep 23 2012 19:07
The earliest human institution was not the nuclear family. The latest research now indicates that it was the communistic, female-centred clan.
Engels argued this in 1884. After a century of establishment denial, including complicity by 'Marxists', it now turns out that he was right after all.
ENGELS WAS RIGHT: EARLY HUMAN KINSHIP WAS MATRILINEAL
by Chris Knight
In 2008, the Royal Anthropological Institute published a scholarly volume entitled Early Human Kinship.[1] It stemmed from a 2005 workshop held in Gregynog, Wales, as part of the prestigious British Academy Centenary Project ‘From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Human Brain’.
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.
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