anthropology

A leading specialist on hunter-gatherers exposes Steven Pinker’s poorly-researched claims that humans have always been war-like.

Richard Lee also summarises decades of research on hunter-gatherers showing how they emphasise food-sharing, gender equality and cooperative childcare. Lee concludes that it was this sort of less aggressive and more cooperative social environment in our evolutionary past that permitted the long childhoods required for human brain growth.

We need to appreciate the significance that understanding primitive communism held for the early Marxists.

Marx himself put aside his work on Capital to do some anthropology, which we find in his notebooks - from which Engels extracted the work which led to The origin of the family, private property and the state. Besides Marx and Engels, there is Rosa Luxemburg: as a prisoner in World War I, she wrote Introduction to political economy, where she deployed the cutting edge of anthropology of her day.

Philosophical article that criticizes the metaphysics of scarcity, widely used (as "unquestionable presupposition") to justify the status quo, repression, commodity exchange, state, exploitation - a true theodicy (an imaginary justification of the sufferings and evils of the world). It shows how both economics and ecology are variations of this same metaphysics, radicalized by the commodity fetishism that pervades subjectivity in modern, capitalist society. And there's an addendum that addresses the pre-capitalist gift.

Edmund Bradden provides an introduction to Chris Knight's theory of human origins. Reposted from the 'Radical Anthropology Group' website.